Meet The Horror Bloggers: Arbogast On Film

Horror writers are a curious and fascinating lot. Through fiction and research alike they cast a wonderful tapestry of words that continually entertain, fascinate, and provoke us. With a mixture of knowledge, passion, and wit they help remind us why horror continues to enthrall people of all creeds. In this ongoing feature, we bring these dedicated fans into the limelight to discuss the things that go bump in the night. And their desire to bump those things back.

Although the thinking man's horror blog Arbogast On Film is out of commission, its eponymous resident reviewer's love for horror and its resonant effect on his own life continues to live on...

"How did your horror love develop?"

I suppose my interest in horror developed as a defensive reaction. I grew up during the Vietnam War but the details of that clusterfuck were largely kept from me and nobody talked about it other than the fact that my cousin Jackie had disgraced the family by dodging the draft. But it was the dawn of media saturation and there were certain current events that just could not be ignored. The Tate-LaBiance killings really changed me, disheartened and damaged me. I knew from then on there was no safe place, that there were evils from which my parents could not protect me. So I began to steel myself, I suppose, by dipping into the macabre. That all sounds very deterministic but, really, it was also about being 10 years old and discovering Famous Monsters of Filmland and thinking monsters were cool.

Horror cut through the haze of life in an isolated milltown, cut off from anything interesting or cultural or fine where all anybody cared about was football, where young French-Canadian Catholic boys leavened their catechism with cruelty. I was bullied for a while, until I got too big and too weird to mess with. There was a palpable sense of pointlessness in my county and so there was a lot of drinking, adults and kids, and kids routinely died out on the highway in road accidents. Another kid went on to become a serial killer with a double digit list of victims, all young girls. In accepting that we were all cut from the same cloth, we were all neighbors, but that some of us chose one path and the rest of us chose another, I guess I was already forging my horror aesthetic.

Having been bullied, I dislike bullies and I dislike horror that uses cruelty sophomorically, that engenders voyeuristic, sadistic pleasure at the suffering of others. The best horror is, I'd wager, the result of self-assessment, of the fearless personal inventory that the 12-step programs teach you, and you can sense that awareness in the best stuff, from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari all the way up to The Blair Witch Project and in such genre tentpoles as Night of the Living Dead, Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, Don't Look Now and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. In horror fandom, these movies often get denigrated for being corny or old hat; constant exposure to them in the form of VHS, DVD and live streaming has, for some people (not me), diluted their impact... but they're all still pure, they're all still driven by potent primal fears. Mind you, I enjoy lesser works, too. I go off-canon all the time because, even when it's a swing and a miss, horror is still the best genre going for getting down to who we are and why we do what we do.

In later life, my appreciation for macabre subjects has played an interesting role in the real life death and, I'm sorry to say, even murder of loved ones and close friends. I've lived some real life horror movie scenes, one of which robbed me of a child, and yet horror is still important to me. Crucial. It's my thinking cap, my worry beads, my safe place. I wish people would treat the genre better, especially those who profess to love it so much.