Origins: Roots, Bloody Roots

Things were different when I was a kid. Back before the age of the internet I went to libraries to look up books on horror movies. I read plenty about tons of them without having seen or even previously heard of a lot of them. I discovered reading about horror was almost worse than actually seeing it given what a creative teenage imagination comes up with. Just reading about Leatherface's patented "arm chair" or about bodies being devoured alive in numerous zombie movies made for a bit of a grisly mental picture.

The first book that holds a very special place in my heart since at one time it was THE most comprehensive and complete editions on the topic of monsters and horror; the A to Z of stories, movies, books and comics which satisfied was Jeff Rovin's Encyclopedia of Monsters. I would check out the book so much from the library that my parents eventually bought me my own copy. 
This was excellent, for a while. Then later I stumbled onto another set of prophetic texts in the pair of Splatter Movies Guides by John McCarty. Splatter. Well that's a visual sounding kind of movie genre, I remember thinking, this firmly established my connection into the horror genre. In order for these books to be guides, however though, they had to describe why they make the cut, quite literally. From Alien to Zombie this book had more than my first bible. And this was how I would pass the time as a kid between Halloweens and episodes of Monstervision on TNT. It was interesting to note how I had started off on dinosaurs and monsters and slowly but surely the interest mutated into a love of the more human monsters and splatter movies or horror flicks (depending on the book). But they both made for good video shopping lists whenever the opportunity presented itself at the local mom and pop video store or if we were very lucky, Blockbuster Video. Yes once upon a time, the now defunct video empire was the mecca of all things VHS. The library was the easiest way to horror since it was literally at the end of the street where I lived. Of course at this point I was addicted, I needed as much as I could get my hands on... but of course the most likely of places quickly became a favorite hobby, the comic book shop. Next time...

But on that note some latenight noise pollution courtesy of Sepultura: