Christmastime is a lot of things to a lot of people, and some traditions make more sense to me than others. Reflecting and taking inventory of the past 12 months? Well, it’s the end of the year, the winter solstice; that certainly makes sense. Embracing the spirit of giving, and of helping those in need? That’s literally the story of Jesus’ birth, so sure. Haunted by ghosts of the past who provide grim reminders of what really matters in life? Well, if you say so, Great Britain.
I kid the Brits; I’ve long associated the holiday with the unquiet dead. For the past two decades, Christmas has been a space sort of occupied by the absence of my father, who died on December 21st, 2004. That unfortunate timing meant we had the funeral home hang onto his body until after the holiday so that folks could all “enjoy” their Christmas (or in my case, self-medicate and zombie-walk through Christmas) and circle back to all the grieving afterward. It sucked very much, and it made me sort of unable to really engage in Christmas for a lot of years. But maybe the Brits are right, and a Christmas ghost story is good for what ails us. So here’s one.
Fun fact: my legal name is not Phil Nobile Jr. It’s not listed that way on my birth certificate, nor on my social security card, nor on my driver’s license. My dad’s name and my name are the same – Philip John Nobile – but for whatever reason no one thought to put a “Jr.” or a “II” on the end of the paperwork when I came along. While my dad was alive, I was called Philip; in fact, my siblings still sometimes call me Philip. My dad was Phil. And Phil is my Christmas ghost.
I’ve talked before about how my dad is largely responsible for my love of horror. Not because he necessarily loved horror, but because once he saw my affinity for it, he supported me having an interest, and was probably stoked that I wasn’t doing illegal shit and getting arrested (things he was often dealing with elsewhere on our family tree). There was no internet, and the only real way for me to connect with the genre was my dad, who would drive me here, take me there, to get me in front of this stuff I loved.
He took me to see The Thing and Creepshow in 1982, and when I became fascinated by makeup FX soon after, he got me my first tin of mortician’s wax – directly from his funeral director/mortician friend. The first VHS tape I ever owned was a copy of Night of the Living Dead that Dad brought home from Bradlees one Christmas.
We were not a cable-having household, so my dad would drive me to Camera Video Showplace (our town wouldn’t have a proper video store for a couple more years), where I first found Martin and Dawn of the Dead for rental in their clamshell Thorn/EMI boxes. Our local convenience store, Krauszer’s, stocked STARLOG but not FANGORIA, so Dad would drive me to the further-away sweet shop (did it have a name? Lost to time) on Union Ave, next to Romeo’s Pizza, to get the latest Fango. I still have those issues.
He would drive me even further still to The Costume Shop in Red Bank, where I pored over their supply of liquid latex, spirit gum and Mehron Rubber Mask Grease, and annoyed their young employee
Scott Stoddard with questions about the techniques and materials he was using in the store’s back room, which he’d converted into a makeshift workshop.
As I was underage at the time, it was my dad who made sure I got to see Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 and Day of the Dead down the road at The Movies At Middletown. (Day was the midnight screening on opening night; he knew I’d been waiting a year for it to come out.) 1985 was a banner year, with Return of the Living Dead and Fright Night also playing; Dad’s friend Tom ran the place, meaning we got in for free. The movies themselves? Dad was a chain smoker and spent more time in the lobby than in his seat. But he got me there; in between working two jobs and feeding seven kids, he got me to the movies.
The photos of all of my wonky makeup projects from back then were all taken by my dad, whose own, mostly quelled-by-then obsession was 35mm photography; I dunno if he was proud, amused, or annoyed (my makeup experiments always made an absolute mess of the laundry room), but he dutifully showed up for all of it.
All of which to say: my dad didn’t share my love of horror, but he acknowledged it, and he kept it fed. I wish I’d been better at recognizing how rare a gift that was. And more than anything, I wish he was around to see how those trips to the costume shop, the movies he took me to, this… investment that he could not possibly have seen as such, ended up shaping me in ways neither of us could’ve imagined. At the time of my dad’s death, my career was writing and producing various forms of non-fiction television – game shows, home improvement shows, true crime – and of course he was plenty proud of all that. But for the last six years, the holidays have been a little extra sad because, as I do my own end-of-year reflecting, I’m a bit haunted by my own Christmas ghost, who missed out on the entire Fango chapter of my life, one borne from the seeds he nurtured. I wonder every day what would be my dad’s reaction to me editing the magazine he used to go out of his way to buy for me. I think he’d have loved it.
I abhor seeing folks throwing away their adult lives in the name of mourning – it’s the worst way of honoring your lost loved ones, in my opinion – but I’d be lying if I said that my dad, his influence, and his absence don’t loom incredibly large in my life, especially around now, on the anniversary of his death. Of course that’s the story of mostly every parent and child, but it’s a soul-rattling thing for me to ponder: if my dad had thought my love of horror was stupid or a waste of time and therefore didn’t indulge me, who would I be now? I suspect I’d be living quite another reality if not for this ghost I carry around with me every day.
And in a weird way, if you’re reading this, he’s your ghost too. Not to get all Frank Capra about it, but so many lives in my immediate orbit would be different today if my dad hadn’t shown up the way he did and encouraged my passions when they needed to be encouraged. I harbor no illusions about how much influence I wield in this little ecosystem of ours, but I do have a pretty good idea of how different certain parts of it would be if someone else had been sitting in this seat for the past seven years. In a very direct way, the person responsible for all of that is my dad. That makes me happy. Not just happy. It makes me marvel. Just by being quietly supportive, my dad created a ripple effect that he never got to know about, and one that folks in its wake might never even realize.
And that’s the real reason I deploy the “Jr.” suffix, and have done so professionally most of my life – so that whoever sees it instantly knows that there was a Phil Nobile Sr. I think he did all right by me, and by all of us, so I’m proud to carry his name into this space that he helped me find my way into. And I’m learning that being haunted at Christmas isn't necessarily a bad thing.
