The moral of the story is that my personality and artistic tastes and tendencies have always leaned heavily towards horror and related subjects. By age nine or ten, my tape collection consisted of Metallica, Megadeth, Faith No More, Alice in Chains and Anthrax. My bookcase was populated almost entirely by Christopher Pike, Edgar Allen Poe, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, R.L. Stine's Fear Street series, and other similar fare. My weekend afternoons, when I was not at Little League, town league basketball, or Rec. soccer, were spent upstairs in my parents' room pretending to watch the Hartford Whalers or Uconn Huskies on their 19 inch black and white set, when in actuality I would be taking in the likes of FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2 or A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET PART 3: THE DREAM WARRIORS when I knew the 'rents were out of earshot. The fact that I recall exactly what films I saw during these early days of discovery is a testament to my hopeless and undeterable devotion to all things genre.

The train left the station in full force with nary a backwards glance in 8th grade, when I would spend the entirety of Friday after school through Sunday morning at my best friend Ashton's house. Previously, my parents, supportive as they were of my interests, still were responsible enough to bar me from renting R-rated films, though you can bet your ass that I spent every trip to the video store with my mother ravenously studying each and every coverbox in the horror section, which in those days was still stocked with wonderful goodies - glorious big boxes, hard plastic clamshells with lurid cover art and enticingly gory stills on the back accompanying shamelessly embellished plot summaries. To this day I still remember thinking that THE DEADLY SPAWN was nothing less than the apex of ultra-violence. Luckily for me, unlike my Mom and Dad, Ashton's parents had no such desire to censor the limits of our viewership, setting up what would be the single greatest year of my young life. Our routine was always the same: we would begin with completing Ashton's paper route after school, then walking to the gas station to amass insane amounts of soda and sweets. Next, we would walk up the main road to the local Mom and Pop video store, where Ashton was able to use his mother's card, which granted the parental permission necessary to provide us with carte-blanche access to the extensive and glorious horror section. As much as I still feel giddy every time I discover a great new genre picture or an old gem that has flown under my radar over the years, there is simply nothing quite like experiencing all-time classics like HALLOWEEN, FRIDAY THE 13TH, THE EVIL DEAD, TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, DAWN OF THE DEAD, and so many others for the very first time, with no understanding of what to expect. Man, those weekends were the stuff of unparalelled legend. We ran the gamut that year from aforementioned genre greats, to second and third-tier exploitation like SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT and BURIAL GROUND, to unforgivable drek such as HEADLESS EYES and GOOD NIGHT, GOD BLESS. Regardless of the level of quality, there was a palpable excitement that was always lingering in the air like electricity, and goddamnit, I wanted to be struck and shocked over and over and over.

Pretty much my entire life since has consisted of trying to see as many horror films as humanly possible, and recapturing that indescribable feeling that I derived from those weekends, with plenty of ecstatic enjoyment; but only rarely does that rush that can only be taken out of seeing something truly great for the first time come to the surface. It's sort of similar to how heroin addicts describe the experience of "chasing the dragon." There's only one first time with something that you love, and after that initial amazing experience passes, try as you may, but you'll never be able to fully recapture that perfect storm, resulting in a neverending series of experiences that are enjoyable, but with an ever-so-subtle stroke of bittersweet, resulting from the understanding that you'll never be able to experience TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, for exampe, for the first time ever again.

However, regardless of this philosophical sidebar, my unflinching and endlessly devoted love of the horror genre will never wane. Which leads to the second, and almost equally important endeavor that could certainly be considered a love of my life, which is writing. As I mentioned above, I have been actively writing since, well, basically ever since I could commit semi-coherent thoughts to the page. As far back as early elementary school, I spent a considerable amount of time writing genre-inspired short fiction, an activity that I have always thought of as much more than a simple hobby. By middle school, I had also taken an interest in what is now labelled as "creative non-fiction." In eighth grade I picked up James O'Neill's integral Terror on Tape, a comprehensive A-Z review guide for horror on VHS. After tearing through it in a matter of a few days, I took up writing my own reviews of films I had recently seen, a practice that has become inseparably tied to my writing to this day. By my junior year of high school, I had written four admittedly crappy horror screenplays, and even co-authored a fairly decent, if derivative short story entitled Truth with internet buddy and personal horror mentor Richard Harland Smith, who I had no idea at the time was a respected scribe himself, being a frequent contributor to Tim Lucas' seminal magazine Video Watchdog.

I went on after graduating high school to study Cinema at the University of Hartford, where I honed my critical theory and screenwriting chops under, among others, David Woods, who co-authored the dense but fascinating Cinema of John Carpenter, as well as several other general film studies books. While at UHart, I co-directed a horror short entitled SGAIL (Celtic for SHADOW), and assembled 90-page thesis consisting of lengthy critiques of topics ranging from the technical genius of Halloween, the cinema of Dario Argento, gender in the horror genre, and the history of the slasher film. I graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Cinema Studies in 2003, and in 2004, I spent the better part of a year working at and writing for Fangoria at its Park Ave, Manhattan headquarters. I began as a meagerly paid editorial assistant, proof-reading each issue front to back, transcribing interviews, and writing captions for the pictures, but soon I was amassing valuable publication, ultimately writing eighteen reviews and two features over the course of my final six months with the mag. These were undoubtedly some of the most exciting days of my entire life, working in the same tiny room as Tony Timpone and Mike Gingold, who were (and are) key figures in the creation of a publication that I have spent almost half my life reading religously.

Once my time at Fangoria had run its course, I began to parlay my experience there into a variety of freelance gigs writing for smaller, but more scholarly magazines like Screem and Scarlet (formerly Scarlet Street). To date, I have had upwards of thirty-five pieces published for a variety of mags. At the moment, I am a graduate student at Southern Connecticut State University, where I am a few months away from receiving a Master's of Science in English, but more importantly, I am in the process of putting together my thesis, an A-Z review guide complete with essays, lists, mini-biographies and more, entitled The Fanatic's Guide to the Modern Horror Film, 1960-Present, a labor of love that I have been assembling for years, which is now truly coming together into something closely resembling a cohesive whole. My hope is that this book will be ready for serious publication some time in 2010. Most recently, I have written two articles, a short piece that looks at the halcyon days of made-for-TV horror, and a more involved feature that chronicles the underappreciated career of Jeff Lieberman. These mark my first time collaborating with BthroughZ. I am excited to be involved with this publication, and look forward to contributing more work to future installments of this fine 'zine.

In case anyone cares, or wants a reference point to see how their interests and tastes line up with my own, here are my top ten favorite horror films of all time:

1. THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974)
2. DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978)
3. HALLOWEEN (1978)
4. BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974)
5. SUSPIRIA
6. JOHN CARPENTER'S THE THING
7. DEEP RED
8. FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980)
9. DEAD-ALIVE
10. ALIEN

Thanks for following along with my lengthy ramblings. I hope you managed to take something of value out of this, because I know too well the aggravation that comes along with the feeling that you've just wasted twenty minutes of your day on some seriously dumb shit that brings nothing new of value to the table. Here's to horror, the genre we love, and to further communications between myself and you the reader!