When I was a very small child all I knew was that I was a little.... off. Demented. Unusual. Something of the color. Oh yeah, I might have looked like your typical sandy haired little smiley faced brat.
But inside of that head of mine there were things running afoul of humanity. I had nothing short of a murderous rampage shifting its gears into overdrive underneath all of that sweetness and apparent normality. I am of course speaking from a creative plane of existence though. As in the arts.
When kids seem to exhibit behavior outside of the standard cartoon watching Santa Claus believing mommy and daddy's little baby sort of thing to other adults we might be labeled as freaks. Hey, speak for your own kids, people.
Oh, I wore my freak colors with pride and flew my flag overtop of a battlefield ridden with GI. Joes that had their body parts twisted and painted red with magic marker. The average Joe Blow me or Negative Nancy Drew rag would certainly eye me up and down suspiciously on the real life playground as I played with their little Johnny do right or Cindy sin eater. But hey, I was always a creative mass murderer and never literally so what's the big deal?
Right from the start I knew that I just wanted to fuck shit up. I didn't torture animals though or punch a hole in my baby sitters face with the jagged edge of a broken pop bottle. I was raised on a healthy diet of television, movies and books and I was smart enough to know what was entertainment and what was real. I never went much for the evening news or that shit rag they call a newspaper. Real life didn't interest me much then. Still doesn't. You always hear that joke "Hey little kid, you want some candy?" Hell yeah, I'll take all the candy you got. I was fat too. But if I had a choice of rewards just give me the 4 o' clock monster movie with Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee.
Maybe a James Herbert book.
Hell, let's all pile into Dad's Lincoln Continental fun mobile and get some candy and popcorn at the concession stand and go see "Suspiria" or "Dawn of the Dead." Then when I come home I can read my new James Herbert book before bedtime. Horror horror horror. Gore gore gore. That was my life when I was a little snot shit.
I just always liked the crazy and sick stuff. Art, that is. Horror movies. Horror books. I grew up listening to heavy metal too and.... well, we all know that metal music is merely the sound of the Devil queefing.
I always joke with people and say that I am a sick fuck. The sicker the better. I'll admit that as I have aged I have somewhat softened. This is not at all to suggest I am no longer a sick fuck mind you. I just find some things boring or unappealing to me now. Torture stuff has gotten kind of old. Rape doesn't interest me. It never did. I just didn't really give it much thought until now. I remember watching "I Spit on your Grave" and just kind of sighing and dealing with the rape portion of the movie. Oh man, but when she got to kill those guys, that was what it was all about for me. Violence, baby. It's my middle name.
That might sound downright sadistic to many regular folks.
But it's art though.
Violence rules. I love it. Always have. Always will. Horror. Murder. Terror. Yummy. Whatever you want to call it. It's art and it hangs preciously on the walls of my blackened soul. Why am I the way I am? I don't fucking know. Why is the grass green or the sky blue?
I mean, don't get me wrong. I'm not a complete weirdo or anything. My lips don't moisten when I squeeze the neck of the ketchup bottle and bleed all over my fries. I don't start fondling myself as I walk through the meat section of the supermarket either. I mean, yeah.... I love me some meat. I like it as rare as the cook will allow and I even toss a half a bottle of ketchup on it to give it that Sam Peckinpah look.
I got nothing against blue skies or green grass. It's nature, man. Yay Wow Neat.
I just think the sky would look better if it were bloodshot like a pair of eyeballs in a hungover head and that grass would look much cooler with a mutilated body leaking all over and in it every which way. It's gore, man. I love violence and I love gore and the gorier the better.
Not that real Faces or Traces of Death type shit. I'm not a paparazzi ghoul or anything. I just like blood and guts on my cheeseburger and movie screens. I like to read it too, and since I am a writer it only makes sense that I like to write it.
When I was a kid I started writing short stories. I was a kid though and really didn't have any stories of my own to tell so I would write what I guess would best be classified today as fan fiction. I used to take characters from movies that I liked and have them all get killed in fucked up horror movie and sex type shit. Remember Smokey and the Bandit? That was an early effort that involved crazy sex orgies and a massive multi-car pile up with everyone being smashed and slashed and trashed into little pieces of bloody man and woman meat.
Yeah yeah yeah, I know I know. A ten year old kid writing about Burt Reynolds bending over Sally's field just before they both have their jaw lines shredded through the windshield of an 18 wheel death machine probably sounds a little bit dark wouldn't you say? Hey, come on. I was ten. What did you expect? Besides, it's make believe. It wasn't like I was out sodomizing my playmates and then bashing them in the head with a pail before I buried their corpses in the sandbox or anything. This stuff is all part of a regular kid upbringing.
