Day One Hundred and Thirty One: Super Nerd

I am a horror movie buff.

I am, I am a huge horror movie  nerd. Seriously, I love scary movies. I obsessed with the filmography, the tropes, and the culture. I love the way that horror movie directors pay homage to each other with small cameos and jokes in their films. I love that the fans are so dedicated to the genre and how the community is a constantly growing fan group.

Right now I’m working my way through Supernatural. It’s pretty marvelous. I’m very into it, partly because of the horror/occult theme and also because of the sick classic car that the brother’s drive. I’m currently on season two and I just finished episode eighteen, Hollywood Babylon. In this episode, the brothers go to Hollywood where a murder by a ghost is troubling a film set. Now, the fake film set in this episode started to look eerily familiar to me. The fake horror movie (Hell Hazers II) had a familiar plot: cabin in the wood, reading from a book summons zombies who systematically kill everyone one of the hapless teenage victims.

Okay, it actually sounds like a lot of horror movies, but the episode is very campy in and of itself. Not to mention that the actual killer is using a summoning spell to summon a myriad of ghost forms in order to kill the creators of Hell Hazers because they were ruining his script.

So I did a little digging. The writer of this particular episode was Ben Edlund. Ben Edlund actually worked as a writer with Joss Whedon on projects such as Angel and Firefly. Now, this episode was done in 2007, Cabin in the Woods was released in theaters in 2012. Before you can accuse the great and powerful Joss Whedon of plagiarism, actual filming and photography for Cabin started as early as December, 2008. Not to mention, Joss Whedon had been sitting on the screenplay for a few years before it finally became a realization.

Maybe it’s a stretch (although it seems too much of a coincidence to be a stretch) but I think that Whedon gave part of the idea to Edlund as kind of a tribute to the horror genre, recognizing that this episode of Supernatural was echoing the themes of his own future film, six years (almost to the day) before Cabin in the Woods was released.

Nerd moment over. But I love my obsession with horror movies. It’s a big part of my inspiration as a writer. I’m also very proud of my epiphany while watching a tv show aimed at teenage girls.

Challenge to my Readers:

Nerd out. Everyone has an obsession; they’re healthy (I think so anyway.) Be proud of the things you’re into and celebrate it.