Z, and the other horror movies that MST3K eviscerated) to appreciate the good (most of Cronenberg’s catalog). In my personal canon, there was room for the badly acted strangeness of Pod People and David Cronenberg’s superlative, body-horror heavy 1986 remake of The Fly-in some ways, I needed the bad ( The Unearthly, The Blood Waters of Dr. High school and college-age me binged on horror movies, both good and bad-there was a period of time where I watched the b-grade schlock showcased by Mystery Science Theater 3000, over and over again, when I was going through a health crisis in my early 20s. I was fascinated with non-human monsters because they represented all-too-human darkness and things left unsaid.Īs I grew up, and grew more cynical, I kept this fascination to myself. This is why I have a sore spot around the 1996 film The Craft the girls I hung out with all wanted to be Fairuza Balk in that movie, but my love of werewolves was just too weird. Witches were deemed okay, but only because they could be acceptably feminine and hide their dangerous nature in beauty. Liking vampires and werewolves (this was the pre- Twilight era) was weird. A fascination with monsters was not acceptable-especially for girls. I was also stubborn as hell, and particularly sensitive to what my peers delineated as acceptably girl-like and not acceptably girl-like.

I was a strange kid I doubled down on that strangeness as junior high started to squeeze my quirks out of me like a tube of toothpaste. In the sixth grade, I became obsessed with werewolves. I went through a phase where I watched all of the classic silent monster movies that featured acting luminaries Bela Lugosi and the senior and junior Lon Chaneys. I can’t remember when it started, but at some point during my childhood, I began to think that vampires, phantoms (specifically, the Phantom of the Opera-which was my 4 th grade Halloween costume), and werewolves were the height of coolness and sophistication. I have been fascinated by monsters from an early age.

Dead blondes bad mothers