My gateway drug wasn’t a movie, but a TV show.  I was 6 years old (maybe 7) and it was called Ghost Story.  I can remember me and my brother watching it each week and just loving it.  Of course, there was also The Night Gallery, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and any other number of Dan Curtis projects.  I also remember watching Frankenstein:  The True Story and being completely enthralled by it.  But can’t remember too many specific movies that I watched as a youngster.   Didn’t have a lot of options back then.  But that was the stuff that started my love of the genre.

As far as what scared me as a kid, don’t remember having nightmares over any of the things that I watched when I was young.  But, seeing Jaws in the theaters at the ripe old age of 11 or 12 scared me for life.  Had nightmares every night for about 2 weeks after that.  Ones that I can STILL vividly remember to this day.  And causing me not to set foot in a body of water other than a swimming pool ever since.  Seeing The Exorcist for the first time, on regular edited TV no less, scared the holy crap out of me as well.  And one other that took me forever to see (because I kept turned it off anytime the title character appeared on screen) was the original The Blob.

 But strangely enough, it wasn’t a horror film that got me obsessed with movies.  It was Star Wars.  Some people have those moments as a youngster when they have that epiphany of what they are going to do with their life.  We’ve all heard those stories of people saying that after seeing a certain movies, they realized they were going to become a makeup artist, or actor, or director and such.  But for me, after seeing Star Wars, I realized that I was going to learn as much as I could about movies that I could.  Whether it would facts or just trivial information, I was going to learn as much about them as I could.  And when the horror bug really developed and mutated, there was no stopping me.

Star Wars was also the thing that got me started collection movie memorabilia.  Of course, I only wished I would have kept some of the stuff I had back then….