Horrors!

Revisiting the movies that scared us

Can you scare kids nowadays? I have my doubts, especially when most of their horrors come from real life. When I was a kid, we got our scares from old movies.

Growing up before streaming services or home videos, whatever I saw came over our Zenith black and white television. We were able to intercept New York stations like WPIX-11, which had a huge catalog of movies, and WWOR-9, which had access to the whole RKO Pictures film library. That meant an unending stream of B-movies on Saturday afternoons and evenings.

“Chiller Theatre” on WPIX-TV was a mainstay for sci-fi movies

TV images then were the result of a cathode ray tube shooting a beam of electrons at a phosphorescent screen, creating a luminous and distinctly different viewing experience from today. The films could be dark, grainy and inscrutable, just like dreams, or in this case, nightmares. That meant what I saw as a kid left a lot of room for my imagination, and with scares factored in, imagination could be worse than reality.

Or so I thought. I carried a bunch of those fearsome film images around with me for much of my life, until home video and YouTube allowed me to revisit them as an adult. It was like turning on the light in a carnival spook house, seeing all the two-by-fours, extension cords, and badly-painted props. Musician Frank Zappa wrote a song about old sci-fi movies, called Cheepnis. "Can y'all see?" he asked,

“The little strings on the Giant Spider?
The Zipper From The Black Lagoon?
The vents by the tanks where the bubbles go up?
And the flaps on the side of the moon?”

Here are some of the films I saw when I was too young to know about the zippers and the strings, and which consequently scared the bejeezus out of me at the time.

From Hell it Came (1957) stamped my impressionable young brain with the horrific face of Baranga, a South Seas island prince unjustly put to death by a witch doctor. Radiation—always the bad guy in 50’s sci-fi— caused him to return to life as a grouchy walking tree with a chip on his shoulder. He’d squeeze people to death or toss them into a pool of quicksand, but I didn’t remember any of that. I just remembered his face—gnarled, terrifying— and it never left my memory. Revisiting it as an adult, it was still pretty repulsive, but realizing  it was fixed in one expression—its eyes didn’t even blink— sure took the edge off.

Riders to the Stars (1954) had a neat premise: three astronauts would catch meteors in space and return them to earth so they could be studied, instead of burning up in the atmosphere. There’s a lot wrong with this—for one thing, they’re not called meteors until they burn up in the atmosphere—but that’s not what I remembered.

It was when one of the three pilots got blown up, his horrifically burned face peering out of his shattered helmet and searing itself into my memory. As an adult, I revisited the scene and discovered it was a dummy in a spacesuit wobbling at the end of clearly-visible wires from some giant fishing pole. The background was unmistakably a studio with a couple of flickering light bulbs masquerading as stars.

The scene was so amateurish, in fact, that it’s been cut out of current versions of the now-colorized movie, with only the last second or two of the head in closeup remaining. Imagine something being too bad for a 50s sci-fi movie…and haunting my memories for decades.

You might expect that the scariest thing about Attack of the 50-Foot Woman (1958) would be the 50-foot woman. No, I was too innocent at the time to be afraid of a large, angry female—that would come later. Instead, I was scared of a big freak in a vest. The wealthy protagonist, Nancy, is abducted in the desert by a giant who’s arrived in a glowing sphere, causing her to get plus-sized. Her butler and the local sheriff follow the alien’s giant footprints back to the sphere, where it has pilfered the woman’s expensive diamonds and hung them inside of clear orbs. The film gets great mileage out of their mugs, distorted by the obs, while the sphere goes

meep…meep…meep. Suddenly, their terrified faces reflect the arrival of the bald alien—outfitted in some kind of medieval championship wrestling garb—who tosses their station wagon in the air before tromping off into the desert night. It was a harrowing scene, and the sound effects made it really eerie, but in retrospect the alien was just a poorly-executed double-exposure.

Putting the word “hideous” in the title of The Hideous Sun Demon (1958) only made it that much more terrifying. Another victim of radiation, Dr. Gilbert "Gil" McKenna, discovers that exposure to sunlight causes him to regress into a reptile with a bad attitude. He’s forced to live his life in the shadows after sundown, taking up with a sultry lounge singer but leaving her sleeping on the beach as the sun comes up.

He strangles a mobster, invades an elementary school picnic, and gets chased by what is clearly the friendliest collie in town before getting shot and falling off the top of a gas tower. He was hideous, all right, until I saw the movie as a grown up. Then he seemed like a sympathetic character—an actor in a really bad rubber mask, wondering to himself why he ever took the role.  

I was frightened by a whole bunch of Twilight Zones, but Eye of the Beholder (1959) stuck with me. The whole episode is told from the viewpoint of a woman whose face is wrapped in bandages after undergoing plastic surgery. The calm doctor’s voice reminds her that this procedure was her last chance to get better. As the bandages come off, we discover that she’s beautiful, and it’s the rest of the world that’s ugly—people with thick foreheads and pig snouts. She scuttles through the hospital as television screens show a grim state figure extolling the virtues of conformity, eventually getting shipped off to a kind of leper colony for scrumptious people. Those foam rubber “pig” masks are genuinely creepy, even as they convey a lot of personality. I’ve got to admit that they’re still pretty scary, even today.

Bad fit: the actor’s chin stuck out of the monster’s mouth, so they called it a tongue.

It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) contained a lot to unnerve a kid. A ferocious bloodsucking alien from Mars stows away on a claustrophobic spaceship, with tunnels, vents and portholes turning it into an outer space haunted house. It’s said to be one of the films that inspired Alien.

I identified with Gino Finelli, an astronaut and potential Marx Brothers character, separated from his crewmates on the lower deck with a broken leg. He spent the movie holding off the lunging alien with flames from a blowtorch that could run out of fuel at any minute. I carried that fear into adulthood, and at one point owned two propane tanks for my barbecue grill in case one of them ran out during a dinner party.

The Flame Barrier (1958) capitalized on unease around sending satellites into space. Satellite X-117 crashes back to earth after entering a mythical layer of the atmosphere called the “flame barrier.” A businessman-cum-space hobbyist has disappeared while trying to find it. Somehow it has landed in the jungle, skidded across the undergrowth, and rolled deep into a cave.

An unfortunate space enthusiast

When a band of searchers including his wife locate him, they discover he’s been absorbed into a glowing ember of a blob from outer space that returned with the satellite—and which is growing at a rapid pace. One of them has to do some freestyle rock climbing above the blob, holding wires to electrocute it, slipping frequently and barely escaping the fall that will lead to him getting zapped and absorbed.

I can still feel my anxiousness as I watched him nearly slip into oblivion. Viewing the film today, it’s a letdown to discover that he actually sacrifices himself by jumping into the blob voluntarily so it can get electrocuted on time. Decades of disquieting memories, and the guy jumped in anyway? Didn’t he know I had better things to worry about?

Sci-fi films from the 50’s have none of the craftsmanship and special effects that modern features possess. But there’s something to be said about movies that left a little room for the imagination, that wrapped their horrors in a bit of mystery, and let our brains invent some stories of their own. Revisiting my fearsome memories was kind of therapeutic, but I have to admit I still enjoy the films.

As Frank Zappa sang, I need a little more cheepnis, please!

© 2022 David Potorti