May flights of devils wing you to your rest

Day 6 - Your all time favorite movie.

Most of my childhood was spent lying awake in bed, pillow over my head, listening to the sounds of people dying coming from the other side of the wall. Was someone in my family a mass murderer? No, no... My mother just has a love for all that is horror and sci-fi, and I was the lucky one that shared a wall with her TV. Unfortunately, my father is not the quietest of sleepers, which would prompt my mom to turn whatever movie she was watching at the time up on full blast. Earlier in my life (like my toddler years), I was afraid of just about everything, which included 90% of Disney movies, but as I got older I became accustomed to the sounds of panicked screaming. The only issue I had with this was the fact that I could not get to sleep. Sometimes I would have to go into her room to tell her I couldn't take the sound of screaming anymore and she would turn it down. In retrospect, I probably should have just moved my bed to a different wall, but you know, whatever...

My mother was not the traditional mother. She loved horror movies and sci-fi, she raised me on Star Trek and Star Wars, and she listened to Queen and David Bowie. She was a stay at home mom, but far from the stereotypical domestic housewife. She was different, which explains my sister and I (of course my dad is also strange, so we've got it from both ends here). She's probably the only mother I know that supported my decision to become a goth-child, encouraged it even. We would sit together and dye my hair pink, red, purple, black... whatever particular color I wanted at the time. Even my grandmother was supportive. She bought me some of my favorite goth-child clothing! But it seems that I was destined for this life, being the spawn of a lover of the strange.

So it's only fitting that the first thing I became obsessed with was vampires. Not the sparkly, emo vampires, but the Anne Rice, emo vampires. Interview with the Vampire came out in 1994, which means I was 8 at the time. I'm not exactly sure how I even discovered it (my mom is probably to blame here), but from the second I heard what it was about and who was in it I knew I had to see it. Two of my first celebrity crushes just so happened to be Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, so my little 8 year old mind almost died at the concept of this movies. Vampires + Tom Cruise + Brad Pitt = 8-year-old Sammi heaven. But my MOTHER, the reason for all this vampire obsession nonsense, blocked me from seeing it. I was 8, the movie was rated R, and despite my mother being cool and into cool things, I was not allowed to see rated R movies. This was devastating news to me. I was going to have to wait until I was older!? Torture.

I tried everything I could think of to convince her to let me watch it, but the furthest I got was that I was allowed to watch one scene and that was it. I had heard it playing from the other side of the wall so I went in trying to be sneaky, playing the "Oh! I just want to say goodnight!" card, but she was too smart. She paused it. I begged to watch it. She allowed me that one scene, and I was sent back to my room to be teased by the sounds of it being so close, yet so far away.

Like how many young boys tried to watch scrambled porn, I did the same, only this was a scrambled version of Interview with the Vampire. It was on some movie channel we couldn't get, I remember the exact scene too, and I tried to watch it for a good 10 minutes. At first it was almost perfect, I got a few minutes in of just a negative looking image (you boys who tried to watch porn should know what I'm talking about here), the sound crystal clear, but after a little while the picture went away and I gave up. It wasn't worth it... I'd give it a few more years.

I used to write and illustrate all sorts of short stories (I've been writing since before I could write), and I even went so far in my Interview of the Vampire obsession to create a little jewel called, "Lestat, Tom and Me." It's a beautifully written story about... well... my adventures with Tom Cruise and his character in the movie, Lestat. An award winning piece obviously...

So at some point many years later, TBS finally started playing the movie on TV. Since it was edited my mother had no objections to me watching it. I think I came in half way through so I only ended up watching a little bit of it before I turned it off... worrying that I would ruin it.

Some time later, I think was about 12,  I ended up watching my first rated R movie, Half Baked, with my cousin, so naturally, my next step was to watch Interview. I believe I was home sick with strep when my mom brought down the tape. She worried that I'd hyped it up too much for so many years that I would be disappointed with it, but put it in anyway. Well, she was wrong. I loved it. To me, it was worth the years of waiting. Since then I've probably watched it at least 4 and a half million times and I'm still not sick of it. I don't know what exactly draws me to it, my obsession with vampires, the years of not being able to see it, but it is my absolute favorite movie of all time.