When you're a kid pretty much everything revolves around violence. Mostly because when you're an adult everything revolves around violence. Childhood is just prepping the meat for the beast of life.
Wrestling was a real big when I was a kid. That was fun for a while. It's fake like the movies. My Dad used to take me to all the matches. Saw all the greats too. If you were lucky some guy would get a chair bashed over his head or have his squib sliced open to simulate being cut. After a while though it just got way too cartoonish for me and by that point I just felt like I was watching a bunch of dudes in tights rolling around with each other and I mean.... well, I liked girls, so there.
Shit man, you wanna talk about violence, look at all those video games. That is like all kids really seem to do these days. Play video games. I was never really any good at video or arcade games. Hence why I found (and still find) them to be boring. I had this friend once show me this game. Don't remember what it was called. Don't care either. He was gushing over this thing like an artery slice and kept telling me "Aw man, I know you. You will love this game!" It was like some person walking around and shooting a bunch of people in the face. He seemed awfully excited about it. I thought there must be something to it so I played it a little bit. Shot some people in the face. Got bored and was like "Umm, is there a point to this?"
My friend grabs the controller from me and just starts blasting motherfuckers left and right.
"Aw man, you get to shoot motherfuckers in the face! It's great!" He's screaming this the whole time.
Uh, okay.
I guess this is what that age thing brings along with it. I love violence and gore. But I need substance. Something. Anything. Make the people look like celebrities that are really annoying. I'd be down with a game where I get to shoot Tom Cruise in the face. Give me violence, sure. But at least entertain me. Please.
I'm fairly certain that most people don't put this much actual thought into the concept of violence. But I like what I like and I know what I like and I like violence. It just has to be the right kind of violence. For instance, I've never been a fan of dick violence. This is nothing out of the ordinary I suppose. Just means I'm a guy. Bring me a severed head on a stick or a plate but damnit stay away from my junk.
I've never been fond of nail violence either for some reason.
Fingers. Toes.
Both just seem to disturb me someway somehow. Ain't that some shit? I can watch someone be eviscerated and then have their entrails stapled to a wooden board and then have naked pygmy women dance all over it as all the juices splish and splash like a gory pool party. Just don't show their feet too close up though because I hate feet as well. But I digress.
I can gaze in awe and splendor as a person could have an industrial sized umbrella shoved firmly into their ass and then opened so that all the protective bits scatter throughout the persons body and bring on the gore once more. Popping out their eyeballs. Slicing through their skin, scraping bone and spraying meat.
Mmmmmmmmmm. Meat!!!!!!
Bring it on. All this and more makes my gore meter peak and then some. But I simply can not stand to watch someone so much as having a pin eased underneath of a finger or toe nail. Fuck! Just typing that and thinking about it is making me cringe.
I don't know why this bothers me so I won't try to hypothesize. Same thing with all the other gory stuff. I am not sure what is inside of me that makes me love to watch movies or read books where the sickest craziest and most blood splattered happenings these people can dream up can be a fixture of my own filthy fun filled dreams as opposed to causing me some sort of sleep deprivation or nightmarish mental bowel movement.
I don't know why I'm as blood hungry and gore crazed as I am. I've just always been big on sex and violence from very early on and now I just really like violence an awful lot. I'm not like a prude or a born again virgin or anything. Just when it comes to the sex thing I find myself growing bored. I'd much rather watch someone be pulled in half and watch their insides spill out in a glorious array of sloshing crimson than look at two people fucking, that's all.
My Dad used to tell this story to people about how one day when I was a kid he came home from work and saw me sitting on the couch reading a book about Charles Manson while watching The Flintstones. It's art, man. I like all kinds of art. I just happen to think the sicker the better. Weirder too.
I've been called a freak. Weirdo. Devil worshipper. You name it. If it's got an evil or vile connotation to it it's been substituted for my given name many times over the years. I just like to think that I am human and us humans are a bunch of sick fucks by nature.
Public interest and dollars made on horror related art seems to be at an all time high right now. We all want to be scared. We all want to be thrilled into some kind of delirious murdergasm from watching someone other than ourselves or our immediate loved ones be stalked, shot at, stabbed, burned alive or splattered onto concrete. Some people like that shit for real. Me? Blood and guts make me go nuts. But all in the name of art. Watching it. Reading it. Writing it. If it involves a death that is going to need a really good cleaning person then count me in. My name is Gitche Manitou and I'm a gore-a-holic.
