Awful truth is, I used to be scared of everything. The dark. Things under the bed. Things in the closet (thank you, Stephen King for “The Boogeyman,” which haunts me to this day). Heights. Blood. Snakes. Monsters. Paris Hilton. Paris Hilton wasn’t even born yet, but I dreaded her coming. I got recurring nightmares from Fantasy Island, Land of the Lost, and even the old Get Smart show. You name it, I lost sleep because of it.
I gradually grew out of my abject terror, but it wasn’t until I met our lovely host in college that I was introduced to the idea of horror as a good thing. El Juano showed me the glory of the gory and the thrill of the thriller.
Alas, most of you these days don’t get to experience the joy of horror, because a lot of what you get has been kind of re-processed and homogenized with a few additives and preservatives. It’s hard to tell one horror movie from another, to be honest. Y’see, Timmy, back in the day before all film studios turned out was remakes, some of us got to see these things called Original Films. You probably know most of them today as remakes, but you don’t really know horror until you’ve treated yourself to some of these gems in their original form.
Night of the Living Dead (1968)Little did little Georgie Romero know that he and his buddies were starting a whole subgenre of movies when they scraped together enough cash to make the most gruesome horror movie they could. Before then, zombies were people Boris Karloff hypnotized to work on his Haitian plantation, but within a few years they’d created a new nightmare--the next door monster. Slow, lumbering, almost unstoppable, and its only function is the biggest taboo in human society: cannibalism. Since then people have tried to speed zombies up, smarten them up, and laugh them up, but to this day nothing beats the original for sheer shivers. And a rights screw-up left it in the public domain, so you can even download it and watch it right now.
(Seriously, go here to download it now!)
The Omen (1976)
Rupert Thorne’s adopted son, Damien, has problems. His nanny commits suicide in a truly spectacular fashion at his birthday party. The nice priest that looks like Doctor Who dies horribly just after trying to reveal the secret of Damien’s true parentage. And a photographer has started to assemble an ugly list of coincidences about the boy that could mean bad news for everyone, and I do mean everyone!
Unlike the crass remake that was rushed out because some marketing guy figured out how to read a calendar, this film is all suspense. No creepy things in mirrors. No cheap shots. Not even much of a body count. You can count the deaths on one hand, really. But the atmosphere in this movie keeps piling up and piling up as Rupert sees the photographer’s eerie pictures, they discover how thoroughly Damien’s past has been erased, and by the time they’re prying open tombs in a European graveyard, just a quick glimpse of a few bones can make you shudder. You can drown in this movie! It’s the creepy tale of two men who’ve discovered they’re standing in front of a juggernaut, and nothing they do has a prayer of stopping it.
Halloween (1978)Even if you never knew the story, John Carpenter’s little film about a guy in a Shatner mask killing folks became an instant icon by tying itself to our favorite holiday. This groundbreaking film (and it really was) took an idea that had been lurking on the edge of the American consciousness and threw it out in the open. What if Michael Meyers, a perfectly normal kid from a perfectly normal family... just went crazy? What if he carved up a few folks and no one knew why? Worse yet, what if he spent his life in an institution, got loose, and decided to pick up with the senseless killing right where he left off? Combined with Carpenter’s revolutionary “point of view” camerawork, an almost real-time script, and a series of gruesome on-screen murders, this film literally changed how horror movies were made. Seriously. Hollywood completely re-geared after this film. The era of sophisticated “adult” horror was gone, and it was now being aimed specifically at teenagers. All because of this movie.
Hey, speaking of aiming at teenagers...
Friday the 13th (1980)
Everyone knows the iconic vision of Jason in his hockey mask. What some of you youngins probably don’t know is that he didn’t get the mask until the third movie in the series. In the second movie he just wore a dirty pillowcase with some eye-holes. Heck, in the first movie Jason was only a minor character. The killer was someone else entirely! Who? Go rent it, I’m not going to tell you everything...
In a way, this series did in the ‘70s what Rob Zombie did in 2007 with his remake. They both tried to copy the original Halloween, but didn’t quite understand what it was about that movie that was so terrifying. Teenagers using drugs? Check! Teenagers having sex? Check! Savage killer? Check! Loads of blood? Check! Friday the 13th just grabbed all the sensational elements of Halloween and ignored some of the deeper subtext... just like Rob Zombie did.
This series created a whole new sub-genre-- the slasher film. It gave everyone the right to call themselves a filmmaker, provided they could figure out creative ways to kill people that sprayed blood a minimum of seven feet. Plus it gave Kane Hodder a career as the man behind the mask.
The Fog (1979)
Carpenter comes back with the story of a wonderful little oceanside town that’s been sitting on a few ugly secrets from the past. Jamie Lee Curtis comes back as the young lady who has to live through it, even though she’s out of her teens. Creepy undead pirates just make us want to come back again and again. This movie gets a lot of mileage out of simple camera tricks, not giving us a good look at the monsters, and that biggest of all nightmares--karma. While it seems a bit unfair at first that the dead things in the fog are picking on this little town, we come to find out the town kind of had it coming. Yeah, we don’t want to see Jamie Lee and her new beau get torn up, but the rest of ‘em... well, the undead have a pretty solid argument in their favor. I say kill ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out.
The Hills Have Eyes (1977)Oddly enough, this early film by Wes “Elm Street” Craven is the American equivalent of Godzilla. The Japanese made a movie about the horrors of the nuclear age, we saw a film about a big dinosaur knocking down buildings. Then America made a film about an innocent (well semi-innocent) group of recluses being mutated by nuclear testing, forgotten, and forced to fend for themselves... and it got remade into a story about brutal cannibals. The real horror of this story wasn’t what these people up in the hills did, it was about what they were. It was this eerie story about how the monster was human and he wasn’t alone. He brought Ma, Pa, Granny, little Joe, and little Becky-Sue with him. The flesh-eating, that was just a side thing.
And if the word on the street is true, this time next year I’m going to have to rant about Evil Dead and Hellraiser, so go see those before they’re torn down and rebuilt.
Go!!
(Virtual Stranger was the inspiration for both the epic poem Beowulf and the motion picture Raiders of the Lost Ark, and is single-handedly responsible for repelling the Martian Invasion of 1936 that occurred in Grovers Mills, New Jersey. He is the author of numerous short stories, the upcoming Ex-Heroes, and an as-yet-undiscovered Dead Sea Scroll. There is compelling evidence that he is, in fact, the Limbergh baby.)
For more of Virtual Stranger's wonderful breed of insanity, check out his ranty blog!
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