When I was a child, I was a scardey cat, a meek little twerp afraid of his own shadow. On a day trip to Ayr in Scotland with family, my older cousins wanted to go into a haunted house at the funfair. I wanted to go in, to act the big man (I was 9) so I decided to tag along. I never made it in the damn place. I froze, I got so scared I yelled "shut up" to the ghost standing at the door making "woooooh" noises. To this day, I have no idea if that ghost was a real person or a sheet draped over a speaker. My money is on the latter but at the time, I didn't really give it much thought, I was too busy running. Now, I had one or two daliances with horror before this, my mum would tell me about horror movies she watched at her friends' house, she told me tales of The Terminator and A Nightmare on Elm Street in such detail, I couldn't sleep that night.
Around this time, I have a memory of watching The Burning, a classic slasher movie with a very memorable massacre scene on a small boat. This is what I remember seeing and telling my fellow school kids about in class. However, I don't know just exactly how I saw it, one of the many casualties of my aging human memory. I think I was off school having just gotten teeth extracted, lying on the couch feeling extremely woozy after being knocked out by a gas happy dentist. I remember my aunt, who was keeping an eye on me that day was watching The Burning but thinking back, it doesn't really make sense. However, I have only ever seen that movie once since and I knew pretty much everything that was going to happen, so who knows. I do know I talked to freinds at school about it. Maybe I'll talk about The Burning on the podcast one day.
Anyway, to the point, three paragraphs in. The Christmas after my haunted house fiasco, I got a black and white TV for my bedroom. I was 10 years old, living with a young single parent and she clearly got fed up watching cartoons every day after school. Friday the 2nd of January, 1987 would be a day that changed my life forever, albeit slowly, it sowed the seeds at least. It was that day, at 10.30pm, BBC 1 showed Poltergeist for the very first time and as it was still the Christmas break (and a Friday anyway), I stayed up to watch it, crappy 80s barely over the ears headphones plugged in at the front and too close to the screen in an oddly fitting way, given the movie. It blew my mind, even in tiny, tinny monochrome, I loved that movie and still do. That TV served me well. Over the next few years. I would stay up watching other movies such as The Omen 1-3, Halloween, Halloween 3, Carrie, Cat's Eye and The Dead Zone. All in glorious black and white and edited for violence and language. As I hit my teens, I became more of an action movie guy but would still occasionally watch horror, I would spend entire Summer days in my room watching videos, often films recorded off TV but some bought and while it would usually be the latest Arnold or Sly action blockbuster, the occasional horror movie would be watched too. I was no longer afraid. The explosion of teen horror movies in the mid-late 90s with Scream got me back into the genre fully again and I have loved it since. I will never forget that little black and white TV and the utter joy it gave me for a few years before I was allowed to get a colour one for my 13th birthday.
And yes, I consider The Terminator to be a horror movie, it's a slasher with guns. What of it?