My earliest memory 'scary' stuff is being a very young child and my siblings and I sat down to watch Beauty and the Beast. I know Beauty and the Beast is not horror because as we all know Disney is the tamest thing that you can get but at that young age I thought that the beast was the most terrifying thing ever and I found it hard sitting down to watch the film.
Later on when I was not much older my family used to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. While everyone was watching the program I went out of the room because I was scared of the vampires and ghouls and everything vaguely monstrous. In other words I was the most freaked out about scary things compared to the rest of my family. It made my stomach churn at that age.
Although I remembered being horrified at all the scary stuff out there I still had a strange fascination. I remember when we first got a family computer. There was a program that allowed you to create bookmarks. I forgot what my brothers and sisters got but I chose to put Frankenstein, the Wolfman and Dracula cartoons on my bookmark. They scared me at the time so I can't truly remember why I put them on a bookmark.
As I went to primary school my fear turned to intrigue. I perhaps was curious as to why I was scared by all of the dark things. It was at this point that I started to read the Goosebumps children's books by R.L Stine. I was introduced to evil living dolls, piano instructors that held terrible secrets, mummies that came to life and lizard type creatures that pretended to be human. I was absorbed by everything and gained a massive collection.
I remember the first novel I wrote. It was in a scrappy two hundred page Note Pad with about eleven chapters, each chapter being hand written and being about three or four pages long for each chapter. The story was about a group of people in a fantasy world who were trying to stop a vampire who is sucking the blood of people around them. They go on an adventure to kill the vampire as it flees from being hunted. I think my aim at the time was to mix traditional gothic monsters with an adventuring tale that Brian Jacques of the Redwall series might be proud of. I don't think I thought too much on my influences at the time but it was fun writing down your imagination. I was highly influenced by Brian Jacques at the time, reading just about every Redwall book there was. Redwall wasn't a horror series at all and all of the characters were animals... all of the moles were Cornish.
I've been interested in things like graveyards and abandoned churches. I wouldn't say that going through church yards was a hobby but I've always had a morbid fascination with these things. Here is a link to two posts about two experiences I had going into church yards and exploring. The first link tells the story about the time I walked to a nearby village called Wanlip and learnt about a slave called Rasselas Morjan that was buried in the church yard and a knight and his wife buried under the altar. The second describes my ramblings around my local village, walking through the local churchyard. There are pictures in both links.
http://edastill.blogspot.com/2011/06/local-history-sir-lady-and-rasselas.html
http://edastill.blogspot.com/2011/05/glory-of-birstall.html
At age ten or eleven I read Dracula for the first time which began an obsession with delving into the Gothic literature tradition including Melmoth the Wanderer, The Castle of Otranto, Frankenstein, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Edgar Allan Poe and H.P Lovecraft as well as other endlessly fascinating authors and stories. It is from here that I looked into films, TV, anything creepy that would satisfy my fascination which I read through in my teenage years.
It then looked behind the stories themselves, reading books about the authors, the European folklore of these fantastic creatures and the people that inspired the characters of my favourite books. I began to be interested in the human psyche, the unspeakable parts of humans that are presented so well in the symbols of Gothic and horror literature.
I looked into different artistic mediums for horror; music, comics, films, anything.
At this point in my life I am still the fan boy that I always was except now I have a few stories under my belt that were born because of the sparking of my creative cogs that came from these horror stories. I have always loved other genres but Gothic and horror have been a constant from my childhood, from the days that I was scared of everything to nowadays where I am more thrilled that scared.
At my age the only things that scare me and fill me with dread are Big Brother, X Factor, Crazy Religious People, Bad Music and Crazy People/ Crazy Religious People in Power among a few other things. Horror literature is far less scary than some things in the world.
In other news I wish to make an advertisement. I am a great fan of horror films, especially Hammer Horror and the original Universal black and whites. Recently I became aware of a webseries called Blood and Bone China. It is a twelve episode series that very much hails back to the Hammer Horror days of not so long ago. The story revolves around a young doctor who brother disappears mysteriously. He travels to Stoke on Trent (yes, Stoke on Trent I said. It's in the Midlands so I'm REPRESENTING the midlands) in order to find out what happened to him. His investigations with the help of his vampire hunting relative and an inquisitive journalistic woman he goes out to face ferocious vampires. It's an independent film project and was filmed all around Stoke on Trent. If all of this sounds vaguely interesting to you then here is the website.
http://www.bloodandbonechina.com/index.html
If you watch your way through the episodes you will find out why bone china is is so important in the series. The series is good fun if nothing else.
Over and Out.
ED
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