Happy Birthday to Me

When I was a little boy my mother used to take me to the tiny independent video store down the road called Pyramid Video. This was during the age when VHS was at its peak, not long after Beta had been made obsolete. They had an adult section in this video store sectioned off from the rest of it. As a child with a strong morbid curiosity I often took a guilty pleasure in passing by the horror genre of the video collection, nervously making sure my mom would not notice my wandering eye scanning the VHS cases stacked so lightly in front of their heavy black videotapes. I didn’t want my mom to think I was sick and depraved after all, and I was attracted by my fear of the box covers: the blood, the discomforting and ominous fonts, the incomprehensible expression of delight of ravenous lunatics. My mind could barely contain the imagination I had of what disturbing sights and actions lay within those uniformly-formatted videotapes resting hidden behind their tattooed skins.

Years and years later, many of these films’ macabre box cover art still remained engrained in my memory as though I had passed them in the video store just the other day. Among these, the cover art for films like “My Bloody Valentine” and “Happy Birthday to Me,” both self-centered and Canadian-born titles, stuck out in particular. The latter mentioned had a grainy black cover with the picture of a young man eyes and mouth wide open in terror as a shishkabob skewer no doubt stacked with meat, peppers, and onions is being forcibly shoved down his throat by a black leather gloved hand. The tagline, food for the creative imagination of a little boy like myself, read: “Six of the most bizarre murders you will ever see.”

I finally watched this movie one rainy, lazy afternoon in Eugene, Oregon at the fresh age of 20. I remember sitting in my attic space room of an 8-bedroom house putting off my pressing need to study organic chemistry, messily eating a pomegranate, chatting on Gmail with my brother Alexei, and watching “Happy Birthday to Me” fragmented into several parts on Youtube. I wondered if I was wasting my time, especially when my brother asked me what I was up to and I said I was watching a Canadian slasher movie from the 80’s and it was a Friday afternoon. I remember him typing before he left, “Well I gotta go man, enjoy your Canadian horror movie, and your weekend.”