Returning to our ongoing discussion of raising children in a world at least partially devoted to fear and loathing is Jeff Allard, Dennis Cozzalio, Greg Ferrara, Paul Gaita and Nicholas McCarthy.

PAUL GAITA: Lot of common threads in all of our “origin” stories. I remember feeling (or being made to feel) different as a kid – I was very tall for my age, wore thick glasses (still do) and was frequently mistaken for someone five or six years older than I was at the time.

RHS: Me, too.  Got me into a lot of M-rated movies.  Remember those?

PAUL GAITA: That, combined with the fact that I had no friends my own age in my neighborhood, made me prefer my own company for most of my free time. I was an avid reader, and loved dinosaurs; that in turn got me into anything with giant monsters on TV, from Godzilla to Irwin Allen’s LOST WORLD (1960) and even VOYAGE INTO SPACE (1970). I remember watching a good deal of THE OUTER LIMITS (ABC, 1963-1965) when I was in grade school but not understanding a lot of it. Horror movies just fell in line with my viewing habits. – I tuned into Creature Double Feature without fail, and stuck around for the Hammer two-fer or AIP double bill if they weren’t running a Majin picture or REPTILICUS (1961).  I guess my parents were like most when it came to my viewing habits – supportive if not tremendously enthused. My dad was my frequent viewing companion for Saturday afternoon fare.   I remember seeing THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN’T DIE (1962) for the first time with him. I imagine he squirmed through a lot of those scenes, hoping I wouldn’t ask about Herb Evers’ interest in those models. He also bought me my first copy of Famous Monsters of Filmland and continued to do so until the mag gave up the ghost. Neither he nor my mother were thrilled about my interest in Fangoria and I remember being asked to show some interest in subjects other than horror in regard to reading material. My stack of FMs went frequently absent when my grades took a nosedive; they were a convenient scapegoat, though they weren’t the particular culprit. As Michael Weldon wrote in The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, I viewed most of my days behind a school desk as a waste of time.  I imagine that they breathed a sigh of relief when I actually made a few dollars from my horror pursuits by writing for Fangoria, though I doubt they reported that particular credit to friends and relatives with the same degree of pride as writing for LA Weekly or the LA Times: “Oh, yeah, my boy’s got a piece on THE RING 2 in the new issue of Fangoria… what? It’s called Fangoria… how the hell do I know what it means? It’s about those stupid horror movies he loves”.

JEFF ALLARD: I never really got any horror-related merchandise as a kid, unless you want to count a Weeble haunted house (complete with a glow-in-the-dark Ghost Weeble) as “horror-related merchandise.” To be fair to my parents, the lack of horror goodies in my earlier years was mostly due to a lack of asking on my part rather than because my parents refused to get things for me. For the most part, I just didn’t know that any cool stuff was out there to be had.  My one big request was for THE INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN (1977) make-up kit and that got shot down by my mother because she was sure that it would lead to some allergic reaction or something.

RHS:  Aww.

JEFF ALLARD:  My big hobby for awhile was magic so I loved to get props related to that, like trick card decks and so on, and my parents were happy to indulge that. My toy requests were usually for superhero stuff.  I had a great collection of Mego action figures and anything to do with STAR WARS (1977). As I remember it, my few horror possessions as a young kid were all comic books. I loved the DC Comics series, House of Mystery, and would occasionally be able to get my mother to buy me an issue. She wasn’t entirely cool with it if the cover looked too ghoulish but I didn’t get too much resistance.

As far as books go, I also, briefly, had a copy of the Boris Karloff presents Tales of the Frightened anthology, which was my favorite book for however many weeks I owned it until I loaned it to a friend and he lost it on me.  When I was about 11, my grandmother gave me her paperback copies of Stephen King’s The Dead Zone and The Stand and as the first novels I remember reading those books really got me going on reading horror. My stepdad could’ve cared less about what I read, watched, or did – which I actually appreciated because he could’ve been a jerk instead – but my mother became more openly concerned about my interests the older I got. When I was a younger kid, I think she was fine with me having a thing for the classic monster movies because she was familiar with those films from when she was a kid herself but I think she expected that those interests would eventually fade away. When they increased, and when the films and books I liked started to move outside of her comfort zone, it got to be more of a battle to explain why I liked what I liked.  I remember her buying me a softcover edition of Stephen King’s Danse Macabre at our local Stop & Shop and her looking at the creepy cover image of a bearded King and just going off about how she didn’t know why I would want a book like that. She bought it for me, and that was all I cared about, but after a certain point in my childhood I always had to put up with a little bit of grief when it came to bringing horror stuff into the house. I guess my mother was just worried that my interests were becoming unhealthy and that she had a warped child on her hands. She was half-right about that, at least.

