Many fans of horror, amateur and professional alike, have devoted themselves to blogging about the thrills, chills, and no-frills side of the genre as seen in cinema and print. In this ongoing series that highlights the writers behind the blogs, we meet the unique personalities and talents that make the online horror scene so engaging. Up close and personal.
In this installment, Morbid from Dreamin' Demon tells us why he mixes true crime with his horror. Be warned; what follows is not for the squeamish.
The reason why I blog about the subjects I do are a direct result of Steven Spielberg and the 1989 death of a 16-year-old stripper. My love affair with horror began when my parents decided to take me and my brother to see Jaws at the Thunderbird Drive-In. My brother fell asleep, I screamed throughout.
The resulting nightmares eventually faded and my love of horror was born. Not just in film, but in about everything. I used to get those UFO and ghost story books in the school library. Fascinated by the blurry photos of objects in the sky or white blobs in the stairwells of old houses, I loved reading the stories of the Green Man and The Dead Hitchhiker or The Devil's Footprint. This continued as my mother, not having anyone around who liked the horror genre, took me along to see whatever horror film came out. Classics like The Shining, Friday the 13th, The Exorcist, God rest her old-school, horror-loving soul and not caring about the looks she would get as her young son stuffed his face with Mike & Ikes while staring wide-eyed at the young girl on the screen raping herself with a crucifix.
The mix of horror and true crime, and ultimately the hybrid horror style of Dreamindemon.com, began with a book a lot are familiar with. On a beach trip with my parents, I dug through my Mom's stack of paperbacks she had brought along to read and found one that looked interesting; 1978's The Amityville Horror. Aside from being a horror book, this book was (supposedly) true. It not only contained the horrific tale of the Lutz family, it also contained timelines, diagrams, floorplans and pictures. That was it. It opened my eyes to a new kind of horror. The "true" kind. Seeing me devour this book, my mother then turned me on to books like Fatal Vision, In Cold Blood, etc. After she bought my first issue of Fangoria (Tom Savini's Maniac issue), after I thought out loud "I wonder how they did that?" while watching in amazement as Kevin Bacon got a knife in the throat, my love of horror did not diminish in the slightest; but the revelation of blood squibs and latex – the peeling back of the curtain to see the man behind it pulling the levers – made the real acts acts men do to each other even more horrific.
The Dreamin' Demon is a blog I started for a couple different reasons but the spark that ignited it was the murder of Chrystal Taylor from Charlotte, NC. She was a girl that hung out with us when I was a teen. 13-years-old and sexually active. Stripping by 16 and an active prostitute. She was cool as hell, though. On August 7, 1989 she went missing from a local strip club after work. Her body was found almost 3 months later. The sad thing? She had never been reported missing. A 16-year-old girl went missing for 3 months, and in that time no one seemed to care. Not me, not her friends, not her boyfriend and not her family. They identified her remains in May of 1990 but the case went cold until 2003 when Charlotte's newly formed Cold Case Division used some DNA to prove Timothy Street, her cab driver that night, was responsible for her murder. Chrystal's death is what got me interested in discussing the backgrounds, the circumstances, the environments of certain crimes…the stories behind the actual acts. Her death is why the River's Edge, Bully and Thirteen hit so close to home for me.
So at its black heart, Dreamin' Demon is a place for people with morbid tastes to discuss horror in all its incarnations without the apathetic coating. People who enjoy the darker side of media– whether that be a film, a book, the latest episode of Dexter, or the true story of some guy who ate the eyeballs out of his kid. All of them are what nightmares are made of. The Vampire, the Werewolf, Jason Vorhees, Bruce the Shark, almost any icons of horror, were born from true events or the horrific actions of real men and women.
We are not for everyone. Our site can be depressing. It can be disheartening. It can make you think that we are headed to Hell in a handbasket and your kids are best locked up under your constant supervision. But we consistently try to inform our readers that our subjects featured are the minority of people out there who go through their days managing not to rape a kid. Statistically, we are doing ok in society, regardless of what the news – or our site – is talking about.
We are not trying to scare anyone. We are simply the Cannibal Holocaust of horror blogs. Mixing reality with the fantasy.