Once upon a time, when Papa was just a little boy,
he had this great love of monsters and everything scary. He loved all the old movies of Frankenstein, the Wolfman, Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, and one extremely wonderful after-school special called Mad Monster Party, a great claymation extravaganza featuring everyone from the Invisible Man to King Kong! And he adored King Kong, at the age of three years old he wept, and wept terribly when King Kong fell off the Empire State Building: "The big monkey is dead! The big monkey is dead!"
From his earliest, earliest memories, Dougie watched The Wizard of Oz, every year, and was scared out of his wits every time, by the tornado, and by the Wicked Witch of the West, and by the flying monkeys. He cried every time when Dorothy, locked up in the witch's chamber, looks into the crystal ball and sees Auntie Emm crying: "Dorothy! Where are you?" He felt terrible when the flying monkeys unstuffed the Scarecrow and seized the Tinman's ax right out of his metal hands. And Mama and Dada's favorite movies were horror flicks, most of them pretty terrible, but typical drive-in movie fare (in movie release usually six months behind the theaters). They were told at church that you shouldn't ever go to the theater, because the theater was bad. Your guardian angel had to wait outside while you got the thrill of your life munching on popcorn and watching the silver screen. So Mama and Dada came up with a way around the whole "evil atmosphere" of the theater (where liquor was freely imbibed, and smokers belched foul fumes, and loose women swung from the chandeliers) which was to go to the drive-in movie theater, where the loose women were hidden in the cars, and the popping champagne corks could not be heard, and the belching fumes of death ascended into the night sky.The theory was, in your car you were in your own little portable house, thus your guardian angels could quite easily flock about the vehicle (perhaps the insulating rubber tires had something to do with it).Needless to say, Dougie's favorite time of year, well, second favorite (close behind Christmas), was Halloween.Gasp. A guilty little secret. Because every year in church they heard sermons on how Christians should not like Halloween, because it was decidedly pagan (kind of like Christmas, and Easter for that matter), and it exalted death, and devil worshippers loved to kill cats (okay, so one positive thing) (psyche). Halloween was bad, bad, bad, and if a little boy liked it he was in danger of not quite making it to heaven. Before Harry Potter came along, Halloween was the chief bad guy for Christians to chase about the street and kick in the pants. Trick-or-Treating should never be allowed because it was extortion, and all the ghosts and witches and goblins, they were all occultic, naughty, and extremely anti-Biblical.Mama felt it was okay since it was all in fun, and the kids agreed, especially Dougie. He loved getting a new costume every year, especially werewolf masks. He loved making pumpkins at school out of construction paper, and witch heads, and scary "what in the world is THAT" monsters. And he especially loved the rash of scary movies played on TV all the week prior to October 31.Mama always accompanied the kids during trick-or-treating, standing just back while the children approached the house. After about an hour she'd say: "Okay, I'm tired already, let's go home, isn't that enough candy?"Enough candy? What in the world is "enough candy?"After a lot of begging and complaining and whining, Mama would relent. Grimly, she marched with her two daughters and son for another hour. By that time, their Halloween bags were getting tough to lug about, and so the kids dreamily agreed to head for home.In about 1969 or 1970 when Dougie was about eight years old, they went to the drive-in movies and saw one of the scariest movies Dougie had ever seen. In it a brother and sister visit their mother's grave in a spooky cemetery. They observe someone, probably a drunk, staggering toward them, and the brother starts teasing the sister: "Oooh! They're coming to get you Barbara!" All of which was very real. Almost anyone can imagine it happening. And the sister is so embarrassed she heads for the staggering man to apologize for the brother's behavior, and he attacks them. It soon becomes evident, this is not a regular drunk, but a dead man who is somehow walking around, with a tummy grumbling for human flesh.Dada probably made a remark about those dadgum carnivores, and how vegetarianism was a much more healthful way of life. Of course, the guy was dead, so health probably wasn't high on his list of priorities, which were probably: #1 eat human meat, #2 eat human meat, #3 eat human meat (supposedly, we long pig taste just like pork). Okay, so that is probably the priority list of every single human being on the face of the earth (except for the vegetarians, who are much healthier, of course, and tend to smell better too) (except for the gas, the beans, you understand, oh those vegetarian beans).Night of the Living Dead was much scarier than any of the following zombie movies through the years, especially the remakes, because it was shocking, and believable, and filmed in black and white in almost a documentary style. And the people weren't sarcastic about the walking dead, they were terrified. Throughout the whole movie Mama kept saying: "Close your eyes!" but generally she was so shocked and scared she was always about ten seconds too late, and then never checked to see if the kids were closing their eyes. Donna and Pammy probably were, but Dougie just had to see what was happening up there on the screen.Another ghastly movie seen at the drive-in was ever-scary Vincent Price in Theater of Blood, in a tangle of Shakespeare horrific deaths, including a man being force-fed his beloved poodles (thank goodness Mama had not switched from Chihuahuas to poodles at this point).Generally, while driving home from the drive-in movie, everyone yawning, Dougie might actually say out loud: "Boy am I going to have a nightmare tonight." To which Dada would respond: "That's okay, just stay in your own bed."Don't forget Godzilla, and the War of the Gargantuas (and how you ended up loving and crying for the nice brown gargantua), and The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Blob -- all of it very bad TV fare, but Dougie loved it all, no matter how many times he saw it. Dada even had a very cheapo film strip for the movie projector of a young Michael Landon in I was a Teenage Werewolf. It was only about a five-minute movie, but there was a great scene where drool is just pouring out of the werewolf's mouth. Dougie thought it was wonderful, and scary, and he and everybody else laughed and laughed and called: "Play it backwards! Play it backwards!" which even made it better.And Dougie loved both The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits (which his parents angrily decried was just a rip-off of the Twilight Zone). Imagine a little doll saying in an eerie voice: "My name is Talky Tina, and you better be nice to me!" or a robot, on trial, which rushes out into the road to save a child, even though it means its own destruction. And the whole family loved The Munsters (and unfortunately, the size and shape of Herman Munster's head was very similar to the size and shape of Dougie's head, which many people assured him through the years), although everyone refused to watch The Addams Family, as it was a rip-off of The Munsters (they were unaware that the Addams Family existed long before The Munsters).Against current pop-culture religiosity that teaches and preaches that people who like witches and monsters and vampires are in fact going to become witches and monsters and vampires, Dougie never became any of those, and was never interested in the occult. He became a gentle man who loves children and animals, and a staunch protector.But there are monsters in the world. Very real monsters. Monsters much worse than witches, and vampires and werewolves. Some of them steal away money from hopeless poor people. Some of them steal away lives. The love of monsters -- fairytale monsters, ghosts, goblins, things that go bump in the dark -- has existed forever, and possibly these scary stories have been a natural human tool created to prepare helpless little red riding hoods for the stark reality that there is something much worse than the big bad wolf lurking out there, and it is real. For every little Hansel and Gretel, there is a something waiting out there far worse than any witch living in a candy house.All Stories © 2009 Douglas Christian Larsen
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