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Mamas, You Can Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Gore Hounds...
(Or, I Haven't Committed Any Axe Murders Yet)
By Scribe
My mother used to worry about me. Oh, she had the usual mother worries about strangers and peer pressure to do naughty stuff, but she had other worries. The stacks of comic books with titles like Eerie, Creepy, The Haunt of Fear, Tomb of Dracula, and Unexplained. The library books about Jack the Ripper. The number of times I sang "Lizzie Borden took an axe..." The way I begged and pleaded to be allowed to go see such movies as Dracula Has Risen From the Grave, I Drink Your Blood, and I Eat Your Skin.
She was raising a gore hound, and it bothered her.
What is a gore hound? Usually the term refers to those who want, desire, and need those movies centered around finding new, creative, and messy ways to kill off increasing numbers of characters. I think the term came into being because we will sniff those suckers out like a bloodhound, and love them so much that we would gladly roll in them, like a hound in road kill, if we could. I extend the term for myself to include someone interested in all things horror.
It started early. I eagerly sought out all the 'urban legends' and 'campfire stories' about ghosts looking for golden arms, escaped maniacs, and hook-handed psychos. I still remember *drip drip drip scratch scratch scratch* *shudder* Anyone who saw Urban Legends knows this one.
I trace my enamoration (is that a word? Do I care) back to first grade, or possibly earlier. I was sick--pretty darn sick. So was my Dad. We were both so sick that Mom, to save steps in nursing us, let me convalesce in their big double bed. While we were waiting for the fever to break, she brought the little black-and-white television (this is dating me. Back then there was little reason to have color television, other than Walt Disney's Wide World of Color) in and set it on a kitchen chair at the foot of the bed. Dad slept, I fretfully watched television.
Dracula came on. We're talking the classic black-and-white Todd Browning/Bela Lugosi version. I watched it while feverish. I watched it with my mouth hanging open because my nose was stopped up. I watched it as my Daddy (I didn't know it, but I would lose him to lymphoma in about five years) slept beside me, radiating heat like a hot brick. It was a, dare I say it--life defining experience.
I still remember those three pale, eerily silent vamp women slowly converging on an unconscious, vulnerable Renfield.
I was hooked.
My tolerance for the grisly in print and celluloid increased. I graduated from classic Universal to Hammer, Amicus, and AIP. I had the hots for Christopher Lee, dreaming about him pursuing me, cape flapping, to sink his fangs in my neck. Yes, I always got turned, I was never rescued in these fantasies.
I didn't jump directly to gore hound status, though. Texas Chainsaw Massacre came out when I was in high school. I live in Texas--do you have any idea what the buzz was like for that movie? The rumors about it at school were incredible. People believed it was only a half step up from a snuff film, and "It's all true! It really happened, not all that far away from here." They said that you saw limbs lopped off in close up, you actually saw the meat hook slamming into flesh. I wasn't going to see it.
We had a drive in--the Don Drive-in, God rest it. I went to see something long forgotten, on the back screen. They were playing Chainsaw on the front screen. You try to ignore the soundtrack of that movie playing over a hundred speakers. I started sneaking glimpses in the rearview mirror. Then I started turning around to look through the back window. Finally, when my show ended, I drove over and watched the second showing. (Don't fuss at me--I made a trip to the concession stand in between--they got their money out of me).
Ooo... The hook was sunk even deeper (and yes, I know that sounds grisly when you consider the movie.)
When I was about, oh, ten or eleven I read a Reader's Digest article about an unnamed horror movie that involved the dead coming back to life and eating the living--presented in graphic detail. I found myself fascinated, and plotted how I'd manage to see this thing. Later I realized it was Night of the Living Dead. I didn't get to see it till I was in college, on campus. I walked in on the infamous 'barbeque' scene, turned right around, and walked back out.
After that I toughened up. It was the heyday of the slasher/dead teen/body count/splatter movie, and I tried to see all of them. I also bought any cheap paperback that featured supernatural mayhem or serial killers.
This is me in the horror section of a video store: "Seen it, seen it, seen it, seen it, seen it, seen it, seen it a lot..."
You can judge how far I've come. I went and saw Dawn of the Dead, a pretty notorious splatter movie. Lord knows how much fake blood they went through in it. I went to see it on a discount night at a small theater. It was packed, shoulder-to-shoulder. I struck up a nice conversation in line with another woman, and we sat together. We giggled when we lost a couple of girls during the first five minutes. They darted up the aisle, eyes as big as search lights when the brains started to get blown out. Their escort left after the first chunk was bitten out of someone, but he tried to walk cool as he left.
I had decided to keep count of on screen kills (not just dead bodies. I would have needed better eyesight than I had, and a calculator). I did it out loud. Yes, yes, I know, I know--talkers are an abomination in movie theaters. Sue me. I don't do it often, but I was excited. I'm sitting there going, "Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen..." Pretty soon my companion joined me. "Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four..." Our voices rose when the more explicit kills happened, and the rest of the audience began to notice. There was laughter. People started giving advice to the characters. It became audience involvement almost as extensive as The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I sometimes wonder what the theater staff thought when the door swung open and they could hear over a hundred people chanting, "Sixty-five! Sixty-six!" "Wait! He was killed, and he came back, and they killed him. Do we count him twice? Right! Sixty-seven!"
That was one of the most hilarious evenings of my life, and I felt at home. I was surrounded by people who didn't think I was odd because I could watch someone have the top of their skull taken off by a helicopter blade and giggle instead of upchuck. I was with fellow gore hounds.
Now I come to the point of this... whatever it is. I turned out all right. I've never committed a murder, axe or otherwise. I've never even committed assault. In fact, the only brushes I've had with the law come from expired auto tags and sticker, and over due library books. I've held steady jobs (all legal), I try to pay my bills on time, I often attend church, I'm patient and polite to old people and little children, I'm kind to animals, and the adjectives most used to describe me in my high school yearbook were 'sweet' and 'nice'.
I once had an acquaintance in college say, "Fannie, I just don't understand it. You're such a sweet, gentle, good natured person. How can you watch all those horrible gory movies?"
I replied, "Has it occurred to you that watching those movies might be part of why I'm so sweet, gently, and good natured?"
I believe that's true--at least for me. I think that my dark side (and we all have one, whether we admit it or not), has been aired and defused by these interests. Just one person's opinion.
So mothers, if your child insists on watching every Freddy, Jason, and Michael movie in existence, you shouldn't necessarily worry.
It's the people who order the video tapes of autopsies and accidents requiring paramedic assistance (when they don't want to be medics or special effects artists) that scare me...
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