On the other hand, for every moment that really should have scared a little kid, there’s at least one more that in retrospect now seems a little dumb.
Five Million Miles to Earth
– One of my earliest memories is of being scared by this movie. I was
doing the “can I have a drink of water?” thing in the middle of the
night when my dad was watching this on TV. I remember seeing the
demon-thing in the flames getting the guy on the crane in the end. It
freaked me out at the time. Of course now I prefer some of the other
parts of the movie, but I still recall the childhood scare I got.
The Legend of Boggy Creek – This was one of those Sun Classic movies that served as a babysitter for a vanload of kids for an hour and a half. This particular effort was about a bigfoot-like creature that lived in the backwoods around the Texas-Arkansas border. The thing mostly specialized in harassing trailer-dwellers, which for some reason got me to thinking “yeah, if you were in a trailer out in the woods a monster like that could really mess with you.” It was stupid and scary in equal measure, the perfect campfire ghost story for the children of the 70s.
Cruise into Terror – I watched this on Friday Fright Night, a venue for which it was particularly well suited. This was in the early days of having my own TV in my room and staying up late on weekends. For the most part Fright Night was a realm of creaky old “classics” that could be had for cheap. This one was a bit different. The plot was plenty dumb, some crap about divers in the Gulf of Mexico dredging up an Egyptian mummy that radiates pure evil. But it had a shock or two that stuck with me for some time.
Garden of the Dead – The only way the zombies in this thing would ever scare you is if you’d never seen a zombie movie before. But when my dad took me to see this at a drive-in double feature, I honestly hadn’t ever seen another zombie movie before. Now of course I know better, but at the time it spooked me good.
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – To this day the Child Snatcher sends a chill down my spine. He’s every “stranger danger” moment we were ever warned about as kids, from his narrow, pinched face to his handful of lollipops to his ice cream wagon that’s secretly a child-snatching cage. The only part I don’t get is why any child, even tykes as guileless as the moppets in this thing, would ever fall for such an obvious creep.
Dirty Harry – To this day Andrew Robinson’s portrayal of the Scorpio killer gives me the creeps. This was another drive-in movie experience, one of my earliest exposures to media portrayal of realistic violence.
Night of the Hunter – As with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Dirty Harry, part of the scare here is that menace can be directed at kids. Getting kidnapped or randomly shot would have been bad enough. But in this one the menace – in the form of a psychotic preacher – worms its way into the children’s lives by marrying – and later murdering – their mother. Robert Mitchum is chilling as the danger that cannot be escaped.
Dawn of the Dead trailer – I didn’t get to see the actual movie until I was old enough to not be unduly upset by such things. But I was still young and impressionable the first time I saw a preview for this Romero zombie classic. The shot that stood out in my mind was the one where the elevator doors open up and a pack of flesh-hungry zombies comes rushing in. I’m not naturally afraid of elevators, but this shock got to me a bit. Think about it and maybe you’ll agree. An elevator is an enclosed space, not bad enough to trigger outright claustrophobia but likewise at the spur of the moment inescapable except through the door in one side. And once that door starts to open, there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Try the “close door” button on one of these things sometime. I honestly don’t think they’re even connected to anything. So if there’s something on the other side of that sliding door waiting to take a bite out of you, it’s gonna get you no matter what you try.
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