Drive-In Horror Memories

Some issues past, we ran an article on "Drive-In Horror." Well, the days of triple-billed fright films at today's "family" drive-ins are past, but at least we still have...

That great American popular cultural institution, the Drive-In Theater, is making a comeback, of sorts. The rate of drive-in demolishing has slowed greatly, and a few drive-ins are being revived (the great 66 Drive-In Theater in St. Louis, Missouri, where Renfield spent many a Saturday night in his misspent youth, has been resurrected in all its neon glory). There’s a lot of nostalgia for the Drive-In experience of yore, and those outdoor cinemas still operating seem to do so mostly in the black.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that, to stay in business, nearly all the drive-ins today have become "family-oriented"; viz., they attract the families by showing family fare on the screen. Lots of Disney and very little Dracula. Thus, although the drive-in is certainly alive and kicking, drive-in horror is on the wane. The great days of the "dusk-to-dawn" horror shows (sometimes five fright flicks in a row!), the horror triple bills, the crazy monster mashes at the drive-in, are all just memories. Drive-in horror peaked in the Sixties and Seventies, carried on in the Eighties, but largely lies moldering in its grave in the Nineties. The coming Millennium doesn’t offer much hope of resurrection, alas.

But, at least, we have the memories. What was it like back when you could see your horror and monster flicks on the truly wide screen under the stars? We asked a few folks to contribute their memories of those ghoulishly glorious days at the Drive-In…

Well, my parents never took me to any of those, and I screwed around and missed out on what seems to be a truly great pleasure according to one friend of mine. So I'll give you someone else's memory: A good friend of mine, growing up in Jackson, Mississippi, went to the drive-in with a group of friends to see The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. They were apparently familiar with the movie, and obviously with the ways of the drive-in, on one such trip. They unlocked the trunk, pulled out the gas chainsaw, and wandered toward the cars with the fogged-up windows. You can only imagine that happened next when the occupants in those cars suddenly heard a LOUD chainsaw, coming from someplace other than the window speaker!!! By the way, I have radio promos for a couple of those classic horror movies and programs. My favorite--the "It's only a movie" chant from Last House On The Left. Don't Look In The Basement most famously played for years as the double feature with Last House On The Left. For a while it also played as a triple feature package (put together by Hallmark releasing), called "The 3 Houses of Hell"-- Last House On The Left, Don't Look In The Basement, and The House That Vanished. I have an old box of vinyl 45's from the 1960's and 1970's, radio commercials for various movies. I acquired them during my days in radio. One of those spots is a classic for Last House On The Left. It includes a chant, "It's only a movie, it's only a movie..." which the announcer asks us to say over and over again so we can deal with this flick when we see it. Some of those records actually came to the radio stations from the DI owners; at least one was stamped with the name "Lake Rhea Drive-In", a theater in Attalla, Alabama that closed in the early 1970's. Anyone remember any of these spots?

I'm not sure whether it fits in with your project, but every bunch of years I glance back at the massive ads that appeared for one of the three drive-ins that my family went to on the south west side of Chicago (Sheridan, the 66, and the Starlite). Perhaps collecting these ads—which I'm sure were used everywhere--would ad for me a visual touch. I try to explain these family outings to my friends (mostly in academia) and they look at me and wonder what my parents were doing letting me see 2000 Maniacs, The Frozen Dead, Wicked/Wicked, etc. I'll be interested to hear if you can get the ads.

Here are a few thoughts on the first horror movie I ever saw at a drive-in: In 1957, when I was six years old, the Japanese movie Rodan was released in the United States. For some reason my parents, totally out of character for them, took me to see it. I wasn't yet a horror movie fan; previous to this, a peek at the movie Frankenstein on what was probably the old "Shock" TV show, had sent me hurrying out of the room. Rodan was a giant flying something-or-other. And to help make things look realistic (to a six year old, anyway), the film was in color. After seeing Rodan swoop down on people, my eyes were riveted to the sky in fear that I might be next, in spite of the security of our (somewhat) sturdy 1952 Ford. No amount of my mother's explaining could completely convince me that Rodan (or one of his kin) was not up there, somewhere, waiting for his chance to get me. Not long after this, I became a big horror/sci-fi movie fan (go figure). But I didn't see the movie Rodan again, until 35 years later. It didn't seem very scary then. But I found it to be one of the best of the Japanese horror movies.

