Plenty of perfectly ordinary people are enthusiastic horror fans who love watching movies that send chills down their spines. It may be strange that someone would seek out things that scare them, but all things considered, it’s totally harmless… usually.
Rod Ferrell took that fascination with horror to a different level. His interest in vampires became an obsession. He loved them so much that he decided he wanted to become one of them, and he would stop at nothing to achieve this macabre fantasy.
Born Roderrick Justin Ferrell in 1980, this young man from Kentucky (known to most as “Rod”) suffered through a difficult childhood and adolescence, but nobody could have predicted how strange and horrifying things would turn out.
He claimed that even as a small child, he fantasized about death. He especially found being executed by the electric chair intriguing. “It was almost like I was romantic with the subject of death; I don’t care how I die as long as I do so,” he said in an interview. “I have nothing left on Earth.”
It didn’t help that Rod was an outcast among his peers. By ninth grade, he was expelled from school and started using marijuana and LSD. Eventually he turned to more dangerous drugs like cocaine and heroin, sometimes simultaneously, which often fueled his anger and violence.
As he grew up, Rod’s fascination with dark subject matter including the occult, gore, and satanism, took a drastic turn. On May 30, 1996, his mother came home to discover that he used a razor to carve an inverted crucifix, a satanic symbol, into his own chest. Another time, she found Rod and his girlfriend drinking each other’s blood!
Rod made no attempt to hide his bizarre behavior. “My bedroom was an array of the darker side of the occult, such as the Necronomicon, the Satanic Bible,” he explained. “I had upside down crosses. I had broken shards of glass lying about in the corner. I had hooks and metal cables wrapped around looking like Hellraiser.”
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