Robert Dunbar

They say a basis in fact underlies most legends. They say it all the time, all those Wise Elders in all those old horror films, the high priests, the scientists, the gypsy fortune tellers. On this single issue they agree unanimously.

Cinema _ all art really _ has great power. Power to illuminate. Power to transform. For those of us who experience film as literature, classic movies comprised an introductory education in the genre. As kids, many of us went searching through library shelves for obscure source novels after seeing some old movie or other. It was the start of many an adventure.

Especially on rainy nights like this, they would congregate under the bridge, all the boys from nowhere, the boys who lived nowhere, who had nowhere else to go.

Just as there are broken people, there are broken places on this earth. Some have always been broken. All cities have such neighborhoods at their edges, and this city is all edges _ block after block of bleakly hopeless outskirts.People don__ bury dead cities. They abandon them. They abandon them to the poorest of the poor, to the lost and the doomed.

Sometimes sanity just means the ability to recognize the end of the road when you reach it.

The unfortunate Elizabeth Bathori was said to bathe in the blood of young girls in order to preserve her youth and beauty. Apparently more than 600 maidens went down the drain before anyone noticed something amiss at the castle. How very inobservant the neighbors must have been.

_a bar he sometimes sneaked into called The Slab. (They served bloody marys and zombies _ stiff drinks they called them _ and the jukebox only played dirges. A spotlight pinned dead go-go boys in cages, and though he__ never ventured to the refrigerated back room, he__ heard stories.)

Even in the wood, there was a right road and a wrong one. All the most terrifying fairy tales inevitably began with some foolish innocent (or two) straying from the path. Then anything might happen.

The original Gothic horror tales focused on personalities deformed through loneliness. Ghouls, vampires, werewolves: all made, not born. But the isolation? Are even such as these ever truly alone? Perhaps the psyche has always been more complex than that, desire eternally more potent than terror. Surely, none prowl entirely in solitude.

No one dreamed them up. No one needed to. The vampire clawing at the window, the werewolf prowling the moor, the hags at the crossroads _ they lurked here already. Some nightmares are ancient, as old as civilization. Some are older still.