I love gore. Not in real life, mind you. I mean, I have no problem with seeing a little blood, but real life guts I can do without. I’m actually fairly squeamish when it comes to actual injuries. But in a horror movie, I love it and always have. I started buying Fangorias off the shelf when I was about 12 years old. That whole horror dry spell between 1986 and 1995? I was probably the #1 supporter of horror films during that time, for two reasons – 1) because of my love for horror and gore, as I mentioned earlier and 2) because as 12-years-old, what the hell did I know about what’s good or not?

So while I’ve matured (some) in my attitudes toward what is good and bad, I’m still a big gore/horror fan. This bothered my folks when I was younger and had posters of a dude with a pig’s head holding a chainsaw or zombies ripping the guts out of some poor dude. But I never got why, exactly. Nothing about these images made me think about any sort of real suffering. They were art. They were just extremely gruesome paintings. I didn’t see a real guy’s intestines laying exposed on his chest. I saw the work that went into pulling that stunt off.

This can all be traced back to the time when I was six years old and accidentally ended up in a theater watching Poltergeist. My dad swears this never happened, but one summer – must’ve been 1982 – we were at the beach. It was raining, so my folks called a movie day and the options were laid out for me and my sister. The Empire Strikes Back, which was in re-release, or Poltergeist – which, as scary as you may remember it, was rated PG (Spielberg gets away with everything). Somehow, to my six-year-old brain, I heard “Double feature, kids!” and couldn’t have been more excited. So I probably said “Yes!” as in ‘Yes! Double feature!’ and my dad heard “Yes!” as in ‘Yes! Poltergeist!’

Thusly I ended up in a dark room watching terrified kids I identified with completely being eaten by trees and strangled by clowns. It scared the living shit out of me. I didn’t get goosebumps. I didn’t go into cold sweats. I distinctly remember, when the guy started tearing his face off, feeling the Earth shift. I wasn’t just dizzy. It’s like someone was cracking up my skull and shaking my brain around. I was so utterly unprepared for any of it. And the strangest part was that everyone else in the theater was laughing. That’s what blew my mind the most. When the kid gets dragged under his bed, when the gigantic flaming skull pops out of the door and screams like holy hell at Craig T. Nelson – I freaked and they laughed. In some way, this may have been the single most formative moment of my life. It led me to film school, to DC where I joined up with friends to start a production company, to writing screenplays and cutting stuff for TV, etc., etc.

So anyway – fast forward 29 years and here is me in a hospital watching my son get birthed, easily now my goriest real-life moment. All the sort of cliché feelings apply – wonderment, awe, terror, etc. He’s my son and he totally blew my mind. And after the first couple of weeks of weird sleep deprivation torture and knowing every second that we were going to end up killing this kid by doing something stupid somehow, things started to return to a semblance of normalcy and things that we did in Little Dude B.C. started to come back into play.

One of these things for me is reviewing DVDs. Every month I get to choose a few DVDs from a list, some nice person somewhere sends them to me and write horribly trite reviews about them. I tend to focus mostly on horror, of course, because dude, free horror movies! But now things have become a little more… complicated. Since watching the birth of my son – a event that involves way more blood and guts, even when done the old fashioned way, than you may expect – I wondered how I would handle the movie magic blood and guts I had loved so long. My sister-in-law pointed out once in passing how, after having her kids, she could no longer stomach much violence in movies. All I could think was – man, don’t let that happen to me. No more Jason? No more The Thing? No more Poltergeist? No way, josé.

The test? An Italian shocker called Torso, a movie that pretty clearly inspired Alexandre Aja’s Haute Tension. At least part of it was dedicated to a sadistic murderer chopping up several of his victims while a woman in hiding watches. The movie is a bit old, so the verisimilitude of today’s gore wasn’t going to come into play. But I knew from the box art of a hand gripping a hacksaw that this wasn’t going to be one of those nice M. Night Sixth Sense sort-of ghost plays.

So one night I was on baby duty – which were 2 to 3 hour stints in which I would walk the boy around until he fell asleep and then sit down on the couch with him on my chest and watch movies. This night, my sister-in-law’s words echoing in my head, I popped in Torso to take a look. The movie itself turned out to be surprisingly effective for something that had been around since the 60s. The Italians pulled no punches with their horror back then (not that they do now. I’m just sayin’.)

And instead of being disgusted by the violent and bloody story line, I found that now having a kid enhanced it. I think we take something of our own into any movie we see. And that’s why sometimes you love a movie that someone else hated, and it comes down to whether or not you identified with the main character. Sometimes you see yourself on screen and live that life for a couple hours, for instance. In the case of Torso and the many other horror flicks I’ve watched since the birth of el boyo, there’s a humanity I bring to it that wasn’t always there before, something that a filmmaker would have to toil long and hard to make me feel if he wanted me to. But now, every character is a the son or daughter of someone. They had childhoods and grew up and had good times and bad times. Just having a son has given every character in every movie a rich back story. And in most horror movies, that’s the blank that needs filling in the most.

Granted, there are still really bad movies. The boy makes up for a lot, but he’s not a wizard. And torture porn? Torture porn can suck it. But I’m happy to report from the other side of fatherhood that having a kid doesn’t mean you automatically have to give up Poltergeist. And hopefully – fingers crossed, now – we’ll watch Poltergeist together one day and coalesce in one big, bloody gut laugh.

If his mom will let me, that is.