Am I “the horror guy”? I never thought so. But, one day while walking down the street of my hometown, I overheard a query made by one of two young guys as they passed me by: “Isn’t that the horror guy?” “Yep!” The young man was referring to the fact that I had written a book on the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise entitled, Welcome to Elm Street: Inside the Film and Television Nightmares.

This perception of me by a couple of local lads as “the horror guy” led me to ruminate. I had only authored one book in which horror movies feature. I had published books on subjects as varied as independent auteur Tom DiCillo (Johnny Suede, Living In Oblivion, Box of Moonlight); movie star Burt Reynolds (Smokey and the Bandit, White Lightning, Sharkey’s Machine); acclaimed cinematographers Nick McLean (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Goonies, Friends) and Roy H Wagner (Nick of Time, Beauty and the Beast, House M.D.); director Walter Hill (The Warriors, Southern Comfort, 48 Hrs.); and an anthology of biographies on 10 top touring female musicians entitled Hired Guns: Portraits of Women in Alternative Music.

Each of those books couldn’t have been further from the tone and topic of the Elm Street book, but to me it fits perfectly within my body of work; like those other subjects I chose it because it was close to my heart – I grew up a Freddy fan since I discovered the third entry of the franchise, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, at the age of five in the Screen Test video shop in Naas. That is the only reason I choose the subjects that I do; it must come from a personal place to warrant sitting up at 3am editing that convoluted paragraph for the umpteenth time.

But I launched the Elm Street book to decent success; it did well on some book charts, go