My love for the horror genre started young, as my parents raised me on the classic Universal horror films, such as Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1931), The Mummy (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), The Wolf Man (1941), and The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), and I think this is a big part of my love of some of the oldest films in the genre (those from the 1910’s and 1920’s).
It was more than the classics that dragged me in, though. My parents enjoyed the 1990 It mini-series, and it terrified the hell out of me. When my father had my mother rent A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), I couldn’t even finish the movie – I hid behind either a couch or chair near the ending, and I can say I felt quite scared.
Another memory as a kid – my parents owned The Night Flier (1997) on VHS, and watched it one night after they thought I had gone asleep, but I stealthily watched portions of it from the stairwell, and I was so scared of the movie, once we moved from a small village in New York to northwest Indiana, I actually threw the VHS tape in the basement, breaking it (a childish decision I have regretted ever since, as I truly feel it’s an unsung great).
Around ten or eleven years old, I slowly branched out. I remember seeing the often-forgotten Baron Blood (directed by Mario Bava) subtitled on either Showtime or HBO, and that started my love of “more obscure” horror. A 2003 movie called Fear of the Dark really got to me, even though it was aimed towards kids (but hey, I was a kid, so it worked). And then I set my eyes upon Saw (2004).
From that point forward, I was 100% hooked.
Saw blew my mind in a way that few movies up to that point ever had. That plot twist destroyed my young innocence and swept me into an obsession with the genre, and have watched over 2,000 movies so far with hopes of greatly expanding that number before my death.
Around 2016, I got it in my mind to go back and rewatch every horror movie I’d seen up to that point (as I said, I was obsessive, and had a list, which I keep updated to this day, of every single movie I consider horror that I’ve seen), and while it took me a while to find my style (compare my earlier reviews, such as Spiders from 2000, Hellraiser from 1987, or Wolves at the Door from 2016, to some of my newer reviews, and you’ll see a significant difference), I hope to review everything I’ve seen and every new horror movie I watch for as long as I possibly can.
I love the genre. Every decade. Every style. I have my preferences, of course (I personally enjoy slashers), but I can watch a 1920’s silent horror film just as easily as a post-2000’s addition, and when it comes to my consumption of horror, anything goes. Any year, any subgenre, from the lowest-budget imaginable to the Hollywood productions, if it’s horror, I’ll give it a shot. I may end up hating it, but I’ll give it a shot.
Quite simply, I love horror films, and I hope that my undying passion of the genre can be seen in my strong personal views regarding these movies (and believe you me, I have some very strong and controversial views over some of the classics of the genre).
Maybe you’ll enjoy reading my reviews, maybe you’ll hate my take on certain movies, but either way, horror is a big part of my life, and it has been for a long, long time, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I welcome you to Jiggy’s Horror Corner, and recommendations are always considered.
Jiggy's Horror Corner 