People always ask me why I love horror movies so much. That, I can’t answer … though probably for some dark, disturbing psychological reason we needn’t speculate upon here. More concrete is when I started getting into horror movies. There was the first time I saw Poltergeist (at a slumber party in fifth grade; a year later, at the sixth-grade slumber party for my own birthday, I gleefully played host to a roomful of terrified classmates as we huddled in my basement, watching Psycho). Recently, I unearthed a junior-high creative-writing exercise entitled “How to Watch a Scary Movie Alone in the Dark.” I must have been around 13 when I wrote that. But I think the horror-movie thing goes even further back. In fact, I blame Walt Disney, from whose Haunted Mansion-spawning mind sprung this impression-maker:
Whose light is on up there??