Fear Was the First Language I Learned

By Vivian Nosti, Co-Founder of The Capital Horror.  

Every person, brand or passion starts somewhere. Mine begins as a child sitting in my kitchen table with my sister and parents over our breakfast of Café au Laitand toast. I would traipse down the stairs of our two story house and enter the kitchen where my father would be dressed in his grey cashmere robe and black leather slippers. My mother preparing our breakfast hastily before we were off to school. There sat my father at the head of a long pale wood table surrounded by his many newspapers at least four on the daily. As I sipped on my warm beverage and chewed my crispy bread. I would listen to his take on world events, the state of the economy and finally the most fascinating part for him was reading to his very young children and wife the obituaries. His almond shaped brown eyes wide with excitement and wonder at all the people who had died. Slowly and methodically he would describe in detail how and in what manner their death’s had occurred. Somehow this ritual became a comfort forme as if knowing about the nature of death somehow staved it away from my family and loved ones. Sitting in rapt attention following my father’s words is how I began every morning of my young life.

Simultaneously I grew up with a big sister who was afraid of everything. The dolls that sat up in a corner of our shared bedroom in their king sized light blue rattan chair their black eyes wide and unblinking. Watching her every move were a reason for her nighttime terror.She could not fall asleep unless I turned them around facing backwards which I did nightly. When we visited our grandmother for a weekend of fun and games the fear consisted of a copy of the painting by Gainsborough “The Blue boy” hanging in my grandmother’s living room. My sister was afraid of it in much the same way as our dolls. We would gingerly guide him to the floor where he hung in her cozy apartment and turn his staring eyes around facing the wall so she could fall asleep and feel safe.

I have never asked her what or why she was so afraid of everything. Or why I was not afraid of anything although I was so much younger. When she would wake me on school nights unable to sleep and afraid. Fear reflected in her eyes and her longing to be comforted and to have a companion to sit with her until her fear quelled was so evident that I would rouse myself from my sleep and she would enthusiastically take me downstairs to pick out a game we could play from our closet which was rather creepy in itself. We approached the door downstairs with a lantern and trepidation. With her by my side I would enter it and pick a game for us and head back upstairs quickening our steps before any imaginary monsters could followus. I would stay awake playing these games with her until she would become sleepy and give in to slumber.

She was afraid of the dark, of monsters, King Kongand Jaws. Usually I would explain that King Kong was a mechanical ape made in Hollywood by very skilled people and was not real. I would invariably give her some similar answer about the film Jaws and to everything from the painting at my grandmother’s house to the dolls in our room. My usual response courtesy of my father’s obituaries. He would always mention how people’s death didn’t always have to do with disease or natural causes but rather that there weresome very unlucky people who were killed under violent circumstances like murder or families that had been victims of home invasions. Armed with this knowledge, I assured my sister that the monsters were not on the celluloid but rather right outside our house a beautiful two story white house with a canopy of trees lining the street. They lurked in neighborhoods maybe they were our neighbors or random men who would enter into our house and kill us. That, I assured her was what we should be afraid of and not imaginary monsters in films. With our high tech house alarm and our parent’s we would be safe.

My bravery took a turn and fell off the rails on the fateful night when one our eldest sisters convinced our father to let his youngest daughters view the film by William Friedkin’s, The Exorcist. I will never understand why he said yes. Possibly   that Christmas day he had too much holiday cheer but off we went to see it and that was the end of my bravery right thereand then on that Christmas day. Why you may ask. When you take two very young girls to see such a film and they are brought up as Catholics and are attending private Catholic school the devil is real. The film terrified me. Indeed, it took me years to see it alone again and not feel terror the way It hit me that night. A primordial gut punch to my existence altering it irrefutably. Lapsed Catholic or not that upbringing sticks to you like blood hard to remove and sticky. For months after the film, my sister and I who at that time shared a room pushed our twin beds together and whispered prayers late into the night with our rosaries wrapped around our small wrists. Pleading with Jesus to keep us safe and asking for his mercy to know that what we had experienced was just a film and that Regan’s fate would not be our own. That was my first taste of the power of storytelling and film to truly elicit a response that could alter how you viewed the world. Worse yet, our father had told us the entire story of how The Exorcist came to be from book to film and that this had happened to a real boy making the possession story even more terrifying to both my sister and I. For months every noise in our house was suspect, every bath a moment of fear. Eventually, as I grew it stopped. The terror and trauma of watching this film as a young child became a distant memory.

Right now, I am going to take you further back to my origin story. When I was very young I went to California where most of my father’s family lived andcalled home. Every time we visited which was quite often. My grandfather a tough yet simultaneously tender man with the old time character reflecting his own upbringing in Spain. His even toned temperamentwould remain the same as he would tell us his stories in his clear and resonant Castilian accent. At the time,when he weaved his tales of supernatural visions and experiences. I don’t think I understood that what my grandfather had was the gift of second sight. I was always the one doing the begging amongst the children eager to hear his stories as I sat a captive audience at attention.

