by Michael A. Arnzen

t wasn't the scary movies. It was my father's hands.

Wait. I better explain that, before you start conjuring up images of physical or sexual abuse.

Michael Arnzen at the Bram Stoker Awards.

The scary movies. The really cool ones -- the edgy ones -- the bizarre flicks from the mid-70's. There were a lot of them and my memory has faded a little with time. I remember that my favorite was The Omen (1976), but I recall being exposed to everything ranging from true b-movie bombs like Food of the Gods (1976) to bizarre imports like Behind the Door (1975).

This was during my formative years. Like, um, somewhere between 8 and 11.

I vividly remember sitting beside him at Andy Warhol's Dracula (1974). I now know it was an art film, at best an experiment with genre conventions, at worst, a silly softcore porn joke. But back then I didn't know what it was at all. All I know is that one minute I was watching something I considered awfully boring for a Dracula movie and then all of the sudden a naked woman was walking down a large marble stairway with zombie-like determination and a wickedly dead gaze and sloshing, galumphing breasts...

And then the world went black.

For, you see, my dad had placed his hands over my eyes. He did this during all the dirty scenes. And the very, very scary scenes. Which was most of the movie.

And he would subject me to this compulsory game of peekaboo a lot when he took me to the movies. I now know that he was just covering his ass: he didn't want me innocently asking my mother, "What's a hymen?" or "Guess what, Mommy? I saw a breast lopped off today!"

But back then all I knew was the darkness. The heavy breathing from the audience. The strange noises on the loudspeaker. And, most often, the screaming. Screams from the characters who I'd just seen (and some who I'd never see again); screams from the audience as characters were hacked to bits; muffled screams from my father -- and the smell from his sweating palms. I'd try to peek through the gaps between his fingers, attempting to piece together images through the tiny trickles of light and color that broke through the gaps between his knuckles. But that didn't work very well, so I'd have to use my imagination to fill in the blanks.

And this is how I was corrupted, you see. Not because of the movies, exactly. But because I had to account for what I wasn't seeing, based solely on everything that lead up to the darkness, and everything I heard while it encompassed me. I had to imagine what led from one of Dad's "cuts" to another.

All horror movies play a game of peek-a-boo like this, anyway. Think about it: characters search through dark caverns or attics and things jump out at them from the shadows. How many times have you seen a hand reach at a character from somewhere outside the frame? The surprise jolts us, but the film is really playing off of what we imagine in the darkness...the stuff that we fill in that's not really there. The anticipation and exploration of what might be lurking in the unknown. It's a striptease, almost, a taboo dance in the dark.

That's the sort of jack-in-the-box game of seeing and not-seeing that my father's hands trained me to play in my mind, and, much later, on the printed page.

Now you see it, now you don't...

When I was a pre-teen, growing up in the beachside town of Amityville, NY, of all places, I remember blowing up horseshoe crabs with my neighborhood pal, Tim. They were already dead, washed ashore, pointy like organic Nazi helmets, made of grey chitin and bone. Pretty horrific and cool-looking creatures. But there were guts inside and we wanted to see what would happen when they exploded.

Some reading this might think "Typical. What a creepy sicko." But doesn't every boy do this? Blow stuff up..."just because"?

Parents are wrong: activities like this don't stem from some primitive destructive instinct, some "boys will be boys" primal urge to kill the innocent and weak. It isn't the pathology of psychosis. Exploding crabs didn't reflect some serial killer in the making.

It's more primitive and simplistic than that. It's the urge to see. To see inside the shell. And to enjoy the spectacle of the splatter.

People who aren't horror movie fans don't get this. They think that gore on the screen is some sort of perversity. But the appeal of splatter is not some sick death fetishism. It's an art form all it's own. There's an aesthetic appeal to gore. Film makers and storytellers who seemingly feature "gore for gore's sake" are showing us that which we would never see in everyday life -- they are experimenting with the given "look" of things -- especially organic things, like bodies -- and turning them inside out. It's an attempt to show what can't be shown. That's the aesthetic foundation of the whole horror genre. Whether we're talking about seeing a ghost from the afterlife, or seeing where the sun don't shine.

Okay, so it is a little sick. A little corrupt. But only inasmuch as surgical researchers and abnormal psychologists are.

