The original "Monster Boomers," those who grew up in the Fifties and Sixties, didn't have VCRs or DVD players. But they did have late-night TV, as you'll see in these...
By GENE DORSOGNA (Introducing another new writer to HORROR-WOOD: Gene Dorsogna has been an avid fan of horror films since childhood and a student of film all of his adult life. He has taught film studies at The College of William and Mary and has had several articles published in Chickens Come Home, a publication devoted to the films of Laurel and Hardy. By occupation, Gene is a Registered Nurse (his second career) and also holds a degree in Education from The Universtity of Wisconsin. He takes every opportunity to discuss films in general and the classic horror films in particular. He says a high point of his adult life was when he met Bela Lugosi, Jr. at a Famous Monsters convention several years ago. He looks forward to a long, happy association with HORROR-WOOD! You can contact Gene here.) The seminal moments on our lives rarely come replete with alarums and the flourish of banners; they creep up on us unsuspected, only to achieve import for us in retrospect. For me, the day came one Sunday morning during the warm Long Island summer before I started the third grade; the summer, as I recall, of 1958. I was turning idly through the pages of the Sunday edition of the Daily News. I had newly become acquainted with the lubricious possibilities of gazing at the ads for ladies underthings, finding them tantalizing in ways for which I had no name. When my mother’s back was turned, I would peruse the models in brassieres pretending, when she took note of what I was up to, that my interest really lay on the comic pages. It was then that the Parade section caught my attention, with a feature story that drew me away from bras and panties, delaying my exploration of the semi-nude female body till later, more pubescent days. Here, arrayed on page four of PARADE was the faces of creatures already iconographic to my elders, but soon to become touchstones for me as well, providing my entrée into the vast world of film studies. Then, however, the only draw was those faces: Count Dracula, the Frankenstein monster, the Werewolf of London, Kharis and Imhotep, the mummy cousins, and the Wolf Man himself. The story announced in large letters that Universal Studios was releasing their library of horror films to ABC and would show them under the program logo of Shock Theater...Shock Theater! The name still resonates; still brings me back. I stared at the pictures, studying the pitiless faces of the monsters, knowing that I wanted to see each and every one of these creatures in action. I had already had some passably satisfactory experiences with spooky movies, courtesy of my father who (not entirely selflessly!) submitted to taking me to see such fare as X-The Unknown, with its radioactive mud amok; Cucurucu, Beast of the Amazon (a shameless cheat, even to my childish eyes); The Mole People, with Hugh Beaumont contending with a threat even more bizarre than Fred Rutherford.
My critical standards were not high, to say the least. I drank of their usually arid thrills greedily, almost always coming home still thirsty knowing on some level the real deal was out there somewhere, waiting…. And here it was… I read and reread the story, questioning my parents as to whether they had seen these movies; their responses were dismissive. "Oh, yes" was the flavor of their response. "that old junk". Not to be dissuaded, I vowed that I would see each and every one these films. But oh, the cruelty of grim fate! Indeed, WABC in New York was running Shock Theater, in fact twice each week, on Thursday and Friday!! Two times!! Less, admittedly, than the Million Dollar Movie on WOR (where a lucky and devious child could see King Kong every night of the week and three times on Saturday and Sunday), but the Shock Theater items would always, always scare the living stuff out of a kid (WOR tended toward a very unscary Fred Astaire). Ahh, but the Gods lowered the boom, cruel totems that they were! Shock Theatre came on at the impossibly stygian hour of 11:15 pm. No kid in the world in the button-down Fifties would ever be allowed up that late!! No amount of wheedling, cajoling, promising, or any other of the arsenal of kid’s persuasive powers worked. Hinting direly that my "sleep would be thrown off" (causing, no doubt, life on this earth as we know it to end), viewing Shock Theater was not to immediately be. Weeks rolled on, and as each new TV Guide found its way into my hands, I gazed in forlorn dismay as the movies starring my monsters came and went, viewed by the rest of the world. And then school started, and the possibility of staying up late dried up even further. I watched in bitter dismay as kids with more enlightened (or perhaps easily manipulated) parents, having been allowed by them to view the Friday night showings, discussed the relative likelihood of being stalked by the Wolf Man or being bled dry by the Count. (Although I was NOT desirous of ending up like a benighted boy named Jimmie who, having been exposed to the exploits of Kharis, not only took to lumbering around the playground with arm outstretched in an effort to terrorize his peers but also took to grabbing and twisting their nipples through their clothes in an apparent compromise to strangling them; a maneuver undreamt of by the lovestruck Kharis, but not beyond the machinations of Turhan Bey). Whether I wore my parents down or did some distinguished bit of schoolwork to earn a special boon is now lost to me. Suffice it to say that one find day I was told that I could pick out one horror movie to stay up and watch on Friday night. I could not believe my good fortune. It occurred to me that the only reasonable explanation for this was that my parents had been set upon by brigands, carried off, and replaced with identical but entirely more benign versions. Whatever the reason, I was given my head! The weeks passed and I studied the TV Guide with the intensity of a speculator in soybean futures contemplating the net value of next year’s crop. I’d been the freedom to choose and I was going to do it right, by God!
