Horror is My Best Friend

Horror fiction has always been my best friend.  As a child growing up, horror comic books, novels, and movies gave me an escape from the horror I had to deal with in real life.

As a young child of six, I watched my father slowly deteriorate from cancer.  One of the few memories I have is seeing him vomit profuse amounts of blood into the bathroom sink.  The very last time I saw him was when I visited him in the hospital. He was completely withered away and was begging for death to set him free.

In a matter of weeks he found that freedom and my childhood changed forever.  

My mother was left alone to support her children.  A babysitter was hired to watch us whenever she worked. She lived across the street and had a son who was a little older than me.  He loved horror films and introduced me to the genre. At first the movies scared me, but eventually I became very intrigued with them. I started coming over to his house everyday begging for new outlets of horror so he introduced me to horror novels and comic books. From that moment on I realized I was in love with the genre and wanted to grow up to become a master of horror.

Immersing myself in this dark fiction diverted my attention away from the traumatizing events occurring in my real life. The horror on screen was not like the horror of real life. The fictionalized horror always had an ending and resolution while in the horror of reality the monster does not die, love does not conquer all, and people do not end up living happily ever after. My mother eventually became very desperate in her struggle to make ends meet, so I was eight years old when she married an alcoholic police officer hoping that he would give us financial stability.

I never really got in trouble as a kid even though I lacked a strong father figure in my life. The macabre genre I loved gave me heroes like Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Todd McFarlane to look up to. I related to their life stories because they came from obscurity but were able to triumph against all odds and achieve their dreams. Reading about those artists inspired me to focus on my craft and not let external factors impede my work. During my spring and summer breaks, I would lock myself in my room to write and draw my own comic books while all of the neighborhood kids played outside.

When I turned 12, I became old enough to analyze the medium I so loved. I realized the villains in horror films like Jason, Freddy, or Michael Meyers all represented the impossible odds we deal with in our daily lives. We all have our personal demons that seem absolutely unstoppable and always come to destroy us at our weakest moments. The heroes in horror films are thrust into situations out of their control and have to deal with these obstacles, but they never give up and face their fears in order to defeat the most insurmountable villains. 

Horror has always been there for me during my best times and my hardest times. I think I owe horror a lot because it was there to take me away to a place where heroes could defeat the scary monster as long as they never gave up.I hold the genre very close to my heart and believe that I owe it an eclectic body of work like my predecessors H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. Horror has given so much to me and I think it only fitting that I give it something back in return.