My Uncle Horror

I grew up on the Jersey Shore with the Pine Barrens casting a shadow over everything the marsh and ocean didn’t touch. But more importantly, I grew up believing that every horror story you’ve ever seen, read, heard, or played was all real. Michael Myers lurked in my neighborhood. The Predator was the source of that robotic cicada click click I heard while chasing fireflies in the woods. Pumpkinhead had a home in a patch of blood just outside my window.

This twisted reality was what I believed as a child because my uncle loved horror and fantasy and sci-fi. Instead of showing me these movies or reading me the books, he would tell me the stories as if they were real. He’d start off by lighting a cigarette and staring off into those thin Jersey trees and marshlands and say, “This looks just like Freddy Krueger’s home. You know, where all that bad stuff happened.”

And, of course, I didn’t know. I was 7. But I wanted to know because even at that young age, I knew knowing the truth of the world was powerful. 

Then he’d start telling me and my brother a narrative version of a Hollywood screamer. In the world he constructed for us, Ghostface lurked behind the Pathmark, and Pennywise waited under the planks of the boardwalk. Horror was so real it lived right alongside you. 

It’s hard to really explain what that type of imaginative rearing does to a person. I knew Santa and the Easter Bunny weren’t real. There was no such thing as the tooth fairy, but Michael Myers the comedian and Michael Myers the killer were, in my mind, the same person. The world was just too scared to stop him, so they let him act, tell jokes, wear his silly outfits—but then every Halloween, they would turn their heads and let him commit heinous crimes in Haddonfield. 

Later, when I finally did see the movies my uncle told me about, I realized that my home was a perfect setting for a horror movie. It sat atop a small hill (and I do mean small, because this was South Jersey) with about a mile or two of undeveloped woods behind it. In those woods, were an abandoned trailer, a cement hole in the ground, and pig bones buried in the dirt. If you went past the trailer and kept going, eventually you’d leave the woods for a church and graveyard. All of this was within a close radius to my home. Even though I grew to realize that the monsters from the stories did not exist, some remnants of what made them did live in my backyard–and everyone’s backyards and homes.

Some may read this and think holy shit. But without this original full belief in monsters beyond our imagination, I wouldn’t be the horror fan, critic, and writer I am today. I wouldn’t be able to feel that notable fear and excitement while consuming horror if I didn’t have that foundational belief in the monster first. 

Aigner Loren Wilson (she/her) is a warm casket, waiting for you to climb in. She is a former senior fiction editor of Strange Horizons and a fiction writer with horror stories in Nightmare Magazine, F&SF, Monstrous Futures, and more. She loves writing about horror’s personal connections to race, sexuality, memory, trauma, and more.