–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

So this came in the mail yesterday, signed by the completely rad Melanie Kinnaman, one of the best Final Girls in horror history, not just the Friday the 13th series. Melanie brought a rare pedigree to the franchise already having aced it in Best of the Best, another of my favorite 80s flicks. Friday V may be rightfully maligned, but it also has bright spots, Melanie’s Pam shining above all.

I remember us all carrying on like lunatics at the theater for Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning, then people throwing stuff at the screen at the cringeworthy reveal. As I said on her page, however, it was the only time I recall people saying it was nice to see the only female character of class survive with young Reggie, whom we cheered for all movie long.

Hellacool stuff here.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

Well, well, look what’s coming back to the theaters for a 40th anniversary engagement! My fellow Gen Xers and especially Carroll County, MD folk will recall we had the dinky two theater job of the 140 Cinema in Westminster with the beat-up, transparent screens. You didn’t dare as an adult go there on a Friday night since we teens took over the joint, especially for new horror movies on opening night.

Horror night back then was Party Time and we made Rocky Horror look tame by our rowdy behavior, screaming, laughing, scaring the ladies to much shared amusement. Toilet humor abound. Popcorn and Milk Duds flying all over the theater. Other flotsam pelting the screen. The theater oversold tickets and people sat on the floor screeching over spilled sodas. Catcalls at the random fools trying to make out admist such mayhem. Always a wit a minute hollering at the butcher fodder teenagers doing what we wanted to be doing, other than die!

I think of Friday IV when I think of this wonderfully immature time of life. I confess to being participant in the shenanigans. I also have to testify to being only 14 when The Final Chapter came out, getting myself and six of my neighborhood buddies into an R-rated movie. Glory days.

This was one of the zaniest nights of my teen life, ending with the usual teen farmer fight in the back parking lot and the all night spinnerama of teen cruising around the shopping center, lap after lap. A 140 Shopping Center tradition for much of the decade.

Definitely NOT the Final Chapter, but the second best of the whole series and one of Tom Savini’s SFX masterpieces. Won’t be the same arena of lunacy as we enjoyed back in the day, but I love sharing this story with younger generations of horror fans

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

If you’re a deep reader, especially horror, and you don’t know the name John Boden, learn it. I urge you. I have been reading John and getting to know him the past year after picking up his book, Jedi Summer in a large stack from Richard Chizmar’s Cemetery Dance table the day I was privileged to meet him and Billy Chizmar, whose fate in this game hints of similar fortune as his renowned dad.

Boden blew me out of the water with Jedi Summer and the timing was close to his next release, Snarl, which was utterly moving in its tragic designs. Now Boden strikes again with another release through Chizmar’s decades running house of horrors. Cemetery Dance has released a Stoker Award-worthy collection of Boden’s short works with his savagely witty title, The Etiquette of Booby Traps.

Boden and poet Michael Branscáth are probably the most unheralded American greats of my generation. Guys I have gotten to know better and know they are like me and share my experiences coming of age, same as Richard Chizmar. I feel brotherhood with all of these dudes for the places we lived and seen, the things we’ve done, the music, films and books we share a love of.

As a reader, you will seldom find writing of Boden’s caliber turning twisted imagery into gorgeous horror prose. As a writer, my guts often writhed with envy reading these stories spanning John’s publication history, but mostly I cringed with a love of Boden’s ballsiness to make you FEEL, even to weep from his visceral textures and at times shocking climaxes. I kept saying to myself, “Keep elevating your craft, Van Horn, because you MUST.”

The flavor of this post is full-on ass-kissery and I can live with that. This was my job once as a music and film journalist and when a band came across my desk who wanted it more than others, who went the extra mile to count, I made it my mission as the critic to boost them as high as my pen could. I can tell you I told two bands on the spot after playing their slots they were going somewhere huge. In the case of Trivium, I told Matt Heafy and Corey Beulieu at age 18 they would rule the world. They proved me right in a hurry.

John Boden, my friends, is horror’s true reigning poet Laureate. He is Joe R. Landsale’s immediate peer. He is that Trivium of the written word. My literary agent friends, seek this man out and make him an offer. I’m that serious.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

Every now and then Photoshop turns genius…

–Meme from the public domain

I doubt TJ would share the same enthusiasm, but I would be totally down for this home pond decoration!

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

Nobody cares about CDs anymore, I know, but when I write, it’s either in silence or with movie scores and soundtracks going. When you see this spread in my writing zone, you know I’m deep diving on a horror project and catching fire. This is a small portion of just the horror section to my film score collection. I constantly write with scores and soundtracks to all genres.

And lest we forget the deliciously creepy metronome of this horror masterpiece. Bom bommmm…bom bommm…bom bommmm… As my friend John Boden would call it, a holy grail out of print film score find I waited a long time for a decent price to snag. I always think back to 1982 and Carpenter’s version of The Thing and reports of people puking from it or walking out of the theaters altogether. Sure, everyone expected an upgraded 50s B-movie. Instead, one of the goriest yet smartly savage sci-fi horror classics anyone ever attempted.

Extra special to me as I was 12 back then and grounded from everything (banished to my bedroom with no t.v., Atari or outdoor fun) for poor grades due a long stretch of bullying followed by weeks of fighting back. I brought home a B on a math test when The Thing came to HBO for the first time back then and my parents knew I needed to see this as a lifelong horror nut. A one-night reprieve to see it and it blew me out of my mind.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

I absolutely despise liver.

