Happy Friday The 13th

Howdy, folks, and welcome back to the MSX. I hope everybody is having a fine Friday the 13th so far.

You longtime readers - all two of you - know I'm a sucker for scary movies. I've been a fan of the genre for a long time, so long that it's hard for me to remember a time when I didn't watch horror movies. Because of that, Friday the 13th is kind of a big deal for yours truly. When I was growing up, my favorite horror movies were the Friday the 13th series. It seems like not a weekend went by when I wasn't going to the local "mom and pop" video store to rent either a Friday the 13th movie or a wrestling video. (It helped that the store conveniently kept the horror movies and the wrestling videos next to each other.) I don't watch the movies as often as I used to, but I've since made it a little tradition to watch at least one every Friday the 13th. Still haven't decided which one I'll pick to watch today, but it's early. There's plenty of day left.

I'm really not a hundred percent sure what drew me to the Friday the 13th franchise all those years ago. I can't say it was the Internet that got me excited about it, since I'd never even heard of something like the Internet when I'd got into the movies. I tend to blame my affection for those movies on television shows like the USA Network's Up All Night and TNT's MonsterVision. I never got the chance to see Elvira's old horror show, but Rhonda Shear and Joe Bob Briggs were good enough for me. I loved Up All Night and MonsterVision, even if I did have to stay up until the wee hours of the night to watch them. It was these shows that helped craft my affection for not only the Friday the 13th franchise, but for silly B-movies like the Toxic Avengers movies and the horror genre as a whole. The movies were fun to watch back then, and still are today.

And really, shouldn't movies be fun?