As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster. No..wait, wrong movie. I have, however, always been somewhat of a weirdo with an attraction to unusual things. I want to say it all started when my grandma read me Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Some of my fondest memories include chanting “The Hearse Song” with her in the kitchen. There is probably something inherently wrong with a 5 year old deriving incredible joy out of a song about death, decomposition, and worms playing pinochle on your snout…but I digress. At age 8, I was OBSESSED with the mummification process. I couldn’t help but tell anyone and everyone about how they’d stick a hot poker up the corpse’s nose, scramble the brain, and pull it right out. By age 10, I was planning future road trips for my adult-self to haunted places around the United States. Trespassing was a particular concern for me then. Come age 12, the morbid fascination had peaked, and I would spend my free time with my head buried in books about serial killers. Tru-TV’s crime library became my bible and I would stay up late on school nights reading about all of the heinous crimes committed by nefarious characters like Albert Fish and Ed Gein. Jack the Ripper, probably due in part to my 19th century romanticism and the unsolved nature of the crime, became a personal obsession of mine.

All of this was precursory to my discovery of horror films. Don’t get me wrong, I was very aware of them at a young age, but not allowed to watch them. I would sneak-watch bits of The Exorcist when my mom wasn’t in the room but would have to change it at any slight footstep, and I think then, I was still too frightened to really watch it anyway. Despite my awareness, my appreciation for it did not develop until my adolescence. But once it did, it did so in a big, big way. Film took precedence over everything and anything. Growing up in the internet age, I was at an advantage, because it made finding new things much easier. It also made it easy to spend lots of time on disgusting gore sites such as Rotten.com, which I was doing a lot of then. Film really helped me channel my morbid fascination into something creative and inspiring. I started out consuming all the quintessential classics: Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, etc, etc. By high school, my palate had developed to include cult films and independent horror as well. One of my particular favorite discoveries at that time, was pioneer of stop-motion animation Jan Svankmajer. Watching his adaptation of Alice in Wonderland seriously changed my life. I didn’t quite know it then, but this was it for me. This was my passion. The only thing I’d want to fill my head with for years to come. The basis of my studies and future career. Having influence on everything from my taste in music to my personal style.

At some point in my teens, I watched a film called May by director Lucky McKee. It was a modern take on Frankenstein with a serious feminist twist. I was starting to feel much stronger in my ideals and becoming much more opinionated about women’s rights and my place in the world as a female. I began severely gravitating toward female-centric cult and horror films. Little did I know, it was becoming a “thing” for me. It wasn’t until about three years ago, that I discovered a book called House of Psychotic Women by writer and co-founder of the Miskatonic Institute for Horror Studies (be still my heart), Kier La-Janisse. That book was it. That book was me. All of these films that I had grown to cherish had a major theme in common, neurosis and psychosis of women in horror and exploitation films. Hell, even Drop Dead Fred, one of my all-time favorite films from the age of four, fit the bill. Let’s get one thing clear, I love all types of cinema. This particular sub-genre just holds a super special place in my heart and mind. It has taken precedence in my film school studies and will continue to do so well into grad school. I am absolutely head-over-heels in love with it.

To wrap things up, I want NC Seventeen to serve as my love letter to cult, horror, and exploitation cinema. I want myself and others to be able to express their opinions about outsider cinema and films that go undervalued, under-appreciated, and ignored by a skewed Hollywood system. NC Seventeen is a place for provocative, transgressive, subversive, and perverse cinema to be valued as art instead of pornography. A place where trash-cinema can be discussed intellectually and poor big-budget features can be honestly taken apart by the seams.

“Hey, hey MPAA, how many movies have you censored today?”

NC Seventeen is now live.

Cult. Horror. Exploitation.

Stay Tuned.