#5 A Double Feature and a Cartoon for 35 Cents
Being a Reminiscence, a Possible Apology, and Maybe an Explanation as to Why They Don’t Make Good Horror Films Anymore.
I was ten years old in 19561. One Saturday morning that year, my fourth-grade good-buddy, Tommy Merrow, who lived around the corner, called to see if I wanted to ride bikes into town and catch a DOUBLE FEATURE at the Pikes Theatre. This might not sound like a big deal, but you consider the proposal through the eyes of a ten-year-old kid, we're talking Big Adventure here. Especially since I'd never gone to a movie by myself before—without my parents, that is.
I said, “sure,” and didn't even ask him what was playing—it didn't matter—because the idea of hanging out in the movies all afternoon, without any grown-ups around, sounded like the best thing I could ever want to do. I was thoroughly in love with movies by then; it was one of the many traits I'd picked up from my father, who'd been taking me to movies since I was maybe four years old. (In fact, one of my earliest memories is the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland blowing smoke-letters from his toadstool perch.)
There was only one problem: like I said earlier, I'd never been to the movies by myself.
My mother didn't like the idea, but Dad puffed on his pipe as he considered it. “Well, maybe we can see if you're responsible enough to do something like this. Maybe it's about time . . .” he said thoughtfully. “But if you screw up, it'll be a long time before you go again.”
“Thanks, Dad!” I was already running for the door when he yelled for me to stop. I did, watching him pick up the morning paper.
“What's the matter?” I asked.
“Let's find out what's playing before we go running off, okay?” I'd been so excited, it hadn't occurred to me he would want to know such bothersome details. He crinkled up the Baltimore Sun, folding it over to the movie pages, where all the small panel ads always zinged me with curiosity. “Hmmm,” he said slowly. “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and Creature with the Atom Brain.”
Wow! Just hearing the titles got my heart pounding. They sounded great!
“Sounds awful,” said my mother.
“Well, they sound pretty good—if you like that kinda stuff—right, son?” My father smiled and winked, because he and I—we did like that weird stuff, and I almost wished I was going to the movies with him instead of dopey Tommy Merrow.
“Okay, thanks, Dad!”
I was almost out the door when he raised his hand. “Wait a second! There's one more place we'd better check first.”
I cringed as he reached for the Catholic Review—a newspaper I'm not even sure exists anymore. Back in 1956, all the kids at St. Charles Borromeo grade school had to sell Catholic Review subscriptions each September and try to win neat prizes like Schwinn bikes and Gilbert chemistry sets. (I never knew anyone who ever sold enough to win anything better than the Voit scuba mask or the Zebco spinning reel.)
Anyway, back to my father, who was scanning the back pages for a listing of every film (it seemed) ever made, which was produced by an organization called “The Legion of Decency.” It was basically what is known as an “index,” of films that had either been approved for viewing by Catholics, or had been deemed forbidden fruit, never to be experienced by those loyal to the Vatican. My father—not just a good Catholic, but rather a super-Catholic (we had a framed picture of Pope Pius XII in our living room)—held the opinions of the Legion of Decency in the highest, most reverential regard.
I always played dumb when he referred to “the Legion's list”, and he had no idea it was the only thing I ever read in the Catholic Review. I couldn't tell you how many times I'd read over the catalog of “forbidden” films, then checked the lurid ads in the regular newspapers, wondering what unimaginable wonders and terrors could be found in movies with names like: Mom and Dad (“See the actual birth of a baby!”), Teen-age Crime Wave (“Teen terror straight from the sidewalk jungle!”), Blonde Bait (“The deadliest bombshell of all!”), Freaks (“You won't believe your eyes!”), Glen or Glenda (“I changed my sex!”), and the one that really intrigued me: The Third Sex (now what the hell could that be?).
But I digress. Sorry.
Getting back to my father and the Legion of Decency . . . who told me the films I wanted to see were both on the “approved” list. He gave me fifty cents and told me to have a good time. I can't tell you how relieved I was to find out the Legionnaires hadn't found anything too offensive about Earth vs. the Flying Saucers or Creature with the Atom Brain. I mean, by this time, I was REALLY PSYCHED for going to that double feature.
