Christian Sellers

My fascination with horror began with my first movie experience. When I was three-years old my mother took me to watch ‘The Elephant Man’. Nowadays taking your infant child to see a David Lynch film may seem ill-advised, but back in 1981 he had yet to make ‘Blue Velvet’ or ‘Twin Peaks’, and at this time very few people had seen ‘Eraserhead’. The moment when John Hurt walked into the office with the bag over his head freaked me out and I began screaming, forcing my mother to take me home. And there began my obsession with finding the most shocking and disturbing images imaginable all in the name of entertainment that would eventually lead to a career in writing about horror. My passion for writing when I was twelve. We had a new teacher for English language and our assignment was to write a short story in which a virus is unleashed in a high school, resulting in the building being quarantined. Having grown up on the likes of ‘The Blob’ and ‘Street Trash’, my take on this relatively straightforward concept resulted in a story that included students melting and exploding, complete with crude-yet-graphic illustrations. This teacher continued to fuel my newfound talent, which was followed by a series of stories based on a run of toys called ‘Bloglins’, which were rip-offs of ‘Gremlins’, ‘Ghoulies’ and all the other mini-creature features of the 1980s. Unfortunately, this teacher was fired after just one year and replaced with someone who inspired nothing but hatred from my creatively-starved mind.