My first boyhood crush was on a dead man. He was a zombie named Quentin Collins, with eyes that pierced my pubescent gay soul and sideburns the size of the Florida peninsula. He stalked across my TV screen on weekday afternoons at precisely 3:30, when the series “Dark Shadows” introduced me to all manner of vampires, werewolves and ghouls in the early 1970’s.
Quentin was dreamy (literally, since he spent a lot of time staring into space in a zombie trance), and had a lonesome, lost quality I recognized but couldn’t yet identify. I saved allowance money for the soundtrack album and replaced the David Cassidy poster in my bedroom for one of Barnabas Collins, the series’ vampire star.
Before long, I graduated to horror films. Slashers did the trick for a while because I delighted in those oversexed straight couples getting whacked with such regularity. If my burgeoning sexuality dared not speak its name, it was enormously satisfying, at least, that straight love was so damn hazardous.
But it was never the killing itself that attracted me. It was the mysterious, gruesome, self-loathing monster. Here I was, in the midst of full pubescent hormonal freak out, with a body revolting against me and a mind wracked with heretical carnal desires. I didn’t just sympathize with the Alien and Pinhead and Freddy, I wanted to take them to lunch and find out how they managed to make it through the day.
My taste for cinematic horror took a break in the 1980’s, during the worst of the AIDS crisis. Something about watching Re-Animator on VHS while my friend Lesley lay dying in the guest room severely reduced the fun factor. AIDS had become the monster, and my sympathies were spent. For at least ten dreary years I stuck to romantic comedies.
If the state of my personal AIDS crisis can be measured in movie genres, then my trauma must have subsided because horror movies are back in my Netflix queue with a vengeance. I’ve been popcorn-munching to zombies, toolbox killers and possessed toys and loving every minute. I can’t even manage to remove the fabulously dreadful Clash of the Titans remake from my watch list.
Ah, Greek mythology monster movies. It is impossible to resist the sight of Liam Neeson as Zeus, growling with magnificence as he commands, “Release the Kraken!” No three cinematic words since “you complete me” have so enraptured my senses, and they are worth the wait. That Kraken is bitchin’.
You should have seen the stir I created at the 1977 Junior Homecoming when I arrived, the school’s weird gay creature, wearing leather platform boots that reached to my knees. I relished in horrifying the crowd and seeing the jaws drop and the fingers pointing at the beast. No Kraken could have cleared the dance floor as fast as my solo disco moment, just before being chased to my car.
It’s hard running in platform boots. I could have used Pinhead for backup.
Mark