I remember a little about the incident. It was sometime between 1986-1988. I had been in Merrillville because I was doing an audit at the Gary Post-Tribune newspaper. I had to spend the next week doing an audit in Detroit, so I spent the weekend there in northwestern Indiana. I grabbed the Post-Tribune looking for something to do on a Friday night and saw the ad. I've always loved drive-ins and loved TCM (the original). So off I headed. The first feature was TCM2, and afterwards my stomach was saying, "Feed me!" I was in a strange mood, and the only thing at the concession stand that looked halfway good was the barbecue. The irony was not lost on me. I bravely scarfed the food down. It wasn't that difficult for me because my mother was an x-ray technologist. During dinner when I was a kid she would talk about the patients she had that day. Sometimes it was real gross-out stuff. Good training. Anyway, the second flick was Re-Animator. All I remember about that one is the classic scene I always wanted to see in a film: a man walking around carrying his (severed) head in his hands. That one is worth seeing just for that scene. The absolute best film company of all time was American International. No matter what the genre, horror, beach, blaxploitation, motorcycle, hot rod, AIP films were entertaining. I've started trying to collect them (slowly) on video.

Could those climate-challenged wonders of cinema make it today? What would have to be done to make them attractive? Would anyone drive a good distance to see them, or would anyone even care? I saw Megalon and MG on the Drive-In screen--MG along with a double-billed Star Wars (My 4th time, but who cared?). I will not forget those times. But should they be permanently relegated to the past, or should these XXX/Slasher/Kung-Fu/Kaiju Havens be brought back? We have a double-screen drive-in here (Wichita, KS) that's doing quite well. It was recently purchased by someone from the Denver area, and he's pumping money into refurbishing it. I do, however, miss the '70s, when we had numerous drive-ins here, and when sci-fi triple bills were the norm, rather than the current First Run approach. For Kung Fu (Master Of The Flying Guillotine) or European horror (Werewolf Vs. The Vampire Woman) we had the Terrace. The K-42 leaned towards the fun stuff: Inframan, Invaders From Mars (the original), Shock Waves, Crater Lake Monster. The Meadowlark Twin so had its unique flavor. I recall seeing Godzilla Vs. The Smog Monster, Star Crash and Flesh Gordon there. When I was a kid, I desperately wanted to own a drive-in some day. Of course, some things never work out. Still, I had a fun couple of years before they started closing. Though I really don't care if I see much of what they show these days, it's a fun trip occasionally. I did, by the way, eventually manage to do something with drive-ins. As an augmentation to my regular income, I work the comic book markets both here and in Europe. To date, I've done a couple of shorter scripts using drive-ins as the central locate. The first, as a matter of fact, was a cheerful distortion of one of my own drive-in experiences, altered into the ultimate "date from hell." Ironic, in that (aside from a collected volume of three issues of another series that I inked and detailed) this is the only story I've worked on that's been reprinted in a second print run...

Going to horror films at the drive-in was a major part of my summer in the mid-1980's; in fact the very first double-feature my friends and I went to when we got our own cars was a twin-bill of The Evil Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1984. It played at the Memri Drive-In (now an ironic name) where films like Deadly Blessing, Zombie and The Boogens were a common occurrence. But what I had forgotten (until I recently did newspaper-microfilm research) is that an Italian horror B-movie called Revenge of the Dead played there in 1984, and unfortunately we decided to skip it. Little did I realize that the film's director, Pupi Avati, would come to my hometown area of the Quad Cities in the 90's (making Davenport, Iowa his American production site) and eventually cast me in a few bit parts. So I guess my point is: always go to horror films at the drive-in, because you never know when you might wind up in one!

We used to always go the horror double features at the Union Drive-In in the late 70's/early 80's. I remember Motel Hell with The Howling. It was a weeknight, so the drive-in was pretty empty and very dark, so the eerieness added to the atmosphere. I also remember the time I went with my sister, Linda and a friend of ours, Meg, to see Humugous with Dr. Butcher, M.D. We were still scared on the way home; my sister made a wrong turn and we ended up on a dark eerie road. When she pulled in a driveway to turn around there was someone standing there. We all let out a scream and quickly drove away.

Back in the early 70's, my brother, Bob Jelen had a short stint at the Salem Drive-In in Salem, Ohio. They hired him to put on a lab coat and a stethoscope and stand in front of the box office. As each car drove up, he made them sign a medical release saying they were healthy enough to view that evening's horror flick. He was about 17, which would place it in 1972. He doesn't remember the name of the flick. The manager of the theater that year was Carl Bevington. Carl was a high school teacher and the advisor to a club that my brother was in. Carl recruited my brother for the gag. Bob related this story to me recently while we were attending the Bengies (Drive-In) meet in Maryland.