One story I remember quite vividly. He used to go to a particular barber for many years and they became friends. One day in jest they made a pact. Whomever died first would come back and let the other know if there was a hell on the other side of this earth bound life we are all living. One night he was sleeping soundly with my grandmother by his side when he was awoken by someone calling his name. There in front of him was his barber Leo. Who stood in front of him just as he was in life promptly informing my grandfather that Hell did indeed exist because that is where he was presently residing. I distinctly remember that my grandfather had looked at his watch to see the ungodly hour someone had dared to awaken him. The next morning the news of Leo’s death spread in town. His wife informed my grandfather of the time of Leo’s death which occurred the previous evening late at night coinciding with the time my grandfather had seen the apparition of his barber.There were many similar stories that he had experienced. Some may scoff but it was as real to me as the cup of coffee I am currently drinking as I write this blog post.

The great British poet and noble laureate Ted Hughes believed that these gifts such as second sight were inherited from our ancestors or ran in certain families and were gifts akin to those of artistic talent, or any other special quality one might have in life that was different from that of which most people possessed. They were special because they could feel and see what no one else could.

From an early age, I had these kinds of intuitions and visions. Including Premonitory dreams all of whichcame true. But that is a story for another day….

Horror and my love for it came early with a white heat that never faded. It entered my consciousness with visual images rather than words. I read widely and voraciously since childhood courtesy of my mother who despite my dyslexia and dyscalculia did not believe anything could hold her daughter back in life. I owe the richness of discovering the joys of reading and writing to her unrelenting spirit and tenacity.

As the daughter of a Television executive who adored film like other people enjoy ice cream. Our family delved into film in every imaginable genre. Foreign films to the Pink Panther and James Bond. My father first introduced me to the film Don’t Look Now based on a novel by Daphne Du Maurier and directed for the screen by Nicolas Roeg when I was still in middle school and I promptly fell in love. To this day it remains one of my favorite’s. Another of my all time favorites that my sister and I savored was Audrey Rose, another supernatural tale of reincarnation starring Anthony Hopkins and Marsha Mason.

Our Sunday ritual were films and family lunches. Icannot imagine my life with out them. As I grew into adulthood I continued going to every film playing at the cinema like a religion. I worshipped cinema and still do. Fade to black, credits role and in you go to another world. Coming out another person with any luck. Every weekend my sister and I would often go see double features and after the films ended we were off to dinner or cocktails to discuss them in a state of reverie, in silence until we arrived at our destination and then we broke our silence and our chatter would begin all our conversation surrounding film and what we had not just seen but rather experienced.

To this day I continue make film a focal point of my life. My experience and taste in the horror genre is so incredibly varied. The dark beneath the banality of David Lynch’s world in the cookie cutter town of Blue Velvet where nothing is what it seems one illusion on top of another like a mirage. The Scream franchise with it’s insider jokes and nods to the Horror genre. Films with more nuance such as Plein Soleil starring Alain Delon with it’s air of sun drenched beauty and menace. To the great master of Horror himself, Hitchcock whose films I know frame by frame, to the ultimate horror of giving birth to the devil so well executed by director Roman Polanski in Rosemary’s Baby to Giallothe campy blood soaked Italian genre of films by director’s like Bava and Argento amongst them.

Asian Horror with it’s ghosts and haunted houses one of my favorites A tale of two Sisters a haunting tale of loss, grief and guilt. To this day I remember seeing  The Death of Peter Proud an obscure film about reincarnation that fascinated my young mind. Possession tales and any and all films that weredrenched in the world of mystery and the unknownappealed to me. The Innocents a ghost story in black and white from 1961 starring Deborah Kerr based on the story by Henry James, The Turn of the Screw which I share with the film director Martin Scorsese as one of my favorite films of horror for it’s oppressive atmosphere and a slow burn of evil lurking the halls of the English countryside estate with ghosts who possess children for their own twisted and perverse pursuits.The Haunting both the classic Black and White versionbased on Shirley Jackson’s story to the present day Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House by Michael Flannigan. Other films that stand out are the horrifying The Entity staring Barbara Hershey as a woman tormented by an invisible being. The Changeling a haunted house story and finally Ari Aster captured my horror drenched heart with with his film’s Heretic andMidsommar.

My love of Horror literature came sometime in between all of these films later in my development. It started with Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula which prompted me to dig deeper into work by contemporary authors of Horror. Personal Favorites We need to talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver, Paul Tremblay’s novels, Daphne Du Maurier, Stephen Graham Jones, Buffalo Hunter Hunter a personal favorite. It would take an entire Post dedicated to every single novel and film I picked up and continue to be entranced by on a daily basis with subjects that have to do with haunted houses, unfriendly spirits, possessions, true crime and more.

I have asked myself many a time what made me turn to that which is darkest in our collective consciousnessdespite not being an occultist. From my earliest memories that started with my father and grandfather my fascination with everything from telepathy, true crime and the complexity of evil have entranced me and their hold only grows with the years.