Halloween was a big thing for the teenagers in the town where I grew up. Sales of toilet paper and soap increased exponentially at all of the grocery stores. These sales went to teens who had never been to the grocery store without their mom and mothers restocking their shelves at home that had been raided by their teens. The sales of toilet paper and soap paled in comparison to the sale of eggs. Egg throwing on Halloween was the favorite pastime of most teenagers in our little town and the surrounding community. As the local police force turned a blind eye to everything but the worst of hijinks, our fair city became a little Hershey’s omelet every October 31.
When the movie “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken” made it to theaters around where I lived in 1966, I was 4 and 1/2 years old. I don’t have that many memories of this time in my life but I do remember specifically wanting to see this movie. I remember seeing the ads on TV. I’m sure that made me want to see it more than anything else. I don’t know how often my mom took me to the movies when I was this age. It didn’t really matter. The ad campaign for this one was doing its job on me. I remember seeing newspaper ads for it too. These ads where the way that I knew it was showing in theaters near us. I remember these ads because I remember “picking up” the newspaper in from these ads with Silly Putty. I remember doing this with the newspaper at my grandmother’s house. I was staying with her while my parents were at the hospital when my sister was being born. This is why they couldn’t take me to the movies.
I saw Evil Dead when it first came out in 1981. I was in college at the time and there was a group of us called the Bad Cinema Club that went to see nearly every horror that was released at that time. This is not to say that all horror movies are bad. But there are a lot that are and we would go to see as many as we could to make sure we saw the bad ones. I do not intend to go through the plot of the movie here. I will say that this movie stood out among all of the others that we were going to see. It had an eerie feel to it that at the time made it seem more real than most of the other horror movies we were going to see. My thoughts at the time were that this stuff was really happening to the people on the screen. They just turned the camera on and recorded what was happening.
I was a freshman in college when Friday the 13th Part II was released. By the time this one came out, I was more familiar with the jump scare techniques they used in the first Friday the 13th film. During my first semester of college, I had helped form a group called the Bad Cinema Club. We would go to see almost any horror film that was released at that time. The studios were putting out a glut of horror films because of the success of Friday the 13th and Halloween. We could go and see something almost every week. Since we were college students trying to be mindful of how much money we spent, we would try and go to see these movies on bargain night. Friday the 13th Part II would be showing at the old Malco Theater in Jackson, Tennessee. This was located in downtown Jackson just off of the court square. The audience for this film would be filled with broke college kids, drunks from the downtown bars, and easy to scare poor people from the neighborhoods around the downtown area. This would be the perfect audience for watching this scary movie.
I didn’t jump on the modern horror movie bandwagon until the release of Friday the 13th. When it was released May 9, 1980, it had been about a year and half since Halloween had made its debut. I had completely missed Halloween and never really paid much attention to it until Halloween II came out in 1981. So I had little to prepare me for the experience of Friday the 13th.
The Halloween party for my fraternity was approaching during my freshman year of college. One of my best friends and I decided that we would go to the party dressed as a couple of the members of the administrative staff of the school. We selected this couple because of their distinct appearance. He was going to go as a rather large member of the administration and I planned to go as the man’s wife. At the time, she served as the Dean of Students. The lady had a fashion sense that appeared to be more appropriate for the 1950’s rather than the early 1980’s. He had a hard time coming up with a costume that captured the essence of the man and he backed out of the plan. I stuck with the original idea and recruited a couple of people to help me put together a costume that would be as authentic as possible.
I was in sixth grade in the spring of 1975 and television was becoming important. This was when we could only get three channels and everyone was watching the same programs. If you weren’t watching the same programs that everyone else did, you weren’t able to participate in the discussions of the “cool” programs. It would be seventh grade and fall before everyone was talking about “Starsky and Hutch” and everyone needed Adidas sneakers. Or at least the knock-offs. That was when television became really important but spring of 1975 was giving us a test run. ABC had a series called the “Movie of the Week”. This was a 2 hour slot where they promised original movies made for TV. Most of the time, they ran pilots for series they had no intention of picking up. An original film didn’t happen that often. March 4 was one of those nights when they were going to show an original film called “Trilogy of Terror.”
The Twilight Zone was in syndication when I was very young. By the time I started watching it, I paid more was old enough to remember episodes of shows. Because it was in syndication, I was likely to see the same episodes over and over even though there was a total of 156 shows. The channel I saw them on aired them at 9:30 every night of the week, right before the news. Wednesday night was a bonus night because they started at 9 and would show two episodes. I started getting ready for bed at 10 so this show was perfect material for giving me bad dreams.
Most of my earliest memories of watch TV relate to being scared. Continuing with my October theme of scary TV shows and movies, I am reminded of a television show called Fantastic Features which aired on WHBQ-TV from Memphis. I was born in 1962 and so was this show. It was a showcase for horror and science fiction films. It was hosted by a character named Sivad. Sivad is best described as a ghoul. He wore a top hat and cape. He had make-up that made him appear very pale and fangs that made him slightly difficult but not impossible to understand. Sivad was portrayed by a man named Watson Davis who worked as an advertising director for the Malco theater chain in Memphis. The name Sivad is Davis spelled backwards.
My father says that I would beg him to watch Sivad with me and I would just hide behind a chair during the show. The opening credits of the show featured Sivad riding on a hearse, creeping around in fog and opening a casket. I remember this being the scariest part of the program. I do remember hiding behind the chair during this part of the show. I don’t remember being as scared of the segments that were done in the studio. I also don’t remember being that scared of any of the movies but I’m sure this depended if they were showing something like Frankenstein or sci-fi schlock like Queen of Outer Space. I remember one of my cousins was lucky enough to have gotten to meet Sivad at one of his personal appearances. He had an autographed photo of Sivad that seemed just as scary as the opening of the show. We would take the photo to a dimly lit room, look at it and run as quickly as we could to anywhere with more light.
Fantastic Features lasted for 10 years and I watched it off and on for any of that time that I can remember. By the time I was able to really remember any of the films, they were showing more 1950’s B-movie selections than anything considered classic horror. These are the kind of movies I love to watch today. I would like to think that Sivad helped me develop my taste for these films. Even to this day, I find the opening sequence to Fantastic Features to be at least a little scary.
Since its October, I’ve decided to devote some of this month’s posts to things that have really scared me. My first thoughts went to television programs and movies. And I decided to start with one of my earliest memories of something scaring me. And that is Dick Van Dyke.
Maybe it’s not him. Doesn’t everyone love Dick Van Dyke? He always played lovable characters. Mary Poppins came out when I was 2 but was in theaters regularly when I was young. Who couldn’t love him as Bert? I was 6 when Chitty Chitty Bang Bang came out and his face was familiar to me from Mary Poppins and The Dick Van Dyke Show. And who couldn’t love his TV show? Singing the theme song to the show and stumbling over living room furniture was a favorite past time at the Wheeler home. I was probably too young to remember the airing of any of the original episodes but some of my earliest memories of watching anything on TV were seeing these re-runs in syndication. I would have had fond memories of this show if it wasn’t for one episode that scared me.
