I've always had a curiosity about the world of fantasy and I was always deeply immersed in watching TV shows and movies about the undead as well as the upbeat side of the world of the superhero.

But for some strange reason I never understood, even though I had over 1,500 comic books, I never built up a single superhero model, even though they existed, and I only built up models of monsters, like Frankenstein, Dracula and the Wolfman. This cycle was only broken a short time ago, when I bought a model of Captain America, a famous Marvel Comics© superhero.

One of my favorite monster magazines was Famous Monsters of Filmland. Famous Monsters featured reviews and commentary on many monster movies and I drooled over the magazine every time I could find an issue of the magazine, as distribution where I grew up in Long Island, NY was very sporadic. It was a very slick publication and had really great photographs and lucid reviews.

Famous Monsters introduced me to the world behind the production of the movies too. How creative teams worked on the movies, and who did the special effects makeup - like Jack Pierce (Frankenstein) and the Westmore family (The Creature from the Black Lagoon by Bud and Star Trek, The Munsters and Star Trek by Mike) and similar topics were explored in the pieces in the magazine.

The magazines I read and the movies I watched motivated me to stage a Frankenstein play when I was very young boy, between 6 to 8 years old, while I was living in Canarsie, Brooklyn, NY and that was over 40 years ago. I wanted to play the monster but they made me the good doctor and I was murdered. It sort of is the story of my life.

At this point in time I bought Collosus Rex who was one of the Colorforms© aliens. He was muscular outer space man from the planet Jupiter and this presaged my becoming a weightlifter later on. In addition to this, I also bought the Scorpio action figure from the Major Matt Mason © astronaut series.

Since then I have delved into horror and science fiction books, magazines and movies with a passion for understanding what makes a quality media piece in that genre. Generally speaking, I think that the older movies and shows were better than the recent offerings.

I know a number of independent movie producers like Warren Disbrow and Brian Coposky. I actually hired them to do molds and make masks for me as well as hiring Mark Alfrey as mentioned later on in this piece.

To be sure, Famous Monsters was not the only horror magazine I ever read. I also read The Monster Times and saw issues of Monster World, and I remember picking a magazine off a street one day when I was a little boy that featured Hammer Films© versions of Dracula and The Daughter of Dracula. I was horrified by the overt portrayal of blood sucking demons, killing weak human beings in their quest for a perverted form of eternal life.

I had a love/hate relationship with these magazines. I was both repulsed by and attracted to these movies and shows. I couldn't understand my feelings towards this genre of literature and media. I had friends who were also involved with these movies and we all shared a common interest in understanding what made our attraction to these magazines tick, so to speak in the common vernacular.

Psychologists and psychiatrists claim that people who engage in watching these movies are usually children who are trying to work out the issue of their mortality. Watching shows in this genre help children to cope with the idea that one day they will pass on and there's a heavy concentration on the idea that death is not final. In that regard, these shows have a sort of cult, religious type of orientation.

For example, psychologists claim that the radioactive, fire-breathing dragon, a mutant tyrannosaurus, stegosaurus hybrid, Godzilla, is actually a psychological attempt by the Japanese to deal with the after effects of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The carnage those bombs produced became incarnate flesh and blood in a nigh invincible entity, an engine of devastation that was eventually killed by a weapon called the oxygen destroyer. Needless to say, the A-bombs did their damage to Japan and were not stopped by that country.

Godzilla never really died because based on the second series, there was a second Godzilla (aka, Gigantis the Fire Monster) who had a run in over 20 movies after the first Godzilla was killed. And I make rubber masks for a hobby and Godzilla is one of my favorite topics to sculpt. I made him for my nephew years ago.

The monsters fascinated me because, just like superheroes, they were physically superior and stronger than normal mortals. In fact, in one Godzilla comic book produced by Marvel Comics©, the Norse God of Thunder, Thor fought the monster Godzilla and prevailed calling upon his Godly might. Thor prevented Godzilla from knocking over a skyscraper with only one hand.

As per the monsters, Dracula supposedly had the strength of 10 men according to one review I read in Famous Monsters years ago and similarly Frankenstein had double that strength and Frankenstein fought the Wolfman in Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman.

I always enjoyed watching the monsters fight each other more than just watching humans fight them. Humans can't battle monsters and demons using physical strength. The humans have to call upon spiritual might to battle the monsters or at least good detective work and good weapons coupled with a lot of resolve to survive. The Dracula

and Terminator movies portray the latter very well.

Of all the monsters, the one I identified with the most was the Wolfman, played by Lon Chaney Jr., and it was a Universal Studios©, from Hollywood, CA movie. The very first mask I ever made was a werewolf mask. The Wolfman movie featured a cursed man, named Larry Talbot, who killed a werewolf. The werewolf Larry Talbot fought bit him and infected him with the werewolf curse.

There was a poem in the Wolfman movie that went like this:

Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night,

Can become a wolf when the wolf bane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.

My own life wasn't easy even as a child. I was in conflict with many of my classmates over certain religious differences and I was one of the weakest children in the grade because my family stressed scholarship and not physical prowess.

