Stuart Willis - Reviewer

Hi - I'm 29, married and have a daughter. I live in Teesside and kill my brain daily doing a job I hate. I keep it alive at night with plentiful doses of lager.

1978 - I was 6 years old and had already decided that the best way to deal with school was to fake illness and avoid it altogether.

I told my mum I was ill - she looked at me suspiciously and said "Well, if you're going to be off tomorrow you can sit up and watch the Dracula film with me."

I presume this was meant to scare me ... but, hang on, I was getting to stay up way past my bedtime AND have the following day off school? Okay!!

It was Horror Of Dracula. I vividly remember watching it on a black-and-white set, and even being terrified when my mum left the room temporarily to make a cup of coffee. What I recall most is that Christopher Lee's Dracula instantly became my hero - I was gutted when he 'died' at the end.

But the horror bug is like any other drug. You start off with the regular dose of TV Hammer horrors, but soon yearn for harder stuff. That's when I got into Video Nasties - I found a list of recently banned videos in a magazine called Halls Of Horror and swiftly started trawling Teesside's video shops in an attempt to buy them from under unscrupulous video renters' shelves. Bloody Moon (on Inter Light Video) was my first purchase at age 12 - aah, fond memories!

Then DVD arrives, and now I'm having great fun catching up with these old classics that look better than ever. What's even better is that we now have the Internet and the likes of the SGM site/message board that help us gorehounds celebrate/trade/discuss etc with like-minded souls.

I also tend to veer off into worrying territory from time to time - foreign cinema, arthouse stuff, etc. A quick slap usually puts me back on track.

My other great love is music. I'm heavily into punk (more old-school than the poppy stuff that's around these days): Dwarves, MDC, Crass, Turbonegro, Peter & Test-Tube Babies, The Ruts, Fugazi, Dead Kennedys, Discharge, The Accused, Misfits etc.

My ambition is to kill someone of cultural importance (nah, not really - you couldn't call Johnny Vaughan 'culturally important', surely?!).

You can contact Stuart by clicking here.

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