Ten horror movies that messed me up as a kid

Yeah, the horror began a long time ago...

Back in 2016 I wrote a piece about the movies that messed me up as a kid. That list hasn’t changed much. I mean, I’ve watched things that have had a lasting impact on me—Where the Devil Roams (I love the Adams family!), Terrified and When Evil Lurks (Rugna is a master), The Platform, Vivarium—but the way a movie can fuck you up when you’re eight or ten or twelve is something hard to replicate two or three decades later. There are also many movies that I consider some of my favorites, but they came later in life and thus didn’t have the same impact as the ones I’ll talk about below. Some of those perpetual favorites include Lake Mungo, Savageland, Bone Tomahawk, Troll Hunter, Split Second, Baskin, etc. Anyway, the list of movies is long, but here, in no particular order, are ten that messed me up when I was younger. Many thanks to all of them.

Alien

I think I was ten or eleven when the magic that is Alien came into my life. At the time, it was probably the most claustrophobic film I'd ever seen. Add to that a slimy, fast-moving monster from the brain of H.R. Giger, squirming facehuggers, and bursting torsos, and the end result is a messed up kid dreaming of space terror and hidden alien eggs for weeks. This became the first movie that I'd watch two or three times before returning it. It also marked the beginning of my love affair with gory/scary outer space stories (something H.P. Lovecraft largely contributed to).

Pet Sematary

This movie freaked me the fuck out. Tiny Miko Hughes with a scalpel? Nightmares for days. “It’s not fair! No fair!” Victor Pascow's busted head? That was The Shit. The whole movie is steeped in an atmosphere of inevitable doom and desperation that's as thick as the fog in those woods. This was gore and blood, but it was also emotional grit that cut to my core and left me shaken, pondering what I'd do if faced with similar circumstances. That made the film personal, and that's the best kind of horror.

The Exorcist

The internet is a weird, dangerous place where everyone has an opinion and is just dying to share it with you. When I wrote the original version of this back in 2016, hating on The Exorcist was a popular thing to do. Well, fuck the haters, as always. Here's why this one's on this list: I watched The Exorcist when I was 12 or so. Period. Young child's fragile eggshell mind and all that jazz Jim Morrison was singing about (“I am the Lizard King/I can do anything/I can make the earth stop in its tracks”). The movie stuck with me. Sure, I'd seen a hundred movies with bad language in them, but gems like "Your mother sucks cocks in Hell, Karras, you faithless slime" and "Stick your cock up her ass, you motherfucking worthless cocksucker" were on a whole new level, especially for a kid who was trying to learn English and paid attention to every word of every book and every movie. Ah, and then there’s the green vomit, the crawling down the stairs, and the violent bed shaking. All those things went into my brain and stayed there, but the stuff coming from Linda Blair's mouth tattooed this movie in my brain forever.

Hellraiser

The effects were a little cheap, but they were bloody enough to get to me. Almost a decade would pass between watching the movie and me reading Clive Barker for the first time, and I'm pretty sure the movie is still the first thing I think about when his name comes up despite the fact that he is a true literary giant. And no, I'm not ashamed of that. Pinhead lives in my head, and his voice tells me things. When I sit down to write, I sometimes whisper to future readers: "I have such sights to show you." People at the library usually move from my table. Anyway, long live Barker!

Cannibal Holocaust

If someone paid me some American dollars, I would write a 5k-word piece about my three-year quest to track down a VHS copy of this movie. Yeah, it was not a film you could walk into any Blockbuster and rent. Later, it also wasn’t at Video Ave. At least not back home. I finally tracked one down (not easy to do in pre-internet times) and got a card at an indie video store 40 minutes from my house just to rent that thing. I sat down and enjoyed every flesh-tearing minute of it. I know I was supposed to be horrified, but I was so damn happy to finally get to watch it that I felt like a hardcore sports fan watching his favorite team winning a championships. I love guts and gore. Yes, I also love turtles.

The Serpent and the Rainbow

If you read Zero Saints, you know I love syncretism, spirits, dark arts, voodoo, santería, and supernatural violence, to name a few. My interest in these things started at a very early age (grandma and her ghosts/candles/prayers/stories are to blame for that). However, this film made me feel like someone had pulled some of my own fears out of my head and made them into a movie. Years later, I read Wade Davis' book and eventually studied voodoo, santería, Palo, and other Afro-Caribbean religions seriously (I even became somewhat of an expert on it and studied people like Marie Laveau, whose grave I visited in New Orleans soon after moving to Austin).

The Shining

I've lost count of how many times I've seen this movie, but I know the first time was special. The weird architecture, the twins, the emptiness, the colors, the blood, Danny's finger, the decomposed back of the woman in the tub, and the slow descent into insanity are all part of it, but there's something else, something my young brain couldn't understand at the time, that makes this gem by King and Kubrick one of those movies that rewired my brain just a little bit and showed me that isolation breeds insanity, and that great stories are always packed with secrets. It also made Jack Nicholson's performance my go-to when older folks started talking about acting. Oh, and I think my love for Stephen King at the time made this even bigger for me.

Jaws

This is one is very easy to explain. I was eight or so. I lived on a tiny island surrounded by sharks…

RoboCop

That fucking hand scene! I can see it in my head as I write this. Sure, I’ve encountered people here and there who go “RoboCop isn’t a horror movie, it’s a sci-fi movie!” or ‘Really? But it’s an action movie, no?” No. Hell no. The violence, the evil people, the carnage, the man who gets torn to shreds and then gets brought back to life as toaster with a big gun and told to get back to work immediately….Yeah, RoboCop is a horror movie, and it’s one that messed me up real bad when I was about eight or nine.

Predator

My love for this movie knows no bounds. Inhospitable jungle full of deadly predators and these guys get hunted down for sport by some alien? Back in the day, there was only one word for a movie like this: perfect. It made me want to tell stories like that, which is great, but I was also too young and that skinned, hanging body and the great Bill Duke pressing that razor against his face? That will turn you into a writer. I’m proof of it.

I fondly remember a bunch of other movies like The Fog, The Fly, Basket Case, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Friday the 13th, The Thing, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Child's Play, Poltergeist, Night of the Living Dead, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and many, many others. However, these ten are different for me; they helped, in varying degrees, shape my understanding of horror, and that means their DNA will probably show up in every horror story I ever write. I'm fine with that. Now tell me about some of yours!