I'm getting scary
Confessions of a fraidy cat who took an incredibly long road to becoming a horror nerd.
I’ve been scared to admit I like scary movies.
Blame it on an ex-boyfriend who had the nerve to tell me- a guy who’s spent his entire life loving and working in comics- that I wasn’t a nerd because my bookshelves of comics, toys, and video games didn’t have enough tabletop games to qualify me as a nerd. Or maybe blame it on the comics industry (My people! My life blood!), where the gatekeepery can get really real, and any little thing can ding you of whatever perceived street cred you thought you had. Or blame Child’s Play.
Growing up, I had an intensely irrational fear of Chucky. It started with a dream where my mom bought me a Good Guy doll with a bow tie at a car wash, and then later in real life I was rummaging through my toy chest and found said bow tie in the pile of action figures and stuffed animals. While the accessory belonged to my Roger Rabbit doll, it took my mom going through each and every toy in the chest (and me hiding behind the doorway with a hammer) to believe that a murderous Chucky wasn’t hiding in my closet… that was a job better suited for my sexuality.
All of this happened too soon in my life to understand that it was the power of my imagination that I should have been scared of, not the visuals depicted in celluloid. For years after that, I avoided horror movies and admitted to being a wimp. If my best friend’s family was watching Alien, I’d walk back to my place and call their apartment every thirty minutes to see if the movie was done. There were certain channels on the TV that were no-fly zones between Nickelodeon, MTV, and Comedy Central. I had my happy stories, and that was fine.
That was until Scream.
Instead of loving Britney Spears, Jennifer Love Hewitt, or Jessica Simpson in the late ‘90s, I was a devout Neve Campbell fan. It’s probably because her demeanor was what I’d imagined Kimberly Hart would be like if she’d left the Power Rangers and studied poetry in East Bay, but whatever it was, when I saw her on Party of Five, I was in love. She was the woman whose magazine clippings I’d tape next to posters of Pokémon, X-Men, and Witchblade. After Scream became an international hit (and my best friend’s favorite movie), I caved to peer pressure and asked to watch his VHS, but only if he would tell me when the jump scares would happen. I fell in love with Sidney Prescott and the world around her. The meta humor and campy asides sang to the burgeoning gay boy in me. The first two movies helped me push through my own fear of scary movies so much so that by the time Scream 3 came out, I went opening weekend without anyone there to tell me when Ghostface would pop out to gut his latest victim.
(Plus, I was a big Jay and Silent Bob fan and I heard they had a cameo.)
For a time, I thought that the Scream franchise was the exception to my fraidy cat rule. Then I became the person who invited friends over to watch The Ring (and subsequently called a landline from my cell after Naomi Watts watches the tape). Then I became the person at the comic shop with opinions about Junji Ito’s horror masterpiece, Uzumaki. Then I became the one who bored my friend Elena when I invited her and her then-boyfriend Grant over to play Silent Hill 2. The quiet appreciation for the horror genre was always there, but I’d never claim any sort of fandom because I knew I was a basket case about anticipating jump scares. I was still a fraidy cat.
That was until Antichrist.
My next brunette dream girl was Charlotte Gainsbourg. I was utterly transfixed by her album IRM, obsessed with her utterly chic lore, and totally terrified by the chatter around her role in Lars von Trier’s provocative drama, Antichrist. I can still remember driving along the coast from the Bay Area to LA as my friend explained the plot of the movie. A more haunting track from Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest was playing softly in the background. He spared no detail as he recounted beat-for-beat the story of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s nameless She battling grief in a lonely cabin with only her husband He (Gobbie himself, Willem Dafoe) to help her… slowly unravel. I won’t give away any spoilers, but the last twenty minutes of the movie spins headfirst into a violent frenzy where mutilation of all varieties abounds. With only the haunting movie poster as my visual aid, the descriptions of the disturbing scenes were nightmare fuel for my brain.
That didn’t stop me from trying to find screenshots of the scenes in question.
I don’t know why Antichrist was the movie that piqued my interest so much, the kind of interest that brought me back to the intense fascination and curiosity of Scream that I had to watch it with my own eyes. I digitally rented the movie so I could watch it on a small screen with full control of the volume. Believe it or not, any version of the portrayed horrors in the movie were -ahem- child’s play in comparison to the grisly images my brain conjured on its own. The scene I was warned about (the one with the gardening shears, for those who know) ended up making me laugh out loud because of how goofy it looked with practical effects. I mean seriously, for the ones who’ve seen the movie: colored balloon with red paint much??!!!
After that point, I realized that there was nothing in a movie scarier than what was in my head. If I ever got stressed in a theater, I could just distract my brain with thoughts about how the scene was shot, consider the practical effects, and go back to enjoying the story.
It’s a good thing too, because I ended up working on the Walking Dead franchise one year later! Also, that was something I never saw as horror… I have a weird thing where zombies don’t scare me? It was more a vehicle for cool kill scenes and dramatic monologues.
The person I have to thank for taking me from fraidy cat to an out and proud horror nerd, is the Queen Horror Nerd herself, Samantha Hale. For the readers who don’t live in LA, Sam runs a monthly comedy night at the Hollywood Improv called Horror Nerd. I got to know Sam through our mutual friend Tom, then became even closer with her when I realized we both adored local comedian Joseph Schles for being soft and biting joke machine. After going to so many Horror Nerd shows, doing some art for her, and watching her great special, I realized… wait, I know all these references. I’ve seen most of these films. Everybody in this space is super jazzed to hear what anyone has to say. There’s no gatekeeping. There’s no judgement.
I felt like Anna Chlumsky in My Girl when an open minded guy in her poetry class embraces her poem about ice cream… a truly calm sense of belonging and understanding.
Maybe I’m a horror nerd.
I spent a portion of last year exploring my relationship with the horror genre and comics. As I mentioned earlier, I am a big Junji Ito fan, I read practically everything that James Tynion IV puts out, I’ve got Hellboy and 30 Days of Night on my bookshelf… the only person stopping me from exploring a creatively fertile genre was myself.
Like, I may as well make money from the night terrors, y’know?
The following projects blossomed from this exploration. I am so so so grateful that the editors associated with these books looked at my gay ass and said “yes, you probably have really dark thoughts, let’s let them out.”
Hello Darkness
Bryce Carlson was the first person to let me get #dark. There was a pitch I had been trying to get across the finish line about a boy who gets sucked into his favorite cw/ Buffy/ vampire diaries-type show that I ultimately looked at and said “I will sacrifice your scope just to make you exist.” Cemetery Cove took what was supposed to be a lighthearted story, and made into a grim little tale. I thought about Robert Kirkman’s queer Marvel hero, Freedom Ring, and how the character was meant to be an exploration of the one superhero who doesn’t have it all figured out right from the start. I took a lonely fanboy whose dream was to finally have community, and made him walk headfirst into a gothic nightmare. He doesn’t make it into the scooby gang, he doesn’t even make it past his first monster of the week.
I’m so grateful that David Mariotte came in as the day-to-day editor on this story, because he knew exactly what I was trying to do, and gave me complete freedom to tell my own version of I Saw The TV Glow.
“Cemetery Cove” is collected in Hello Darkness Volume 3. You can order it here.
Creepshow
Ben Abernathy and I have been friends for a reeeeally long time, and I believe that this story was our first time working together in an official capacity? I sent Ben two different pitches: one was the opposite of my story for Hello Darkness where it could have been long form but I liked the idea of it being tiny, too (more on this in a bit), and the other was me prompting myself with a thought of, “what’s a story no one would expect from you?” I thought: corporate workplace, straight guy protagonist, and mega gross visuals. What came out of my mind was a Severance meets Titane short story about a guy who takes part of a program at work that turns him into a tire for an optimized 18-wheeler. The final story, “Wheels on the Truck” turned out great, due in large part to artist Ramon Villalobos’ intensely detailed visuals. He gave so much life and depth to the American landscapes that framed the vile things that were happening to the main character’s body. I had such a blast thinking about the grossest things that could happen to a person!
“Wheels on the Truck” is collected in Creepshow Volume 4. You can order it here.
Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: Megazords and Monsters
Okay, so this one was technically done for the Halloween Special, but my story (“Putty For Your Thoughts”) is about to be collected in the title I typed above, and for the sake of SEO and you actually seeking the story out, we’re going with Megazords and Monsters.
Every time I get to play with the Power Rangers toys, I’m a happy man. David Mariotte reached out to me for a Halloween story, and I jumped at the opportunity to tell a story that focused on my strengths… which is lowkey tricky in the Power Rangers universe. I like drawing hand-to-hand fight scenes. I love drawing well-dressed teenagers. I suck at drawing mechs. I don’t love drawing crazy splashy explosive fight scenes. With that in mind (and with the goal of trying to impress anyone who was putting me in a corner from a hiring perspective), I focused on a deeply psychological story about Kimberly having her mind put in a putty’s body while Rita Repulsa took over hers. Versions of this idea have been toyed with in Power Rangers lore, but never quite in a way that examines what it means to be a Putty, and never in a way that truly forces Kimberly to ask herself who she is when she’s stripped of everything.
I had such a blast drawing this story. Who knows what you as the reader got from it, but I was throwing Kafka-meets-The Substance vibes, with a little McQueen thrown in for fun. The final results are eerie, sad, maniacal, and still finds a way to land on the spirit of what it takes to be a Power Ranger.
“Putty For Your Thoughts” is collected in Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: Megazords and Monsters. You can order it here.
What horrors lay ahead?
I’m nowhere near done playing in the sandbox of horrors. I’m in the midst of writing a story for EC that literally came from a dream I had where in the dream I asked myself: What’s a new version of a horror story about a couple having one nightmare night in a big house? I’m also cooking up an idea with a longtime friend where we want to take all our fears about what’s going on politically but like in a chic, Silent Hill kind of way. I’m also taking that short story pitch I threw at Ben Abernathy and taking time to develop it into a mini-series. It’s a queer meta slasher, because after so many decades of loving the Scream franchise, how can I not?