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Duder Ex Machina: Yes, I am a Horror Weanee by Nafa ----------------------------------------------------------
When Richard initially asked me to contribute to
Doomed Moviethon I was honored; and yet I was so daunted that I dragged my
feet on the article for over three years. First there was the question on
which film to write about; so many films in my youth, teen years, and
adulthood have represented horror to me that I didn’t think I could do any
specific one justice. That led to how to present my entry. Should I be
funny? Should I be serious? Will I need a thesaurus? All this pushed me
backwards into the quandary of how to even get started. Well, I decided when
all else fails just be yourself and tell about what you know and tell it in
the way you’re most comfortable. So, here I am. Typos, bad English usage,
and all.
Horror films for me began at a very early age. I can’t
tell you exactly when or what the first horror film to capture my
imagination was, but there’s a good chance it was one of the Universal
Classic creatures and more than likely it was Bela Lugosi’s suave Dracula or
Boris Karloff’s misunderstood Frankenstein’s monster. I can say this with
almost utter certainty because both creatures were featured in Abbott and
Costello films, and I was all the Abbott and Costello fan as a child (and
though the Frankenstein monster was played by Glenn Strange in
Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein,
Karloff did appear in Abbott And Costello
Meet The Killer). And a steady diet of
films on my black and white television where Hammer horror films, big rubber
Toho monsters, 1950s B-movies, and early cinema silent creeps continued to
feed my imagination.
However, the biggest influences on my young psyche at this point lay in the stills from my mother’s film books. Lovely large bound tomes of Hollywood greats intermixed with images from all manner of scary film, both famous and lost and everything in between. Not having seen most of the films in the books, my mind would wander as to what the creatures in these pages would sound like, smell like, and move like. The imagination is amazing. I still have these books. The image of 1920s The Golem ranks high on my on my list if frighteners, not so much for his menacing size and foreboding manner but also for the fact that he looked very similar to a bully from school. Though I’ve never seen the actual film, Lon Chaney in London After Midnight remains an iconic standard of one the scariest moments on celluloid.
Actually, as a child I was fascinated by all things Lon Chaney and the many roles he created. And the literary influence didn’t end there. Thanks in part to my Chaney fascination, in kindergarten I was given a book about monster movie make-up and how to make you look like the classic creatures. I read it cover to cover and tried to emulate looks with one of my mom’s eyeliner pencils, but to little success. A few years later (around 3rd grade) I started reading biographies on Vlad Tepes, the real Count Dracula, and decided that I liked the Lugosi one better.
My first real brush with contemporary horror was on
the early morning drives to Los Angeles International Airport so my father
could catch the red-eye to Florida. On the route to the airport from the
interstate (and in the shadow of the Mattel toy company building) someone
had put up on the walls a seemingly endless stream of posters for the film
Maniac.
At 2:00am, the sleepy mind of a 10-year-old can make a simple movie poster
in the mists of downtown LA the indelible measuring stick by which all
horror films will be judged… even without seeing the film.
So many films passed through late night cable and fueled our adolescent fright-receptors. A favorite was always the Friday The 13th series, especially Part 2. That played for what seemed like an eternity and Chris and I must have watched it a dozen times. One night when we were having a sleepover at our friend James’ house we convinced him to watch the film with us. Now James was a good foot taller than Chris and probably 4 inches taller than I was. In the climactic scene where Jason comes through the window we had convinced (probably paid) James’ little sister to jump out behind the curtains and lunge at her brother. She did, James freaked out, and Chris and I had to go home early. (On a related note: I have a lot to say about the role of the moral, even holy, warrior figure in horror and how Jason is actually doing God’s work but that’s a treatise for another time).
It was several years before my family got a VCR and by
then the trend was truly in full swing. (I do recall our first rental:
Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.)
Our card got good use at the Carrollwood Video View though it was mostly
used for comedies and the occasional Sci-Fi classic. One rental worth
mentioning was The Emerald Jungle,
which turned out to be Umberto Lenzi’s
Eaten Alive repackaged and trying to
cash in on The Emerald Forest
(a vastly different film). Something this film did teach me was that I did
not care for the realistic exploitation genre. Though I would eventually sit
through the entire series of Faces Of
Death and
Inhumanities (much better than
FOD),
I never found any joy or entertainment in the faux reality genre, and even
less in animal cruelty.
It wasn’t until I met my friend Scott that we decided
to tear our way through the back wall. It took the better part of a year but
we conquered most of it. From the early 1980s HBO-fodder such as
Graduation Day
(I’d like to buy a disembowel, Vanna) to the classics like The Exorcist
(which we watched clutching Bibles and pillows…seriously) and Fulci’s
Gates Of Hell
(City Of The Living Dead
- an almost untouchable film) to the films of the time like the
Hellraiser
series. In fact, it was during a viewing of the first two
Hellraiser
films that Scott and my friendship nearly came to a sudden end.
In the mid to later 1990s, after Danse Macabre went
off the air and Video Movie World closed for good, there was a lengthy time
with little new or interesting horror films. I was relegated to Blockbuster
Video selections, and there are only so many times one can watch
The Serpent And The Rainbow
or Prince Of Darkness.
Even watching my beloved Friday The 13th
series over and over grew tiring. Then, thanks to Akira Kurosawa’s
masterpiece Dreams
and an under-rented Blockbuster copy of
Kwaidan, the door to the world of Asian
horror was kicked open wide for me. All at once beautiful, grotesque, and
frightening, it was just what I was looking for. I sought out all the
Japanese, Korean, and HK films I could find and was in heaven. At first
there was a small amount of difficulty locating titles, but thankfully it
was close to a time when Asian horror was about to break into the mainstream
which meant there would no more hit or miss about releases and no more
paying $25 for a 5th gen VHS copy without subtitles (though there’s
something quite charming about those bootlegs). It’s come a long way to the
point where now I can go to Wal-Mart at 12:30am and pick up a car battery,
orange juice, and a copy of A Tale Of Two
Sisters. |
