The Horror.... The Horror

When I was a comic book kid, I latched onto a couple of monster series, Tomb of Dracula and Werewolf by Night. I remember when the Dracula comic hit the stands in spring of 1972 - I snapped up issue #1 and collected that title for quite some time. These books weren't quite horror but more action... sort of like Dracula as a superhero. Sort of. Same goes for Werewolf by Night, which debuted its first issue in fall of '72. Those two were my favourite of the old school (the only school I knew at the time) of monsters. The Universal Studios movie monsters, that is.... or was.

My interest in these comics stemmed from my love of the old movies I saw on television as a youngster. The monster films of the 1930's and 40's were pretty "kid safe" by the time I learned about them in the 70's. Cool-looking creatures lurking and stomping around shadowy castles. What else could fire the imagination of a young boy more than that stuff?

With favourites like Dracula, Wolf Man, the Frankenstein monster, and the Mummy tucked up into my noggin, I sought out anything I could find from this scary genre. Sure, I gave myself nightmares, but back then, scary dreams were a welcome addition to my viewing "entertainment", especially since home video didn't exist yet.

Anyhow, I soon added a couple of nice big reference books to my shelves. The first one I got was by Denis Gifford, the greenish book with yellow title pictured below. A few years later I added the one by Alan G. Frank, featuring a bloody good photo of Christopher Lee as Dracula on the front cover. 

Oh, and jumping back in time a bit again, my very first horror-oriented book purchase was a neat little guide to movie monster make-up. I bought that through the Scholastic Book program at school. Man, was I stoked for that book. Funny thing though.... as much as I liked looking through the book, I never once did myself up in any of those make-ups for Halloween. Probably just too difficult or expensive at the time. And not the sort of thing my folks would help with either. I did, however, dress myself as Dr. Jekyll's alter ego, Mr. Hyde, one Halloween. A fairly easy costume, I think: I made myself a top hat and walking stick, and I think my mom might have helped with the cloak. And I must have dabbed creepy make-up on my face to look a bit hideous. 

And to add a little ambience to my bedroom, I bought myself a couple of Aurora monster model kits. It seemed to be a rite of passage into early adolescence to build monster models, at least for this fan. I recall at least one friend who did the same thing. I assembled and painted the Dracula and Wolf Man kits and loved seeing parts of the models glowing in the dark at night. I actually hung onto those two kits all these years. The Drac kit has needed repairs now and then, for it was a bit fragile with the bats hanging from the tree branches. The Wolf Man kit was a sturdier piece of work and has weathered the decades quite well. My paint job on these things wasn't the greatest, but hey, I loved them way back then. Painting, especially for three-dimensional subjects, just didn't come all that naturally to me. So I made up for that by slathering bloody red on the monsters' faces - when in doubt, add blood!

It wasn't much longer until I discovered the Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. I had trouble locating the mag in my smallish city, so I wasn't able to accumulate much of a collection. But each issue was fun and informative.... silly and crazy captions were added to stills of the great monsters of yesteryear. In fact, between Famous Monsters and my reference books, I learned a lot about movies I would not even see until decades later, when I began building a serious movie collection. Yes, though I was bitten by the horror bug as a young lad, I am still a fan.... and very young at heart.