There’s a popular October challenge—watch a horror movie every night of the month.  I’m neither a young person nor retired, so this is not something I’ve ever been able to do.  It’s been quite a nice October around here, but adulting requires so much time.  Even for those of us who enjoy horror films.  I have tried to catch up on them, and I went on a Tim Burton kick for a while, but his movies often fall closer to weird on the meter than they do towards horror.  Still, they often have visual appeal and a kind of gothic sensibility.  I do enjoy a good gothic tale.  When I read about gothic fiction I often wonder why it has such a draw for me.  My childhood was in the context of a broken family and I found solace in monsters.  That hasn’t changed.

I’m sure that my wife often wonders what she got herself into.  When we first decided we belonged together (and clearly we do), I’d entered an enthusiastic academic stage.  Pop culture was considered shallow at the time, and although we occasionally watched a scary movie together, it wasn’t an obvious part of my personality.  It was when I became a dark academic, having lost my long-term teaching job and finding myself functionally unemployed, that horror came back to me.  My wife and I had been married for almost twenty years by that point, and even then horror wasn’t a major focus for me.  Our daughter loves Halloween, as do I, but trying to find work, moving to New Jersey, then having to commute into Manhattan all took their toll on my Octobers.

Writing Holy Horror was probably the defining moment in my current October mindset.  At the time religious studies in horror were in their infancy.  I could count the books on one hand.  Since I’m between worlds—I still rely on light academia for a paycheck, but I live in dark academia—I take whatever encouragement that I can get.  It’s not easy to come by when your books are priced for an “academic readership.”  I still get people asking when Nightmares with the Bible will be coming out in paperback.  Now that publishers have latched onto the teat of ebooks, that’s not likely ever to happen.  I still watch horror movies when I can.  My October challenge, however, is to appreciate as much of the season as I can with a 9-2-5 and some very expensive books on my hands.