Leave it to King to turn it into a terror tool.

Well played as usual, my man. Well played.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

I didn’t get it in by Halloween as my annual tradition, but the shlock metal-horror film Trick or Treat 1986 is very dear to my heart, the film and the soundtrack by Fastway. Devilish whispers of “66 Crush” echo in my ears anytime I think of this flick and if you’re already familiar with the film about a persecuted metalhead fighting back against his oppressors via the satanic spirit of his dead metal hero, Sammi Curr, you know what I mean. “66 Crush.” It’s a rally call only the true metal heed, posers get bent.

Marc Price did an honorable job transitioning from that dweeb Skippy on the beloved Eighties sitcom Family Ties to a metalhead, Eddie Weinbauer, who slides by the gnarly nickname “Ragman” in this film. Price did a solid job of representing our generation of metal and none of us saw it coming then. Yeah, okay, the movie’s a turd in the last half hour. The premise of enacting vengeance via the resurrection of a hedonistic metal god from his fiery suicide through the backwards acetate spin of his final recording is not merely a joke, it’s pitiful. Then again, music lovers going all the way back to The Beatles’ White Album have been twirling vinyl in reverse seeking hidden messages. All part of the shtick Trick or Treat (not to be confused with the 2007 horror anthology Trick ‘r Treat) rides on, since Ragman’s metalhead-incognito best friend, Roger (Glen Morgan) nyuks about “pinheads” wearing out their records (and styluses) accordingly.

For all the facepalm-worthy shenanigans once Trick or Treat turns into a horror film, it has its metal heart in the right place and it’s glorious. For the first hour, the trials of Ragman in high school are as exact as what most headbangers of the 1980s experienced as outcasts. You had to the walk the walk to feel Eddie Weinbauer’s pain. It’s not just getting shut out of the boys’ locker room naked for the girl’s gym class to stamp the humiliation effect even deeper; it’s the fact the bullying jocks have infiltrated Eddie’s metal sanctum by poaching his cassette tape and strapping on his garb in mockery. Someone in Weightlifting class school violated one of my metal tapes back then, which I not only correlated with in Trick or Treat, I recreated my experience in my novel, Revolution Calling.

I can see myself and my headbanging buddy, Mark, when Trick or Treat came out in the theater. It wasn’t crowded, considering all local teens were usually present and accounted for most Eighties horror films. This one was about heavy metal, and it was no different than school, with only an alienated subdivision in attendance geeking at all the heavy metal bands we loved in Ragman’s bedroom, mirrored by our own. We outclassed Eddie’s room by the amount of metal pictures and posters enshrined in our rooms, yet he had an attic loft, bro, the halcyon of teen privacy!

Priceless cameos by Gene Simmons as a local metal DJ with the handle, “Nuke” and Ozzy Osbourne in a hilarious roast of Eighties televangelism make it worth digging up this relic. A relic which has found a wider cult audience (along with another metal-horror film of the day, Black Roses), by newer generations of headbangers. Trick or Treat 1986 is now considered an out of print lost classic fetching bigger bucks than the five-dollar cheapie bins it used to haunt. Thirty bucks for a DVD in the age of streaming says something, especially when Trick or Treat is currently found on just one independent streaming platform…for extra pay, of course.

Photo by Ray Van Horn, Jr.

Anyone who likes the Celtic punk band, Flogging Molly, ought to be aware that’s Dave King himself singing for Fastway in this film. An offshoot metal band started by the late Motörhead guitarist “Fast” Eddie Clarke, Fastway had a small handful of albums in the Eighties before they were corralled to contribute the songs to Trick or Treat. Seven anthems written for the album, all of them rocksteady pumpers, and two previously released cuts which never appear in the film, “Heft” and “If You Could See.” Fastway steals your soul (and the movie itself) with “After Midnight,” “Get Tough,” “Stand Up,” “Tear Down the Walls” and “Hold on to the Night.”

Blackie Lawless and W.A.S.P. were first recruited for songwriting duties with Lawless originally cast as Sammi Curr. Gene Simmons was also offered the role of Curr, instead taking a more memorable backseat as Nuke in homage of his disc jockey hero, Wolfman Jack. Nobody who loves this film gets by without snapping off Nuke’s sign-on greeting, “Wake up, sleepyheads….iiiiit’s parrrrrty time!”

Of all things, the part of Sammi Curr went to dancer, Tony Fields, whose wispy shag and chiseled physique gives the otherwise burnt-up phantasm a lilt such a nefarious, would-be black metal character doesn’t deserve. Fields’ twirling and prancing onstage at the school dance is too prissy for a spawn of Satan looking to take revenge upon the same school Eddie Weinbauer attends, synergy at its finest. Yet by this time, we’ve been waiting long enough for Eddie to consummate his improbable romance with Popular girl, Leslie. I say improbable romance tongue-in-cheek as I, as a headbanger of the decade, would land a straight Popular girl for more than a year after this film came out. It happens, believe it, or don’t.

Cringeworthy in the final acts (especially the toilet gag in momentary escape from Curr), Trick or Treat is still pure gold in my eyes. It speaks to my teenage soul for the first hour and it lays the foundation to writing about my own heavy metal life in Revolution Calling.

I’ll see ya ’round midnight, shock ya ’til the sparks fly…

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.