By Sidney R. Shannon

I fell in love with horror movies as a young boy. I remember every saturday watching those old classic black and white movies. You know the ones starring Lon Chaney, Jr. as the Werewolf or Bela Legosi as Dracula? But probably my favorite character though, at the time, was Frankenstein, portrayed by the great Boris Karloff.

I recall flipping through one of my horror magazines one day and I found one of those really "cheesy" ads in the back, advertising this 7 foot tall life-like poster of the "UGLY GUY", replete with GLOW in the dark EYES. Wow, I thought. I deliberated with-in myself whether I should order it, thinking it would be kinda of cool to have, and probably after about, maybe 30 seconds, I started cutting out that little mail-in coupon, feverishly stuffing it, along with the required payment in the first envelope I could find. I subsequently mailed that envelope and greatly anticipated the posters arrival.

After a few short weeks wait, I had my poster and boy was I excited. It was exactly as they described, 7 feet tall, plastic and when I turned off the lights, it glowed in the dark. Oh, and its image, the one of Frankenstein, was really ugly, maybe even scary to some, but not me. My nephew David was, however, one of those people. I remember wanting to play a prank, which included, scaring the hell out of him. I would send him to my room where he would see the poster as soon as he opened the door and would almost die as he would run screaming from the room. You see, the little fella was all of maybe 5 or 6 years old. I knew just one look from him at that poster and it would have the desired effect. And so I thought of some reason for asking him to go to my room. And just as I thought he didn’t protest but immediately ran up the steps and down the hallway to my room. After what seemed like a few seconds he was coming back down the hall and down the steps noticeably faster than he went up, but this time he was crying. You have to know that as a kid of 13 or 14, I couldn’t help but find this experience very funny, and was never my impetus for buying the poster.

The magazines, posters and of course, all of those cool movies, were (and still are) some of the reasons why I love horror movies. As a child I got my kicks out of trying to scare my nephew from time to time, and as an adult, I still get my kicks, the only difference is, I find myself in the fortuitous position of being able to "now" give people what they want, and that being the same thing that all lovers of the horror movie genre want which is fear. In measured dosages, of course.

I love writing it helps me share my love of motion pictures. My site scarymoviemania.com has truely been a labor of love. I also maintain a great blog at scarymoviemania.blogspot.com