RHS: My Mom bought me Danse Macabre and The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film. You know, Norman Bates was right – a boy’s best friend is his mother!

JEFF ALLARD: I still feel lucky that I only got minor flack from my mom when it came to horror. In her own way, she was more supportive than not.

NICHOLAS MCCARTHY: Though they got the heebie-jeebies about the splatter movies I was watching as a young teen and expressed their concern, my parents essentially left me alone in my obsession with horror movies, and encouraged me to make them, giving me a Super 8mm camera at age 10.  In high school my mother would clean my room, which was covered with one sheets for movies like VIDEODROME (1983) and ERASERHEAD (1976).  I have a memory of watching a tape of DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978) when I was about 14, on the VCR I had saved up to buy.  I was sitting there freeze framing a special effects shot where a zombie was getting shot in the head.  I had read Tom Savini’s book Grand Illusions and wanted to see the effect up close.  My father walks in and I’m staring at this frozen image of someone with blood bursting from their skull!.  He got upset and started telling me that this is not the kind of thing I should be looking at.  I got very upset too, and tried to explain to him that I was looking at it because it was a special effect, pointing out on screen how it was all done.  He backed off.  I imagine my dad had never heard the word “squib” before.  Though I wonder if I had mentioned a “blood-filled condom” he might’ve been even more alarmed!

RHS: My family watched a lot of movies together but rarely, maybe never horror movies.  I do have a recollection of watching THE BODY STEALERS (1969) with George Sanders, a pretty dull, dry affair, and my Mom saying after half an hour or so “Maybe this movie would be better if we watched it in the nude.”  I got my Mom to sit with me through DAWN OF THE DEAD – I was older, of course, in my 20s – which she still refers to derisively as “that thing in the shopping mall.”

PAUL GAITA: My Dad found that movie interminably stupid, for some reason. His response confused me, as he was a vocal and dedicated lover of “action,” and I thought he’d appreciate the gunplay. Come to think of it, he disliked a lot of the horror movies of the ’70s and ’80s – yet both he and my mom loved ALIEN (1979) and saw in during its original theatrical run. Go figure.

JEFF ALLARD: Richard, your experience with your mom and DAWN OF THE DEAD reminds me of my experience with my mom and DEAD RINGERS (1988). I was in college when that came out and was home for a weekend visit. There weren’t any theaters close to my school - none playing DEAD RINGERS, at least – so I really wanted to make a point of seeing it before I went back. My mother, feeling that she hadn’t seen me much that weekend, decided that we should see it together that Sunday before I left. Eeeeh…had I known exactly what would be in the movie I would’ve said no but I said yes and by the time DEAD RINGERS was over we both had our regrets about the experience.To this day, if I mention that I’m seeing a David Cronenberg film, she’ll say “Oh God! Isn’t that the person who made that awful movie about the twins? I hated that movie!” I don’t know if that was the last movie I saw in the theaters with my mother, but it was one of the last, for sure.

NICHOLAS MCCARTHY: Wow.  There are few worse movies to see with your parents than DEAD RINGERS.  I took my parents to see EYES WIDE SHUT.  That was an awkward conversation afterwards.

RHS: THE BROOD (1979) would be the one to take your Mom to.

JEFF ALLARD:  Ha, that would’ve been memorable. There’s no way she would’ve sat through that one, though. At least DEAD RINGERS had the appearance of being a straight drama but THE BROOD, forget it. Once the Brood killed Nola’s mom, my mom would’ve been heading for the exit.

PAUL GAITA: They should have used that as the poster tagline. “THE BROOD – it’s the one to take your Mom to.”

GREG FERRARA: As far as merchandise goes, I got all that on my own.  From my parents and relatives I got books.  Books on the movies and actors and directors but nothing ever genre-related.  My brother and I bought a lot of William Gaines’ stuff, Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror, and since my brother was six years older than me and never threw his comics away, I had a whole stash of those horror comics to go through once I started reading them.  As a kid and teenager I bought the usual crap: Novelty shrunken heads (I don’t think they were real), rubber ghoul masks and vampire blood, lots of vampire blood.

RHS: I had all that stuff, too, bought either at Diskay’s Department Store on Main Street or from the back pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland.  I think I was riding a five year contact high from the smell of all that plastic.  I can still smell some of that stuff… in my dreams.

GREG FERRARA: My brother had a super-8 and I later got my own super-8 and so, for me, the appeal of collecting anything horror related was its value as a prop.  That’s where vampire blood came in handy.  A friend from high school and I made a series of ridiculously bad movies in which I would be lost in a nightmare, like something out of Caligari.  This involved lots of blood and these movies are now lost to the ages, thankfully.  Whew.  Thank God for moms cleaning out closets.

