Kiss mildly scared me as a child. Their evil Kabuki warrior make-up and devil music was a recipe for disaster, as I already hated clowns. By chance I saw their film, Kiss Meets the Phantom, which is a modern remake of The Phantom of the Opera, with a bunch of changes, most importantly Kiss running around an amusement park which is being terrorized by an evil scientist. That was another thing that scared me: amusement parks, and fairs. From a very early age, I had an innate, visceral hatred of carnies and circus people, always imagining that behind the facade of sawdust and elephant piss there were dirty miscreants spiraling down to new depths of decadence, like that "Rectum" bar at the end of the French movie Irreversible.
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