Sean [The Freak] teaches writing to college freshman at an Arizona university. Contact him at seanbottai@gmail.com

The first horror movie he remembers seeing is a TV-edited version of Friday the 13th Part 2 when he was about 7 years old. He was immediately addicted (though devastated when he thought Jason killed Terry’s dog), and subsequently saw every horror movie he could find.

For some reason, the most scarring, terrifying movie experience of his early childhood is seeing the Boogeymen in the Laurel and Hardy version of Babes in Toyland (1934). He also went mad with fear after catching Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural (1973) on tv and seeing the jump-scare in the prologue to Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983).

His favorite horror film of all time is Dan O’Bannon’s The Return of the Living Dead (1985), which he caught on HBO in the middle of the night when he was 11 without any context and was just like, “WHAT IS THIS!!!????” It’s a perfect movie, that could only be more perfect if it was Suicide who took his clothes off in the graveyard and not Trash. (P.S. The other movie he caught on cable that night was the sleazy Charlie Sheen flick The Boys Next Door, which was the most upsetting, demented, maddeningly erotic thing he’d ever seen in his short life).