Cannibalism with a side of Voortman cookies (My Life as a Horror Fan, Part 8)

“WORLD TELEVISION PREMIERE” was a familiar and sometimes exciting phrase for kids in the early 1980s. It meant that you were going to watch a big budget, smash-hit Hollywood movie at home. Unless you had one of the four – FOUR! – premium stations, there were two ways to watch recent popular movies: You could go to the theater, or you could catch one on sychronous broadcast TV. I have a hazy memory of watching Mark Hamill introduce Star Wars on a little black and white set in my room as a preschooler. At the time it was kind of a big deal.

Hamill
I’ll play the rest if you remove RROH’s restraining bolt.

VCRs became available in affordable consumer models in the mid-1970s, but it took about 10 years for them to catch on. No one we knew had one until my folks bought one in 1985, right smack in the middle of the format war and the golden age of the local video shop. Overnight, it seemed like everyone else got one too.

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Phantasmagoria of the Library (My Life as a Horror Fan, Part 6)

The library at John Tyler Elementary School was not a place of welcome. When I was in second grade, it became a battleground.

That’s a strange reminiscence from a librarian. My mom found it odd back then too that her son, who read everyday, loved the public library, and always left it with a pile of books, complained that he didn’t like the school library and couldn’t find anything to read there. I was quick to explain. There were books there that I wanted to read, but I wasn’t allowed to read them.

The school library was divided into three large sections. The low shelves under the windows held picture books and early readers for first- and second-graders. The floor-to-ceiling shelves facing the desk and lining the two alcoves across the reading area from the windows were for grades three and up, offering YA fiction and nonfiction. An additional wall of tall shelves on the east wall at the end of the reading area were off limits to everyone but fifth- and sixth-graders. And as far as the librarian Mrs. Huffle was concerned, those age restrictions were absolute.

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My Life as a Horror Fan (Part 2): Cujo, a paperback book cover review

My Mom loved horror, and loved to read. The mass market paperback was made for her. She had stacks of them, usually in a brown paper grocery bag in her bedroom. Whenever she’d finish the last in a bunch, we’d walk a couple miles to a second hand bookstore to sell them and fill the bag with new ones. Whichever book she happened to be reading at any time, she’d keep on the left side of the vanity in her room. I thought they were neat because – this was the early 1980s – many of their covers had an opening that framed a face or a flame or some image, and when you opened that cover there was a second cover, and you’d see the small image you were looking at a moment ago was also part of a larger illustration. For instance, the front cover of a novel might have a drawing of a woman with red eyes, and when you opened the cover you would see the red was part of a second illustration of blood oozing from a wall.

One book cover in particular really caught my attention when I was three years old. It was summertime, so I probably found it on the vanity only a few months after having the life scared out of me by Fantasia. This cover didn’t have the “illustration behind the illustration” effect. As a matter of fact it didn’t have much of anything on it, but what was there was drawn to great effect.

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