As someone once said (whether it be Shakespeare or Bill Clinton), too much freedom is a dangerous thing. Having been given free reign at the feast, I finally made my choice. And the winner was...The Spider Woman Strikes Back. Oh, wretched and pitiable child! Oh, ye unfit for sound decisions!! And so the die was cast…. Friday night. Adrenaline charged through my body. I visualized being terrorized by women morphing into spiders and despoiling the countryside! I anticipated hiding my eyes from the horrors to be unleashed before me! I demanded to sit on the floor in front of the TV to be as close as possible so as not to miss one instant (this involved a special compromise, as my mother insisted that I sit on a sheet placed over the carpet, hinting darkly that if I sat directly on the rug I would fall prey to the dreaded carpet mites!!).
Our TV was a twelve inch fish-bowl shaped affair housed like a weird deity in a cabinet behind two doors with ornate non-functional little knobs that when opened gave one the feeling of having opened a medieval alter-piece. And there I sat, protected from the hideous carpet vermin, fighting my last adversary--sleep--on my way to a real scare. Finally, 11:15 rolled around and the Forties Universal world logo came on, accompanied by the proud trumpeting of horns. Seventy-five minutes later, drunk with the lack of sleep, I felt like the foolish virgin promised a prince on her wedding night only to find herself ravished by the court jester. Somehow, the drugging of cows and the growing of exotic flowers (even if they were nourished by greasy looking rubber spiders) was not quite what Parade magazine had promised. Nobody changed into anything; nobody even changed clothes, so minuscule was the budget! I knew that this would not be a fit topic for speculation in the schoolyard. There was, however, one small consolation. I had seen Rondo Hatton. And I was fascinated.
Of course, I knew nothing of the man nor did I know anything of the terrible disease to which he had fallen prey; I did know, however, that here was someone I had never seen the like of before. At some childish level, I sensed a kindness in him; after all Gale Sondergaard was the eponymous baddie here. He became, in a sense, the moral center of the movie for me (certainly the dumb sheriff and the callow boyfriend had no idea what was going on!!). His lumbering presence and his non-acting became a method unto itself, giving his thankless role a verisimilitude not present in the other performers (Having seen this film again recently, I realized that the great Sondergaard was having the devil of a time to keep from cracking up.) Nevertheless, I still knew that the real goods had been denied me and that I had dropped the ball in making my decision. Since I was found in the morning to have not been consumed by carpet mites nor having had the loss of sleep transform into a bizarre changeling, I was allowed to do this again- and next week! And I had seen the TV Guide, and did the next Shock Theater look good! Horror Island! How could a movie with a name like that be a cheat? Ha! Never! Well, need I say more…? It would be several more weeks before I hit what I took to be pay dirt in the scare department. The Mummy's Tomb. There was no way that Universal (whose marketing tactics I was beginning to regard with suspicion by this point) could screw me this time. So once again: the sheet, the battle with sleep, the sprawling before the altarpiece. And then…holy mackeral! When poor Kharis was finally consumed by the flames in the last reel, and I was reduced to turning off the light and going upstairs all by myself, I finally experienced the delicious sense of really having seen the real goods. When Kharis first emerged from his case, I shuddered and hid my eyes (briefly!); when he chased Babe Kane down the dark alley I panicked. Each commercial break dropped me safely back on the mite-guard in tne living room, but only for a moment--soon I was whisked back to Massachusetts and into the clutches of the rampaging mummy. But order--via a fire and the obligatory howling mob of Universal extras--was restored. To my mind, I knew I would never see a better movie!!
It was not long before Shock Theater Matinee showed up on Saturday afternoon, and I was able over the course of many months to see most of the classic Universal horrors (as well as some less than classic ones and a few clinkers from Columbia). The Mummy bored me, and it was not until many years later that I appreciated the supple and insinuating beauty of that film; then I considered it a poor second to Tomb. I was even disappointed by The Mummy's Hand, not knowing it was made first and thinking: what a shame they stole so many scenes from Tomb! But all of this began a lifelong love affair with horror movies that did not fully blossom for many years, fully legitimized in the mid-60s when Carlos Clarens published his seminal history of horror films; gradually, the films became respectable. The immediate effects of meeting Kharis and Rondo Hatton were minimal; I did not turn into the scourge of the schoolyard nor did I become an anchorite huddled in front of the TV. In the fourth grade, however, I did contribute a running cartoon strip for our class newspaper (The Dickinson Tiger), called The Return Of The Mummy which was basically a rehash of The Mummy's Tomb with a twist: it starred an intrepid explorer (replete with a miner’s cap, no doubt to light his way into all those tombs) that I called Charles Derwin (sic) and whom I fashioned into a crude likeness of Rondo Hatton; I had domesticated the fiend, making him a child’s hero (something I hope poor Rondo might have appreciated.). Misspent youth? Well, maybe in some aspects, maybe not. Certainly, having learned to love all those "children of the night" when I did planted the seeds of my adult interest in film history in general and provided me with a particular love for all those dark and Gothic adventures first made so long ago. Hail to you, Kharis! Many thanks, Rondo! Godspeed to you both! Thanks Gene, for dishing up all those great childhood monster memories! It takes old Renfield back to those halcyon days when classic monsters filled late-night TV! Article copyright Gene Dorsogna |
