Growing up on the Upper East Side in the nineteen-seventies, I was a bit of a shut-in. I would prefer to have been a sickly child. I always love it when I read a biography of some key Modernist or neurasthenic Victorian and it says, “So-and-so was a sickly child, forced to retreat into a world of his imagination.” But the truth is that I just didn’t like leaving the house. Other kids played in Central Park, participated in athletics, basked and what have you in the great outdoors. I preferred to lie on the living-room carpet, watching horror movies.

Photograph by Dan Winters

I dwelled in a backward age, full of darkness, before the VCR boom, before streaming and on-demand, before DVRs roamed the cable channels at night, scavenging content. Either a movie was on or it wasn’t. If I was lucky, I’d come home from elementary school to find WABC’s “The 4:30 Movie” in the middle of Monster Week, wherein vengeful amphibians chased Ray Milland like death-come-a-hopping (“Frogs”), or George Hamilton emoted fiercely in what one assumes was the world’s first telekinesis whodunnit (“The Power”). Weekends, “Chiller Theatre,” on WPIX, played horror classics that provided an education on the subjects of sapphic vampires and ill-considered head transplants. I snacked on Oscar Mayer baloney, which I rolled into cigarette-size payloads of processed meat, and although I didn’t know it at the time, started taking notes about artists and monsters.

Fate was cruel and withholding, and then suddenly surprised me with a TV announcer’s tantalizing words: “Stay tuned for ‘The Flesh Eaters’ ”; or “Don’t go away! We’ll be right back with ‘Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things.’ ” I couldn’t look the title up on the Web, couldn’t know anything beyond what its luridness conjured, and there was the frightening possibility that I might never have the chance to see the movie again. Who knew when this low-budget comet would return to this corner of the galaxy? Its appearance was a cosmic accident, one that might never be repeated. Weeks before, some bored drone at the TV station had decided to dump it into this time slot, and today I happened to be home from school with bronchitis. Did I have time to grab some baloney or a bowl of Lucky Charms before the opening credits ended?

Thanks to “Star Wars” ’s Pavlovian ministrations, I got excited whenever I heard the horns that accompanied the Twentieth Century Fox logo. I started to recognize the names of the studios responsible for my afternoon diversions: Hammer, Amicus, American International Pictures. I associated certain people with quality product: Roger Corman (“Day the World Ended,” the original, 1960 “Little Shop of Horrors”); Samuel Z. Arkoff (“Queen of Blood,” “The Amityville Horror”). Men in rubber reptile suits crept through the gloom, and cars ran out of gas on spooky backwoods lanes. Final-reel showdowns between the hero and the mad scientist unfurled in dungeons whose walls were made of gray foam—and seemed remarkably familiar from the climax of last week’s movie. I was in fourth grade, and already getting acquainted with that great American virtue the Lack of Quality Control.

I didn’t draw a distinction between good movies and bad movies. For every science-fiction classic—such as “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (emissary from the Galactic U.N. warns humans about good citizenship)—that I discovered on UHF channels on bright summer days, there was a “Food of the Gods” (giant chickens rain pecking doom on a small island) that sent me twiddling the V-hold. For every new addition to the canon that my family saw on opening night, like “Alien” (an outbreak of tummy trouble among space miners) at the old Loews Eighty-sixth Street, there was a “Demon Seed” (rom-com about a horny computer that wants to impregnate Julie Christie). I valued body count over mise en scène. This is what I understood about art: its very existence was credential enough. If it had posters and TV ads and contained within its frames actual human beings who had posed before cameras and mouthed words, it satisfied the definition of a movie, and that was enough for me.

At the time, many of the New York cinemas that showed the movies I liked were disreputable shacks, where marijuana billowed from the back rows, insects nibbled on the candy glued to the floor, and the telephone booths in the lobby provided stages for all sorts of shady theatre. The city had not fallen so far into ruin, however, that my younger brother and I were allowed to stroll into these places unsupervised. Fortunately, our parents were fellow-enthusiasts, and had in fact given us a taste for this peculiar fare. Mom and Dad didn’t believe in censorship. We enjoyed beheadings, disembowellings, sexual assaults—all sorts of flickering R-rated depravity—the way others might take in a Grand Canyon vista: as a family.

