‘Are you OK? Is it too scary? We can leave if you need to …” It was May 1980. I was nearly 13 years old, sitting in an Ohio movie theatre with my mother watching Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. She was right to be concerned; exactly two years earlier she had taken me to see Larry Cohen’s horror film It Lives Again – his sequel to It’s Alive – and the experience had caused more than a year of traumatic, recurring nightmares. As a result, I had since avoided any scary movies (or even their trailers). So it was risky for her to take me to see another horror film that early summer evening.