The first time I met Quentin Tarantino at a Fangoria convention, he wasn’t a celebrity guest promoting a new film. He was a fan, attending because he loves this stuff. And that love shined through the events of the evening.

It was May 1993, and while Reservior Dogs had come out and startled the hell out of the independent screen scene, carrying with it the burgeoning legend of a wunderkind who had emerged from behind the counter of a Manhattan Beach Video Archives store, Tarantino was not quite yet a household name. Pulp Fiction was a little over a year in the future, and his first studio credit, as True Romance’s screenwriter, was a few months from release. I was at the Los Angeles Fangoria Weekend of Horrors convention, where I was producing the second annual Fangoria Chainsaw Awards. For this Saturday-night ceremony, I had wrangled a number of notable horror people to announce the fan-voted honors, led by Bruce Campbell as host.

But as the minutes ticked down to the beginning of the festivities, the presenter for Best Independent/Direct-to-Video Movie still hadn’t showed. I can’t recall who it was, but they were MIA, and on that pre-cell-phone evening, all I could do was leave the main event hall and run out to the expansive dealer’s room, hoping to run into our errant celeb. The space was rapidly emptying, as the rest of the convention was winding down, and while that person was nowhere in sight, I did encounter Tarantino, who was with an acquaintance of mine (again, unfortunately, that person’s name escapes me now) taking one last browse of the vendors’ tables.

Not too long after that, Tarantino surely would have been mobbed by fans in such a situation, but here he was, mingling apparently undisturbed with fellow genre enthusiasts. I couldn’t help briefly interrupting my mission to geek out a bit, as I loved Reservior Dogs, and had also had the opportunity to read Tarantino’s original draft of From Dusk Till Dawn (which at the time was intended as a directorial vehicle for KNB EFX partner Robert Kurtzman, with Kane Hodder, Robert Englund, Day of the Dead’s Joseph Pilato and other fright luminaries starring). Tarantino graciously accepted my gushing, and expressed his appreciation for an interview with him we’d run in Gorezone. The cool thing was that the interview was conducted by our French correspondent Caroline Vié with no outlet initially in mind, and Tarantino first learned it was in GZ when he got his own copy; turned out he was a regular reader, which seemed quite a compliment.

Meanwhile, his friend noticed the anxious look on my face. I explained the situation, to which he suggested, “Why not have Quentin present the award?” I might not have suggested it without that encouragement, but took the opportunity to ask Tarantino if he would mind stepping in as a last-minute replacement. I’m pretty sure I used as bait the fact that the winner, The Resurrected director Dan O’Bannon, would actually be on hand to accept his prize. (This was the year Bram Stoker's Dracula won most of the categories, and needless to say, Francis Ford Coppola, Gary Oldman et al. would not be in attendance.) To my great relief—and veiled excitement—he accepted, and I quickly outlined the parameters before heading back to the main convention hall to get the festivities started.

With so few of the winners on hand, Campbell and the presenters did a sterling job carrying the show, and Tarantino was one of the highlights, enthusiastically introducing the clips from the nominated movies. And while he had famously received a great deal of his film education at Video Archives, he expressed his devotion to the big-screen experience when, after a clip from Highway to Hell, he said brightly, “I saw that one in the theater!” A few minutes later, he prefaced his announcement of Scanners III: The Takeover director Christian Duguay with “I’m probably going to pronounce this wrong, I apologize…”, a humble, respectful statement you’re not likely to hear from someone on one of the major awards shows. (In fact, he not only pronounced Duguay’s name correctly, he did the same for Highway helmer Ate de Jong.)

Just before he revealed O’Bannon as the winner for The Resurrected (for the record, the other nominees were Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case 3 and Nicholas Jacobs’ The Refrigerator), the fan in Tarantino came out again when he confessed that there were a couple of those movies he hadn’t seen himself, and added, “I’m going to have to rent them—they look really cool!” Particularly back in those days, it wasn’t often you’d hear an up-and-coming directorial star profess an interest in seeing a flick about kitchen appliances come to murderous life, but at the time we were all just learning about the depth and democracy of Tarantino’s passion for genre cinema.

That devotion to film fare of all stripes came out again when a bunch of us got together for drinks in the hotel bar following the Chainsaws. It was a lengthy, spirited discussion about screen topics of all stripes, and there was nothing Tarantino couldn’t discourse on or relate to. The long-abiding Godzilla geek in me was most impressed when he mentioned that he knew an actress who had played a token American in a recent Toho monsterfest. And when, after having imbibed a couple too many, I briefly launched into one of the songs from Bill Plympton’s The Tune—which seemed a fairly below-the-radar, New York-centric cinematic object—he recognized it right away. (Turns out The Tune had played the previous year’s Sundance Film Festival alongside Reservior Dogs.)

Twenty-two years ago, movie geekery had not been mainstreamed the way it has today. Genre fans populated a world that existed on the fringes, often dismissed or derided. Tarantino’s unabashed devotion to films considered downmarket, and his unique skill at synthesizing their tropes into fresh, exciting features of his own, was one of the factors that helped these movies toward a new acceptance by the close of that decade. The rabid fan just starting to make good whom I met that night has kept that fire burning ever since, continually finding new ways to express that fervor on bigger and consistently varied canvases. He’s a major Hollywood player, but he’s never stopped being One of Us.