So finally, I was out the door and on my bike. Tommy Merrow and I rode up to the center of our town Pikesville, Maryland) where the grand Pikes Theatre dominated Main Street. We chained our Schwinns at the big bike rack next to the parking lot and got into line with at least 200 other kids (mostly boys cuz this was 1956 . . . ). I can still remember looking at the street posters of the films depicting the saucer ships careening over the skies of Washington D.C. and actually feeling giddy that I was finally going to a cool move without my parents.
Once we got inside and found some seats, the Newsreel has already kicked (something about Ike) but I Was not plugged in—politics would fail to engage me until the Vietnam War when they wanted to invite me to that party. And at that moment, my pocket was still heavy with silver—the largess still remaining from my cost of a 35-cent ticket. The precious metal had been heating up for awhile, and now threatened to burn its way from my pocket if I didn’t unleash it for some popcorn or a box of my fave movie candy: Ju-Ju Bees.
Anyway, candy in hand, I sat down just as the Tom and Jerry reel started. And even though I had never been what you might call a fan of movie-cartoons (mostly predictable and usually lacking in any real wit), I simply loved this one because I was watching it in a huge dark place full of screaming, laughing kids just like me. It was great! Not a grown-up in sight and hours to do whatever I wanted . . .
. . . which was: to be transfixed by a couple of black and white films that left such deeply graven images upon my memory, it will always seem like I just saw them yesterday. Creature with the Atom . . . which was: to be transfixed by a couple of black and white films that left such deeply graven images upon my memory, it will always seem like I just saw them yesterday.
Creature with an Atom Brain had a misleading title, though—a trait many films from the fifties and sixties shared. There was no creature, just a bunch of guys in suits (everybody in the movies in the fifties wore suits) walking around at night with stitches across their domes where this scientist had replaced their brains with “miniature atomic reactors.”
Yeah, right.
Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time, and although the film was a bit on the “talky” side for a bunch of preadolescent hooligans (I always loved that word—long before it was embraced by Pravda), there were some great night-time scenes with the atom-brain-guys walking through the woods and the cops trying to shoot them down. It was an interesting presage of the George Romero classic Night of the Living Dead, and while it didn't scare me like some other films did, it left an everlasting impression on me.
But it was the headliner, the second flick, that made the whole afternoon so magical for me. Earth vs. the Flying Saucers had everything! A plot that unfolded gracefully, with plenty of suspense, action, and great Harryhausen special effects. There was this great scene where one of the saucers was dogging the convertible carrying Hugh Marlowe and Joan Taylor and it made that weird fluttering/hovering sound (which got accidentally recorded by the tape recorder on the front seat of the car, remember?). And then, several scenes later, when the recorder's batteries gave out while Marlowe was replaying the sound of the saucer, we heard the slowed-down sounds becoming intelligible! The saucer had actually been sending them a message, and we heard it begin with that marrow-curdling salutation: “DR. RUSSELL MARVIN” and later we would hear that same scary voice speak to all of us: “PEOPLE OF EARTH . . . ATTENTION.”
And the aliens . . . how could we forget those guys when they stiffly teetered out of the ships with their featureless heads (or were they helmets?) and their arms outstretched as they directed their disintegrator beams at all the tanks and artillery pieces? I'll never forget the scene where actor Donald Curtis tommy-gunned one of the aliens and everybody crowded around as they slowly removed the alien's helmet to reveal its true form. I was peeking through my fingers covering my face at that point and the theater had become this vast space of pure, dark silence. A classic moment. Simply beautiful stuff. I'd always loved SF and horror films, but being there in the dark, washed in the glow of crisp black-and-white images, on my own, I felt finally free to let go and really participate in the joy/terror that's part of the outré film experience.
So when the climactic battle scene in Washington—with the spinning, careening saucers and Hugh Marlowe's clunky flatbed produce truck—finally erupted, I was able to stand up and sail my flattened popcorn box at the screen along with the rest of the crowd. In those pre-Frisbee days, a popcorn box was a pretty fair substitute and the best part was no parents around to tell you to stop acting like the kid that you were.
Yeah, it was sweet.
But when the last saucer ship had crashed (each one to the pre-testosteroned cheers of the audience) and the credits were rolling and the houselights warmed up, I can remember feeling in some way changed. Although only dimly aware of it, I must have had an inkling I’d had endured some kind of rite of passage. I wasn't ready for the drive-ins and the freckle-faced girls with the billowy plaid skirts yet, but I had definitely entered a new era of moviegoing. And there would be no turning back.
