Monster Kid

I guess I really was a "monster kid."  I never liked to think of myself as one, just as trekkies dislike being referred to by that term. But I have to cop to the facts. As a lad I watched as many horror films as I could on New York's premiere horror shows, "Creature Features" and "Chiller Theater."  I bought my copy of "Famous Monsters of Filmland" every month along with the somewhat more sophisticated magazine "Castle of Frankenstein." I even had my photo included on the fan page of FM. I read the horror fiction of Mary Shelley, Bram Soker, Poe, H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Bloch. I read horror fanzines: the excellent "Gore Creatures" as well as the slick-paper "Photon" and "Cinemafantastique."  I bought every issue of the horror newspaper "The Monster Times" and purchased reprint volumes of the great EC horror comics of the 1950s. I lovingly assembled and painted the Aurora monster models and owned the complete "Phantom of the Opera" (1925) on Super 8 film. I also shot my own horror films with a Super 8 camera. I dutifully went to all the new horror films, no matter how dreadful some of them were, such as Al Adamson's "Dracula vs. Frankenstein" (1971), because Forrest J. Ackerman had a cameo in it, the names Dracula and Frankenstein were in the title, and it included performances by Lon Chaney, Jr. and J. Carol Nash.  (It also introduced the now justly forgotten "Zandor Vorkov" as Count Dracula.)  I went to the science fiction and comic book conventions in Manhattan and published a fanzine of my own. (One issue!) I wrote horror stories and had one published in the fan pages of James Warren's comic magazine Creepy. Dracula and King Kong posters adorned my bedroom wall.  Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Vincent Price and Lon Chaney Sr. and Jr. were gods to me. Eventually I went on to other things, but here I am, back again. I'm still a monster kid at heart and always will be.