Some might characterize my parents’ casual attitude as neglect, but I prefer to interpret it as a refusal to shield their offspring from the realities of twentieth-century life. There were lessons to be learned in the movies we saw. Fail to regulate nuclear energy, for example, and it’s only a matter of time before you’ll be overrun by grasshoppers mutated to gigantic size (“Beginning of the End”). If, in your travels, you come across an establishment with bleeding walls, screaming mirrors, or pagan guest-room shrines garlanded with intestines, you’ll know that you’re in a haunted house. It was survival training. “A Clockwork Orange,” which I saw several times on HBO before I was ten, taught me more about not opening my door to strangers than a hundred school-assembly lectures. I never talked much in educational settings, so it is unlikely that I asked my mother, “What are they doing to that woman?” during my introduction to Stanley Kubrick, but, had I inquired, I’m sure she would have said, “It’s a comment on society, son.”

The first film I remember seeing in a theatre was “The Devil’s Rain.” It was the summer of 1975. I was five, my brother a year younger. It’s safe to assume that our parents had taken us to see age-appropriate movies before that night—animated features full of talking bunnies and wise old falcons, instead of hordes of shambling Satan-worshippers—but I don’t remember them. “The Devil’s Rain” is a negligible and mind-numbing film, notable only for the utter ineptitude of its attempt to cash in on the brief occult-movie fad that followed “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Exorcist.” I can scarcely decipher “The Devil’s Rain” now, so I can’t imagine what I made of it back then, how I interpreted the aggressively insipid dialogue or the soporific performances by William Shatner, Eddie Albert, and Keenan Wynn, who must have been fretting over mortgage payments or the grandkids’ tuition when they trekked down to Durango, Mexico, for the shoot. But the scene in which the cultists’ centuries-old curse is lifted and they transform into multicolored ooze stayed with me over the years; it is a protracted group-melting sequence that I’m sure is unique in cinematic history. And I remember being appalled for Tom Skerritt’s character—a psychic researcher—when he discovers that Satan has claimed his brother and his mother: his loved ones have been turned into monsters, and now they want to kill him.

When I finally got around to writing my own horror novel, “Zone One,” years later, I tried to capture this elemental terror, of the familiar turned homicidal. A monster is a person who has stopped pretending. In a zombie apocalypse (“Night of the Living Dead”) or a secret alien takeover (“Invasion of the Body Snatchers”), you fall asleep one evening and when you wake up in the morning the world has changed. Your relatives and your friends, your neighbors and the friendly folks who run the dry cleaners reveal themselves as the monsters they’ve always been, beneath the lie of civilization, of affection. They look the same, but now they want to destroy you, to consume you. And you have to keep running.

I eventually outgrew my fear of implacable force-of-nature killers, and I never lost sleep over humanoids from the deep, or murderous, severed hands, but I didn’t lose my fear of people. Some people have anxiety dreams about being late for a class they forgot they’d enrolled in, or about giving a speech stark naked. I had zombie anxiety dreams. They started after I saw “Dawn of the Dead,” in 1979, and kept coming back. For decades. Depending on what was going on in my life at the time, I was pursued by fast zombies or slow zombies. I was alone or with a group. I got away or didn’t. For me, killer robots and giant grasshoppers had nothing on people. I had those dreams until I wrote “Zone One” and finally found somewhere else to put them.

In 1981, when I was in seventh grade, my family moved downtown, to a new building on Fifty-seventh and First. My brother and I could walk to school, there was a pizza joint down the street with a cigarette-scarred Asteroids machine, and the corner Optimo sold comic books. The most splendid convenience of our new abode, however, was its proximity to Crazy Eddie’s, the local consumer-electronics emporium. We acquired our first VCR, and laissez-faire parenting combined with the home-video boom to nudge me into my next incarnation: I had been a shut-in; now I was a latchkey cinéaste.

