A coworker in my old shop loved slasher flicks, the campier and gorier the better. He'd show up every Monday morning and regale us with the latest B-movie horror vid he found deep in the bowels of the Netflix hinterland. This facet of the genre never did float my boat and Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th sailed without me. Even though I love Jamie Lee Curtis, I've never seen a single installment from the Halloween franchise.
I've previously posted about watching Jaws at a drive-in as a 5-year old. While the short term result was a kid who slept in the very center of his mattress for the next few weeks, the experience apparently didn't scar me permanently because I still enjoy a good thriller. Maybe my tolerance was built up watching Godzilla terrorizing Tokyo on a regular basis right after the old Saturday morning cartoons. Besides, growing up, the monsters that freaked me out most weren't rampaging lizards, vampires, werewolves, or even man eating sharks. What really wigged me out were mummies. I'm not sure why, but it may have had something to do with all the unsanitary looking bandages. I had a large book of Egyptian history and a major section was devoted to the cache found in Tutankhamun's tomb. I always flipped through those pages quickly because of the detailed pictures of Tut's mummy. While any mummy film gave 7-year old me the heebie jeebies, forty-something year old me enjoyed the Brendan Fraser Mummy series - the Tom Cruise relaunch, not so much.
Sometimes, move monsters don't require fangs, fur, or bandages, sanitary or otherwise. In The Ring, all it took was a waifish little girl to peg the creepy meter. Another time, while at Auburn, I went with a group to catch Dead Again. One of the gems of this psychological thriller was Robin Williams in a stellar supporting role. Every character had a bit of a shady past and a history that they hid or was hidden from them. No one was what they appeared. It was a slow build up and in one of the climatic scenes, I think every girl in the theater jumped. The girl next to me pretty much wound up in my lap. Years later, some guys in the shop were discussing the best thrillers we've seen. I told them my Dead Again story and a coworker asked, “Whoa, Wayne, what’d you do?” I just shrugged, "Pfft. I married her."
While Halloween parties in the coming weeks will be inundated with a macabre cast of deranged dolls, sadistic clowns, and cutlery wielding hockey fans, I still prefer the roll call of old school monsters from Bobby Pickett's 1962 single - just no mummies, please, thank you very much.
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