Blast From the Past with Donna Lynch

We all love to talk about our Favorite Things, but it’s not always the latest and greatest that charms us. Sometimes it’s those foundational favorites, the works that shaped us, that we find ourselves returning to again and again. Here at Speculative Chic, we decided it was way past time to create a dedicated platform to shine a spotlight on these longtime gems. Welcome to Blast from the Past.

To kick off our very first official Blast from the Past post, we bring you horror author and poet Donna Lynch, whose latest poetry collection, Choking Back the Devil, comes out Wednesday, July 17th, from Raw Dog Screaming Press.

What shaped Donna into the writing about the deep darkness that lurks all around inside each of us? I think the title below tells it all…

Dr. Lecter or: How I Learned to Stop Checking Under My Bed Every Night Until I Was Seventeen and Love the Horror Genre

Nearly forty years ago on a quiet Saturday afternoon, while my grandmother rocked nearby in her La-Z-Boy talking to my aunt, I sat on the floor, surrounded by blocks and little plastic animals, enthralled and terrified by what was on the television screen above me.

I was very young so my memory is hazy (although I’ve re-watched the movie several times in recent history), but I remember seeing a little boy nearly drown at the hands of his father in the pool of his family’s bizarre choice in vacation rentals: an isolated, dilapidated estate. I’m sure a slew of other things happened in the minutes before and in between that scene and the conclusion, but the only other part I remember from that first viewing was the dad freaking out to find his young wife in the attic, possessed, having taken the place of the old woman they inexplicably agreed to tend to for the summer (because, apparently, she came with the rental), then getting thrown through a window and landing on the hood of their car, which prompts the little boy to run into the house, where he’s crushed by a chimney, which would make this second worst vacation I’d ever imagine, topped only by the time when I was eleven and my step-dad made us all drive from Maryland to Disney World in the dead of summer while I had the chicken pox.

At any rate, the movie was called Burnt Offerings, and it was the first horror film I’d ever seen. It was upsetting to watch those things happen to a little kid, and this movie that was basically a Karen Black/Bette Davis version of Freaky Friday was certainly unsettling, but I handled it pretty well for someone my age. I even remember feeling a little accomplished, having watched a scary movie and not crying…at least until a couple years later.

It was second grade, perhaps, and I was sleeping over at my friend Jill’s house. Her mom told us not to play in the den while Jill’s brother was watching a movie, so of course we played in the den while Jill’s brother was watching a movie. We just did it quietly, and behind the couch. This was my first mistake. My second would happen later that evening when I went into hysterics and had to call my mom to pick me up in the middle of the night, certain that I would be stabbed through the throat from underneath the bed, just like poor, young Kevin Bacon had been a few hours earlier.

From that night on, and for the next ten years, I had a nightly ritual of checking under beds before I went to sleep, or whenever possible, shoving things under beds to insure no one with an arrow could get under there. Also, thick mattresses.

Many years later, I’d briefly meet Tom Savini at a horror convention and use that opportunity to complain about my decade-long miserable bedtime ritual. He gave me a genuine look of pity, though probably not for the reason I wanted. And later, after some tequila shots, I would take up the same complaint with Kane Hodder, despite the fact that not only was he not Jason in the early part of the franchise, but also Jason wasn’t even the killer in the original Friday the 13th, so I think I just needed to be heard. My therapist agrees.

I’d been okay with books. I read a ton of Edgar Allan Poe, and incessantly checked out the book about folklore from the school library that had woodcuts of burning witches and werewolves dismembering children in Eastern European villages of yore. I made it through I Know What You Did Last Summer, and I even read Slaughterhouse-Five because I thought the title sounded scary, and let me tell you, I was in for a mild shock. But truth be told, it wasn’t until seventh grade that I finally sat down and voluntarily watched (and enjoyed) a horror movie. It was 1987 and the movie was The Lost Boys.

It was stylish and silly enough that I wasn’t terrified and it opened up a whole new mentality for me: the idea of being attracted to the villain. I had an inkling of this years prior with Return of the Jedi. Luke was too wholesome. Han was more my speed (whatever that means when you’re eight), but I also found myself drawn to Darth Vader, at least up until the point at the end where he looked like Jonathan Winters playing a harmonica. I suppose it was his power, since I was definitely too young to have a choking kink.

(By the way, it creeped me out to even write that sentence).

Which brings me to David Cronenberg and Clive Barker. I couldn’t tell you with certainty what I watched first, but my guess is either Videodrome or Nightbreed, since by then I had a VHS player and a lot of catching up to do. The courage and bravery I’d found with The Lost Boys gave me a brand new outlook on horror, and I wanted all of it. Except I didn’t.

