It could be a book, a film, a tv show, a snatched glimpse of something you shouldn’t have seen when you were too young to understand it. We all start somewhere. Horror fans – let us know your origins stories in the comments! “At the age of 15, I went with a friend of mine to see a horror movie called Psycho, which was in a double bill with George Pal’s War of the Worlds. And we mistimed the time of going in to see the movie. We walked in at the end of Psycho. Just the moment that Lila Crane is going down the stairs to the apple cellar, where she will soon encounter the dead Norman Bates’ mother.
Ben Wheatley
Director of Kill List, Sightseers, High Rise, Rebecca “Well, I mean there’s two answers. One, the first horror shock that I had would’ve been the end of Carrie. And probably walking into it as a kid not even seeing the rest of the film. And the hand coming out of the ground. I never felt so terrified in my life. I can still feel the contraction of my heart now, of how fundamentally afraid I was about that. Which is not throwing Frisbees into electricity substations, don’t play on the railway, don’t play at building sites. And they would show these films and they would show children being killed again and again and again. And you were just like, ‘Oh my God.’ And that it’s so graphic. It was weird because it kind of unbalanced horror, I think, in the UK for a whole generation. Especially because it’s kids dying as well. And you were a kid. There’s a whole thing that’s like a sports day that they do on the railway. They do a series of events and one of them is running up the tunnel. And so these kids, all in their sports gear, run up a tunnel and a train comes down and then they’re all dragged out, arms and legs. And it’s just unbelievably horrible. And so that has haunted me my whole life.” “Well, it was a movie that we did. I mean, the experience I had on Paranormal Activity is what made me want to make scary movies. Not just because it was a hit, but because I finally found… I’d always had straddled studio and independent film. I loved making independent films. I hated independent film distribution. I loved studio distribution, but I really didn’t like making studio films. Horror movies, you could have the best of both worlds. Horror movies, still to this day, are independent movies distributed by studios.
Katharine Isabelle
Star of Ginger Snaps, American Mary One of my favorite movies, it isn’t technically a horror, although I think it is because it is fairly horrific is Apocalypse Now. That has such terrific elements in it, but I never really was introduced to the real horror genre. I watched my first Freddy Krueger movie on set at night in my trailer on Freddy vs. Jason. I think my mean, older boy cousins forced me to watch The Thing or something stupid like that when I was a child. And I was like, ‘arrgghhh!’ I screamed and ran out, so I wasn’t really familiar with the whole genre at all. It wasn’t until Ginger Snaps came along, which I didn’t see as being a horror.
Daniel Myrick
Director of The Blair Witch Project, Skyman
Dan Trachtenberg
Director of 10 Cloverfield Lane and Black Mirror “Playtest”
Rose Glass
Director of Saint Maud
Neil Marshall
Director of Dog Soldiers, The Descent I think it was an aunt of mine who had A Pictorial History of Horror Movies by Denis Gifford, in the house. And I would just pour over that book and the pictures just sucked me in. Every time I went round there, I used to look at that book and read it and study about horror. I have my own copy of it now. I think it’s all of these elements just got me into that world really.
