My introduction to the genre was slighly different as I got into horror via radio plays, which were very popular in 70's/80's Germany and could be bought cheaply on vinyl and tapes, most of them were cheap knock-offs of classic Hammer movie plots, featuring all the greats from Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman, the Mummy...later came the "Alien" and Zombie rip offs as radio plays...until the German censorship craze in the 80's also ruined this creative outlet for horror....
They got me so inspired I started to write and tape my own "scary" radio plays when I was about 11, later on I began to collect horror movie soundtracks to beef my amateurish radio plays up (which never had a commercial run back in those days).
Horror movies were hard to come by in 80's Germany, but I read a book called "Lexikon des Horrorfilms" in which about every post Hammer genre title got severely bashed. The writers had a special disliking for slashers and Italian undead flicks....
Nonetheless I got interested and wanted to see the movies, which I only "knew" through their music, like Carpenter's "Halloween" and so on.
Then my father (of all people!) ACCIDENTLY rented the original "Friday, the 13th" from the highly restricted "for adults" video store, mistaking it for some comedy
. Since I knew what it was, I popped the VHS into the player while everybody was still sleeping...
What's to say? I was 15 and I fell instantly in love....!
