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Because I spend an inordinate amount of time sitting on my can, I try to get out into the real world and get some exercise. I used to run a bit but I’ve slowed it down in the last year or so and I’m more interested in hiking. The bottom line is that I’m around a lot of people who are taking their fitness with great seriousness and it seems as though everybody’s wearing the Fitbit nowadays, or some other device that counts the number of steps they take in a day, a week, a month. My worlds cannot help but collide and so I’ve been thinking about my movie steps, specifically my horror movie steps, and those first fright films that got me started on the weird and wonderful journey that is my life in fear.
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I’m fairly certain my door into the genre was the Gothic soap opera DARK SHADOWS, which I began watching at some point in 1969 or 1970. Before that I was pretty pure, I think; untainted, apple-cheeked and Disney-fed. I don’t know how I came to watch the show — maybe kids at school brought it up — but by third grade I was rushing home to catch the afternoon broadcast. My sister collected the novelizations from Paperback Library and at some point I lucked into the DARK SHADOWS board game and a Barnabas Collins model. The show gave me a pretty fair primer in the requisite Gothic tropes: the haunted house, the sliding panels, the light in the attic, the poison in the ring, the undead, the shapeshifters… and Barnabas Collins remains, to this day, one of the most frightening-looking horror characters. There was a savagery in his visage that to this day has yet to be bettered. But we’re not talking TV, are we, we’re talking the movies. And I suppose the first all-out horror movie I ever saw in a cinema was…
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DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE (1968). This was the third sequel to Hammer’s HORROR OF DRACULA (UK: DRACULA, 1958) but the first Hammer horror I ever saw. It was released stateside in February of 1969 but it didn’t get to my local bijou until that summer. I remember clapping hands over my eyes when Dracula wrapped his cape around the alabaster shoulders of Zena the Barmaid, taking just enough of her blood to turn her into his slave. You didn’t fangs tear flesh but I was still horrified and damned my eyes until the music changed. Still, there was plenty of disturbing content on hand, including a dead girl stuffed up inside a church bell (her blood running in streams down the rope), a decomposing corpse disinterred from its grave, the dead/undead Zena’s body stuffed into an incinerator, and Dracula himself impaled on the business end of a four foot cross. For a not-quite 8 year-old boy, DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE was a master class in ghoulishness and gave me plenty of nightmare fodder… not that I had nightmares. I’d had a taste of horror and I wanted more.
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FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED (1969). This was the next-to-the-last Frankenstein film for Hammer with Peter Cushing starring as the good doctor… but, again, this was my introduction to the series. Man, it is bru-tal! In the first scene, a guy gets his head lopped off, another guy breaks into a storefront laboratory and finds a corpse in a tank, this weirdo pictured above (Dr. F in a mask but we don’t know that yet) appears, there’s a struggle, the second guy trips over the first guy’s severed head… and that’s just the beginning! Moving forward, you get a really scary screaming insane woman in an asylum, you get a buried body exploding up out of the earth (one hand waving like Ahab at the end of MOBY DICK) due to a busted water pipe, a dude’s head gets drilled into with a tool my Dad actually had in his workshop, Dr. Frankenstein stabs the heroine in the guts, the young hero (who reminded me of the animatronic Kris Kringle in the Rankin-Bass holiday favorite SANTA CLAUS IS COMING TO TOWN) dies, and in the closing frames the whole shithouse, to quote Jim Morrison, goes up in flames. What a ride! Between this and DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE, I had a lot to think about. FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED was released in the United States in 1970, the year I turned 9. Also released in 1970…
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HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS (1970). Man. What balls. If you know DARK SHADOWS and its first feature film crossover HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS then you’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s like series creator Dan Curtis wanted to kill, bury, and salt the earth of everything he had created. This movie is a blood bath! I can’t believe they let kids watch it! I was 9! I may not even have been 9 when I saw this! It was awesome! I don’t know which setpiece is the most disturbing but surely near the top of the heap (of bodies!) is the bit where the Collinsport sheriff’s department swarms fledgling vampire Carolyn Stoddard, driving her into a corner with their bulk-ordered crucifixes and driving a stake into her heart. This simulation of gang rape was an echo of a scene from Hammer’s DRACULA, PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1965), which I had yet to see, but with more guys. Even at the tender age of 8 I knew there was something wrong about this, even though the victim here is a predator too… but that was the allure of horror to me, even then: it was a metaphor for a world fraught with all manner of outrages and none more outrageous than a solution that is somehow worse than the problem.
