Our next contributor is making his debut to the Halloween Horrors series, but is a fellow contributor at Drive-In Asylum… which conveniently has a new issue out… one that both he and I wrote articles for…. but I’m not going to bug you with that… but I will leave the link here just in case: Latest Issue of Drive-In Asylum

Please welcome Sam Panico to this year’s series. Sam, along with his wife Becca, run the BandSaboutMovies website and podcast.

Besides the 2 aforementioned facts, I honestly don’t know much about Mr. Panico. I’ve read that he was a wrestler. I’m kinda hoping that he wrestled bears. C’mon… tell me that wouldn’t be cool as shit! Well, I mean, it wouldn’t be that cool if you were losing. I’d guess that you’d need superhuman strength or something like that. I’m not sure if Sam is a superhero, but I’ll ask him.

What was I talking about? Oh, yeah. Here’s Sam with a piece on a movie that has some of the most rabid fans I’ve ever seen.

You should be loyal to your heroes… they can turn on you.

Sam Panico (www.bandsaboutmovies.com) on Sammi Curr

You should never meet your heroes — or see what they’ll be like when you grow up.

16-year-old me was certainly in a different place than 45-year-old me. Back then, I was ill-prepared for the competitive world of high school. To compensate, I grew my hair out, wore black and gave off the vibes that led teachers to pull me aside and ask if I worshiped the devil. The hero on my walls, the voice in my ears, the killer wolf that wouldn’t scratch on no doors? Glenn Danzig, a crooning Elvis/Jim Morrison hybrid (moments) who sang about B movies, Satan, and skulls. He was my protector against sneers, bullies, worry, and the girls I couldn’t get the courage to talk to.

Thirty years later, my hero has feet of clay. He’s been dragged through the memes and the mud, and he’s done much of that himself. But this article isn’t about Glenn. As it’s true subject — “Rock’s Chosen Warrior” Sammi Curr — would say, “You should be loyal to your heroes… they can turn on you.”

The point I’m trying to make is that in 1986, I was Eddie “Ragman” Weinbauer, the hero of Trick or Treat. Wandering the halls of my high school was a chore, an exercise in ennui. I could have written the letter that he sends to Sammi: “Airheads and brain-deads are everywhere. Who needs them? What have they got that I need?”

With one backward spin of Songs in the Key of Death, Sammi Curr spoke directly to Ragman, telling him the advice he’d need to succeed and get exactly what he wanted. “The bait is you. Let the big fish hook themselves. You’re the bait. The bait is you.”

An aside: this is where boys and girls differ. When a girl gets magical powers, like in The Craft, she may use those gifts for ill at the start. By the end, she’s discovered the secrets to happiness and has even accepted her enemies into her heart. When it comes to boys who get what they want magically — think Christine or Trick or Treat — once they get laid, all their schemes of revenge go away. But at that point, things have gone too far and they drag everyone down with them. There’s a lesson here — women are smarter than men and don’t think with their dicks. But I digress.

I lived the same life as Ragman and I believe that Sammi Curr was totally justified in giving up on him. Sammi gave him the means to destroy his enemies and Eddie got soft. “NO WIMPS. NO FALSE METAL.”

Here’s another lesson: there’s no easy way out of Satanic pacts. But I just know that IF I had Sammi Curr on my side in high school, life would have been different. And I certainly wouldn’t have been upset once he started blasting people with lighting on prom night.

Sammi had it much easier than Glenn Danzig. After a career of drinking blood from the mouths of snakes and recording songs like “Fuck with Fire,” Sammi had the good sense to die in a hotel fire. Even reborn as pure energy or something — his powerset is ill-defined — Sammi will never age or get fat or grow irrelevant. He will never scream at someone because they had the wrong soup backstage. He will never be photographed carrying cat litter or become a silly meme that gets posted to my Facebook wall. He will remain eternally evil, hand tapping on his side, shocking us all until the sparks fly.