Two

Max was born on a stormy night in 1950 while Sunset Boulevard and The Breaking Point showed in theaters. He grew up in Binghamton, New York, where his father worked as a shipping manager and told a joke every night at dinner.

One night, Dad said, "We had to fire one of our employees today. On his way out the door, he told me all along he'd been moonlighting as an actor on the side."

Mom filled six-year-old Max's plate. "Oh, is he any good?"

"I think he's fantastic. I mean, all these years he's been at the warehouse, he convinced me he was actually working."

While Max laughed, Dad face-planted in his pork chops and mashed potatoes.

"Dad?"

A sudden and massive heart attack had killed him.

For Max, it left a permanent psychic imprint. A dark truth learned too young.

The world isn't fair, he thought.

At the funeral, the pastor told him his father had ascended to a better place.

Max stared at him. "Better than my house?"

"He's in heaven," the pastor said. "Heaven is perfect. He's happy there."

"Because of God. God can do anything."

"That's right. It's why we pray."

For the first time in his life, Max wondered why God allowed bad things to happen to good people. On the spot, his child's mind reasoned that one of two axioms must be true. God couldn't stop evil, which made him weaker than evil. Or God could stop it but didn't want to, which made him kind of monstrous himself.

Max's first taste of cosmic horror.

Mom squeezed his hand. "Dad isn't really gone. He's smiling down at us right now."

Max sensed a con everyone agreed upon to make everything bad about life actually feel nice. Like the actor at Dad's warehouse pretending to work.

"Tell me a joke," he said.

On the drive home, he looked out the window at the pink houses flashing past. Everyone else's lives seemed perfect. More of the big con? They had to be hiding something behind all those curtains.

If they weren't, then he must be a freak.

Mom went back to work to support them. At school, Max curled into a ball under his desk during a duck-and-cover drill to practice surviving an atomic war. He lay there expecting the bombs to drop this time, but they never did.

At home, he watched television hoping someone might articulate the thoughts and ideas that felt way too large for him. The world seemed oblivious and happy. As he got older, his belief this was a lie grew.

Then he discovered Shock Theater on channel 7.

At a nocturnal hour, Cool Ghoul John Zacherle introduced old Universal horror movies with macabre humor. Tiptoeing downstairs after Mom turned in for the night, Max sat two feet from his TV set to gape at Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy, and The Invisible Man.

Watching gave him a delicious thrill. Not only was he breaking the rules, but the films struck him as forbidden and arcane knowledge. A glimpse of real taboo. A window into his own troubled soul. These fictional monsters mirrored the dark truths and questions he wrestled with in his life.

Afterward, he went to bed quaking over what might be under his bed. The greatest of fears, he learned, wasn't what you saw but what you didn't.

The nightmares came soon after.

When Mom caught him staying up and then discovered his stash of EC Comics and Weird Tales, she flew into a rage. She worried whether his obsession with horror affected his development and whether the nightmares damaged his brain.

"It's not healthy for you," she yelled.

Max disagreed. These stories didn't hurt him.

They were saving him.

Either way, he grew into a tall, gangly, and pasty kid who didn't fit in. A boy who preferred the serenity and quiet desperation of the night to the earnest, social day. After the sun went down, the shadows recast the familiar as the unfamiliar, a breeding ground for terrors both imaginary and real.

As for the nightmares, they'd transferred to his waking hours, during which he reimagined the mundane world as scenes in horror movies.

At school, Max felt like a freak. Even the outsiders shunned him. Then he discovered Famous Monsters of Filmland.

The first issue he read had the great Vincent Price on the cover along with a bold invitation to catch pics from The Pit and the Pendulum. Max bought and hid it under his mattress, where other boys stashed Playboy.

The magazine told him he wasn't weird at all. Okay, he was still weird, but he wasn't alone—there were many other weirdos like him.

In fact, there was a community.

While America sank into Vietnam, Max avidly consumed movies and TV shows like Thriller, Way Out, and The Twilight Zone. He read every issue of Eerie and Creepy. When he caught Psycho as a rerun at a late-night theater, he began to admire the artistry behind the stories he loved.

The forty-five-second shower scene in Hitchcock's masterpiece had taken a week to shoot, he learned, and involved seventy-eight camera setups. The next time Max cracked open Famous Monsters, he didn't just see a community. He heard a clarion call to contribute and lead.

He wanted to direct movies.

As the sixties reached their messy end, Max arrived at the School of Theater, Film and Television at the University of California, Los Angeles. His education in filmmaking welcomed him like a blank page, full of potential but also intimidating. He loved it all, right down to the iconic palm trees and four-hour-long classes at Melnitz Hall, where he learned things like Freudian interpretations of Citizen Kane.

Even here, however, he found himself an outcast. The weird and twisty kid who wanted to direct horror movies. Another milestone in what would be a lifetime of horror shaming.

The censorial Production Code had died a few years earlier, resulting in an explosion of gore before the New Horror of the seventies refined the genre for the emerging yuppies. Eager to push boundaries, Max shot his first student film in his dorm room in grainy 16mm using bell lights fitted with wax paper as homemade diffusers. Titled Martyr, it told the story of a man tortured by his malicious doppelg?nger. He turns the tables and kills it, one bloody piece chopped off at a time, only to discover he literally fought and killed himself by suicide.

Max's snooty classmates loathed it, wondering who allowed this uncultured, blue-collar weirdo into the same film school as the next crop of Kubricks and Fellinis. Behind his back, they called him the "enfant terrible," a man out to break not society but film itself. When they reached the real world, many of them would one day try their hand at horror as an easier path into directing, but for Max, it had always been his sole destination. His professor also hated the short, declaring that Max's ambition far exceeded his years and that he confused art with bad taste.

Nonetheless, Max had found his home in every meaning of the word.

By the end of his film school years, the blank page with which he'd started had filled to bursting. The school of hard knocks awaited him. Long was the way and hard, but he never gave up on his dream. With Jack the Knife, he finally grabbed it by the tail and rode it to the top of the Hollywood horror scene.

For Max, the real horrors were nuclear war and Vietnam. Watergate and Charles Manson. The Summer of Sam and the energy crisis. The hostage taking in Iran and AIDS. Blackouts and riots and Three Mile Island. Growing old, not being able to afford rent, bringing children into this world.

Dad dropping dead after telling a killer joke at dinner.

Finding out he had the same heart defect as his father.

Horror helped Max process all of it with monsters he could safely fear. Fears he could face with a sense of wonder. Terrors he wanted to create for others so they could share in its bitter but cathartic medicine.

No more curtains hiding dirty secrets in pink houses. No American exceptionalism to the universal savagery of the human condition. No sweet icing plastered over life's existential turds. No more false justice.

His audiences would see and feel it all in gory detail.

To Max, it was as healthy as eating carrots.