The natural progression for me from comics and books, was the movies. Just as soon as I was old enough to get myself to and from the cinema I was buying tickets for the horror films.

And what a time to come of age and be a fan of horror - the eighties!

I saw Friday the Thirteeth, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Gremlins et al all at the cinema as they were released. If there is a movie equivalent to book first editions, that’s how I saw these movies - with hoards of like-minded twenty-somethings in a dark theatre scaring ourselves senseless.

And truly, is there a better way to see a scary movie?

Recently, on Facebook, the gorgeous Nick Butcher posted the Rotten Tomatoes list of the top horror movies and claimed he’d seen 21 of them. I clocked in at 32 - with a lot on that list I’d love to have seen.

And some I remember I never want to see.

Like Saw and Hostel (though I have seen that one) its ilk. I enjoy that extreme gore, torture-porn type of movie that was popular in the early 2000s. I prefer more finese like we see in the fabulous Silence of the Lambs, and The Sixth Sense, and Let the Right One In. Those kind of movies where the scare gets into your bones because the horror is only a thin veil away.

And that’s why I’m still scared of the dark.

Associated links:

• 100 Best Horror Movies (IMDB)
• Top 100 Horror Movies (Rotten Tomatoes)
• Creature Features (Pinterest)