When I was growing up, the location television station that showed movies every afternoon would set aside Saturday afternoon for Tarzan movies starring Johnny Weissmuller. There weren’t enough Tarzan movies to show them all year, so they showed Shirley Temple movies and Lone Ranger television episodes instead of Tarzan. But Tarzan movies were definitely my favorites. One of the most memorable of these Tarzan films is Tarzan Escapes.
The Exorcist was released in 1973. I was 11 at the time and way too young to see it. I knew what I knew about it because of pop culture references like the Mad Magazine parody and the Saturday Night Live sketch they did when Richard Pryor hosted in 1975. In 1979, it was re-released to a theatre where we would regularly go. My friends and I were eager to see it and made plans to go as soon as it was announced.
The horror film The Howling is considered one of the better horror films of the 1980’s. When it first came out, I went to see it on the first weekend it was showing. My wife and I weren’t married yet and we went to see this on a date. Just outside of the theater while we were waiting to get in, we saw some friends who had just watched it. They didn’t like it and warned us that it was bad. They had walked out early on the film. I didn’t trust our friends taste in horror movies. This was the same person that didn’t like Night of the Living Dead. Either way, I enjoy watching bad movies too, so their warning didn’t discourage us. We were convinced that we would have a fun time that night.
In 1964, Olivia de Havilland made a movie called Lady in a Cage. It’s considered a “psychological thriller”. Her character has a broken hip and in order to get up and down the stairs in her mansion, she has a small elevator installed. While she is home alone, the power goes out at the house, trapping her between floors on the elevator. Ringing the alarm on the elevator only attracts the attention of teenage hoodlums who come into her house to rob it and terrorize her. This film features James Caan in his first credited role. It also features some gruesome scenes of violence that were controversial for 1964.
In the early 1980’s there were horror films being released nearly every week. As I have mentioned in previous posts, my college friends and I went to see almost all these films. We even formed a loosely defined group who regularly went together to see these films. This group was called the Bad Cinema Club. The name of the group doesn’t always reflect the quality of the films we were seeing. We were mainly dedicated to watching horror films and enough of them we were seeing were bad enough for us to take on this name. One of the films that turned out to be not so bad was called Maniac.
Night of the Living Dead is one of my favorite horror movies. I have watched it at times with audiences that laughed all the way through it. Other times, the audiences have been more likely to scream. One of the most memorable times watching was when I was in high school and my friend Ricky invited me and several friends over for movie night.
There are a handful of Three Stooges shorts that have scary stories. When I was a kid watching these films, I saw them way more often than I saw any other horror movies. They were just scary enough to introduce me to the pleasures of horror films.
The best horror films also make us laugh. Any time you go see a horror film that has a moment where the audience screams, it is always followed with laughs. Many comedians have made horror/comedy films. Laurel and Hardy went into this territory with their film Oliver the Eighth.
I doubt if very many of you recognize the name Pamelyn Ferdin. But if you grew up in the 1960’s and 1970’s, you would have seen her in countless television shows. Younger kids would know her face if they ever watch Brady Bunch reruns. She was the voice of Lucy Van Pelt in many of the Peanuts movies and specials although she didn’t do the Charlie Brown Christmas Special. She also played a dead girl in a TV movie called Daughter of the Mind. At the time, this was the scariest movie I had ever seen.
A few weeks ago, I saw the film noir classic, Laura for the first time. It is probably the film that Dana Andrews is best known for but I know him better for a handful of science fiction and horror films he made in the 1960’s. My favorite of these is a British film called The Frozen Dead.