With Halloween around the corner, this seemed appropos. We all know the Freddys, Michaels and Jasons, but before they made their way into the pop culture psyche, there were werewolves, zombies and even Jack the Ripper to send us hiding under the covers....
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/movies/26scar.html?8dpc=&pagewanted=printOctober 26, 2007
Joy of Fright: Old Chillers That Should Scare (but Not Terrorize) the Kids
By WENDELL JAMIESON
THE natives pushed back as hard as they could, but slowly, terrifyingly, the huge door started to open. Then the giant ape burst through, sowing fear through Skull Island — and the living room of my family’s brownstone in Park Slope.
I was all of 5, and I had stumbled on the original “King Kong” on television. I didn’t switch it off. Instead I turned down the volume and hid behind the couch. Every time I peeked, things only got worse: Now Kong was chewing on a native like a toothpick; now he was squashing another into the mud with his giant foot.
My dad tells the story of how he got home, found the television on, silently, and then noticed the top of my cowering head. On screen Kong ran amok. My dad asked if I was O.K. “I’m fine,” I reportedly said.
Then — and I remember this distinctly — he leaned over and switched off the set, and Kong was gone, and waves of relief rolled through me.
Fast-forward about 36 years. My own son, Dean, is about to turn 8. He was completely unfazed a few years ago when I first played the original “King Kong” for him. “Look, look — this is scary,” I said as the Skull Island climax began, eyeing him but getting nervous myself. I felt a little of that old hide-behind-the-couch instinct coming on.
“What?” Dean shot back as Kong rampaged. “He looks so fake.”
Why had I been scared and not Dean? He has certainly been exposed to all kinds of computer-enhanced on-screen mayhem that my childhood self could never have imagined. I wondered: Have those fast-cutting kaleidoscopic images of action dulled his senses, paved over his fear receptors, and denied him the joy of being scared by a movie not filled with blood or over-the-top special effects? Part of me had clearly loved this feeling when I was 5; otherwise I would just have turned the set off.
So with Halloween approaching, I decided to try a little experiment: Can my jaded 7-year-old be scared, or at least have his pulse set racing, by a little old-fashioned smoke-and-mirrors, black-and-white moviemaking?
Not with a slasher flick like “Halloween” that would leave him permanently scarred, mind you, and that would require me to take up permanent residence on his bottom bunk, but with movies where the terror is off screen, hidden by that giant door. I would stay away from the classics — “Frankenstein” from 1931 with Boris Karloff is too scary, I think — and pick movies I’d never seen.
Some children can’t be frightened by a film no matter what; others refuse to enter the room at the mere hint that a scary movie might be on. Each parent has to decide how far to go. Dean falls somewhere in the middle. He likes to be scared, relishes the thrill, but within limits.
So for the last several weeks he and I have watched a series of clever horror movies from the 1940s, including a few exciting recent releases. I’m happy to report success. Dean has learned to allow his imagination to frighten him, and he doesn’t seem any the worse for wear.
As a bonus he has also learned some lessons about cinema. He can now tell, almost instantly, when a character appears who was created solely for the purpose of being killed. And he has even learned some lessons about life, like this one: When you are alone with the bad guy, and he is pouring you a drink, and he asks if anyone knows that you came to meet him, you always answer: “Yes, yes. Everyone knows! I told everyone I know that I was coming! Totally.”
Our first retro cinematic terror trip took us to the films of Val Lewton, a producer who, given a small budget, a title and a running time by his studio, RKO, was left to his own devices. He made a series of highly literate, imagination-stoking horror films in the 1940s. His stable of directors, then just starting out, included Jacques Tourneur, who would go on to make the noir classic “Out of the Past,” and Robert Wise, who would later direct “The Sound of Music.”
Many of Mr. Lewton’s films, the most famous of which is “Cat People” (1942), include techniques that became the basic building blocks of scary movies that followed.
In one scene in “Cat People,” a woman walks down a deserted street. She is being followed. She looks around, nervous. Her heels click on the pavement. It is undeniably creepy and quiet. But the calm is shattered — by a bus screeching suddenly (but harmlessly) into the scene. Not what you expected, but startling. It’s a film trick that’s been imitated thousands of times since.
