In this installment, League of Tana Tea Drinkers' member Brittney-Jade Colangelo of Day of the Woman brings a youthful approach to an old genre.
Horror has always been a huge part of my life. Before Kindergarten I was a Craven Crusader, I had conquered Carpenter, and I bellowed with laughter at Barker. My mother introduced me to the films at a young age, but my father brought me into the horror culture. My parents also used to run the haunted hayride for our community.
People from all over would come to our town to experience the terror that my family would provide. While it would drive down creepy trails and scary wooded areas, my parents were lurking. My father may have been the big man in the hockey mask that jumped on top of the ride towards the end, but my mother was Pamela Voorhees. She was a woman dressed in the hockey mask at the beginning of the ride. Sort of a symbol for the terror that was about to come. In my opinion, it was brilliant.
My mother also chose a babysitter for me who shared a love of horror. I had a babysitter named Jillian who LOVED horror films. She would come over to watch me for the evening while my parents went out galavanting and she would come over with bundles of horror films. While most parents would probably freak out, my mom encouraged it! We even had a night where all the neighborhood kids came by and we watched Sleepaway Camp. Knowing it would scare us sheetless, it lead to an up all night party of ghost stories shared by not only the children and the babysitter...but my parents as well.
I know it sounds completely ridiculous to think that one of the "worst horror remakes" could have influenced me to enjoy old-school horror, but I promise it does have a point. After that weekend, I ran home to my computer and used Ask Jeeves (yes, this is before Google blew up) and typed in "the house on haunted hill movie". I was hoping to see if it, in fact, WAS the guy from Night at the Roxbury in this film. Instead of getting a bunch of images from the movie I had just seen or finding out that YES Chris Kattan did a horror film, I was given a picture of Vincent Price. Being only 9 years old, I had no idea who the HELL Vincent Price was. My mother did a great job leading me to the Freddy films, Jason, Michael, Carrie, and the rest of Stephen King's characters, but I had no idea who this guy was with the Boris Badinov mustache. So I went to my local family owned video store and asked "Do you have anything with Vincent Price?" The man smiled at me and said "Of course I do, and I wouldn't let most kids rent his stuff, but then again Brit...you've never been like most kids".
I scurried out happily from the video store with VHS copies of House of Wax, The Pit and the Pendulum, Theatre of Blood, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, The Fly, and on top of the stack...The House on Haunted Hill. Along with those films, he sent me home with a few of Castle's other greats, like Uranium Boom, The Tingler, Macabre, and what ended up my personal favorite, 13 Ghosts.
I must have looked pretty bad-ass to any middle-aged pedophiles down the street--a little 9-year-old girl with a vast collection of horror films bungie-corded on the back of her Huffy.
I started DotW for the sheer fact that for some reason or another, people think the horror genre is dying. I want to change that opinion. I am barely 19 years old, female, a competitive baton twirler, a beauty queen, poster child for my former high school (literally, I'm on the website) and yet I live and breathe horror films. I like that I don't quite "fit in" with the stereotypical horror fanatic. I started writing to show the world that horror is thriving through the generations that weren't born in the Golden age, and that the future of horror is bright and booming :)
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