My brother and I piled into a buddy's Corvette (I was 11 at the time) and went to the local drive-in to see 2001. I was greatly impressed, especially by the apes, and distracted by the fact that my brother had mistakenly doused our popcorn with sugar. Prior to the show, my older friend, who was a traveling musician, went on and on about a film he'd recently seen in Pittsburgh called Night Of The Living Dead.

And here's a report on today's Drive-In Horror scene by HORROR-WOOD's very own Drive-In Correspondent, Dan Sweet (contains a spoiler)...

This is dedicated to my brother Mike (1954-1998) who died two years after being paralyzed by a drunk driver. We spent thousands of hours watching hundreds of movies together. I miss him terribly. Please don’t drink and drive.

I had given up on the idea of exploitation movies being shown at the drive-in anymore. This week-end I got a very pleasant surprise: the Holiday showed a triple feature (remember those?) of Halloween H20, Snake Eyes, and Disturbing Behavior. Wow! A maniac with a knife, combined with de Palma, plus nutcase teenagers on the loose. I’m there, dude!

The Holiday is celebrating it’s 50th anniversary and has been remodeled with the "retro" look. We found cars backed up waiting to get in (a good sign). The $5 admission is more than reasonable. The let-down was discovering that the drive-in has become civilized. No goofing around, no turning head lights on the car parked in front of you with the steamed up windows. Thank goodness for technology! The goofers have found out the joys of laser pointers! Quite amusing to see red dots moving along the screen while the manager is threatening them over the p.a. system, "If anyone tells us who the clowns are with the lasers they will receive a $25 cash reward." Next time they only change the first movie I think I’ll bring a pointer in, get a friend to turn me in after the first movie, and split the $25 bucks. Easy money.

First thing shown on the screen were some vintage drive-in ads, then previews of the movies coming soon. Now it’s time for Halloween H20. A genuine drive-in movie just like the old days! All the action takes place in the dark so if you’re parked very far from the screen you can’t make out anything going on. Ah, nostalgia! The best part of this by-the-numbers piece of crap was the fella parked next to me who told his date, "I’ve seen this before," and then told her the climax just before it happened (thanks, buddy). MICHAEL MYERS GETS HIS HEAD CHOPPED OFF! There, I’ll sleep better knowing I’ve let the world know the end of the movie. No reason for me to be angry by myself!

After this hound was over we were subjected to old concession stand ads. If you’ve ever seen any of the video compilations of drive-in ads you’ve probably seen them. Lots more impressive on the big screen. The ordeal was the old amber tinted 10 minute clock with a clown standing on each side and with each passing minute an announcer telling you how many minutes 'til showtime. From the good old days when drive-in patrons either couldn’t read or were busy doing other things during intermission (food or sex).

Second on the bill is the latest Brian dePalma rip-off...er homage, Snake Eyes. It’s got the typical dePalma plot: lots of flashbacks, nothing is what it seems, and by the end it’s so convoluted you could care less. Lots of nice action scenes and he held Nicholas Cage back just enough that you didn’t want to burn the screen down. Wonder what the bill is for all the scenery he chews?

Now it was time for the second intermission. Yep, they showed the same commercials and those bloody clowns standing there for ten minutes. Now the drive-in sells "gourmet" sub sandwiches, fresh pizzas, and bottled water (good grief! bottled water?). I went for the old faithful "mystery meat" hot dog and watered-down soda. As soon as I finished eating my stomach started killing me, so some things never change.

Now came the high point of the night: Disturbing Behavior. My kinda movie with kids "perfected" by a nut case doctor who go into a steroid-like rage when they get horny! Chases, geeks getting beat up by the "implant" jocks and their "plugged up" girl friends. This is the type of movie drive-ins were created for. Who cares about the big budget dramas? Give me the violence and plot holes you can drive a truck through.

And that’s how I spent last Saturday night. The Avengers starts this week. The trailer looked good (a bad omen). Anybody got a laser pointer they want to sell cheap?

Always remember: see ‘em under the stars as it was meant to be.

--Dan Sweet

Thanks to all our contributors. You've helped keep the "ghoul old days" of Drive-In Horror alive for the rest of us. Perhaps, if the Hollywood horror output increases, and enough horror fans demand it, we'll see the return of Drive-In Horror!