Corin Hardy
Director of The Hallow, The Nun Aged 7 – 9… a combination of Ray Harryhausen’s creature features that always aired over the xmas period on tv, captivated by the wonderful mythical monsters, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (now thats an epic Horror Movie!) at the local cinema and a triple whammy of The Twilight Zone movie, (“Wanna see something reaaaallly scary?…”) Salems Lot (the kid at the window….) and Alien (sheer utter sci-fi terror) on VHS when the babysitter was over, left me traumatised. Yet infatuated. Largely it was the monsters that I loved, Pumpkinhead, The Blob, The Fly… And the idea that someone was actually paid to make them excited me and I decided that I wanted to do that, so I started creating my own home-made monsters and makeups and basic animatronics in my old bike-shed sculpture studio. “That film blew my mind wide open with its wicked concoction of creative inventiveness and I was never the same again. Raimi coined a phrase that I think is perfect description of what makes Evil Dead 2 and a lot of his movies of that era as well as 2009’s Drag Me To Hell, the riotous rollercoaster experiences combining gore and gags in double measures. He described them as ’Spook-A-Blast’ – one moment you’re screaming terrified and shortly after you’re uncontrollably laughing and then repeat. Spook-a-blast! But it’s a very fine tuned balance and Evil Dead 2 is the perfect example and as a result it caused me and my group of horror and heavy metal loving friends to instantly pick up a Super 8mm camera, pool our collective paper-round money and shoot Evil Dead, Friday The Thirteenth and Thing-style gory zombie horror movies across our weekends. The monster bug never left me and through my teenage years I continued creating many grotesque designs in latex and strove to get work experience and summer jobs in prop and FX houses in the UK whilst doing my own special effects at home and shooting low fi shorts and music videos, until after studying in a degree at Wimbledon School of Art in sculpture and technical design for the stage and screen I made my first proper short film which was stop-motion ode to Ray Harryhausen entitled Butterly.
Christopher Landon
Director Happy Death Day, Happy Death Day 2U, Freaky That was the bug for me. My parents divorced when I was pretty young and my dad, which is probably not good parenting, but it worked for me, he let my sister and I start watching horror movies at a pretty early age. We were just obsessed with them. We saw everything. It was an interesting childhood.” My parents tried to raise me without TV, which backfired horribly. Their protectiveness only made me want to watch as many films as possible, the nastier the better. I hid a portable TV under my bed and spent my Sundays browsing car-boot sales, the only places I could get hold of 18 certificate VHS, which I then hid within a loose wall cavity in my basement. Whenever my parents left the house, I’d stick on a Video Nasty and revel in the sleaze.
David Kerr
Director of Inside No. 9 Seeing that was pretty much a wallop, and when you’re forming your taste as a kid or a teenager, that’s what speaks to you. On the one hand, it’s ‘I don’t want to see that again’, but also… ‘I want to see that again!’ That’s really what horror is about. You have a feeling of terror and attraction at the same time. Take it away! Don’t show it to me! Can I see it again?“ “I saw The Exorcist when I was way too young and it still sticks with me. It scared the bejesus out of me as a kid. The next film that really affected me like that was The Ring as an adult. I don’t know why. I’m not particularly afraid of the Freddy Kruegers and the Chuckys and things like that. I’m more afraid of this kind of evil that is harbored in every human to some degree and also the devil really. So those kinds of things scare me, the stuff that’s more psychological. It’s funny because Cape Fear isn’t really a horror movie, but it sure is scary. Those kinds of things I think that are really possible are the ones that scare me and that I kind of always think about and less the slasher kind of stuff.”
Rachel Talalay
Director of Tank Girl, Doctor Who, and A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting “There are two types of people. There are the ones who love horror and want to be more scared and are challenging themselves. And then there’s the people who are scared of absolutely everything. And as a kid I was scared of absolutely everything. So the original Star Trek and Twilight Zone, absolutely. And then when I had access to Doctor Who, that got added to that list of just… those images in my head that wouldn’t go away and terrified me. I was even scared of Time Tunnel, which is really cheesy. And of course I was terrified of the monkeys in Wizard of Oz.”
Natalie Erika James
Director of Relic “I was a real scaredy-cat as a kid, could not handle anything, was scared of E.T. even. I would have really bad nightmares, would crawl into my parents’ bed in the middle of the night until I was seven. Really a scaredy-cat. But it was probably when I was about 11, the first film that I went and saw with friends, without parental supervision, was The Others and it scared me shitless. So I was so terrified. And I remember sitting backwards in my seat just so that I didn’t have to look at the screen but feeling such joy at having survived that experience with my friends. And that was quite incredible. Not dissimilar to going on a roller coaster or something like that. The closest you can get to death without dying or something like that. So it kind of started there. And then in my early teens, again at sleepovers, we would watch horror films and scare ourselves. So that was probably my way into it. I also was really into darker fairytales. Slowly, I became more interested in Gothic horror literature as well. So probably more from a reading perspective. And then when I went to film school I started making dark psychological drama and then, slippery slope, I just slowly started embracing more extreme horror elements from there.”