So: you're probably still waiting for me to tell you about what came out of those ugly horseshoe crabs when they went boom.

Not as much stuff was lurking inside as we suspected. Grey snot spit out from the underbelly, squirting through the gaps in its soft lower carapace. Some of it was stringy. But nothing was too exciting. The helmet didn't crack.

It was a little disappointing, ultimately. Tim regressed to caveman strategies. He picked up one of the exploded crab shells and tried cracking it open on the rocks. I just got bored. The reality didn't match what I'd imagined. I knew that breaking the shell wouldn't make a difference. But in my mind...well, I could imagine far worse than what really happened. Far, far worse...

Now you see it, now you don't...

I started actually writing my horrible imaginations out when I was in the Army, out in the field, with nothing much to do while manning the radio equipment in a big van. My writing personae came out of reading, actually, not blowing things up. I'd read so many horror novels, a point arrived where I was in the middle of one -- King's Firestarter, I believe it was -- and got the audacious notion that I could better. I found out right away that I couldn't, but I stuck with it and a few years later (after the Army, halfway through college), I decided that I could start trying to publish and see if anyone else thought I was any good.

Cover to 100 Jolts from Raw Dog Screaming Press

Trained? That's right. I went to the used book store and bought as many paperback horror titles as I could afford -- which was quite a bit at a dime or a quarter a pop. Anthologies about squids, books with skull-faced holograms on the covers, whatever...if it was dark, I bought it. And I tried to read at least one story or one chapter out of each and every one. If the writing hooked me, I studied it. If it sucked, I tried to figure out why. In fact, reading the bad stuff not only taught me what to avoid, but convinced me that I could do better if I kept at it. Eventually, my writing improved and I learned what the building blocks are of a good horror story.

But I did more than read. When summertime came around, I made a pact with myself. I would watch at least one -- if not two -- horror movies a day. I'd rent them from the local video store, one which had a helluva big horror rack. And I'd be indiscriminate: pseudo-snuff flicks like Faces of Death, Italian giallos like Suspiria (1977), black and white classics, TV miniseries on video, stock horror schlock like Amityville-3D (1983), bad comedies like Transylvania 6-5000 (1985)...it didn't matter.

I watched them all. Every single one. Sometimes I'd have to shut the curtains or turn down the volume so my neighbors wouldn't worry. But I studied the horror movies like a monk. I didn't take notes (though I should have). I didn't do anything but sit in the darkness, alone, and absorb them. I wanted to be exposed to every sick trick in the trade, no matter how well-crafted, no matter how lame. I encountered twisted psychos and sick freaks and rotting monsters of every kind. I learned a lot about the evil that men do -- the sickness of desire -- the dark side of the imagination. I saw bodies turned inside out. Blood spattered in every Rorschach pattern imaginable. I'll say it again: I wanted to see.

In some ways I was traumatized. Doing this day-after-day was masochistic. The brutality numbed me. The images saturated my brain by day and wrung themselves out in my dreams at night. But soon my skin got thick. And I began to see patterns. There are cues in the soundtracks; set-ups in the editing...it takes a heckuva lot to scare me now. I learned what works and what doesn't -- maybe not universally, but at least on me. And now when I write I write to try to scare that person inside me -- that person who thinks he's seen it all. To take him one step beyond.

Now you see it, now you don't...

Maybe that's the thing that compels us to keep watching and reading and writing horror over a lifetime: the knowledge that you can't see it all before you die.

The human eye is a hungry organ, but it will eventually close. We can spend our whole lives waiting for that to happen, or we can try to fill it up as best we can.

That's what writers have to do. "Eat with their eyes." It's an expression I borrow from a writer I admire greatly, John Shirley. In an article from his website, Shirley's advice to writers is "to start with the assumption that they're not really so conscious as they think they are; not so perceptive as they think they are. To make a conscious, deliberate effort to look at things they are used to and see them in ways they are not used to. To see the extra mundane in the mundane -- not necessarily the fantastic, but the deeper reality." This is rewarding in itself; but it's also what readers expect us to do. To become educated in the real beneath the real.

Maybe to corrupt ourselves on their behalf.

There are plenty of other ways I've done that. But I'm not showing you anymore.

At least not here, not now. Maybe in another place, like the chapters of a book or the lines of a poem.

I know: I'm such a tease.