2001-02-03 - 23:59:05

Horror Movies

Last night apropos of nothing, Lily and I wanted to see a movie, but were disinclined to make the lengthy trek to the video store. It's a peculiarity of the north side of Frown Town that there are no video stores nearby. Italian restaurants, hell yes, but no video stores.

So I suggested that instead we watch something that was around the house. I have most of the first five seasons of Mystery Science Theater 3000 on tape, so I suggested we watch one of those. For those of you not familiar with MST3K, it's a two-hour show that features terrible movies with a running smart-aleck commentary by a guy and two robots. They're pretty funny.

I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I've actually seen a couple of the movies shown on MST3K on TV as a kid, and I was actually entertained by them. What can I say? Standards of entertainment were lower back then, I guess. All of which got me thinking about the difference between movies now and 40 years ago, and the difference between how you perceive things as a child and as an adult.

One of the movies lampooned on MST3K was a 50s sci-fi horror film called The Amazing Colossal Man. It's about a soldier who becomes a giant after being exposed to radiation. I remember seeing it as a young boy and being impressed by it and thinking it was cool. However, watching it as a grown-up on MST3K the movie was ludicrous. Slowly paced and badly acted, the movie looks like it had a budget of about $43. The "special effects" were laughable and wouldn't fool even an infant nowadays.

It's interesting the way the advance in special effects has rendered a lot of pre-Star Wars movies almost unwatchable. They only seem to be fit for mockery.

There was one old Horror/Sci-fi movie that I remembered scared the devil out of me. I can't exactly recall the name, but it had a title like "First Man in Space" or something like that. The premise of the film was: an astronaut flies into space without proper shielding and gets covered by Cosmic Dust. This turns him into a savage super-strong monster with no face. The Cosmic Dust is so abrasive that a casual swipe with it can rend metal.

This movie gave me serious nightmares. Looking back all those years, I'm trying to figure out why. I think it's not because I was frightened that this particular monster would hurt me, I was more afraid of the idea that something could take away my face and turn me into a mindless brute.

The funny thing is that I can still see in my mind what this monster looked like: it was an astronaut in a spacesuit that looked like he had been dipped in glue then rolled in sequins. Some monster!

I also recollect that in spite of the terror this movie inspired, I saw it twice!

I'm sure that if I were to see that movie today I'd laugh my ass off, or more likely be bored by it. There is one show I saw that I remember utterly terrifying me as a child that I actually have seen as an adult.

There was an episode of Outer Limits that featured a man who, with the aid of a machine, was able to mutate himself into a being from the future with a huge head that could kill people by pointing at them.

I recall being so unnerved by this show that I couldn't bear to watch it. To take my mind off how scared I was I went downstairs to the basement to play with my toys. However, after a little while I became curious what was happening on the show so I ventured back upstairs to watch it again. Of course after a short while I became frightened again and had to go back down to the basement. I seem to recall making several trips back and forth to the basement while the show was on.

A couple of years ago I was in a music/video store, and in the Science Fiction section they had a bunch of Outer Limits videos. Looking at the video boxes I was able to find the episode that had so terrified me when I was four. It was called "The Sixth Finger" and it starred David McCallum, who would later play Ilya Kulyakin in The Man From U.N.C.L.E. TV show. Curious, I decided to buy the video.

Folks, it was terrible. Badly-acted, plodding and talky, I could barely make myself sit through the whole thing. The funniest thing about the episode was the make-up job on McCallum when he became the Future-Man: you could clearly see where they attached the various extensions to enlarge his head. A six-year-old in a Halloween costume would have been more convincing.

As I think back on those old horror movies, something strikes me as very odd - I can't remember anybody else around the house at all while I was scaring myself silly with this cheesy monster-movie crap. Where were my parents? My brother was probably too young, but there should have been some sort of adult supervision, either my parents or a baby sitter. Where were they? All I can remember is myself, and the television.

In fact, a lot of my early childhood memories are simply me sitting in front of a television, with nobody paying much attention to me. I wonder if this affected the way I developed. For example, I virtually gave up watching television when I was in high school, and only started watching again after I finally splurged and bought a TV in 1992. However, in spite of the long hiatus, I am hypnotized by the booby box with frightening ease. It becomes almost impossible for me to concentrate on anything else if a television is on.

A little boy growing up in front of the television... I'm sure there's a horror movie in there somewhere.