I still didn’t love the Jason’s or the Michael Myers’. I wanted charm and mystery and charisma and darkness. I wanted to be with the monsters in Midian, or caught up in an unethical, icky, HIPAA-violating love triangle with twin gynecologists. I wanted to be that cool female cenobite just so I could be near Pinhead (or “Lead Cenobite” as he’s billed, which is so much more distinguished than “Pinhead”). I was in love with the Alien Queen, and Darkness from Legend. I wanted to be a vampire’s love interest/victim (and up until fourth grade or so, I really, really wanted that vampire to be George Hamilton in Love at First Bite, but that’s a whole other story), I wanted to love a werewolf, or be a werewolf, like the gentle Danielle Dax kind in The Company of Wolves, or a witch like the one in the same story who seeks vengeance and turns an entire snotty bridal party into wolves. I wanted devils and demons and ghosts to be my army and my allies. I wanted this because once upon a time, I’d had a lot of darkness in my life and I was so afraid. I was afraid of everything, and thought everything was haunted as a way to explain that fear. But now I wanted it because it meant I didn’t have to be afraid. In my imagination, I could be the things I’d feared, I could be in alliance with them, and it gave me the power I so badly needed. It made me Shuna Sassi. It made me Darth Vader.

So I lived in that horror-fantasy realm for a while (and still do), but then around 1990, I read a book by Thomas Harris that messed me up in a really amazing way. It was called Red Dragon, and I didn’t sleep easily for weeks.

Frances Dolarhyde was a horrendous, powerful force, and he was human, which made him that much more terrifying. He didn’t drown and come back, or get shot dead and come back, or fall out of a window and come back. Still, I didn’t feel any connection to him then, and wouldn’t until years later, in the film with Ralph Fiennes playing the role, but I knew right away that I didn’t need him to have that charisma, because Hannibal Lecter did.

I went back and watched Manhunter, Michael Mann’s very well-done and stylized Miami Vice adaptation of the book, and became intrigued by Brian Cox’ portrayal of Lecter. The novel, Silence of the Lambs existed then, but I hadn’t yet read it and it would be almost a year before the film would come out, so my familiarity with Dr. Lecter was limited to the pages of Red Dragon.

When the film was released, I saw it in the theater and was stunned beyond words, both sickened and enamored, delighted and mortified. I’d never seen a horror film so smartly packaged, well-acted, and well-paced. I know the entire point of Hannibal Lecter is that he is erudite and charming, but the take-away is that he’s also a killer and a fucking cannibal, with the latter being something I felt I could overlook, given the opportunity. To that end, I belong to a small, underground society of twisted mole-people who enjoyed the ending of Hannibal…in the book. We rarely speak of this, lest we be cast out, back into the cold, dark underworld, with all the people (myself included) who think Alien 3 is one of the best in the franchise.

I’ve also spent many years hiding my love of Hannibal Rising. Not every villain needs an intensive back-story, but knowing the psychology of Lecter seems only fitting, given his profession. There is a depth to him, such a lush, visceral landscape of history that I’m glad to know. The war, the soldiers and his sister, the memory palace…they literally make him, and knowing those stories mattered to me. Even knowing it existed mattered, for the same reason that knowing there’s a back-story to almost every one of the Nightbreed matters: it taught me how to create characters of my own. It taught me how to pull them out of the ether and make them real. Because that is how you fall in love. That is how you grow to care, it’s why you will invest your time and energy and money into something as both a creator and a consumer, and it’s a remarkable thing.

When I sat down fifteen years ago and began writing my first novel Isabel Burning, I knew I had to get to know my characters. I had to find their life stories even if I’d never tell them, because it was the only way to make them real. It was the only way to make them loved, as ugly as they are. I build family trees for my characters because I need to know where they come from, and for their actions to make sense, they need to know, too.

I absolutely do not begrudge the horror genre its slashers or torture porn (I even have a soft spot in my heart for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), but the dark path I took that led me to sexually-charged body horror, transformative horror, and psychological horror is the reason I have made it such a tremendous part of my life. And it’s the reason I no longer have to check under the bed.

Most of the time.

Donna Lynch is a Bram Stoker Award-nominated horror author and the co-founder, lyricist, and singer of the dark electronic rock band Ego Likeness (Metropolis Records). Her works include the novels Isabel Burning and Red Horses, the novella Driving Through the Desert, and numerous poetry collections, Daughters of Lilith, and the Stoker Award-nominated Witches (Raw Dog Screaming Press) being among them. Her 7th poetry collection, Choking Back the Devil, will be released by Raw Dog Screaming Press in July 2019.

Lynch lives in Maryland with her husband and collaborator, artist and musician Steven Archer.

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