PAUL GAITA: My dad bought me what I believe to be every issue of Famous Monsters in 1978 or so until the end of its publishing run; he got them for a quarter apiece because the local store that carried them tore off the covers (indicating that they had not been sold) and shipped those back to Warren – then turned around and sold the remainders for a reduced price. He also bought a lot of horror-fantasy related comic books; he had tried out the Marvel/DC superheroes on me, but found that my interests lay more with Gold Key’s titles, like The Twilight Zone or Boris Karloff, or things like Doctor Spektor. My dad was my frequent movie companion for Saturday afternoon monster movies; as I mentioned, many of my first viewings of films I later came to love, like ATTACK OF THE MUSHROOM PEOPLE (1963), REPTILICUS (1961) and MAN-EATER OF HYDRA were with him.

RHS: ATTACK OF THE MUSHROOM PEOPLE messed me up. Messed.  Me.  Up.  I saw it in my Grandparents’ apartment in the Bronx when I was like ten and I didn’t eat mushrooms of any kind for thirty years.  I think it also made me an atheist and prevented me from ever being any kind of joiner of any kind of moment ever.  But I also think it kept me from ever doing drugs.  To this day I have an absolute revulsion towards surrendering my individuality for any reason, be it sitting around in a group getting stoned or waving my arms in the air at a revival meeting.  So… thank you, Mushroom People!

DENNIS COZZALIO: I didn’t have so much encouragement in my interests in horror growing up as I did a lack of discouragement. My mom and dad were pretty much tolerant but indifferent of my interests. I shared interest in comic books with one cousin but in all other areas like movies, especially horror movies, reading, writing, drama, music, I seemed to stand alone in my extended family of grandmas, grandpas, aunts, uncles and cousins in the intensity of my interest in these things. But when I met a couple of guys in 6th grade who had similar enthusiastic interest in movies and horror, it was a real thrill. Someone else knew about Famous Monsters of Filmland? And Aurora monster model kits? And Captain Company rubber masks? And Super-8 Castle Films condensations of all the great old horror and sci-fi titles?  Suddenly I didn’t feel so alone. Not that I was necessarily tortured by that loneliness—I’ve always felt a kind of enjoyment in being in the only one of my close circle of friends and relatives who got something. But it was good to have friends who were kindred spirits, especially in such a small town.

NICHOLAS MCCARTHY: When I was a kid I truly felt that no one else shared my interests — my friends enjoyed me turning them on to movies, but none of them were so driven like I was to obsessively read and watch this kind of stuff.  I saw many movies by myself, even lying to my parents that I was with friends so they wouldn’t worry. I remember slipping out of the house at age 11 to watch Herzog’s NOSFERATU (1979) on my own in a giant old theater in Boston.  The first people I met who shared my love of horror and cult movies were pen pals – genuine pen pals, before the Internet – whom I “met” through the pages of all the film magazines I read.  Now living in Los Angeles and going to movies I feel like I regularly see dudes wearing the kind of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) shirts I wore as a teenager.  But growing up I always felt like the only one.  I’ll never forget standing outside a record store when I was about 17 and a girl walked by wearing a DAY OF THE DEAD shirt (1985).  I summoned some words about how I thought her shirt was cool.  She asked me if I knew the movie, I told her I did — and then found myself speechless.  She smiled and disappeared.  Forever.

RHS: Aww.

DENNIS COZZALIO: My grandma on my dad’s side was my greatest comfort in terms of encouraging my love of movies. We would frequently watch oldies together, and sometimes newer films cut up and reformatting on network TV – I remember seeing ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968) with her in this fashion. She also took me to see both MANDINGO (1975) and DRUM (1976) when I was 15-16 years old. She was a fan of both books and I guessed she figured no one else would go with her! That was, shall we say, an interesting experience. I saw my first on-screen orgasm in the presence of my fraternal grandmother. But she was never a horror fan, and I often had fun jolting her with news of new movies that were coming out which I knew she would find too disgusting or scary.  I tend to be as encouraging as I can with my own kids, without being overbearing about it. If they express interest in something, I try to check it out and make evaluations based on what I know about them as little people.

This is the final installment of our Horror Dads Roundtable.  We hope you enjoyed it.  The Horror Dads will return to The Movie Morlocks on a semi-regular basis in the near future for informed and inflamed commentary specific to one movie at a time.  First on the table: Frank Darabont’s THE MIST (2007).  Stay tuned.