Horror, the forbidden frights. “When your older”, a phrase that’s regularly heard. Atop the shelf, the man with the scorched face, the hockey head, the ghasping ghost, stare out at you from their plastic lodgings. You, eager to break the disc free and unlock the terror within.
A regular experience amongst young horror fans, especially in the video and DVD eras, was the curiosity and excitement that came from browsing your parents horror collection.
As a kid, I was an avid Scooby-Doo fan, dressing up as him for my birthday party, collecting all the films and shows on DVD and the action figures, so it’s no wonder the horror films on the shelf intrigued me.
Some of my earliest horror film experiences? When my dad took me to get a copy of Beetlejuice after finding out about it through, of all things, a level on LittleBigPlanet. I sat down, eager to watch it, and found it unlike anything I’d ever seen, not only because I ran to my parents over Beetlejuice himself dropping an F-bomb. How innocent I was. But I loved the way Burton combined visual gags and dark horror comedy and the film was on regular rotation.
Another core memory is my aunt buying me the Gremlins/Gremlins 2 box set on DVD when my parents were away on a trip. Needless to say, those little green creatures terrified young me and I burst out into tears halfway through the film. Yet, it started a life-long love for Gremlins and I’ve now seen it twice in the cinema, own a replica Gizmo and have watched it at home more times than I can count.
Then came the time I’d anticipated, the graduation onto ‘adult’ horror. I spent a couple weekends watching through the Scream films, and realised quite quickly, that they were nowhere near as scary or as violent as the adults in my life had built them up to be. Not to say I didn’t love them, that franchise is my favourite horror one to this day. But when I binged through other series like Nightmare on Elm Street & Friday The 13th, I found out they were more goofy than scary, if endlessly entertaining. However, even if I fawned bravery when watching them, there were still some nights where the bed-side light was kept on, mostly due to Freddy Kreuger. But when I watched him impersonate The Wicked Witch of The West in Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991), the fear factor was out the window faster than Mr Kreuger could fly past it.
I’m not going to argue that The Final Nightmare is a good film, it’s really not. In fact, it’s by far the worst film of the franchise – and up there with Jason Goes To Hell (1993) as one of the most ‘wtf’ moments in any long-running horror series. But at least these franchises took these goofy risks even if they never paid off, something that you probably wouldn’t see nowadays.
Now, I sit here writing this lover letter to the genre, with my room full of collectibles and blu-rays, and still, my old Scooby-Doo DVD collection in a box under my bed…
Featured Image Credit: Warner Brothers Entertainment
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