"I had my cinematic awakening in the late ’90s, and my understanding at the time was David Lynch didn’t want the film commercially released on VHS due to perceived inferior audiovisual quality. As a result, Screen Slate contributor Patrick Dahl and I first saw Eraserhead on an nth generation VHS bootleg with burned-in Japanese subtitles that we purchased at a horror convention in a Holiday Inn near Cleveland. I understood the movie completely differently when I finally saw and heard it in a theater, but this tape has its own vibe."

"The first novel that messed me up. I’ve read it so many times—first in my late teens, when I was in my full horror fan mode. In Ireland, where I lived, there was no such thing as a streetlight, so you looked outside and your own imagination would decide what was there. But there was something about the descriptions of the Bramford, the apartment that Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse move into, that was my first descriptive explanation of New York living. Way before I saw the movie, the story leapt off the page."

"That record, and that image, and that video... it was powerful because I was afraid of it. More than just a regular horror movie, because at some point, logic will kick in. 'Freddy Kruger's not real'. But Michael Jackson is real, you know what I'm saying? I don't think it can be denied how brilliant he was. Michael Jackson was one of the most obviously brilliant things I've ever seen. Off The Wall was just as good as Thriller, if not better; it's the iconic image of Thriller that makes it so good."

"There’s no film like it. It’s a mixed-media film that blends animation with real time, and absurd comedy with deeply real horror. It’s just super fun and almost like Dada. It just makes you laugh when you’re probably not supposed to and makes you scream when you’re probably supposed to be laughing. I love things that are both terrifying and humorous, and that film is just a ride unlike any other. It’s so vivid and well designed and visionary. It’s a perfect midnight movie—not unlike Assassination Nation."

"The first horror movie I ever remember even seeing was The Mummy with Boris Karloff, so that would be my first monster that is beloved to me. Boris channeled something so haunting with that role, and close-ups on his eyes were enough to give me the heebie-jeebies for the rest of my life. The way he physically channeled that walk and the creaky movement of someone who’s been dead for that long and decaying for that long in bandages, he really gave it something beyond that era."