AVQ&A: What was your gateway to horror?

Ahead of our annual Horrors Week, we share our earliest, most indelible experiences with the genre.

By The A.V. Club  |  October 26, 2024 | 8:00am
Left: Goosebumps book cover; center: Michael Keaton in Beetlejuice: The Grudge movie poster
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AVQ&A: What was your gateway to horror?
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As we gear up for Horrors Week—which you’ll be able to sink your teeth into beginning October 28—we’re taking time to reflect on our earliest and/or most indelible experiences with the genre. Staff Writer Emma Keates asked the rest of The A.V. Club: What was your gateway to horror?

Beetlejuice

Before I got around to Are You Afraid Of The Dark? and Poltergeist, there was Tim Burton, the first director I knew by name. How could I possibly ignore the fact that Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Batman, and my favorite, Beetlejuice, were all made by the same person? (Unsurprisingly, Michael Keaton was my favorite actor) But Beetlejuice, more so than the other two, informed my sense of the macabre and my sense of humor toward it. Beetlejuice’s creatures, settings, and attitude toward death are plenty scary and subversive but in a more absurdly mundane manner that makes horror welcoming to outsiders or aspiring outsiders. Beetlejuice and its spin-off cartoon series, which I couldn’t get enough of, made death, tragedy, and horror in the macro funny to me, instilling a gallows humor that aided my transition to Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark, Gremlins, and beyond. [Matt Schimkowitz]

Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory (1971)

Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory was the first horror movie I ever saw, and not just in a “the Oompa Loompas really freaked me out as a kid” kind of way. If you’ve watched it as an adult, you’ll know that this thing is as classic as they come. People point to the boat scene (which is shocking to this day; there’s a chicken getting decapitated in there), but there’s so much more. Charlie encounters a harbinger in the form of a creepy old janitor in the first ten minutes of the film. Wonka then makes the kids literally sign their life away before trapping them in his torture factory and picking them off one by one. We never even see them come out; for all we know, Veruca was burned alive in that furnace. It’s no wonder I gravitate toward films about body horror and crazed lunatics now. [Emma Keates]

We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story

Like some other answers here, the horror sequence that stuck in my brain and led me to find more of those nightmare-inducing moments is both embedded in a harmless children’s movie and involves crows. We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story is a silly film for dino-obsessed kids that combines Jurassic Park and Oliver & Company. The post-Don Bluth folks at Amblimation gave a mismatched group of dinos big brains and sent them to present-day New York. Their foe was Professor Screweyes, the evil twin brother of their benefactor Captain Neweyes. (Yes, they are twins with different eye-based last names.) The brain-draining Screweyes is disproportionately scary throughout thanks to gravelly voiceover expert Kenneth Mars, but the most terrifying scene is his comeuppance. In an expressionist moment of shadows, spotlights, and shaky breathing, he’s devoured by a flock of crows, consumed in an instant, gobbled down to just a screw. [Jacob Oller]

Carrie (1976)

Back in the days when people watched movies on network TV and would tune in in the middle, I half-watched most of Carrie with my mom. Having missed her traumatic scene at the beginning, most of the middle was us gawking at the 1970s fashion. I was 10 years old and had no idea what was coming. In the fateful scene where Carrie is crowned prom queen, I thought they dumped chocolate syrup on her. “No,” my mom said. “Pig’s blood.” The massacre that followed upset and fascinated me for months, and I would rewatch clips from the movie and read about it on the family computer after my parents went to bed. When I went to my own proms years later (in Maine, no less), it was still in the back of my mind. I’m sure I’ve been more scared since, but nothing has stuck with me like that. [Drew Gillis]

The Grudge (2004)

I consider my gateway to horror as the first time I was legitimately spooked while watching something scary. While I had indulged in books and films of the genre that I thoroughly enjoyed (like Goosebumps or the Scream franchise), I can’t remember anything freaking me out like The Grudge. Yes, sadly I saw the American remake before going back and watching Ju On: The Grudge, but to my pre-teen brain, Takashi Shimizu’s movie left an indelible imprint. I remember being terrified of attics, of walking in hallways with lights lest they flicker behind me, cats, and even growing out my hair lest they be used as a weapon. The Grudge isn’t particularly well-made or anything. But there are enough unsettling sequences that it shouldn’t be recommended to watch alone at home with your lights off. As basic as it gets, it’s an interesting entryway into just how affecting horror can be on an impressionable mind. [Saloni Gajjar] 

The Simpsons, "Treehouse Of Horror"

Like many kids who grew up in the 1990s, I adored The Simpsons while often completely misunderstanding it. And while my inability to grasp jokes about the politics of radioactive fish didn’t get in the way of me enjoying Bart’s cool skateboard pranks, I hit a much harder wall with the annual “Treehouse Of Horror” episodes. Which were, I’m fairly sure, the first time I knowingly scared the shit out of myself with media because, hell, I wasn’t going to miss my Sunday night Simpsons dose! I definitely remember catching “Treehouse Of Horror IV” when I was nine, because the image of Mr. Burns as Dracula got burnt into my nightmares. But the traumatic one was “Treehouse Of Horror V“. A brilliantly funny episode, but I’ll never stop shuddering over the ending, where America’s Favorite Family is subjected to “that fog that turns people inside out.” “Stupid cheap weather stripping!” is a funny joke now; at 10, it was just Body Horror 101. [William]

"The Raven," Edgar Allan Poe

I remember seeing my first horror movie when I was seven years old (might have been even younger), and sneaking peeks at my older brother’s copy of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist when I was not much older. But reading Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” a year later (I was a melancholy third grader) marked the first time that a piece of horror storytelling rattled me. There’s no overt threat—as annoying as a raven that only knows one word might be—just the implication that the narrator will be mired in loneliness, never(more) able to forget his lost love. Though terms like “nepenthe” and “quaff” initially went over my head, Poe’s words still send chills down my spine because, as evocative as they are, they leave so much room for my mind to conjure fantastic images on its own. [Danette Chavez]

Goosebumps books

Scholastic recommends R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books for third- to seventh-grade readers, but that definitely didn’t stop me from devouring them when I was in first grade. In retrospect, it makes sense that a series of horror novels, light as they may be, isn’t intended for six-year-olds. But I was a voracious reader as a kid, and the Goosebumps series seemed endless (not to mention the choose-your-own-adventure spin-off, Give Yourself Goosebumps). Maybe Goosebumps desensitized me to horror early on—or maybe it opened my eyes to the breadth of the genre and showed me that any story can be a horror story if you tell it the right way. Who’s to say, really? [Jen Lennon]

 
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