Today is the start of the official “hot” season around here. Temps are climbing into the upper 80s/low 90s and lots of humidity. I know my elder dog won’t like it, and I know I’m not gonna like it either. It’s supposed to stretch clear into next week and even get those “feels like” temps feeling like well over 100 degrees.
These are the days where my wife and I both mutter “Thank God for air conditioning.”
Thank God, indeed. Not just for the comfort of cool air inside when it feels like the surface of the sun outside. But also for those of us that seasonal allergies makes life a living Hell. The past month has been awful here in the pine forest we live in. Between the pine dust falling, then segueing right into cotton-y horrors of the cottonwood trees making it look like it’s Christmas in May and June, it’s been a damn rough month or so. Going through boxes of Kleenex like we own stock in em, and popping Claritin and Sudafed as if our lives depended on it(it sort of does), the allergy season has hit us pretty hard.
But fear not, thanks to the wonders of HVAC, streaming, and Blu Ray players all we need is right inside our four walls. Despite the discomfort of hot and humid days, there’s something very nostalgic and peaceful about them as well. When I was a kid hot, summer days meant hours clocking miles on my Huffy BMX, charging through the woods playing war or building forts from fallen limbs and pine needles, and riding a mile and a half down county roads to the closest convenience store to play the two arcade games they had and grabbing candy and a pop for the road.
It was a very 80s thing to do. We had no game system or even cable TV, so playing with Star Wars toys in the front yard under two pine trees or cooking a frozen pizza and then wrapping it in foil to take along on some misadventure by the lake was the name of the game.
But in November of 1984 all that changed. My dad bought us our first VCR, a Toshiba Betamax player. Coming home from school on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving 1984 and seeing this sleek, silver machine sitting on top of our 27″ Zenith console was mind blowing for a nearly 11-year old me. We were no longer limited to the 6 or 7 channels our 50 ft antenna tower offered up. The world of entertainment was blown wide open for us, and the first two movies we watched on that beautiful contraption was Strange Brew and Creepshow. Hoo boy, I felt I’d stepped into the future.
Summer break 1985 was a whole new ballgame. Sure, I still got out to ride the bike and stomp around like a goon in the woods. But those hot summer days offered up a new activity and that was watching movies inside in the comfort of AC. My mom would take me into Video World after we’d gone to the grocery store and she’d let me pick out 1 or 2 movies, depending on if there was one she wanted to rent as well. I’d already been baptized into the world of horror films by watching Halloween, The Fog, and Phantasm on network TV(Edited For Television, natch), so my brain was primed for the big leagues by the summer of 1985.
One day that summer my mom came home with Nightmare On Elm Street. Now I don’t know if I asked her to rent it or if it was of her own volition, but needless to say that was a turning point for me. That’s when I went from a boy to a man. Now watching Creepshow a few months prior was a definite “moment” for me, as “The Crate” made me feel a type of giddy sickness I’d never felt. I was both appalled and amazed at the same time. The rewiring had begun.
But Nightmare On Elm Street finished the rewiring. I was an official horror hound after seeing it. First, just the concept of it was cool as hell. Teens being hunted in their dreams by a child molester who had been burned alive by the teens parents years before. And not only that, but if they died in their sleep they’d die for real? Crazy. Then on top of that there was lots of real looking blood and gore, and with some bizarre shots, like the extending arms in the alley, the tongue through the phone receiver, and Johnny Depp being swallowed by his own bed and spit out in a geyser of blood.
I was sold.
From that moment on summer was late night frozen pizzas, Mountain Dew, and whatever horror flick my mom would let me rent. I remember I used to look forward to going to spend a week with my aunt and uncle and cousins. They were in the same boat as we were with no cable. But they lived in town, so there were more options for mischief. Given that they were super religious the mischief was limited though. That summer in-particular I’d gone over to stay for the week as my parents took a vacation up to Michigan with another couple. By the time they picked me up I was super homesick. I was so happy to see my mom, and when we got home my dad had rented George Romero’s Day Of The Dead. Talk about a homecoming. I could have practically kissed the living room floor(and that VCR.)
Day Of The Dead bumped my love of horror up significantly, and continued the rewiring of my brain. The gore was outrageous, and the characters went from likeable to ghastly. It was another timely, thoughtful, and socially relevant piece of modern horror. Romero had done it again.
It was hot and balmy outside in July, but inside it was cool as a cucumber and the blood and guts flowed.
As a teen my closest friends were also horror fanatics, so besides pining over girls and learning “Hot For Teacher” and “Modern Day Cowboy” on the guitar we were all about grabbing the next gorefest from Video World or Video Plus. And when I started buying Fangoria, Gorehound, and Slaughterhouse magazines at Reader’s World downtown I was hip to all the new horror flicks.
This really set a precedent for me, and has followed me into adulthood. I remember one particular summer, the summer of ’02. I was married, living in a house my wife and I built(well, paid a builder to build), and we had a 2-year old. My wife was working part-time for a catering place in town and was gone a lot on Saturdays as they served food at this mammoth sports complex in Fort Wayne. So it was just me and the toddler on a lot of those hot Saturday afternoons. After cleaning the house my kiddo and I would hunker down and watch movies. I’d discovered the wonder of Ebay by then and had bought The Evil Dead, which came in a life-size Necronomicon, a five-disc set of Dawn Of The Dead, as well as a deluxe edition of Day of the Dead(there was also the first season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, but that’s for another time.)
2002 was a particularly hot summer in Indiana, so the AC was running and besides mowing the lawn and driving to work I was inside. The sun and heat did nothing for my 2-year old, as she was red-haired and pale. Staying indoors was the right call. I’d lay the kiddo down for her nap and I’d watch a horror movie. The Betamax of my youth was now replaced with a DVD player, something I got in on early buying mine in the summer of ’98(first DVD I bought? Halloween.) And if she’d wake up early we’d switch over to Baby Einstein or The Simpsons(I’d started collecting seasons of the Simpsons on DVD and starting my kiddo early on developing a proper sense of humor.)
Even now this is how I prefer to spend those hot summer days. With streaming services I’m not delegated to just the DVD/Blu Ray collection in the basement. I can pretty much watch whatever my black heart desires. It’s all at my fingertips. I can’t even imagine how my brain could have handled something like Shudder or Tubi as a preteen horror freak. In fact, I’m not sure it could have.
As a 50-year old I’m in the unique position to both have more responsibility and also less. I have a mortgage to pay, as well as utilities and groceries to buy. Yardwork and housework, too. But all my kids are grown up and fend for themselves nicely. So when I have my responsibilities taken care of, I’m free to sit down on the couch with a beer in hand and sift through all the horror options right at my fingertips.
This is a longstanding tradition for me, almost 40 years in the making. Everybody has their “thing”. That one thing that they hold true to themselves. That thing that gets them through life. Makes the hard stuff bearable. For me it’s always been music, both as a listener and maker. But a very close second is horror films. There’s a contentment in being scared and disgusted and grossed out. But horror, when done right, is so much more than just scares. It’s a mirror into society. George Romero knew that and did it beautifully with his “Dead” films. Even at 11-years old I saw that. And at 50-years old I still see that.
Plus, horror is just damn cool.
Complex Distractions 