by lhb412 » Fri May 29, 2015 9:26 pm
^That is quite literally the first horror film I ever saw (at least all the way through). I was a real scaredy cat as a kid. Sci-fi and fantasy was okay (my favorite, actually), though I had to look away during, say, the entire ark scene in Raiders or the library ghost in Ghostbusters - but anything with the primary focus of scaring? I wasn't having any of it. Vampires in particular frightened me more than anything. For some reason the elves in The Santa Clause gave me nightmares.
... then, I hit the age of 11 and it was like a switch had be pulled and I no longer minded. It was AMC's 1999 Monsterfest, and I just decided I would watch as much of everything as possible. It was mostly Universal, Hammer, AIP stuff (as well as some Godzilla and Harryhausen!), but this just so happens to have been the first one of those movies I watched. Maybe that's the reason I always had a fondness for werewolves after that, even though there are only a few really good werewolf movies. My favorites of them are The Wolf Man, Curse of the Werewolf, and An American Werewolf in London.
Oh, and I have a confession to make: I still haven't seen The Howling. Love werewolves, love Joe Dante, decades of meaning to see it and never getting around to it.