Old scares put to rest

October 26th, 1980 is a date which sticks in my memory. That was the day we moved from our yellow brick home in Richmond Heights (one of the so-called "Forty Thieves") to a frame house in the county seat of rural Lincoln County. I was ten years old, Halloween was my favourite holiday, and I was an enthusiastic artist. I produced a series of "Spook Mountain" pictures which depicted an impossible steep hill crowned with an elabourate manor and corseted by a spiral road with spooks and ghouls everywhere the eye could see, from ghosts and witches in the sky to werewolves and zombies in hotrods. At the same time, I couldn't even watch the mildest scary movies. A couple years earlier, a laughably mild offering from Hammer Studios called The Gorgon had given me nightmares that I recall to this day. And it was sometime in this, my tenth year, that I happened to watching television alone late at night (I often had insomnia) and caught a preview for Phantasm.

The title didn't stick with me, but two scenes did: the bladed sentinel sphere hurtling toward a victim and graveyard scene where ghouls rise from beneath the earth to snatch a young boy from his bed. Both of these played on intense fears I had at the time: the fear of monsters under the bed and the fear of things flying at my face. The sphere being the de facto trademark of the resulting horror franchise, it was through this that I tracked down the film and rented it and now I can say that the whole movie seems tailor-made for my adolescent fears. Other things I was terrified of: windows at night, dark closets, and stepping on something squishy. So naturally there's a bursting-through-the-window scene, a monster-in-the-closet scene, and a ankle-grabbing-in-mud scene.

But the chief fear the director plays upon is abandonment. The two main characters are orphans, and as many scenes take place in their suburban home as in the massive funeral home on the outskirts of town. I may come from a decent-sized family, but when you're lying in bed awake at 3 a.m. you're all alone. Having my mother away at the hospital (she worked nights when I was in grammar school) made it worse. All in all, I'm lucky all I saw was a scrap of the trailer edited down for television. Had I seen the movie itself back then--or really any time during my teens--it would've amped up my nightmares to an almost intolerable degree.

But what a difference two or three decades makes. Now I can see the film for the shoddily-made shockfest it is. There's a clumsiness to most of the scares that deflates their impact. There's a bad cut between when the sphere is flying at the caretaker and when it's on his face, for instance, and the seams in the astroturf are visible before the ghouls leap out from underneath. My older brother, who watched it alone yesterday, called it "hokey". When the furtive beasts who have been terrorising the teenage protagonist finally appear onscreen, they're costumed like Jawas and I had to stifle a laugh each time thereafter when they're referred to as "dwarfs". (These were decided not the stuff of my nightmares, but featured players in my escapist fantasies.)

Now to get to me, you'd have to play on different fears: chiefly my fear of the death of those close to me, but also home invasion, urban violence, and helplessness. In other words, I'm a perfect target for zombie films. Which is why I originally had 28 Days Later slated to arrive today, but whether because of Halloween tomorrow or just general NetFlix incompetence, it's listed as "very long wait" so I had to bump something else into its slot. I told the Old Man I'd wanted it here while my brother was in town so I'd have someone to watch it with me. "I'll watch it with you," he said. "What you mean is that you'll fall asleep on the couch next to me while I watch it." And, frankly, that's good enough for me.