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I had all the fears that a lot of kids have: of a society of the netherworld living under my bed, of monsters living in the closet waiting to suck me in and do terrible things to me. There was a crack in the wall by my bed that I stared at all the time, imagining little friendly people living in the crack. One day while I was staring at the crack, it suddenly opened about five inches, and little pieces fell out of it. That really happened. I was afraid of clouds, the wind, trees -- there was a forest outside my window in New Jersey, and at night the trees had silhouettes of arms and heads and tentacles. I liked being scared. It was very stimulating. In my films I celebrate the imagination as a tool of great creation and a device for the ultimate scream, and even as a kid I liked pushing myself to the brink of terror and then pulling back. In the morning I was the bravest guy -- little seven-year-old Steven walking around the closet, or talking to the trees, saying, "I'm not afraid of you." But once night fell, all bets were off.
I had no way to sublimate or channel these fears until I began telling stories to my younger sisters. This removed the fear from my soul and transferred it right into theirs. One story was about the old World War II % flier who had been rotting in our closet for 20 years. I took a plastic skull you buy in a model shop and put a flashlight inside so the eyes and face would glow; then I put my dad's World War II aviator cap over the skull and put goggles over the eyeholes. At night, I'd dare them to peek into the closet. They wanted to see it, and they didn't want to see it. But one by one they would slowly open the door and go in. When they were inside I put a plug in the wall and the skull would light up and they would scream, and eventually I would let them out. It's amazing that they even grew up. It's amazing that I grew up and they didn't kill me.
I wasn't a religious kid, although I was Bar Mitzvahed in a real Orthodox synagogue. The first four rows were filled with Jewish men in their 80s who sang the Haftarah along with me, so that whenever I forgot something all I had to do was listen -- they were way ahead of me anyhow. It was like having a hundred prompters. My mother observes the dietary rules now, but back then our family was storefront kosher. Whenever the rabbi left our house it was, "Strike the sets, remove the props." My mom and I were seafood nuts, but of course lobster is not kosher. We'd bought three live lobsters for dinner, and sure enough, the rabbi pulled into our driveway. Mom panicked and threw the live crustaceans at me; I had to hide them under my bed. Then the rabbi came to my room to see how I was doing. You could hear the lobsters clicking and clacking each other with their tails. The rabbi just sort of stared and sniffed the air; he must have wondered what that tref scent was, lingering in the kid's bedroom. The minute the rabbi left, my mom and I gleefully threw the lobsters into a pot of boiling water and then ate them.