Blind spot of the dead

As I've got older and more and more people have access to the sum total of human knowledge on their fuckin' phones, my geek game has been shamed, over and over. Half-remembered facts and movie stills burned in the brain were no match for the fact power of the mighty IMDB.

And now that I've seen how much other people in the world care about the same dorky shit I do, I've come to the galling conclusion that I'm not at a real horror nerd, just a fairweather fan who likes all the obvious gory shit.

Because I somehow became the kind of geek who can give a reasonable account of what happens in, say, the Spanish Blind Dead ghoul films, without actually ever seeing any of them.

Growing up, I might have been the only kid in town I knew who could tell the obvious difference between John and Sal Buscema, but I had my limits and it's not just because I'm a lazy swine. 

It was just the age I grew up in, the one where things weren't always available. I was obsessed with Hammer horrors for a while, but it was more than a decade before I got to see their first Dracula. There would always be a bit of Fulci or whatever on the shelves at the local video rental places, but you'd be dreaming if you think you'd find a comprehensive collection.

What I did have access to was books - lots of books. Going through every second hand store in town and snapping up anything about horror movies I could find. I always signed up for every library I could in every town I lived in, and would just inhale that information they had between dusty covers.

And now I listen to a lot of podcasts and read a tonne of online essays every month, which shovel in more data and information, and I end up knowing a lot about movies, without having to resort to Wikipedia. I know all about the Tombs of the Blind Dead series - can name a bunch of the actors and directors, could rattle off a brief run-through of all the plots, and have seen enough small clips and trailers over the years to get a handle of the vibe.

But - and this is the fatal part - I don't feel the crushing need to actually see them. I watched Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar the other night, but still haven't seen a semi-classic horror film like the first Blind Dead shocker.

I don't have any excuse - you can find these kinds of films all over the show, no matter how obscure they get. There are a huge amount of them on youtube, and it might take literally seconds to track them down somewhere.

And yet, unless it served right up to me, I'm not likely to go out of my way to see it, because I have to be in a certain frame of mind to dig on grainy and gritty euro-horror, and that frame of mind is sadly rare.

I still might actually get down to it one day. I know that they can never live up to the fever dreams they inspired, and that impossible standard of anybody's imagination, but what ever could?