Devil’s Arcade, by Martha Thomases
In honor of Halloween, here are some things that have scared me during my lifetime.
* Dell Comics. When I was ten years old, my friend Kenny Raffle had a big pile of comics he let me read. In the stack was a Dell horror comic about a giant hand that would come out from under the street through manhole covers, grab people, and devour them through holes in its palm. It was stupid but terrifying. Several years later we had squirrels in the walls of our house, and when they ran around in the middle of the night, it sounded like fingernails on the wall. I’ve since learned that Dell didn’t submit their material to the Comics Code, arguing they were inherently wholesome. I mention this not to defend the Code, but to demonstrate that what seems wholesome to one person can terrify another. Stephen King was afraid of the “twi-night double-header.”
* High School. I know now that it’s almost impossible to be an interesting adult if you had a good time in high school, but it still haunts me. I dream about finding myself still there, despite my insistence that I’m an adult, I graduated college, and I can’t live in an all-girls dorm anymore. Also, I can no longer fit in my uniforms.
* The first Alien movie. John and I got ourselves on a list for a screening at Book Expo (then the American Booksellers Association convention) before the official release. I was so excited that I read the graphic novel (by the beloved Archie Goodwin and Walter Simonson) the night before. It was so scary I couldn’t sleep. I insisted we get to the screening early so we’d get good seats but, once the monster was loose, I had to leave. It’s the only time I ever left a movie in the middle, and I still can’t watch it, even cut up on television.
* Submarines. They’re dark, small, damp and probably smell bad, and you can’t get out of them when you want to. Paradoxically, the subway seems perfectly normal.
* Plastic bags. They’re so scary they have warning labels, telling you not to put them on your head. If you need to know why, see James Coburn in Charade.
* Nuclear war. Not the kind that makes our President shake his metaphorical fist at Iran, but the kind we practiced for in the 1960s. Nothing brings home the reality of a radioactive holocaust like lining up in the school hallways and learning how to duck and cover.
* Pregnancy. It’s impossible, of course, but I remember illegal abortions, and it was not a fun time. If I were to have a baby now, I would be on Medicare before her bat mitzvah.
* Vampires. Even before Joss Whedon, I spent a lot of time wondering what it would be like to be a vampire. I mean, it’s not their fault they need to drink blood to stay alive. They were especially scary because they didn’t just kill you, but also changed you, so you were trapped forever with an undying craving. As an adult, I’ve experienced these feelings for coffee.
* Nazis. When my mother was growing up in Jamestown, NY in the 1930s, the German-American Bund would have all kinds of pro-Hitler rallies. He was going to clean up society, get rid of undesirable foreigners, defend traditional values, make the country safe and secure, and the trains would run on time. Mom died in 1980, so she didn’t know this would be the Republican platform for 2008.
Martha Thomases is the media goddess of ComicMix.
I agree for sure about the first ALIEN. It gave me the kind of terrifying experience I ask for in a horror movie without skimping on intelligence, and the design of the creature (which was far scarier before the later movies and licensers started letting you see what the whole thing looked like in bright light) was visually magnificent.
Alien was a great horror movie; Aliens was, give-or-take, just about as good. And I'm not particularly a horror fan – both movies really worked for me.
Ditto on nuclear war (duck and cover, anyone?), also pre-legal-abortion pregnancy. But the scariest movie I ever saw remains the original Carnival of Souls, which I caught alone and stoned at 3 AM, in my white trash ghetto apartment in Queenstown, Maryland about thirty years ago. I flicked it on not long after it started but had no clue what I had seen for some years, as I missed the title and opening credits. Like stumbling into someone else's nightmare.
I saw PENNY SERENADE in the middle of the night when I had pregnancy insomnia. It's not supposed to be scary, but it was.
The Wizard of Bleeping Oz, age 5, in a theater, taken there by my mother who was quite surprised I didn't agree that she was doing me a favor, screaming bloody murder as I was. Something about a red hourglass and a green woman keeping me from my Auntie Em. And I didn't even have an Auntie Em.
I remember having a dream as a kid that I was looking out the window of my house and looking at the twister from the movie coming towards me.I saw Poltergeist in the theater and remember how much I was laughing at it, but I didn't realize until I was walking out of the theater that my heart was just pounding.
Yeah, I was in the Cleveland area, prone to tornados and warnings, many of which would interrupt afternoon tv and get me flashing back to Kansas. Funny they never put doorbells on those storm shelters.
George Bush and Dick Cheney. I find them extremely SCARY!
Shhh… you'll wait Dick up!
Scariest movie I saw in a movie theater was THE EXORCIST and that's because of my Roman Catholic upbringing. I was in flipping COLLEGE and I slept that night with the lights on and tried to stay awake because I KNEW the Devil was coming to possess me. Every nun warning was going to come true.It's odd but, despite WRITING a certain amount of horror based fiction, I don't like to read or watch it. As I've said before, I prefer to GIVE nightmares than GET them.
Few things scare me. Many moments in movies can startle me, but that's not the same.Twilight Zone episode where the woman was "horribly disfigured", yet we saw her as beautiful. When the doctor and nurse were revealed, I had to watch through my fingers. Saw it alone. At nighttime. As a child.Third part of "Trilogy of Terror", starring Karen Black.Exorcist. Working 6 days a week on the midnight shift, going to college, had been awake for at least 30 hours.Chucky films. Have never seen one, have never watched more than 2 minutes of one. Just the idea of sentient dolls just creeps me out.
Alan – That episode of the Twilight Zone starred Donna Douglas (Ellie Mae Clampett) and I think she was voiced by somebody else, Mercedes McCambridge (or someone else with a really deep voice). I think it was titled 'Eye of the Beholder'.Trilogy of Terror is also a personal fave.The Exorcist (before the edited out the subliminal stuff) was also extra spooky.The original Invaders from Mars and Invasion of the Body Snatchers freaked me out as a kid.
I'm with John Ostrander on watching scary movies — I write this stuff for a living, and I have a very low tolerance for it onscreen. Mullholland Drive, for reasons that still escape me, really freaked me out. Thematically it has a lot in common with Carnival of Souls, so maybe it just touched some subliminal nerve. I've never gone back to watch it again, either.
Martha, sorry to derail the discussion, but your Springsteen influences are showing. :-)
It was that, or Season of the Witch.
My scariest movie — Brian DePalma's Sisters. Not an absolutely great movie (since it was early I hadn't grown tired of his Hitchcock obsession), it really upset me. When I left the theater I went across the street to a pay phone and started calling friends.
I still have Exorcist nightmares to this day! And the first time I saw it was edited for television!Pat