BART: [having just heard a recitation of Poe’s “The Raven”] That’s it?! That’s supposed to be scary?
LISA: Well, it was written in 1845. I guess people were easier to scare back then.
BART: Yeah, I guess so. Like Nightmare on Elm Street 1 – seems pretty tame by today’s standards!
Heh. Two guys I know took a third friend (the victim) to “Carrie.” Right at the key moment…they each jabbed him in the ribs. He absolutely freaked. Magnificent.
And, yeah, the Banshee from Darby O’Gill was terrifying! Even today, it’s…effective!
Seeing the old classics, today, I’m astonished at how very little on-screen time the big monsters get. Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon – only scant screen-minutes. Hell, the Mummy, as a Mummy (wearing the bandages) is on screen for only a few seconds, and only to sneak past the archaeologists and escape from the tomb. All the rest of his scenes are as a creepy old guy in a fez. (But, yeah, as a creepy old guy in a Fez, Karloff was definitely a little scary!)
If B movie just means low budget, there are quite a few scary B movies. Night of the Living Dead, Paranormal Activity, The Blair Witch Project, and so on.
I’m not sure, but the old Universal monster movies were probably considered B movies and audiences at the time considered them scary. Small kids will still find them scary now. Hammer horror movies were low budget for sure. I never found them very effective myself, but I wouldn’t show them to my kids.
It’s interesting how spooky music and sound effects and odd camera angles can be effective for naive viewers. More recent movies rely more on jump scares.
Seeing the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I’m astonished at how long it takes for the killing to start. The first half of the film is just atmosphere and buildup. But that makes it scarier! In any more recent movie of that type, the writers seem to feel obliged to space the killings as regularly and predictably as cumshots in a porn film.
Originally it meant a supplement to the main feature. That dates from the days before television, when people thought nothing of spending three or four hours in the cinema, and there were also cartoons and newsreels and things.
There was a 1950s Mexican one that played regularly on our local horror movie series (Nightmare Theater with Sammy Terry out of Bloomington, IN)- BRAINIAC about a sorcerer burned at the stake centuries ago who comes back in the modern day (as a comet that was passing when he burned comes back) to kill the descendents of his persecutors. He passes as a cultured gentleman but turns into a demonic creatures whose pointed tongue penetrated his victims’ skulls to suck out their brains.
I found it in a bargain-bundle of cheapie horror films for $5. Amazingly, it still held up.
One of my co-workers a decade older than me explained that to her the giant radioactive monster movies when she was a kid were scary because of the ever-present fear of nuclear war & the uncertainty of what radiation could do.
Yes, true. There may have been another reason for why people spent all afternoon in the theaters and the B movie may have been made to supply extra watching material. And that reason is cool air.
In 1922 a man named Willis Carrier developed the first modern cooling system and it was introduced to the public in the Rivoli theater at Times Square on Memorial Day of that year.
Sitting through as many movies as one wished was a way for people to stay cool during the hot summers.
50’s kid speaking.
(Beginning Of The End)
That would have required Stunt Grasshoppers and advanced special effects technique. I’m pretty sure it was simply grasshoppers walking on a photo, filmed from above.
Definitely not. That movie creeped me out big time when I was a kid, and I remembered it fondly for many years. Finally saw it again about fifteen years ago and was amazed to see how very little screen time the monster has, how little of the beast was actually shown (never more than above its waist), and how uber-cheapo it looked.
Don’t forget the slasher movies of the late 60s and early 70s. Those things were totally sadistic and nihilistic in a way that movies today are not. They can be scary in their own way.
When I was rather young, I saw “The Screaming Skull” on TV, and it really knocked me for a loop. Led to a decades-long skull phobia (which, in proper Freudian terms, has now turned into a skull obsession! You should see how many skulls I have in my living room!)
Watching the movie now…I kind of admire it for the game attempt at acting from the cast, and the rather clever contrivance of the main plot. It’s a nice thriller today, but not particularly scary.
(The “screaming skulls” motif in “Jeremiah Johnson” was nice and eerie: Robert Redford’s character rides through an old Indian Graveyard – the kind with skeletons exposed to the elements – breaking a taboo. When he rides back, all the skulls are now fixed on posts with their mouths open, as if screaming. It’s a warning… Elegant use of the motif. Otherwise, just a so-so movie.)
This aspect of the Wizard of Oz has been written about a fair amount. Parents figure it’s kid-friendly because it’s rated G. But to a 5 or 6 year old the juxtaposition of monkeys, wings and said transport of toddler-sized parcels are genuinely scary. I doubt whether many 9 year olds were ever scared by it though, at least when viewed on TV.
The Wizard of Oz does indeed contain plenty of special effects that are pretty frickin’ scary to a kid. The Witch herself is pretty frightening. Or how about the trees throwing apples, or the Oz head with the flames?
Ah. When I was at the University of Illinois, we always showed that movie in our sf club film series. We particularly liked the mountains in the background as the locust marched from Urbana to Chicago.
As for scary movie, I also vote for Invaders from Mars, especially since our backyard was filled with sand when I was very young. Scared the crap out of me.
