Nightmares on Celluloid
I grew up in a family that loved Halloween. My grandparents would adorn their home in Falls Church with fake cobwebs and place a terra cotta jack-o'-lantern with its illuminated grin flanked by genuine pumpkins. My grandmother would keep a tattered black witch's hat (which, I'm relatively sure, was older than me) in the closet which she would throw on to hand out fistfuls of Snickers and Milky Ways to the neighborhood trick-or-treaters.
My father had taken this seasonal memento mori and made it a year-round thing. My love of film really is something descended down from my father and my grandfather but whereas my grandfather favored a good, old John Wayne picture (Rio Bravo and The Quiet Man usually being at the top of the list and, subsequently, the top of mine), my father leaned more into horror with a particular penchant for the Universal Monsters. Watching these old, black and white flicks nearly as old as my grandfather on dusty old Betamax tapes were regular occasions in the Stone household right there alongside episodes of the original Star Trek and not constrained to the month of October. I was doing Bela Lugosi impressions on the playground and screaming "IT"S ALIVE!!" like Doctor Frankenstein before I could tie my shoes.
Those films have the feeling of cinematic comfort food, teleporting me right back to that wood-paneled basement where I spent most of my time at home during my childhood. Forget all the Halloween candy in the world, when October rolls around, I'm usually holed up somewhere watching the horror movies I grew up with, the ones that were just spooky enough to make me a little anxious but fun enough where I could live with the jump scares. Dracula and Frankenstein are each classics, of course, but I really love Bride of Frankenstein and The Wolf Man of that original Universal crop; Bride because it both deepens its characters and escalates the action and scale of the proceedings and Wolf Man because it's moody and tortured as all get out taking full advantage of setting the story in the atmospheric English countryside. As I've gotten older, I've warmed up more to The Invisible Man whom I thought was lame as a kid because it was just some dude that nobody could see when he took off his bandages and I've learned to appreciate The Creature from the Black Lagoon whom I thought was just too damn weird and out of place growing up (part of the charm, I suppose); I've always thought The Mummy sucks and still kind of do. And even though they've always been lesser films, Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man and House of Frankenstein blew my mind as a child; they were crossovers before I even knew crossovers could be possible, before Superman could team up with Batman or the Avengers take on the X-Men. And having said that, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is a goddamn classic. I revisited that flick over the weekend and it still stands among the best of Universal's horror line, certainly the best film the classic 1940s comedy duo ever put out.
After Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Mummy lapsed into public domain in the 1950s, the Hammer Studios in England put their own spin on the classic horror characters, most iconically with Christopher Lee's interpretation of the ubiquitous Transylvanian vampire. My father had dismissed them as lesser remakes of his favorite films but they always terrified me and still unnerve me all these years later. Christopher Lee is FUCKING SCARY as Count Dracula and, being European productions, Hammer was able to depict more graphic content than their American counterparts had decades previously. Blood never ran redder than it did in a Hammer Horror flick and it ran often, usually accompanied by token dismemberment and a higher body count. Sensationalism aside, the Hammer Horror films leaned more into their Gothic roots with castles, manors, and deconsecrated churches that actually felt like the real thing rather than the obvious Hollywood sound stages employed by Universal. Now, the only truly good Hammer Horror films are the first three installments of their Dracula franchise (Horror of Dracula, Dracula: Prince of Darkness, and Dracula Has Risen from the Grave) but what they do, they do quite effectively.
Slasher flicks are weird beast for me. My dad wasn't a big fan; he hates the jump scares that the sub-genre often relies on and recalled that the only film he ever walked out of was the original 1978 Halloween; when pressed, he confessed he couldn't stand it when the killer "was fucking around the house". I kind of get that; I certainly think jump scares are overdone usually as a cheap gimmick (Narratively, I would argue you put a jump scare early on to draw audiences in and another about halfway through as a reminder of the stakes but I could argue my ideal story structure for horror film in a completely separate post). As such, I don't really like most slashers but the first Halloween really is a classic as is the first and third (Dream Warriors) Nightmare on Elm Street films. Literally every Friday the 13th flick is absolute fucking garbage and while the first Scream is fine, the series gets progressively weirder to the point where I don't even get what's going on by the third...and there's a fourth beyond it!
