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Night Terrors - Sort Of: Helen Chappell
Night Terrors - Sort Of...
by Helen Chappell
Like most kids like me, I was single, dateless and alone on weekend nights. While my brother and other popular kids were out doing whatever popular kids did back in the Dark Ages of the Latter Half of the 20th Century, I was home, armed with a snitched bag of chips and an old black-and-white TV conveniently located as far away from sleeping adults as possible.
When you hit your teens in those three- or four-broadcast-channel days, you moved your viewing from the after-school cartoon hosts (Captain Chesapeake? Sally Starr, anyone?) to the Three Stooges and Popeye before dinner. After the sitcoms and private eye shows and the parental units going to bed, after the eleven o’clock news (always deadly and ugly), it was time to settle in for the late-night horror movies.
Gore De Vol
Maybe you remember Roland, or Zacherly or Gore De Vol or Elvira or some other horror host. Maybe you don’t, depending on where you lived and what you were up to on Saturday night down in the TV cave with the old black-and-white. But you might have all-too-clear memories of the absolutely dreadful, cheap’n’cheesy horror movies they screened in those dead hours. The cool kids may have seen them, more or less, at the drive-in (remember drive-ins? We had one on Route 50 and another one somewhere over the rainbow near Denton. When the drive-ins weren’t screening any of the terrible, terri-
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ble movies The Colonel forced Elvis to make, they filled up the screen with screaming Yvonne Lyme, Raymond Burr facing down Godzilla, and so many other actors either on their way up or their way down.
After a few weekends of people in gorilla suits with a diving helmet on his/her/their head terrorizing 38-year-old actors pretending to be high school sophomores around someone’s swimming pool in the San Fernando Valley, or an attenuated Bela Lugosi, long past his prime and tragically drug addicted, or Boris Karloff wrapped in toilet paper stomping around like a revivalist mummy ~ well, you sort of grudgingly start to enjoy this genre.
Which is a good thing, because when Blood Count ran out of the classics like Dracula, Frankenstein and King Kong, the affiliate started buying or renting bottom-of-thebarrel absolute dreck. What John Waters would call so bad it’s good, and if it’s bad enough for John Waters, it’s bad enough for me.
And the more C- and D-List the Saturday-night screamers became, the more entertaining they were in their sheer awfulness. Now, many movie mavens see Plan Nine from Outer Space as the worst movie ever made, and for a shoestring production filmed in the USA, it might be. My personal favorite U.S. Awfulness is Queen of Outer Space, starring none other than Zsa Zsa Gabor, which has to be seen to be believed.
These grade D movies have earned their reputations as howling headbangers. But the true Bad Horror Film Buff knows you can stoop even lower than these two classics.
Anyone who has seen a vampire film from Mexico starring Abel Salazar as the blood-sucking count, or Tom Selleck’s film debut in a Philippine masterpiece so awful I’ve blocked out the name, as has Wikipedia. . . well, there they are, the pits of D-List horror. [Editor’s note: For anyone interested, the Selleck flick was called Daughters of Satan]
Wooden acting, wooden dub-
bing, cheap sets that fall over when an actor accidentally bumps into them, boom mics hanging over the ingenue’s boobs, the wig falling off Senora Blood Countess as the hero stabs her with a rubber stake. . .
These films have it all. Movies shot on Scotch tape, sound recorded on a dying reel-to-reel tape, lighting done with flashlights and small appliance bulbs, costumes picked up from rental exhumations or worse, filmed on a budget of 35 cents, direct to the grindhouse or the drive-in. If I could understand the dialogue, dubbed into Spanglish, I’d be lucky, because Spanglish is the only Spanish I have.
Happily, you don’t need to speak Spanish or poorly dubbed English
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Night Terrors because you can more or less figure what little plot there is from the spiderwebs and shadows that cast the action into shadow at the high points of the drama. Such as it is. Which made the trend for Japanese monster films all the more delicious. As I noted before, nothing could be more entertaining than Perry Mason fighting the fifty-foot-tall dinosaur who is obviously a guy in a rubber suit. Truly a cousin of the Creature from the Black Lagoon on steroids, but much more fun because he’s able to stomp out Tokyo with a single scaly foot and wreak a lot more havoc than some dinky vampire or mummy.
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Godzilla is iconic. He’s the monster I want on my side at the end of the world.
But then, there was Mothra. When I was living in New York and on the edge of the punk/New Wave scene, there was a sort of cult around this giant moth who lived on an island and, I think (the plot was a little unsteady), was controlled by two tiny fairy ladies who sang to the giant moth.
Of course, Mothra wreaked havoc on Tokyo and a lot of other places, but what I remember is my friends in the band The Miamis singing their one and only hit, “Mothra’s Island,” at CBGB’s.
Good times.
In the ensuing decades, filmmakers have figured out there are big, mainstream bucks in horror movies and have acted accordingly.
Horror and the supernatural are mainstream now, and more explicitly gory, while often weaker of plot and heavier on the contrivances, with plot holes so big you could drive a truck through them. And a lot of this boring content gets Rick Kollinger
streamed, so it’s even more ubiquitous than ever. Every once in a while, you get a good one, but that vast unintentionally hilarious Saturday night desert and its hammy hosts are gone forever.
In memory of my friend Rick Kollinger, who loved cheesy movies, too. We never got our film review show on Easton Cable, but we had some laughs.
Helen Chappell is the creator of the Sam and Hollis mystery series and the Oysterback stories, as well as The Chesapeake Book of the Dead. Under her pen names, Rebecca Baldwin and Caroline Brooks, she has published a number of historical novels.