I didn't realize it then, but I had been lucky enough to be growing up in the golden age of SF/horror/monster movies. For the following decade, an endless parade of black-and-white (and the occasional Technicolor) classics came lurching out of Hollywood and into my neighborhood theater. Their names fall off the tongue with recalled joy, as if they were lines of Mediterranean poetry: Them!, The Deadly Mantis, Curse of the Demon, Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, War of the Worlds, The Beast That Challenged the World, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Black Sunday, Invaders from Mars, The Crawling Eye, Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, Circus of Horrors, The Horrors of the Black Museum, Psycho, The Thing, The Tingler, House on Haunted Hill . ..
Ah, friends, stop me before I go on for a very long time.
What I'm reciting here is a litany some might say should be offered at the altar of misspent youth. But that's bullshit. Credit for my enduring mutant/creative person status lies partially with the sense-of-wonder and fascination-with-being-scared that horror/dark fantasy/SF films deeded to me when I bought all those thirty-five-cent tickets.
My love-affair with SF and horror films has never faltered. If I could have gotten along even half as well with the women in my life, I would be an inordinately happy man (instead of just a regularly happy one).
But you can't have everything, right?
And, you know, when I think back on many of the old films, I realize they worked and left such an impression, not just because I was young and therefore impressionable, but also because they were genuinely scary in a majority of cases. (Okay, okay . . . I admit that for some reason The Giant Claw bothered the shit out of me when I saw it in '57, and when I saw it on the USA Channel a year or so back it looked plainly silly with its visible wires and bulging Ping-Pong ball eyes . . . but that was the exception that makes every rule, right?.)
I contend that, in general, the filmmakers of the golden age knew how to scare us and do so with some style. Sure there were certain formulae to follow—the main one being that you never really got a good look at the scary thing for a long while. You had to suffer through lots of tense shadows and strange sounds and blurry glimpses before you saw anything, and in the really great stuff like Cat People by Val Lewton or George Pal's Martians, you hardly saw them at all.
Which gets me to the first point of this essay, which is clearly this: They don't make them like they used to.
I say this at the risk of sounding like an old fart because of one simple fact: There ain't a director out there who can create a horror to compete with stalking terrors locked up in the subbasement of my imagination. Or yours. Why is that? you might ask. The answer is both obvious and subtle, and it lies, I think, in a semi-careful examination of the relationship between horror as film and horror as literature.
The stuff of horror/fantasy/SF is special stuff on the printed page, but it becomes changed when brought into the movie theaters. I don't know about you, but I've rarely caught the film version of a good HDF novel and come away feeling the film captured the essence of the original material. Sometimes, such as in the case of Kubrick's The Shining, you get a totally different emotional feel (and emotional response) to the whole story, so much so, the book and film seem almost totally unrelated.
In other words, HDF film adaptations usually suck the Big One. But the major question remains why?
I'm not sure I have the answer, but I think we can try to shine a little light in some of the darker corners of the enigma and see what we find.
Okay, so what's the problem with most HDF films?
Many other writers have examined this issue, often using the works of Steve King as the primary focus. I'm not going to rehash a lot of that discussion other than to note how many of these writers seem to be shocked, actually astonished, that filmmakers can dummy up fine books like 'Salem's Lot, The Shining, Firestarter, or Cujo. Why not? Filmmakers screw up novels all the time; have been doing it since soon after Edison's dancing bears caught the public eye; and will continue to do it long after we're all gone.
It's unreasonable to expect King's work to be any more immune to the problem than the rest of the books out there.
What we seem to forget is a basic truth about the creation of anything we call art, or entertainment, or even trash—it is a medium unto itself, and that's it, man. A novel is not conceived or created as a film, but rather as a book.
Yeah, I know, seems obvious, doesn't it? But think about it. A book is created most of the time by the imagination and effort of a single mind. A film is the product of hundreds of people's work and is, when actually brought to the screen, in the words of Sam Goldwyn, “a goddamned miracle.” As soon as people begin to restructure and reconceive a book as a movie, the work becomes different, changed, and essentially contrasted to the original work.
