It all happened a long, long time ago, in a city not too far from here. Most of my friends were watching Star Wars and having the time of their lives pretending to be Han Solo and Luke Skywalker saving the galaxy from the evil Empire. I had no problem with this. It was fun. But two things converged in my childhood, like two galaxies colliding, and the supermassive black hole in the center pulled at me until I couldn’t resist any longer.
The first thing that happened was I stayed up and watched a late-night version of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead from 1968. People have spoken ad nauseam about the influence that Romero’s films have had and how the flesh-eating ghouls would be forever after referred to as “Romero Zombies” because before that film, zombies were mostly of the Voodoo variety in Hollywood. Two things happened to me after that movie was over. The first was immediate: I was in shock. The second took a little more time and it was a newfound appreciation for older films, black and white films. I was a kid and black and white meant one thing-old. After watching Romero’s masterpiece, I came to see the awesome power of shadows and light in black and white movies, and that lead me to even more classics like Psycho, The Cat People, Dracula, and my absolute favorite, Frankenstein. Are we sensing a pattern? This leads back to that first thing, the shock.
Finishing this bleak film, I mulled it over in my head, wanted to watch it again as soon as possible, and thought about the implications of it all. First there were the recently dead walking the Earth, and they were hungry. Sure, they were slow (which honestly made them creepier in a way I couldn’t describe), but in numbers and with their lack of a need for sleep and the inability to feel pain, they were unrelenting. More than that, however, was the bleakness in which the film seemed to revel. The ending of the film, which I won’t give away here so as not to spoil the same experience for anybody else first coming into their own shock, left me speechless and a little disturbed at what it all could mean, if it meant anything at all.
Not too long after this, in that city not too far and in that distant time, I came across a book, one that I was probably not supposed to be reading at my tender age. I always read above my age level, and honestly, I think my parents were just happy that one of their kids was a voracious reader. This book was by Stephen King and it wasn’t one that most people point to as their go-to King novel. Most fans of his work point to It, The Shining, or Salem’s Lot as the novel that triggered their interest in his work. No, for me it was Gerald’s Game. I don’t know if any of his other works would have had the same effect on me had I not read it so soon after the shell shock of Romero’s bleak and hungry world, but it was a combination of the monsters on screen, and then the very human monsters in the King novel that set me on a path. In the novel, there are no hungry, dripping wet, snarling creatures hungry for human flesh or wanting to steal a soul. There are no vampires, no evil clowns, or haunted hotels or cars. No, it is simply a haunted woman, tied to a bed and unable to escape, dealing with the sins of her past and the voices of those that have shaped her nagging at her in her trapped state. The idea that before she succumbs she could literally drive herself to madness fascinated me, and still does. So much of my own writing focuses on what people perceive as real and the loss of oneself in their own mind.
These two works, one film and one literary, introduced me to horror in a way that was truly mind-opening and life-altering. Firstly, I learned that monsters could be fun, but they could also tell us a story of humanity. Secondly, I learned that not all monsters are not-of-this-world. Some of them are very real and very human. Worse still, some of them live right here in our minds where we can do nothing about them but listen as they tear away at our sanity from the inside and from the past.
Both pieces of dark art instilled in me an interest in the dark things that lurk in every corner, the dark corners of the world, and the dark corners of the mind. Beware, here there be monsters. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. All those sorts of things. Sometimes the genre is balked at, but I invite everyone to explore the corners they were once afraid of. Go into the basement and extinguish the light. See how you feel. Enter that crawlspace, stare at that clown. Worse, listen to your own thoughts. You might not enjoy it as much as others do, but you might learn something still. Being scared releases in us something we didn’t know was there until it came clawing out, screaming. Go, look in the corners. Find something new.
Brian Lonergan 