Room for Fright Every Night

My siblings and I have always enjoyed having the bejesus scared out of us.

Our mother sometimes worked a swing shift. Our dad worked odd hours so we never really knew when or if he’d be home. By the time my older sister was about 12, my middle sister, my brother who was the youngest, and myself – all of us about two years apart from the next one -- were pretty much on our own after school, living on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, casseroles warmed in the oven (there weren’t any microwaves back then), or stovetop cooked cans of tomato soup.

Growing up in Minnesota, there are many days when it’s just too dang cold to go outside. While alone in the house, our most favorite thing to do was to watch scary movies. Of course this is before VCRs, or DVRs or even cable. We had five measly channels to choose from, but somehow, we were able to find movies that scratched that horror itch. On Sundays, when the weekly listings came out, we would go on a search making note of any movies that might make us scream in terror and then plan all activities around it.

A local TV station had a weekly program of horror features that opened with a coffin, smoke, and white, skeletal fingers peeking out of the lid. Horror Incorporated, was a big favorite of ours. The opening segment starts with a high-pitched scream and ends with a high-pitched scream. We loved to mimic it, screaming at the top of our lungs. We lived on a five-acre lot with no neighbors around to dampen our volume. We could scream as much as we wanted, and we wanted to often.

Dracula, The Werewolf, The Blob, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Monster from the Surf, Godzilla, The Creature From the Black Lagoon. Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, Jr., Vincent Price, Bela Lugosi and bug-eyed Peter Lorre. If we saw a film starring one of them, it made our “must see” list. We’d sit side by side on the sofa, a shared blanket clutched to our chins, looking forward to the thing that would make us jump and scream.

As we grew older, the fright somehow changed to hilarity. By the time The War of the Gargantuas,  came out, we were ready to laugh, and laugh hard. The story is about two Godzilla-sized creatures, hairy and monstrous looking, who rise from the sea, one good and one evil. At one point in the film, a woman is in a rooftop lounge singing a song that includes the line, “… the wooooords get stuck in my throat.” She repeats the line over and over. “The wooooords get stuck in my throat.”

Then one of the Gargantuas picks her up, eats her and spits out her clothes. To this day, all we have to do is sing that line from the song and we all crack up.

As we grew older, our tastes developed and the reruns of The Mummy, or the Three Stooges or Charlie Chan versions of those films didn’t interest us anymore. We wanted the truly scary films, like The Thing From Another World. That artic mission, the discovery of the space ship under the ice, the isolation, the killer vegetable and the dry wit and snappy dialogue, had all the makings of a classic. The remakes have never lived up to the original black and white.

Most of our favorites had themes of science gone wild. We were still doing “duck and roll” drills in elementary school. Nuclear science was frightening stuff. There was a real fear that man would mess around with the wrong mixture of something dubious and we’d never see the horror coming before it was too late.

An amazing trailer for one of our favorites starts with a montage of images, all pointing to secrets the government is keeping from us. Then a news announcer, in a dramatic voice, warns that, “Unless something is done and done quickly, man as the dominant species on earth will be dead within a year.”

Wow. A time frame and everything. Evidently, all that nuclear dust from testing has created monsters … biblical in nature … that are bent on the destruction of the human race. There are images of cars driving down main street America, with speakers blasting. “Stay in your homes! Stay. In. Your. Homes! This is not a drill.”

The actual movie starts with a little blond girl, obviously in shock and standing alone in the debris of her destroyed home, clutching a stuffed animal. Someone asks her what happened. All she can do is scream THEM! Those giant ants were no joke.

I have always loved the science fiction style horror films and still do. The Alien franchise is one of my favorites. All the Predator films are great too. This idea that some alien race would come here because Earth offers a fertile hunting ground, it's a fantastic premise. Still, there’s nothing like the terror of what normal humans can do to each other.

Alfred Hitchcock rocked our world. The Birds, Rear Window, even his TV show became a favorite. My brother had to work hard to convince me to watch Halloween. I’d never liked the slasher movies, the stupid women who went in the basement or sprained their ankles bored me. But Halloween was different. The first time Jason pops back up after being unquestionably killed was such a satisfying horror moment.

Then I started reading Stephen King –Carrie, Cujo, It—I couldn’t put them down. Since we’d always had dogs and cats for pets, Pet Cemetery was particularly horrifying for me.

One Saturday morning, I got up early to find my older sister sitting at the kitchen table, her eyes bloodshot, her hands clenched in front of her. She looked like she hadn’t slept all night. I asked her what was wrong. She said she’d been to a movie the night before with some friends. “The Exorcist,” she said, then refused to say more. She’d seen it the first night it was released. I think she’s still scared from it.

Of course, now we’ve all been bitten by the zombie bug. One of my sisters lives in Atlanta. My other sister is obsessed with The Walking Dead show, so when she went to visit, they HAD to go where the show was being filmed, driving by “Alexandria” and where the Terminus was filmed. She still talks about that trip.

My brother and I, share a love for R. R. Haywood’s Undead series. More than 24 books into the series and we still snatch them up as soon as they come out. In fact, I’m such a fan, that I actually wrote to him and asked him for an interview. You can read it here. He’s a great guy and I’m crossing my fingers that he’ll get a Netflix deal someday to make his books come to life.

We’ve never really grown out of our love of fear. Several years ago, I went home to Minneapolis just so I could go with my siblings and a few friends to a place called Scream Town. The massive, outdoor park had five different themed areas, darkened and filled with things and people that jumped out at you. We were, by far, the most senior people at the theme park, all of us in our late 50s and early 60s. We didn’t care. It may be our age that made so much of it hilarious.

In one room, you had to walk through a space with what looked like bodies wrapped in plastic, hanging from the ceiling. They were so numerous, you had to bump and bang your way through this horror, the “bodies” swinging sickeningly. We clutched each other, heads ducked, stumbling around in the dark, and laughing our asses off, screaming too.

In another place, you rounded a corner to come face to face with a man in a glass encased electric chair. The red light in the small booth where he sat cast a horrific, shadowy glow over him. The rubbery, trembling and smoking dummy, wrapped in a straitjacket, it’s mouth gaping open with chilling screams piped out of the box, was so life-like he was fascinating.

We made our brother go first, hanging onto his jacket while we made our way through the corn maze, then stood fascinated at the sight of a cow suspended in air as if it was being sucked up by a UFO. Scream Town does not skimp on the props or makeup.

Now, every year when Halloween rolls around, I think about Scream Town and think about my family and consider flying home for the holiday where we have every excuse to act ridiculous, scream at the top of our lungs and laugh until our bellies hurt.