One of my early fantasies was that I owned Godzilla as pet and he defended me against my bullies. There is actually a movie called Godzilla's Revenge wherein a little boy named Ichiro befriends the Son of Godzilla, aka Minya, Tadzilla or Minira. It's too bad I'm not Japanese because my fantasy actually predated that movie or was invented around the time of that movie.

Eventually, when I was 10, I took up weight lifting and in a few years I became one of the strongest children in my grade. I tried to become like my favorite superheroes.

Still, it's worthy to note monster models were my fascination and I built up models made by Aurora. Back in the late 1960's and early 1970's I had all 12 of the Aurora monster models. I even remember all of the monsters: Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman, the Mummy, King Kong, Godzilla, the Forgotten Prisoner of Castlemare, the Witch, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Phantom of the Opera, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Aurora discontinued their Bride of Frankenstein kit at the time I was collecting these kits, but I'm currently looking for it as it was reissued recently. I'll probably build it up and give it away. In the old days, I used to horde all my possessions but in my old age I just do it for the fun of it and try to give the joy to other people.

Back over 30 years ago the kits came with two sets of heads and hands. The first set was the regular type of part and the second was glow in the dark. I used the glow parts on my models.

I used to do something really crazy with the Godzilla heads. The glow head I'd put on the built up model but I'd shoot underarm deodorant through the neck of the regular head and I'd light the deodorant after it came out of the mouth, simulating the monster's fire-breathing, radioactive breath. I'm lucky I didn't blow myself up! It's not funny, I could have.

As a side note, my bedroom used to glow in the dark for about an hour after I turned my lights out at night due to all the glow parts on those monster models. I really used to get a kick out of all of this.

One day, my mother got tired of all of these aberrations of nature and demons from the fire pits of Hell. She threw them all out without warning. It's too bad because they are actually worth a pretty penny these days.

One of my friends from my elementary school days and I used to play Dracula vs. Dr. Van Helsing all the time. My friend and I used to switch off which roles we'd play. We used to always argue as to whether or not flashlights warded off Dracula. It was slanted. If I had the flashlight it worked and if my friend had the flashlight it didn't.

In the movies the good doctor and his descendents were the sworn enemies of the demon, Dracula, and they killed him every time he was resurrected and became undead again. But it is hard to keep a good demon down.

We also used to watch Dark Shadows and read Dark Shadows books, which were about a vampire named Barnabas Collins who lived in England, and the show featured werewolves, vampires and witches and other assorted types of monsters. My friend gave me a whole bunch of Dark Shadows books. All of this was back in the 1960's.

One day, my family adopted our German shepherd as a watchdog. His name was Zeus and he eventually became very large and powerful. The weekend we adopted him, on Friday night, there was a monster movie time slot called ”Fright Night” and they played Daughter of Dracula. There were wolves howling in the movie and my little puppy Zeus was howling right along with them. It was very comical.

My family used to also watch The Munsters, which featured a family of monster parodies. Herman was the Frankenstein Monster, Grandpa was Dracula, Lilly was Dracula's daughter and Eddie was the wolf boy. I always got a kick out of the show and its gallows humor. As a side note, I was at a car show some years ago that had the Munster Coach vehicle in the show. It was kept in good condition many years later.

One year around 1990, I bought a horror/sci-fi magazine called Fangoria and I saw an ad by David Ayres (he worked on Close Encounters of the Third Kind) about learning how to make rubber masks as I mentioned earlier in this piece. I started learning this craft but it became obvious to me that I would never attain the skill to make a top-notch mask.

I went to a horror convention called Chiller Theatre, named after the old horror movie time slot of many years ago, around 1992 and met Warren Disbrow, John Dods and Brian Coposky and I contracted with Brian to do a life cast of my head. Brian dragged his friend Mark Alfrey into the deal and Mark led the life casting session.

Later on, I went to Mark's apartment in John's complex (I bought some items from John - he worked on Beauty and the Beast, Cats and the Monsters TV show) and saw all the fantastic sculpts that he did and I decided to have him design a line of masks for me.

I called the line, The Twilight Delights Legion of the Undead and my favorite mask, a werewolf skull, was named after my beloved dog Princess.

One of my former therapists noted that I had been dealing with the other side for a long period of time. He seemed to have a respect for my involvement with the dark side. And I wanted to capitalize on it. I found a struggling and starving artist in Mark Alfrey and I wanted to become a patron of this art and craft. I'm still working on it.

If you see Mark's Website you will see how he sculpted demons, vampires, aliens, mutants and similar themes for TV shows like Angel, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Hercules the Legendary Journeys, Babylon 5, etc. Just look at the amazing talent of this man and recently he “graduated” from horror and is working doing bronze sculptures.

More recently, I have watched shows like Hercules, Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Charmed all of which featured a variety of monsters and supernatural beings like witches. I never lost my fascination with this genre and I'm not the only one. It seems that quite a few baby boomers watch these shows too.

So to wrap up, I'd like to say that watching monster movies and TV shows is healthy for people of all ages, and I still have a few Godzilla movies in my apartment. I find all of this to be relevant, even in my old age and I hope I adequately covered why people watch these types of shows.