When?

[retrorussell]

It started back in the mid-to-late seventies, when my sisters and I would watch Monster Matinee on Saturdays.. Ghidra, Mothra, Godzilla, Gamera, etc.  But I didn't really pay attention to the laughable production values/appreciate a movie's badness until we rented Rodan on laserdisc in the early eighties.  We fell over howling.

[Newt]

As far back as I can remember, it was a treat and delight to watch B-movies with my Dad.  So mid-60's?   He had those Aurora models too.  He got me into Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, Outer Limits and we always seemed to be the only ones I knew who tried to catch the 'new' off-beat TV shows - before they were cancelled (as they always were  ) The original Star Trek included.  I realized that I was a little...odd...when I had read both Dracula and Frankenstein by age 10 - and most of my classmates had only vague ideas of what they were about!  Dad and I almost had a secret language: quoting dialogue from our favourite episodes and making references to them in appropriate situations and cracking each other up.

Thanks, Dad!

[100Nights]

When i was 5 or 6 when I watched my first Godzilla film. I think from that point there was no place really else to go but geekdom.

[Derf]

Me? A geek? Who sez I'm a geek? The whole world? Oh, okay.

When I was in elementary school, before I'd really been introduced to monster movies, a friend actually briefly convinced me that Godzilla was real. It didn't last long, but then, of course, I became more curious and fell in love with the big ol' radioactive reptile and all his movies (that'd be Godzilla, not my friend, who was a kid and not reptilian at all  ). I didn't really view them as "bad"; rather, they were just entertaining. I do remember laughing with my brother at The Giant Claw and The Deadly Mantis, but, again, they were entertaining movies, so they were good, not bad.

In a way, I was like Paquita, except not as cute and without the girly bits  . I always marched to my own drummer, and figured out early on that if people didn't like me for who I was, I didn't really care if they liked me at all, because I wasn't going to change just to suit them. I like the things I like, and if that makes the world label me a geek, so be it. These days, my wife and daughter don't understand why I like the movies I like, but they tolerate me well enough and give me space to watch them (okay, I had to buy an old travel trailer and fix it up to have that "space," but still...).

[Hammock Rider]

Nobody in my family has the same taste in books and movies that I do, but I never saw myself as being fundamentally different because of that. To me, I just had different taste in books and movies.  I've always had this penchant for b type stuff though. I remember watching Mysterious Island on tv when I was just a wee lad and loving it. I discovered Godzilla a short time later. After that I'd watch anything with a giant animal in it.

[skuts]

WOW! I am having serious flashbacks from those FMF covers! Thanks RCMerchant, Raffine and Allhallowsday for reviving all those dormant kid memories!

[skuts]

Oh yeah, It started for me when I saw the movie trailer for Earth Vs the Spider on TV when I was four! That was more than 50 years ago.

[Raffine]

Oh yeah, It started for me when I saw the movie trailer for Earth Vs the Spider on TV when I was four! That was more than 50 years ago.

Yeah, I'd have to say my roots go back to being that four year old peeking from behind the couch to watch THE KILLER SHREWS, THE SCREAMING SKULL, FROM HELL IT CAME, THE GIANT GILA MONSTER, etc. on the afternoon Dialing For Dollars show. Thank you, Tom York and WBRC!

Seeing my first FM sort of solidified the warpedness already twisting in my brain!  


Tom York twisted my mind. And the lovely Pat Gray put fire in my heart.
Bill Bolen and Joe Langston didn't do a thing for me.

[JaseSF]

Also I've got to give some credit to Walt Disney for turning me into a B-movie fan...I'm not sure how else I would classify The Black Hole and Tron both of which I adored as a kid (I even had those little book/records of both and they were very cherished in my youth although I'm not sure whatever happened to them today)...

[voltron]

I was always into b-movies since i was a kid. this was aound the early 80s. i remember seeing an ad for the movie "visiting hours" in the local newspaper and wished like hell that i could go see it. i thought that skull design on the hospital was awesome! by the time vcrs came around, i was in heaven renting up anything and everything horror related, from the bigwigs like F13th to more obscure like Pieces, Hospital Massacre and the like. eventually, i was a regular fango reader. but as far as "bad" movies go, they just kinda snuck up on me and went hand in hand with my horror addiction. as much as there is "good" horror (ie: halloween), there is "bad" horror (ie: garden of the dead), but that didn't really need mentioning i guess. i can't really explain my attraction to bad movies, but to put it simply, i just like to be entertained and damned if the majority of movies WE like are entertaining as hell. btw, when i eventually did see it, "visiting hours" did not dissapoint. has to be one of the classiest slashers i've ever seen.

[KYGOTC]

I was born in 1989, so I missed the golden, silver, AND bronze age for all this kinda stuff. Also, NO ONE in my entire family digs monsters, weirdos, or anything taboo, so it's truely a mystery how I've gotten to where I am now. Infact, when I was naught but a wee sapling, I wasn't even allowed to watch Batman, Power Rangers, and the like. Much less anything weird or remotely frightening. Because of this, I had a phobia of anything riskay growing up. In middle school, I was even too afraid to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail because of the Black Night scene.

Then, somewhere in my junior year of high school, I did a complete backflip and OVERLOADED on anything and everything weird and socialy unaceptable. Friends would always try to get me to watch Hellraiser or Scream or even Frankenstein, and up until that point, I would never abide.

I don't know what happened to me or why, but I'm sure as sh!t glad it did.

[Ed, Ego and Superego]

I'm no geek, I just like hanging around you guys! 

[Raffine]

I'm no geek, I just like hanging around you guys!  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBXyB7niEc0

[Ed, Ego and Superego]

I'm no geek, I just like hanging around you guys!  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBXyB7niEc0

All the best freaks are here...Stop staring at me. (look it up kids)

-Ed
ps. Crap, Prog Rock marks me doesn't it?

[WildHoosier09]

Generational difference, I was born in old '82 so I never got a chance to see the FM magazines that are listed here.  It does kindof feel like missing out on a golden age though. 

When I was a kid my mom tolerated bad movies and my dad loved them.  I remember spending long times talking with my dad (typically as we were doing something, working on a car, cutting wood, etc.) and pestering him with questions until he pretty much gave me the entire plot-line of every horror movie he had ever seen (when I was too young to watch, later he showed them all to me).  This coupled with the fact that I lived in a "haunted" house as a child definitely cemented my love of all things horror.  I say "haunted" because our house was out in a woods nearby town where teenage boys would drive their girlfriends too for the explicit goal of scaring the girl's pants off (easier to get in the pants that way).  My house wasn't really haunted, just everyone in nearby towns believed it was so we had a bizzare underworld popularity as the house at the end of "witch's hollow".  We would have teen kids coming back to see our place all the time and several times they would get stuck because our lane was narrow with no good place to turn around. So they would be desperately trying to escape as my dad would be calmly walking out to their car to explain the finer points of a three point turn.  Of course I would go out to watch (creeping the kids out further) and my sister and I would always be talking about ways to enhance the experience (like having me jump off of a large cross in the front yard or setting up something really spooky, we never actually did these things because that would take planning and foresight). It is strange how much of an impact actually being "the spook" while growing up had on me.  My love of bad movies can be blamed on Cassandra Peterson and her hmmm... assets  .  That was cemented when my parents made the mistake of letting me watch "Elvira: Mistress of the Dark".