Monster Scholar

I was asked by Robyn Lass of HorrorBlips.com to contribute to another opinion article on the Achilles heel of horror bloggers--the one thing that freaks us out in horror movies no matter what. That said, my one true freak out would have to be vivisection. This fear has a long and tortured history with me. It started when my best friend dragged me to a showing of House of a Thousand Corpses . I watched the entire movie from between the fingers of one hand and clapped the other firmly over my mouth to keep from screaming uncontrollably as Dr. Satan performed surgery on his teenage victims. I don’t remember getting home or crawling into bed as I lay awake half the night petrified that Dr. Satan was going to strap me to his operating table. But the fear of Dr. Satan’s scalpel soon receded into my subconscious and didn’t surface again until college. I taught a Biology II lab at the university where the students had to cut open frogs, worms, crustaceans. Dissection didn’t bother me, and I ac...