Mainlining the Macabre

I thought I watched a lot of movies in high school. I got to college and slowly realized that I hadn't watched any movies. I could talk about a lot of famous movies, but you don't need to see Casablanca in order to discuss it. Everyone knows what Moby Dick is about and they know the first line of the book, but no one's really read it. Maybe no one ever has except one guy who is probably dead now.

I watched a ton of movies in college. I was shown many movies by professors and recommended many movies by fellow students. I graduated college still having only seen the movies that everyone else was seeing. I wasn't doing the recommending. I went to the movies more often in college than in high school as well. I saw quite a few "art house" films. I saw more movies than any of my friends had. I think I have watched more movies than any of my friends ever have to this day. But no matter how many movies I watched, I still didn't feel like I was watching anything cutting edge or special. I wasn't being party to edgy art. If I loved movies as much as I claimed to love movies, then I would have to define my tastes, and make them specific.

I finally realized what the problem was a couple of years ago...about four years after graduating college. I didn't belong to a cult. I needed to watch movies whose very titles summoned up feelings of either absolute dread or complete elation. Another prerequisite of these movies I would need to watch would be their obscurity. I needed to search out movies that could only be seen by people in the know.

I decided that I would delve into horror and see how it went. Horror had a lot going for it in my search for a genre to define my movie tastes. Halloween was my favorite holiday and horror movies reeked of all the ambience and character that I loved about the Halloween season. Special effects got me interested in movies to begin with and horror movies were loaded with both CGI and practical effects. I like naked women and horror movies are chock full of them. Also, horror movies were very "fringe". No one ever talked about a horror movies' accolades. Horror movies were not known for their achievements in anything except blood-letting. (I know differently now, however.)

Having made my decision to approach horror as a new home for my new sharply-defined self, I began watching all the classics: Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday 13th, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre - these movies are the foundation of horror as we know it today, and I got to know the genre from these movies. I had seen many of these canon horror films before, but I watched them with new eyes because they were now helping to define my likes/dislikes. People have always asked me what my favorite movies are and what I like to watch. Horror was going to start coming up more and more and I needed to know these movies better.

Watching the classics is easy. Everyone wants to sit around and remember when they were ten years old and they saw Nightmare on Elm Street for the first time. As I started delving into the horror genre more, I found myself watching movies on my own. The reason for this was two-fold: No one knew what these movies were and I could not bring myself to unleash the disturbing imagery on anyone else. I don't mean to say that graphic depictions of violence disturb me, but they're still disturbing. You're one cruel motherfucker if you lend your copy of Salo to some friends and fail to warn them of the graphic scenes involving, among other things, the eating of feces and razor blades and the really spectacular eye-gouging/scalping/torture finale.

I found horror on my own. I latched onto horror because once I got into it I couldn't leave it alone. Even when I take a break from it and try to watch something else, I always go back sooner than expected. It's too much fun to keep me away, and it's got an edge that most people can't deal with. I like horror because it's exciting and laid back. I like horror movies because other people don't like them. Also, you can tell the people making these movies had a great time doing it. It's a party I want to attend and so I bring as much of it into my living room as I possible can. My name is Benjamin Landes and I'm a horror movie addict.