Turner Home Entertainment released all nine Lewton films in a boxed set two years ago, complete with a documentary, and is reissuing it early next near, at the same time as a new documentary about Mr. Lewton by Martin Scorsese. The set provides endless thrills and joys, and the quality of the prints is superb.
Dean, alas, wasn’t impressed by “Cat People.” It didn’t help matters when I had to explain that the cat in the title might not be a real cat, but more likely a metaphor for repressed physical desire. He gave me a blank look.
Mr. Tourneur directed “Cat People” and our next selection from the set, “I Walked With a Zombie,” a reworking of “Jane Eyre” set in the Caribbean. Here horror lurks in the sunshine, amid slanting shadows of palm trees, with drums always beating in the distance. Dean enjoyed it, and found the ending involving zombies wading into the surf “creepy,” but didn’t seem overly worried by the various untimely deaths.
I had better luck with “The Body Snatcher,” a period adaptation of a Robert Louis Stevenson story that features a nuanced, chilling performance by Karloff.
His character sells body parts to doctors for medical experiments, and eventually begins killing people when the cadavers run out. Bela Lugosi gets onto the kill-for-parts scheme, and the two meet in private. Karloff offers him a drink before asking, “Does anyone know you are here?”
“Oh no,” Dean said. “He’s going to get him drunk, and then he’s going to kill him.”
Spoiler alert: Dean was right.
Karloff puts his hand over Lugosi’s mouth, and the two of them tumble into the shadows.
Early this month Fox Home Entertainment released some films from its collection that are loosely comparable to Mr. Lewton’s, three mid-’40s horror films directed by John Brahm: “Hangover Square,” “The Lodger” and “The Undying Monster.”
Released from 1944 to 1946, they are all set in an imaginary late-19th or early-20th-century England, in which some people have accents and some don’t. The prints are remarkably pristine, even better than the Lewton films: all deep, deep blacks and graduating shades of shadowy grays and silvers, rarely marred by dust or scratches.
We ignored the Amazon aficionados who warned us off “The Undying Monster,” saying it was the least impressive of the three, and watched it first; Dean was intrigued by the title. It was appropriately crisp and chilling, beautifully shot.
Like so many of these movies it included plot elements that are familiar to me but quite fresh to a 7-year-old, in this case an English country gentleman who turns into a wolfman. Some old-fashioned C.S.I. leads to the culprit, who morphs before our eyes at the very end, but not before he has claimed several victims lost amid the elaborate, atmospheric 20th Century Fox sets. Screams abound.
“Hangover Square” starred Laird Cregar, a heavyset actor (who lost a great deal of weight for this part) with a singular ability to look really troubled. The plot — a composer keeps blacking out and killing people, but doesn’t know it — felt more noir than horror to me, and so Dean skipped this one; his mother and I watched after he went to bed.
It’s just as well. The magnificent finale, in which Mr. Cregar carries the body of his latest victim to the top of a Guy Fawkes Day bonfire amid the cheers of children who think he is carrying a dummy, and then watches it go up in the flames, was gloriously chilling. Little, however, was left to the imagination.
“The Lodger” is a variation on another timeworn plot, in this case Jack the Ripper, and also stars Mr. Cregar. Dean paid rapt attention to this one, even if in his excitement he kept referring to the Ripper as the “Roger.”
And here, finally, terror took hold, as it had in that Park Slope brownstone so many decades ago. It was not what the viewer sees, but what one of the Ripper victims sees, that brought it on.
She looks at the camera as the lens gets closer, her eyes darting from here to there. Is anyone nearby who can help her?
She is so scared she cannot scream; she tries, she struggles, but it just won’t come out. It is a wonderful example of horror-movie making where you are scared even though you don’t see what’s terrifying, and you don’t even hear it. You are trapped in a foggy, black-and-white dream where your mouth opens and delivers only silent acknowledgment that you will soon be dead.
Afterward, in our apartment, silence.
Dean broke it.
“Now that was scary!” he said.
I spent the night on the bottom bunk.