In keeping with my family’s affection for doomed product lines and hexed formats, we purchased a Betamax. The year before, we’d bought a TRS-80 instead of an Apple II, and in due course we’d unbox Mattel’s Intellivision, instead of Atari’s legendary gizmo. This was good training for a writer, for the sooner you accept the fact that you are a deluded idiot who is always out of step with reality the better off you will be.

Every Friday afternoon when school let out, my brother and I made a Crazy Eddie’s run. It was one of the chores we were assigned in order to earn our allowance, like doing the dishes, buying groceries, and getting Dad’s cigarettes from Optimo. We rented five movies, the maximum that Crazy Eddie’s allowed. One movie was mainstream Hollywood product, generally a misfire along the lines of “Continental Divide” or “Bustin’ Loose,” starring someone we were fond of (in these cases, John Belushi and Richard Pryor, respectively). The rest were horror flicks. We no longer had to rummage through the TV listings and stay up until 3 A.M., or rely on luck, or on our parents or our two older sisters, who were in high school and college by then and less inclined to tow their little brothers to the movies. In fact, my brother and I were in charge now, programming the family film festivals. More and more, the only time the six of us were in the same place was on a movie night, usually after a holiday meal. We’d chop up and devour the turkey, then reconvene in the living room to watch some people get chopped up or devoured. We’d chuckle over the familiar tropes: how the black guy always dies first, or the white lady survivor always trips—compulsively, repeatedly—in the final chase scene. We were not a carolling clan.

The early eighties were the heyday of slasher and splatter movies. “Splatter” was a horror genre that prided itself on elaborate, “realistic” special effects: arterial spray that approximated our lay idea of what arterial spray would look like; pulverized eyeballs that exploded more convincingly than the pulverized eyeballs in last year’s midnight hit. “Slasher” was a subset of splatter, a reference to the killer who did all the splattering. The minuscule servings of gore in the fifties and sixties “Chiller Theatre” films had been designed for television, and when there was blood it looked fake, an unnatural crimson, especially compared with the blood in the psycho-killer movies released in the wake of John Carpenter’s “Halloween.” The killer in that film was a mute, vaguely supernatural maniac who escaped from the loony bin and returned to his home town to catch up with old friends. (This was before Facebook.) The movie was grim and lean, a low-budget affair that made millions. Studios had always chased fads, from fifties juvenile-delinquent movies (which took on the perils of the newly emergent teen culture), to sixties biker movies (shocking “exposés” of motorcycle gangs), to seventies blaxploitation (what if we made movies for black audiences, who exist, apparently?). The first entry in the “Friday the 13th” franchise, in which a mute, vaguely supernatural maniac punished camp counsellors, was released in 1980, two years after “Halloween,” and a (dismembered) arms race broke out. Special-effects gurus strove to surpass their previous achievements, and to outdo their rivals’ latest mutilations. Decapitation is so last year—anybody who’s anybody is eviscerating now. Sure, you made your name in chainsaws, but can you do nail guns in soft tissue?

My brother and I dropped the stack of Betamax tapes on the coffee table and got to work, two or three movies on Friday night, the rest on Saturday. Once we’d adjusted the tracking on the VCR (the tracking, always the tracking), the slashers stabbed, ripped, mutilated, and otherwise perforated hapless victims on public transportation (“Terror Train”), on the grounds of educational institutions (“Prom Night”), and during eponymous sleepovers (“Slumber Party Massacre”). Not even holidays, Hallmark and otherwise, were safe (“Silent Night, Evil Night,” “Mother’s Day,” “My Bloody Valentine”). Once in a while, we subbed in a movie by a more polished director, such as Dario Argento, the Italian who’d collaborated with Sergio Leone and Bernardo Bertolucci before crafting his own eccentric thrillers. We sought out his “Bird with the Crystal Plumage” after Fangoria hipped us to it.

Perhaps you never subscribed to Fangoria, or only infrequently grabbed a copy on the newsstand. Let me refresh your memory. Fangoria (subtitled “Monsters—Aliens—Bizarre Creatures”) catered to aficionados of the new wave of hypergory spectacle, luring them in with grisly covers, which featured decomposing heads, exploding heads, more decomposing heads, and the occasional half-man/half-cat head. Famous Monsters of Filmland, the “Chiller”-era fan magazine, was hopelessly corny in comparison, with its recycled features on Lon Chaney and Val Lewton, its black-and-white ads for Frankenstein model kits and “Planet of the Apes” action figures. Where was the blood?

