Originally published in The Plain Talker, November 2007
We've just finished that great time of year when so many television stations have scary-movie marathons. I've always had a soft spot for scary movies; I think it comes from being part of the Dialing For Dollars generation. (Dialing For Dollars was a midday movie show that was aired on weekdays, and usually started about the time I was getting home from school. The movie was usually some old black-and-white horror classic, such as "The Amazing Colossal Man" or its sequel, "Attack of the 50-Foot Woman." During the commercials, the host would call a phone number randomly selected from the phone book, and if that person was watching the movie, they won money.)
Some of my earliest memories are of scenes from these movies. I'll never forget the Amazing Colossal Man running around in his giant diaper, and the scientists who were trying to inject him with a sedative (or maybe a shrinking solution) by teaming up to launch a giant syringe, javelin-style. I remember a young Steve McQueen battling a giant mass of red jell-o in The Blob. And who could ever forget the giant spiders in The Giant Spider Invasion?
I can't remember the name of the scariest movie I ever saw on Dialing For Dollars; all I can remember is that it involved ghosts, pirates and ghost pirates… and I didn't make it to the end. Once one of the pirate ghosts materialized and said some spooky, I had had enough; we only had two channels at the time (three counting PBS, and four when the weather was just right) but I would have watched snow rather than see any more of that creepy pirate.
At the time, I was young; no doubt I would have laughed at that movie just a few years later. And so, while the terror I felt that day was real, the scare itself was mild compared to some frights I would subject myself to in later years. Tame daytime movies gave way to slightly more horrific primetime films, and to actual theatrical movies. And when we finally got cable, and I had access to multiple movie channels, it was like a smorgasbord; it seemed as if at least one of the channels was showing a scary movie no matter what time I started to channel surf.
But, by that time, something had changed. Scary movies weren't really scary anymore; they were just gory. Suspense had been replaced with buckets of blood, and I had seen enough of my own blood by that time that I wasn't scared of seeing fake blood on the movie screen. It seemed that my days of being frightened by movies were over.
So with that in mind, I thought back, and tried to determine the scariest movie I had ever seen. It didn't take long to come up with an answer, though my answer surprises many people. The most frightened I have ever been by a movie happened between episodes of a two-part TV movie.
The movie was 'Salem's Lot, and it was based on one of Stephen King's earliest books. It was a vampire story (and one of my favorite King books, though I hadn't read it when I saw the movie) that took place in modern-day Maine. A vampire and his crony move into a small town, and before long townspeople start dying from anemia. (And yet, nobody figures it out for the longest time; don't these people know anything?)
As Part One comes to an end, a vampire child is hovering outside the window of his little brother. (It's an upstairs window, which should have been the first clue that maybe there was something not right going on; the other tip would have been that the still-living brother had been at the funeral of the now-undead brother earlier that day.)
Vampire-brother floats outside of the window, urging his brother to let him in. He keeps tapping and scratching on the glass with his long, dirty vampire fingernails; eventually, the brother overlooks the sight of those nails, and of his brother's ghostly pale complexion, blood-red eyes and fangs, and opens the window; vampire stuff ensues, the screen fades to black, and we are left to wait for Part Two.
OK, it doesn't sound scary, and at the time I was affected with a few nervous jumps. When I went to bed, I still wasn't frightened by the movie, but I was anxiously awaiting the second part.
And then… I heard something tapping and scratching at my bedroom window. I had been almost asleep, but suddenly I was wide awake. I listened… and decided that it had been my imagination. But no! There it was again, and there was no doubt: something was hovering outside my bedroom window, tapping and scratching on the glass. I had no idea what it was, but there was no way I was going to turn over, open my eyes and look at the window to see.
For several minutes I lay there, listening to one of my undead friends-- or had a vampire somehow gotten hold of a family member?!-- tap at the glass. It wasn't a dream, and it wasn't my imagination, and though I couldn't actually feel my hear turning white, I knew that it was. This was really happening.
I thought of all of the things I was going to miss once I became a vampire. Mostly, I was going to miss sunny days, since exposure to the sun's rays would kill me in my vampire state. No more sunny days at the lake, no more watching the sun rise from my fishing boat, no more tromping around in the backs of sloughs catching snakes and turtles… like the turtle I had caught that day, the one that was in a plastic bucket. On my dresser. By the window. The one who was walking around inside the bucket, scratching the sides with his claws.
OK, so it wasn't a vampire. But for a few minutes there, the terror was absolutely real, and it was all because of that movie. No movie had scared me like that before, or since. But, I keep watching them, so maybe one day one of them will live up to the task.