Confessions of a Horror Junkie

A woman sits on a crumbling foundation wall. Her husband, down below, is searching the burned-out basement as a monster waits in the shadows to reveal himself. The man wants verification. The monster wants exculpation. And the woman, still in lamentation, just wants to go home with her husband and grieve the loss of their daughter. A hand reaches up. The woman grabs it to pull her husband from the ruins, only to look upon the face of the monster. The monster who killed her child, the monster who just killed her husband and the monster who will now kill her as well.

That scene from The Bride of Frankenstein has been burned into my memory since I was a child watching Shock Theater - the weekly horror show that opened with Shirley the tarantula creepy-crawling over an ancient volume of forgotten lore. Scary stuff, man.

I'm not sure when it really started. Maybe it was the not-so-scary monsters on Sesame Street. Or maybe it was my ritualized Saturday morning appointment with Scooby Doo (every week, me in my PJs, a bowl of cereal and Scooby). Somewhere early in my childhood I developed a love for monsters, ghosts and ghouls and everything that bumps in the night and sends shivers up a young boy's spine.

From the monster movies on local shows like Shock Theater and Nightmare Theater to books and magazines about monster movies (thank you Uncle Forry!) to the actual novels themselves that inspired those movies, my love for the genre increased as I matured.

And then I ran into a wall.

When I was but an awkward teenager, somewhat of a Teenage Frankenstein myself, I had an encounter with the very source of all the marvelous mysteries of life itself - I met God. Really. And my life changed. I'd like to think for the better. Part of that change was a desire to please God in every possible way. I wanted to be like God...not in power, or authority, or in any of the ways the super-villians want to be like God. I wanted to be like God in compassion, and mercy, and love, and kindness, and forgiveness. It was a kind and loving God who accepted me where I was at and as I was and I wanted to be just like Him.

In my zeal to be more and more like God I found myself imitating people I thought were closer to God than I was. I ritually sacrificed my secular albums and more or less renounced my affection for scary movies, horror magazines (sorry Forry!) and gothic novels.

And in the end I found myself looking more like the son of Falwell than the Son of God.

I just wrote that I renounced my affection for all things horror, but that's not entirely true. For years I continued to be a closet horror junkie, always careful in Christian fellowship but sneaking away for my horror fixes whenever I was able.

Thank God (and I mean that) I met Dave Canfield (Imagin 'Dat) and Rod Bennett (Wonder Magazine) - two Christian men who were able to see Christ even in the darkest places of the horror, sci-fi and fantasy genres (not unlike C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien before them...). Two men who said it was alright - nay, more so than that - it was downright meet, right and salutary for us as God-seekers to build monster models, watch horror movies and read comic books.

And like one who is re-born, I abandoned the closet and once again embraced those stories --- because it's THE STORIES that touch the deepest depths of my so oft-shadowed soul --- and stand before you (actually, I'm sitting as I type this) with my collection of horror DVDs and all those albums I trashed (now on CD) and, I'd like to believe, I'm looking more and more like Christ now than I did when I was confusing religious culture for true Christianity.

I'm a Christian who loves horror, sci-fi, and fantasy. And there is no condemnation in that.