Tom Atkins had to fake-slap me, and Savini painted a hand-shaped bruise on my left cheek. The filming went late that night, and when we left the set, I was starved. My father drove me to a nearby McDonald’s. I was overtired and cranked up and hopping up and down, shouting that I wanted a chocolate milk shake, that he promised a milk shake. At some point my father realized that half a dozen McDonald’s employees were staring at us with haunted, accusing looks. I still had that handprint on my face, and he was out at one in the morning to get me a milk shake as . . . what? A bribe not to report him for child abuse? He got out of there before someone could call Child Protective Services on him, and we didn’t have McDonald’s again until after we left Pittsburgh.

By the time my dad had us heading for home, I knew two things. The first is that I probably had no real future as an actor, and neither did my dad (sorry, Dad). The second is that even if I couldn’t act to save a rat’s ass, I had nevertheless found my calling, a purpose in my life. I had spent seven solid days watching Tom Savini slaughter people artistically and invent unforgettable, deformed monsters, and that’s what I wanted to do, too.

And it is, actually, what I wound up doing.

Which is getting me around to what I wanted to say in this introduction: A child has only two parents, but if you’re lucky enough to get to be an artist for a living, ultimately you wind up with a few mothers and fathers. When someone asks a writer “Who’s your daddy?” the only honest answer is “That’s complicated.”

IN HIGH SCHOOL I KNEW jocks who read every issue of Sports Illustrated cover to cover and rockers who pored over each issue of Rolling Stone like the devout studying Scripture. Me, I read four years of Fangoria magazine. Fangoria—Fango to the faithful—was a journal dedicated to splatter flicks, pictures like John Carpenter’s The Thing, Wes Craven’s Shocker, and quite a few films with the name Stephen King featured in the title. Every issue of Fango included centerfolds, just like an issue of Playboy, only instead of some babe opening her legs, you had some psychopath opening a head with an ax.

Fango was my guidebook to the all-important sociopolitical debates of the 1980s, such as: Was Freddy Krueger too funny? What was the grossest picture ever made? And, crucially, would there ever be a better, nastier, more bone-splitting werewolf transformation than the one in American Werewolf in London? (The answers to the first two questions are open to debate—the answer to the third, is, simply, no.)