I screened Forbidden Planet to my fifteen-year-old the other day. (Yes, not a “scary” movie, by the OP’s meaning…) Usually, he plays Peanut Gallery with older films, but this held his fascination, for the most part. The scene where the Id Monster tries to break through the force field, he was riveted.
Good movies stand the test of time.
They weren’t supposed to be scary. They were supposed to sell tickets. To that end, they had to be somewhat entertaining.
Special effects capabilities were much more limited back then. Unless you were top-of-the-line, your stuff could look pretty awful. And sometimes even if you WERE top-of-the-line. I watched the Disney version od Babes in Toyland a while back (circa 1960), and was appalled at how bad the effects work was. Also, our recent experiences with effects, especially CGI, have ruined us for cheaper stuff. There’s also a creeping level of expectation as people get used to effects work. At one time New York Times journalists were fooled by Willis O’Brien’s footage from The Lost World in 1925. Today it wouldn’t fool a five year old. Women were reportedly fainting in the aisles at the 1933 premiere of King Kong. Bottom-of-the-barrel effects (such as the abysmal ones in Killers from Space might not have fooled 1950s audiences, but they didn’t look as hopelessly bad then as they do now.
I’ve come to appreciate the inventiveness of filmmakers from the 1950s with shoestring budgets. The Blob did an amazing amount with a limited repertoire of tricks. Bert I. Gordon, in Earth vs. the Giant Spider, was able to suggest a cave without having to build a set by filming his two actors on a black set and imposing stalactites on either side of them. He got a huge amount of mileage out of a sucked-dry dummy that shows up onscreen for a fraction of a second. There’s a lot of creativity among the awful effects.
Of course, as noted above, such films WERE genuinely scary to kids. The original 1951 The Thing gave me a nightmare after I first saw it on TV. Night of the Blood Beast has one of the ookiest moments on film, when a man views an x-ray and sees that the titular monster has implanted alien monster embryos inside him, to hatch later. * The aforementioned Earth vs. the Giant Spider and the odd little Italian-but-feels-like-its-Mexican Caltiki the Immortal Monster had a couple of moments of genuine scariness as you saw what the creature could do to a human being, in the latter case dissolving off flesh.
The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus. Even if you’re not a kid.
*The idea of an alien creature implanting its young inside a human body, to be nourished there and later break out of its host, a la the Ichneuman fly, dates back at least to A. E. Van Vogt’s story “Discord in Scarlet”, later bundled with “Black Destroyer” (another monster-on-a-spaceship story) and others to make The Voyage of the Space Beagle. It could have directly influenced the Ridley Scott film Alien, but I suspect that screenwriter Dan O’Bannon, who seemed more attuned to movie SF than literary SF, lifted this particular image from Night of the Blood Beast. He certainly seems to have taken the “Monster on a Spaceship” idea (which he’d used in dark Star already) from Jerome Bixby’s underappreciated It! The Terror from Beyond Space rather than from Van Vogt. The plots have too many similarities.
The Aquabats Super Show! has taken up the mantle of ridiculous low-budget sci-fi horror monsters these days. i mention this because while I find it as laughably cheesy as intended, my daughter runs out of the room if it comes on lest she see The Floating Eye of Death. I can see why it would frighten and fascinate her.
We who are jaded don’t necessarily appreciate a time when even cheesy special effects were new and powerful to those who had not seen such things before.
I’d agree with you, but…have you ever seen a grasshopper run vertically up a stalk of grass? They’re all natural-born stuntmen! Stuntbeings! Stuntinsects!!!
Plus, they knocked a couple of grasshoppers off the photograph, and they fell to the ground, so gravity was definitely involved. They must have had top-shelf special effects to edit out the grasshopper safety harnesses!
Hey, Captain Murdock. If you’ve got the “Forbidden Planet” DVD, give the “Original Theatrical Trailer” a watch. If you’ve never seen it before, you will get a laugh out of it.
I remember seeing “The Day Of The Triffids” with my dad when I was pretty young (8 or so?) and it scared the hell out of me; we had to walk home in the dark and I was scared of every bush along the way.
Less than a year ago I tried to watch “Them” with my stepson (he’s 9 now)…we made it as far as the scene at the beginning where the shopkeeper is found dead in his cellar and my kid decided it was too scary. The whole start of the movie with the little girl walking silently through the desert is really pretty creepy (we have since watched the whole thing and he thought it was pretty good).
On the other hand, he had no problems with “Forbidden Planet” and “The Creature From The Black Lagoon” a year or so ago. None of the Harry Potter movies phased him (he loves them) and SW EP 3 (where Anakin is graphically burned alive and has multiple limbs chopped off with a lightsaber) didn’t bother him in the least.
So yeah, some of those old movies are definitely scary, at least to a little kid. Maybe it’s pacing and atmosphere - lots of creepy music and foreshadowing can be much scarier than when you finally see The Monster and it’s obviously a guy in a rubber suit.
I miss “suspense” horror movies. Can’t stand the more modern splatterfests & torture porn.