Introductions and my take on the horror of the 1980’s!

Greetings,  Subcreatures!

My name is Brian, and I am happy to be on board as a contributing member of the Necronomicast!  I am a film buff, plain and simple.   As I grew up in the 1980’s, horror movies captivated me and were an influential aspect of how I grew up.  Cable television was a relatively new concept in the early 1980’s as Cox Cable started laying the infrastructure to the neighborhoods of Omaha.  I remember when neighborhoods and subdivisions were slowly being connected, spreading west, and the world was brought into our living rooms.

In 1983, we were added to the legion of subscribers to cable.  My parents were considerably older than the other parents of my friends (my dad was 70 when I was born), and this new technology was certainly more than what they were comfortable with.  There was no such thing as parental pass codes or lockouts on our cable box!  HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, The Movie Channel, and Spotlight (remember that channel?) were now carried through wires of infinity into our home.  I was 9 years old, and I would soon stumble upon a film that would change how I viewed movie entertainment forever.

Friday the 13^th Part 3 was on HBO in 1983.  I watched the promos with dread and the heard the kids on the playground talk about this movie in mythical ways.  I was determined to watch it.  One night, I snuck downstairs after my parents went to bed and turned on the TV at 12:30am.  I only made it for a few minutes before I shot back upstairs and hid under the covers.  The image of Jason retrieving the machete out of his shoulder and crawling out of camera shot was enough for me.  Over the next few weeks, I finished the movie, a few segments at a time.  My friends and I were in near hysteria that summer.  Almost daily, we were sharing the visceral images of what we saw on cable the night before.  It was legendary.

Most Omaha movie theaters were smaller back then, with only two or three screens in each one.  As we got older, my friend Paul and I would rely on all kinds of inventive ways to sneak into the 17 and older flicks.  Buying tickets for one movie and sneaking into another, having older kids/siblings/family buy tickets for us….whatever it took to see the newest exploits of Jason, Michael, Freddy, and Pinhead.  We would go to the mall and read the latest issues of “Fangoria Magazine” and “Monsters” when they hit the racks.  We would drink Capri-Suns in the warmth and safety of the summer sunshine and talk about what we recently saw and what we were excited to see in the darkened theater.

The Necronomicast Show brings it full circle for me.  In the episode we are recording this week, we share some 1980’s horror with you all.  We are just four guys, sitting around talking about what we recently saw and what we are excited to see in the darkened theater.  Not much has changed, except we’re not drinking Capri-Suns.

Sleep tight,

Brian