Bela Lugosi's Dead

Well, when I was younger this was what the weird, cool kids listened to. He is indeed dead, by the way.

When the calendar turned to October I thought I might spend some of the month writing about something I really love watching, and that would be scary movies. Life got in the way, as it does. This isn't a tragedy, but I've got a few free minutes now and I've been watching some "scary" flicks lately, so it's on my mind.

"American Scary," the documentary I mentioned a day ago in my previous entry, focused almost entirely on the Creature Feature host. The movies? Not at all. One last point about those hosts of the past.....I've flipped through the book "Bowling Alone" and to an extent I agree with Robert Putnam. Technology is not a replacement for human interaction. The advances made in our media, likewise, have consolidated matters to an extent that what is "local" is constantly shifting. In fact, a person living today can completely and totally cocoon themselves in a world of like-minded fellow citizens...to the exclusion of any other point of view.

What's this gotta do with Creature Feature hosts?

Well, when the small fibers that make up a community are snipped, little by little that sense of commonality disappears. To a very small extent, those entertainers brought us together regardless of race, creed, or political leanings. There weren't "right-wing" hosts, or "liberal" hosts, it was as shared experience.

Plus, there's a "charm" factor to those guys and gals. And, obviously, I'm feeling nostalgic about it all. You rock, Count Gore DeVol.

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Back to the movies, themselves. I digress too much, I realize this.

As I've said on this page before, my mom introduced me to the monster movie. We loved 'em, and still do. A silly Godzilla flick can break up the monotony of a rainy afternoon as well - if not better- than a video game. We can watch them and goof on them together - and have fun doing it.

Not really anything scary there, though.

Shall I do a list? hmm.....when you're out of ideas, go with a list. Here's a few real oldies, and I'll add more modern movies in the days to come. Not necessarily scary, but there are creepy moments in all of them.

Dracula (1931): one of the best, and you can tell it's great because it defined - for nearly 70 years anyway -the image of the vampire. Yeah, there's a flick that pre-dated this one called "Nosferatu" that's a silent film and whose antagonist is an ugly beast, but Lugosi's monster has screen presence. He's not really scary, but commands every scene he's in. The movie does a good job of paring down the novel it's based on into an hour, so stuff's cut out. I'm no film historian, but in this movie the villain steals the show - and I have no idea if this was the first instance of that phenomena occurring on film or not.

Freaks (1932): this one haunted me. I think I saw it around '88 or '89 as part of a cult film festival. Banned in several countries and chopped up by various editors, it's something of a legendary film. Directed by the same guy (Todd Browning) who made "Dracula," it tells the story of a greedy woman doomed to a gruesome fate. The final scenes are far more creepy and chilling than most of the modern scary movies.

The Black Cat (1934): interesting film that addresses war, the human psyche, perversions, Satanic cults, and revenge. Lugosi and Boris Karloff are the stars, former WW1 vets who find each other in post-war Hungary. It ends in awful violence, and somehow what the viewer doesn't see is worse than (as in the torture porn movies today) what you can see. The movie plays games with the "who's the real bad guy?" plot, and in the end everyone gets what's coming to them.

Bride of Frankenstein (1935) : better then the original, which is pretty good. This one gives us a persecuted monster (yeah, played by Boris Karloff) being chased from place to place by people who are revolted by his appearance, even if he saves them from (for example) drowning. The mad scientists seek to give the poor bastard a mate, but- as he says - "she hate me, like them" or something like that. The monster in this movie shows himself to be a true Roman noble, with his last words being "we belong dead". Then.....KA-blooie!

OK, OK, so this is a bunch of old movies. And I left out a few I liked, like Creature from the Black Lagoon ( a redux of the "lost world" story) and the first Godzilla (a barely disguised atomic bomb allegory). What I notice is that the older movies aren't afraid of PLOT or DIALOGUE. My kids sit there and say "Dad, why do they talk so much?" It's true, the characters in the movie have extensive scenes of expository dialogue that - I guess - is too much for the ADD mind-set of today. They also tell STORIES. There are action sequences in them, to be sure, but these movies aren't the current dreck of action scene after action scene after action scene. In reality, these are little more than dramatic stories that have supernatural or sci-fi elements to them. Most are tragedies, or at least have tragic figures in them. None are especially SCARY, as we understand that term right now. There's no blood or gore, not much in terms of on-screen violence....but what is implied is worse. I guess that's what I find unsettling...that uneasy, creeped-out feeling I get when I watch some of these movies.

So, maybe watch a couple of these in the next few days. As Lugosi says, near the end of Dracula, "there are worse things than death."