That title is quite misleading. There is absolutely nothing scary about my mom. She is the most sweet and adorable person I have ever known. I’m sure many of you believe that your moms are probably as nice as mine. You’d be wrong, but I still encourage you to believe that–It’s your mom, after all.
The scary part of this post is really about the horror genre and the fact that my quiet little mom used to love old horror movies and scary T.V. shows. She passed this trait on to me at a very young age. I remember coming home from grade school to watch Dark Shadows every afternoon with my mom. I loved the eerie music that opened the show and who could resist vampires and witches on a soap opera?
Though we had five children in our family, I don’t recall any of my brothers and sisters watching with us. My sisters were probably too young(realistically, I was also too young for that program, whereas I was between the ages of 7-9 when I was viewing) and my brothers clearly had no interest.
- Re-issue Barnabas Collins model kit
- A few years later when I had reached the ripe old age of 11, my brother and father were involved in Boy Scouts and would go away on camping trips. On those occasions, I would stay up late on Friday nights and watch the classic Universal Horror movies on the local UHF affiliate(correction: I think it was channel 5 from Boston) with my mother. With my father and brother gone, I was the eldest male in the house and I felt very grown up indeed. On some level, my mom probably let me stay up because watching Frankenstein or The Mummy alone at 11:00 pm was a bit unsettling. It didn’t hurt to have a 5′ tall 95 lb. body guard around, just in case.
My perception of my mother was always that of a quiet, loving mom. Now, looking back and remembering those scary shows she and I would enjoy together, I guess she was also a cool mom.