What a joy it was indeed!

And what a joy it was to read Bill’s account of his experience because it SO nearly mirrors my own with my first exposure to DAWN at the same exact age. Substitute Buffalo, NY with the rural south & his group encounter with my lone one & our’s were VERY similar experiences.
Though, my own was actually an early spring of ‘79 pre-release screening that I got a free ticket for from the proprietor of my favorite local comic shop.

At 17, I was a lifelong genre film fan who considered himself to be pretty “worldly” when it came to horror, having seen countless exploitation films at the drive in with my parents who were genre film fans as well. But, nothing that I’d seen previously quite prepared me ( or the packed house that I shared that screening with that night ) for the shock of those opening scenes in the apartment complex. Scenes that were seminal to cinema & that everyone in the audience collectively knew right away were groundbreaking stuff.

It was a one of a kind night at the movies, that’s for sure.

- Jim

Shouldn’t that be a name of a Horror movie award? The movie so scary good that it makes you loose control of your urinary tract….

Another great moment was like three years later when THE EVIL DEAD came to my local theater. Here I was on a friday afternoon leaving a high school which had a graveyard built around it and whose address was 999 in queens to see this movie. Lets just say after seeing it I was never the same again. The effects and atmosphere were so brutal I was wondering with my somewhat religious upbringing if I had just seen something truly evil and perhaps even..real.

When I left the theater it was already dark so the walk home past my high school and the graveyard was creepy to say the least.