I’m currently watching this masterwork of world cinema, The Beginning of the End, in which a plague of giant grasshoppers (and exceedingly bad special effects) descends upon Chicago.
To me watching the movie now, it’s so bad it’s funny. Grasshoppers running up photographs of buildings! Contrived screaming! Was this sort of thing anything other than completely ridiculous to anyone, ever?
It was scary to me as a little kid, when I watched that very movie on Chiller Theater. (It was a Kansas City station I think)
Now I imagine I’d laugh, but it freaked me out back in the early 1960’s.
Sure they were. When we went to those movies in the 50’s, we wanted to be scared. We laughed at some of those movies, especially if the script was as bad as the effects. But a lot of those movies were very effective.
Them! is a good example. Nice build-up to the giant ants, with the little girl walking in the desert, the destroyed trailer and general store, the dead guy and the twisted shotgun, then the cop getting killed off screen. We heard the sound made by the ants and we heard the cop scream. And then the ants go flying and land on that ship! Holy shit!
In the original Invaders from Mars, we could see the zippers in the Martian suits, but before that we saw people getting sucked down into sand pits, and we saw adults behaving oddly. Again, there was a build-up of tension, so we could forgive the silliness. And that movie had awesome cinematography.
There are more. Godzilla, Rodan, The Blob, Creature from the Black Lagoon, the one with the big octopus, and the spider, and the leeches. The bunnies and grasshoppers, not so much.
For many of the sillier ones, there was a role-playing aspect. A boy and a girl go into a darkened theater. Stuff happens onscreen. The girl pretends to be frightened. The boy pretends to be brave. They now have a pretext to [del]grope[/del] embrace each other under cover of darkness.
You may call it my ghoulish obsession
It’s a subject on which I get chatty
And the worst one I’ve seen,
Haunting all of my dreams,
Was the Cockroach That Ate Cincinnati.
My father told me that the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz scared the hell out of him when he was a kid. Okay, I know that’s not exactly a B movie but I could never quite figure out how anybody in their right mind could find those flying monkeys scary. When I was a kid the first few movies from the Friday the 13th franchise were kind of scary. Within the last 2-3 years I saw one of them (part 3?) and I couldn’t believe I had thought it was scary when I was a kid. The gore just looked so fake.
Perhaps you just have to be in the right mindset to be scared by something like that. Nobody expected special effects in the 1950s/60s to realistically present a giant ant or a flying saucer.
The movie is available on YouTube. Notice that the rear-projected scenery for driving scenes looks just as bad. They knew perfectly well that the effects weren’t very realistic. They didn’t care.
It’s true they didn’t care. But should they have, given the technology?
Given movies extension from staged plays - over the last 3000 years - in which whatever effects needed were rudimentary in the extreme it’s not unreasonable to tell an audience “these are giant ants, just pretend with us”. It only relatively recently that special effects have attempted verisimulitude. Even now, recent effects - such as the dinosaurs in Jurrasic Park - look a bit hokey by up-to-the-minute eyes.
Agreed. Another that scared me at the time was the original Little Shop of Horrors.
Quite a few of the 50s-early 60s monster movies were scary as long as they held the tension at a suitable level. E.g., The Blob. The last part of The Killer Shrews was great nightmare fuel. (But there were a ton more craptastic films that the OP is probably more familiar with. Attack of the Crab Monsters is so stupid …)
I’m reading your post in the voice of a '50s-style sci-fi B-Movie narrator.
“Whatever the answer, you can be sure the OP is looking for it…in the Twilight Zone.”
I can believe that some people found them scary, because we forget that people could be a lot more paranoid and sheltered before the internet age, to a point that seems completely dysfunctional now. I knew families in the 80s who basically only allowed things like religious stuff and baseball in their homes. Even cheap horror movies would be considered somewhere between antisocial and satanic. (Lots of parents didn’t even allow silly crap like Dungeons and Dragons.)
They scared the hell out of me too. They were genuinely disturbing to a small kid.
One of the cheesy movies I found really scary when it came on TV was The Crawling Eye.
Don’t know if it meets the criteria of being a B movie, but Darby O’Gill and the Little People scared the crap out of a lot of kids with the banshee segment. My daughter, who is now 51 YO, still remembers it with revulsion. Doesn’t even like to talk about it.
Also not sure if it was truly a “B” movie or not, but the original “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” was pretty scary to me as a kid. And it holds up. Also remember a flick called “Fiend without a Face” which I found scary as a kid, saw it a few years back and couldn’t stop laughing.
I saw a movie at a friend’s house when I was a kid. It was “Beast From the Haunted Cave” from 1959.
I’d like to see it again, to see if it scared me as much as it did then. Probably not.
Holy shitsnacks, your daughter ain’t kidding. The banshee scene scared the ever living hell out of me when I was a kid!
I think I understand where you’re coming from. Let me offer a different perspective.
Our local butcher looked like something out of “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” bloody apron, chopping block and big, gory knife in hand.
Animals were butchered right in front of the children!
Kids ran free all day with generally no fear of molesters or kidnappers.
Dead bodies of family members were visited laid out in the home.
Horrible diseases killed often and many walked the streets disfigured by accidents without plastic surgery.
If anything we had more than our share of gore and death in our lives at the beginning of the last century and were accustomed to it.
There were some religious groups who didn’t approve of movies but the vast majority loved them. Even the naysayers sneaked out of town for a peek.
What was new was the medium. That’s what made it scary. The darkened theater, the flickering light, the makeup and bizarre plots. And the magic of moving film.
Not to mention the big kids sitting in the balcony dropping popcorn on your head right at the scary spot.
Is “The Thing” a Grade B? The original with James Arness scared my socks off.
It sure does.
That scene with the pod people chasing the living up the street with these determined cold looks on their faces is about as scary as it gets.
Society has changed and I no longer belong. But they are going to “fix” that." Yikes!
The
End
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