I think this is especially true in HDF because there is a natural, psychological element—hell, a psychological requirement—in horror fiction. The reader must bring to the HDF fiction experience his own nasty little bag of psychological bugbears, his own phobias, hang-ups, and personal problems with the Outer Hull of the World. A good writer of horror or dark fantasy will eventually tap into almost everybody's private fears and sources of trauma. It's called pushing somebody's buttons, and it happens all the time with the good writers, the good books.
The difference in horror or dark fantasy films is simple. All our personal demons and tormented visions are replaced by someone else's single ideation of how everything looks, acts, and feels when you are getting scared—the director sometimes the screenwriter. It's impossible to count on the filmmaker's vision being very compatible with too many readers' imaginings. It just doesn't happen. That's why they have horse races, friends, and why the tracks make a lot of cake—because we're all different in myriad ways.
So what's the conclusion? Are all HDF films adapted from other sources categorically inferior? Do we just trash them all in our literary smugness?
Nah.
The best thing to do is divorce the literary experience from the cinematic one. Don't expect things from either medium that are unlikely to be delivered. Yeah, right, you're thinking to yourself. How do you do that when you've pulled up to your favorite spot at the summer drive-in with your favorite Sweet Thing and some controlled or uncontrolled substances close at hand, and you're settling in to catch Groundhog Day IV and Night of the Bloodsucking Psychos with Sharp Implements?
Hey, what're you joking me?
When in that happy situation, you send your cerebrum on a much deserved vacation and you go about venting the urges of your R-complex. Screw film criticism, right?
I guess what I'm really trying to say here (other than copping to a weakness for the horror-movie double features of my flaming youth) is that all the uproar and indignation about how Hollywood and even the Indies are ruining the literature of HDF is a bunch of bullshit. Remember, the printed word perseveres. Even if they make the worst piece of crapola imaginable out of last year's award-winning novel, the film can never diminish the book's greatness because the movie is not the book.
Besides, there is a kind of sleazy enjoyment in watching truly bad HDF films. I'm not talking about the endless progression of he's-coming-to-chop-you-up flicks—a particularly odious subgenre that does not really belong in this discussion. These films are non-psychological in their one-track obsession with killers who kill in supposedly ingenious, but ultimately predictable ways. They are uncommonly dumb, and are fit cinematic fare only for the true Mongoloids among us (people who chain their wallets to their belts and have an affection for Red Man baseball hats spring immediately to mind). The list of bad-but-fun HDFD films is practically endless, and I won't bore you with a catalog of all the household standbys because somebody else in this book is probably already doing that.
But, I mean, think about it.
For some reason, we can sit at home on a Saturday night preferring to catch a black-and-white rendition of The Creeping Terror or The Screaming Skull instead of Flying Leathernecks or Pillow Talk. We'd rather watch The Oblong Box than The Bridge on the River Kwai, right? There's a certain charm to the inept theatrics of people like John Agar and Tor Johnson that you just can't get in the average late-night movie on your local independent channels.
And I think stuff like Fright Night, House, An American Werewolf in London, Alien, Jacob's Ladder, The Fly, or anything else by Cronenberg show flashes of really great filmmaking. Films that make you react, make you feel, and maybe even think. When a movie works on these levels, you don't find yourself comparing it with the original source material, and that's the way it should be, don't you agree?
Ah good, I thought you would.
I think the biggest problem with contemporary “horror” movies is that they are most often just slasher flicks. When people learn that I sometimes write horror or dark fantasy or suspense, they immediately assume I spend my time writing the twenty-sixth iteration of Friday the 13th, and that's more than a little tragic.
It's insulting. And it's wrong.
The horror film has a long and wonderful tradition in the history of cinema. To have it bogarted by a small backwater subgenre of pinheaded chop-'em-up flicks is to demean the art of scaring—and being scared.
Does this mean I miss my wonderful double features and nickel boxes of Ju-Ju-Bees?
Of course I do. But it also means I never lost the thrill of being so manipulated by a good HDF director that I feel like my emotions have been sent through a goddamned threshing machine. Hey, I admit it: put me in a theater and scare the crap outta me and I'll love you forever.
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(originally appeared in Cut! Horror Writers on Horror Film edited by Chris Golden, Borderlands Press, 1992)
Yeah, I’m an Old Cocker now, but I’m not dead yet . . .