Kevin McKidd
Star of Dog Soldiers and Rome I loved…I mean ‘80s horror movies were my jam. The Nightmare on Elm Streets, all that stuff. Poltergeist was huge for me. Obviously, The Shining… That movie was huge. Alien, the original Alien movie still has this psychological hold over me.
Roman Coppola
Visual effects and second unit director of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, screenwriter of Moonrise Kingdom “As a kid, I had one particular friend who really deeply loved horror movies. In fact, his mother was in Dementia 13. His name was Jeffrey Patton, and his mother was Mary Patton, who was one of the actors in Dementia 13 [under the name Mary Mitchel], which of course was my Dad’s horror movie that he made as a young man. And we used to watch horror movies. So when I think of that genre, I think of films, and again, particularly the canon of Universal Movie Monsters. I became very interested in makeup when I was a kid, theatrical makeup. And so Jack Pierce is sort of a hero to people who love that kind of thing, you know the Famous Monsters of Filmland [magazine]. There’s a lot of fan activity. There’s a guy named Forrest Ackerman, who I had the pleasure of meeting, and he had a wonderful selection of horror memorabilia, and he’s very generous to let me do tours of his home. In fact, I think he has the ring, Dracula’s ring from the film and had a lot of King Kong armatures, a lot of great stuff. … I think of the horror movies, and especially this particular friend, Jeff Patton, who introduced me to all that. In terms of literature, reading, it’s not really the same, but the Grimms’ Fairy Tales are something that I had a selection of. I used to read those, and of course, they’re very outrageously kind of gruesome and kind of shocking and horror-esque. So that’s kind of what I think of when I think of horror in reading and films.”
Sean Pertwee
Star of Dog Soldiers, Event Horizon, Doomsday “I was sort of obsessed with ghosts. With my father being an actor, we stayed many times in lots of different places, wherever he was filming we used to rent and I had a few experiences myself. My mom absolutely doesn’t believe in ghosts, but she has had the most horrendous experiences of anyone being a non-believer. I, on the other hand, do and I had quite a few experiences. Coal thrown at us, bouncing balls, all the cliche’ stuff really. With my cousin, we used to tune in when we were very little because there were only three channels in this country at the time. We used to tune in to the television and listen to Ingrid Pitt, Christopher Lee, and all these wonderful people. All the Hammer House of Horror movies, we used to tune in and listen to them on the radio to freak ourselves out when we were little. But I always loved it. Village of the Damned, all those kinds of movies, I loved that style of movie making.”
Brannon Braga
Director Books of Blood “I think the first movie I saw in the theater as a kid, which was probably ill-advised, was Tales from the Crypt. The 1972 one. More memorably, seeing John Carpenter’s Halloween at age 12 was very similar to the Psycho experience that Clive [Barker] described, in that the audience was going berserk like I’ve never seen an audience do. In fact, you can go to YouTube. Somebody tape recorded an audience reaction in 1978 to the last three minutes of Halloween. You have to listen to it, because it’s an old movie now. But at the time, people are going crazy from the suspense. It was the filmmaking. I wanted to make movies like this.”
Xavier Gens
Director of Frontier(s), The Divide, Gangs Of London I far as I can remember I think the first horror experience I had is when I saw Invasion of the Body Snatchers by Philip Kaufman on TV. This film really traumatized me when I was young and I had nightmares for more than a week after watching it. It was a real experience.Then my Dad brought me to theatre to watch Conan the Barbarian by John Milius. It’s not a horror film but I still remember for ever the first screening of Conan. The Thulsa Doom transformation into a giant snake really impressed me for such a long time. The 3rd film is clearly Jaws by Spielberg. I saw it on tv and I couldn’t go swimming after that. Still today I’m too scared to go swim in the Ocean…