This new breed of horror magazine had buckets of blood, and viscera to boot, in full-color production stills of mortified bodies stuffed into refrigerators, surveys of charred flesh, foldout posters of suppurating corpses. The articles were fawning chronicles of on-set visits, retrospectives of pioneering visionaries, and barely edited interviews with scream queens and fright-film directors. Fangoria adored special-effects guys, young outlaws such as Rob Bottin (“The Howling,” “The Fog”) and such éminences grislies as Dick Smith (“The Living Master of prosthetic makeup on his most elaborate project to date!”). Ads for “The Blood Boutique” counselled aspiring makeup artists on where to send their parents’ checks in exchange for liquid latex and blood capsules (“Bite into ’em—they mix with saliva to produce plenty of you-know-what. They taste good, too!”). News that would be an evanescent blip on one of today’s entertainment blogs—Principal photography has finished on “Inseminoid”? Sam Raimi announces “Evil Dead”?—became, in the pages of Fangoria, the heralding of genius.

Although I still wasn’t distinguishing between good movies and bad movies, I recognized that directors fell into different classes. At the pinnacle were those who appeared in the mainstream press as well as in the monster mags: Famous Directors, who dropped the occasional genre outing in with their more (so-called) highbrow offerings. Kubrick adapted Stephen King’s “The Shining.” Hitchcock’s “Psycho” provided the template for the unhinged psycho-killer genre, and his enigmatic avian apocalypse in “The Birds” inspired more dread than your average nuclear-fallout pic. Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby” sired numerous knockoffs, including my beloved “The Devil’s Rain.” This is what artists do, I learned: they mix it up. And it was O.K. to get your start in the scare business. A.I.P.’s Roger Corman, who bestowed upon the world “The Wasp Woman,” “The Brain Eaters,” and “Attack of the Giant Leeches,” had a knack for giving a break to young talent: Francis Ford Coppola’s axe-murder outing, “Dementia 13,” was a Corman production, as was “Piranha,” written by John Sayles. John Landis also showed up in Fangoria a few times, on account of “An American Werewolf in London,” although he was en route to “Trading Places” and “Coming to America,” and made sure to point out that he was “known as a maker of comedies.”

After these establishment directors came the Masters of Horror. Fangoria was a strong advocate of auteur theory, the entrails brigade. In 1982, its worthies included John Carpenter; George Romero, who invented our modern, shuffling zombie in “Dawn of the Dead”; and David Cronenberg, in his Grand Guignol phase. Cronenberg, one of Fangoria’s idols, was coming off an impressive string of gruesome and peculiar horror flicks, including “They Came from Within” (sexually transmitted parasites take over a condo complex) and “The Brood” (disturbed woman “manifests” mini demon-children in a cautionary tale about attachment parenting). “Plot details on Cronenberg’s next picture remain top secret,” the December, 1981, issue of Fangoria teased. “It’s sufficient to say for the moment that it’s a rather unorthodox view of the future of cable television.” When “Videodrome” (secret signals in TV transmissions generate brain tumors and turn James Woods’s abdomen into a VCR) finally hit the theatres, I wrote a book report about the novelization for my eighth-grade English class. (Quickie novelizations were a nice way for horror and science-fiction writers to make some bread; based on original screenplays, these adaptations often contained scenes that had been omitted from the final cut, making them proto-“DVD extras” of your favorite film.) I’m sure my report was mostly summary, ticking off the film’s catalogue of salacious atrocities: “flesh bullets,” human intestines bursting through TV screens, and Debbie Harry’s character jabbing a cigarette into her boob as foreplay. I got an A, if I recall correctly, but that was New York in the early eighties. The ascension, years later, of horror gods like Cronenberg and Raimi to critical and mainstream respectability validated all those hours of flipping through Fangoria. We were talent scouts.