Creature Feature

[Tarhog]

I loved them, before I even knew what they were.

Horror movies.

From the first time my father, a fellow night owl, whispered in my ear like a secret conspirator, I was hooked. 'I think there' s a great scary movie on tonight....' There was something excruciatingly exciting and irresistibly foreboding about the proposition . Monsters, bloodsuckers, aliens, the dead returned...in a world with four TV channels, a great scary movie was about as dangerous and cutting edge as it got.

TV then was safe, sanitized, a sweetly-packaged and steady stream of pure vanilla. To get an education, you really needed a 'great scary movie'. Only there could you learn life's real secrets, that sometimes the good guy didn't win, bad things happen even to good people, and that there was more to the world than brightly-lit daylight was willing to reveal. Violence, sex, betrayal, murder, sin, cruelty, death, those just weren't topics for the dinner table in polite congenial suburbia, but if you stayed up late, they were lurking in the shadows.

Horror movies were the heroin of my childhood, and I was a two-bit junkie.

I loved movies of all kinds as a kid, and still do. But there was something about the horror film, good, bad, or awful, that was particularly seductive. Some of them are etched from start to finish in my memory, as if I watched them only last night. Others I recall for the power or atmosphere of a single memorable scene. I know I'm not alone out there. Some of my best childhood memories consist of sitting up into the wee hours of the night, watching some classic fright flick as my father kept me company from his recliner. We didn't say a whole lot those nights, but we shared a lot of murder, mayhem, and madness together. It was a bridge linking us together in a sea of uncommonness and incommunicado.

Sometimes even now, late at night, I'll be catching a spooky flick, and smile, knowing he's probably up at his house, wide awake, and watching the same movie.

I could catalog and describe a thousand horror films for you. I could put them in order of greatness, and tell you why they were classic, ground-breaking, laughably bad, or dogs. But the truth is, even the bad or obscure ones made an impression on me. So rather than dazzling you with my insightful 'Greatest Hits' list, I thought I'd share with you a few of the ones that come skittering, scratching, and screaming up from the cold, dark recesses of my repressed childhood memories. From my little spooky hope chest of horrors, I introduce you to a few memorable old friends...

Freaks (1932) - Political correctness wasn't invented in 1932. Like the tent only the grownups were allowed to visit when the Carnival came to town, this one gave me nightmares as a kid. 'Gooble, gobble, gooble, gobble, one of us! One of us!'. Sometimes, what we imagine is far scarier than what we see. Sometimes.

The Wolfman (1941) - Of all the Universal classics, 'The Wolf Man' was my favorite. 'Even a man who is pure at heart, and says his prayers at night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the moon is full and bright.' ****ing A Skippy. Like the sick kid home from school we all at times longed to be, Larry Talbot was the ultimate sympathetic figure. He even takes one for the home team in the end. And he gets to carry around that ultra-cool wolf's head cane. Naked under the moonlight in search of steak - that's every young American boy's dream.

Dead of Night (1945) - Is there anything scarier than a really strange and unsettling dream? Me thinks not. I'm a huge fan of British horror, and this is a great example. It begins with a man stopping at a house he's seen in a recurring dream, only to find it filled with the same group of people he's had nightmares about. Strange tales ensue. Several, including one about (goosebumps) a ventriloquist dummy who's no dummy. If you haven't seen this one, you need to.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRtlEEL4sp8

Click HERE to see the rest of my list of some classic horror childhood gems...