Horror Memories #1: Joe Bob Briggs

Today is Friday, the 28th day of April in 2023, the year ancient prophecy tells us the King of Darkness and his infernal minions will rise up from the foulest depths of Hell and conquer this realm in an unrelenting frenzy of ravening bloodlust.

I made that last part up. I’m a writer and that’s what I do. I make stuff up and sell it to people. It’s okay work if you can get it.

This will be a little bit of a deviation from what I’ve posted before in the sense that it’s more about my reminiscences of being a young horror fan than news about my writing career. Tonight Shudder will premiere the second double-feature episode of the new season of The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs and you can bet I’ll be parked in front of my TV with a beer in hand and some Nashville hot chicken for dinner.

I’ve been a Joe Bob Briggs fan for a long time, going back to the 80’s. The actual beginning of my fandom is slightly murky after all this time, but it probably started with Stephen King’s advocacy of Briggs. In 1987 I bought his book Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In. That book, along with Michael Weldon’s The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, became indispensable to me during that decade. These were my holy texts of gore and weirdness.

Around the same time, I discovered JBB’s show on the Movie Channel, Joe Bob’s Drive-In Theater. It became a weekly viewing staple for the next several years. If I wasn’t at home on a Saturday night, as was often the case back then, I’d stick in a fresh videotape, put my VCR on the SLP setting, and set a recording to watch the whole thing later. Sometimes I wish I still had those tapes, but I don’t have a working VCR. Luckily a lot of the old segments are on YouTube.

In Joe Bob, I felt like I’d found a kindred spirit, a host and critic who was an amazing breath of fresh air for those of us sick of stuffy mainstream critics who looked down on horror. This was a guy who got it, who understood what made low-budget films dismissed by snobs compelling and fun. Someone who laughed at the outrageous things in these movies while also offering insight into the subtleties and nuances those snobs always missed, the things that made them special. I believe a lot of his somewhat younger fans today, the ones who know him primarily from Monster Vision or even just the current show, see him as a little bit of a wise old father or grandfatherly figure, a respected elder guru. While I understand that and am grateful for the respect the man has garnered, back in the 80’s he seemed like someone who could be a slightly older peer. Someone you could get drunk with and talk horror with and maybe even get into some serious trouble with on a Saturday night. Of course that never happened for most of us. The man was a television and media personality, not a hometown guy from down the street. But you could envision it so easily because Joe Bob never talked down to his audience. He was one of us, even if the Joe Bob “character” was in part a cultivated persona for John Bloom (his real name, as I’m sure anyone reading this knows).

I believe I’ll title this post Horror Memories. It may be the first in an ongoing series that will act as a supplement to the regular newsletter. The next installment will probably be about discovering Fangoria magazine in the very early 80’s, a period I still consider the absolute golden age of that publication.

The new Last Drive-In episode is just a few hours away as I write this, so I better wrap this up and take care of some other stuff to get ready for the show. Below are pictures of my original copy of Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In and a page on the inside where I was able to get him to sign it for me at the Scares That Care convention in 2019.