As you might imagine, a holiday like Halloween was the pinnacle of happiness for young Tory Belleci. According to The Monterey County Herald, his dad decorated the house with spooky props when Tory was 10 years old, and from that moment on, he was hooked. After that, Tory took over the haunting of the Belleci house, and his dad realized that yes, he had created a monster. He said that when the decorations got to be a bit too realistic, he told his son that he had to “cool it.” Tory’s mother also couldn’t handle her son’s knack for props and pyrotechnics. “He used to scare me to death,” she said. “Halloween and Fourth of July were my two worst nightmares. He just used to scare me.”

It wasn’t just his mom that Tory was scaring. At 19 years old, he got into some trouble with the law when he set off a homemade pipe bomb near his parents’ house. The officer who came to the scene of the blast helped show Tory how to channel his love for special effects in a way that didn’t get the cops called on him. Tory said the officer was “very instrumental” in his life, and that he still sees him every now and then. “I say, ‘You could have made a decision to arrest me, and now look. I’m getting paid to blow stuff up,'” Tory said.