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LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH (1971). I was enough of a horror fan by age 9 to be permitted by my parents to take in an evening showing of LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH. I have absolutely no memory of wanting to see this, or of what might have piqued my interest in the film. I just remember going, in the company of a babysitter, to a double bill of this and ROSEMARY’S BABY. I was not given license to stay for the second feature, which may have had to do with the lateness of the hour at which it would have put me back on the street… but I had no complaints. JESSICA represents a sea change for me, genre-wise; while the other movies had been relatively standard Gothic entertainments, this was altogether a different animal: moody rather than scary, deliberately paced rather than cracking, and elliptical rather than explicit. It’s a woman’s picture, you could slot it in right alongside NOW VOYAGER (1944) though THE SNAKE PIT (1948) would be a more appropriate go-with (I would also recommend CARNIVAL OF SOULS or REPULSION) and yet I was entranced, engaged, intrigued, beguiled. At age 9. Or 10, tops, depending on whether that double bill hit the Danielson Cinema before or after September 3rd. But either way, LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH gave me a taste for mystery and mood, for the discrete eeriness of daytime, and proved itself to be an apt metaphor for profound hopelessness. It’s the horror movie that gave me a way of seeing not just other horror movies but life itself.
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THE BROTHERHOOD OF SATAN (1971). This was another kiddie matinee. What were the adults thinking?!! Made on the cheap by Hollywood pros in and around Albuquerque, New Mexico, this is a haircut off of ROSEMARY’S BABY (which I had not yet seen) but with Satanists looking for kids to embody rather than a warm womb in which to incubate the scion of their dark lord. Kids are naturally afraid of old people and THE BROTHERHOOD OF SATAN exploits this fear to perfection. There’s a lot of scary stuff here, from an ice house full of dead people to a toy tank that somehow crushes a full-sized car full of people, and yet the bit that stuck with me over the years was the hellacious looking cake seen late in the film. I’ve spent the past forty-odd years wondering what the hell that thing must have tasted like. This was also my second Strother Martin movie (after TRUE GRIT), which makes it an important step forward in my appreciation of all things weird and wonderful.
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NIGHTMARE IN WAX (1969) BLOOD OF DRACULA’S CASTLE (1969) double feature. At some point my oldest sister, Lisa, was coerced to take me to the Danielson-Putnam Twin Drive-In for this double feature. I remember select scenes from both at the distance of forty-plus years but what stuck with me, what impressed me then and has stayed with me over the decades, is the overwhelming sense of sleaziness that pervades both movies. They are unforgivably cheap and cast with Hollywood veterans (Cameron Mitchell, Berry Kroeger, and Scott Brady in the former, John Carradine, Alex D’Arcy, and Paula Raymond in the latter) well past their sell-by date and tender time-worn Gothic blandishments. NIGHTMARE is a downmarket PHANTOM OF THE OPERA/MYSTERIES OF THE WAX MUSEUM tale with Cameron Mitchell playing a scarred madman and BLOOD is a vampire and werewolf romp but neither of these films was remotely as frightening as the cocktail parties to which my parents brought me back in those days. It’s the smoking and boozing in these movies that got under my skin, reminding me of what it was like to be around inebriated adults. And so my enjoyment of… no, my need for and reliance on horror movies as a window on the real world was firmly set by this time. These were the first steps, these were the stories to which I was attracted, which helped me make sense of the world into which I had been brought. The next few years would mark the opening of flood gates. Due to late night TV broadcasts, I would be introduced to the entire Universal classic monsters canon, while return trips to the drive-in and my local movie house would treat me to a bona fide symphony of terrors. (Though I used a shot from NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD at the top, I would not actually see it until 1980, though I had read John Russo’s novelization years earlier.) It’s heady stuff to imagine how different your life might be if you had gone there instead of here, seen this movie rather than that… but by age 9 my path was clear. Into the house of horrors and straight on ’til dawn of the dead.