I refer to those 70s and 80s horror flicks as time capsules, transporting me to a time of cheap video stores in shopping centers and strip malls, a clear indicator that we were no longer in summer as they gradually took over cable TV for the month. For kid whose father took him to walk to the top of The Exorcist steps before he could barely walk himself, they were an education into the more sinister potential that cinema could offer, a celebration of the darkness as the neighborhood grew colder but something that could and was revisited year-round. It could be something as simple as watching the Thriller music video or playing an old Castlevania game but there has always been a definite appeal to horror as long as it's done well; nothing that feels too excessive in terms of gore, which is another big turn-off in the genre for me. But a good horror flick has always had an appeal all its own in the face of things that go bump in the night.
My father had taken this seasonal memento mori and made it a year-round thing. My love of film really is something descended down from my father and my grandfather but whereas my grandfather favored a good, old John Wayne picture (Rio Bravo and The Quiet Man usually being at the top of the list and, subsequently, the top of mine), my father leaned more into horror with a particular penchant for the Universal Monsters. Watching these old, black and white flicks nearly as old as my grandfather on dusty old Betamax tapes were regular occasions in the Stone household right there alongside episodes of the original Star Trek and not constrained to the month of October. I was doing Bela Lugosi impressions on the playground and screaming "IT"S ALIVE!!" like Doctor Frankenstein before I could tie my shoes.
Those films have the feeling of cinematic comfort food, teleporting me right back to that wood-paneled basement where I spent most of my time at home during my childhood. Forget all the Halloween candy in the world, when October rolls around, I'm usually holed up somewhere watching the horror movies I grew up with, the ones that were just spooky enough to make me a little anxious but fun enough where I could live with the jump scares. Dracula and Frankenstein are each classics, of course, but I really love Bride of Frankenstein and The Wolf Man of that original Universal crop; Bride because it both deepens its characters and escalates the action and scale of the proceedings and Wolf Man because it's moody and tortured as all get out taking full advantage of setting the story in the atmospheric English countryside. As I've gotten older, I've warmed up more to The Invisible Man whom I thought was lame as a kid because it was just some dude that nobody could see when he took off his bandages and I've learned to appreciate The Creature from the Black Lagoon whom I thought was just too damn weird and out of place growing up (part of the charm, I suppose); I've always thought The Mummy sucks and still kind of do. And even though they've always been lesser films, Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man and House of Frankenstein blew my mind as a child; they were crossovers before I even knew crossovers could be possible, before Superman could team up with Batman or the Avengers take on the X-Men. And having said that, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is a goddamn classic. I revisited that flick over the weekend and it still stands among the best of Universal's horror line, certainly the best film the classic 1940s comedy duo ever put out.
After Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Mummy lapsed into public domain in the 1950s, the Hammer Studios in England put their own spin on the classic horror characters, most iconically with Christopher Lee's interpretation of the ubiquitous Transylvanian vampire. My father had dismissed them as lesser remakes of his favorite films but they always terrified me and still unnerve me all these years later. Christopher Lee is FUCKING SCARY as Count Dracula and, being European productions, Hammer was able to depict more graphic content than their American counterparts had decades previously. Blood never ran redder than it did in a Hammer Horror flick and it ran often, usually accompanied by token dismemberment and a higher body count. Sensationalism aside, the Hammer Horror films leaned more into their Gothic roots with castles, manors, and deconsecrated churches that actually felt like the real thing rather than the obvious Hollywood sound stages employed by Universal. Now, the only truly good Hammer Horror films are the first three installments of their Dracula franchise (Horror of Dracula, Dracula: Prince of Darkness, and Dracula Has Risen from the Grave) but what they do, they do quite effectively.
Slasher flicks are weird beast for me. My dad wasn't a big fan; he hates the jump scares that the sub-genre often relies on and recalled that the only film he ever walked out of was the original 1978 Halloween; when pressed, he confessed he couldn't stand it when the killer "was fucking around the house". I kind of get that; I certainly think jump scares are overdone usually as a cheap gimmick (Narratively, I would argue you put a jump scare early on to draw audiences in and another about halfway through as a reminder of the stakes but I could argue my ideal story structure for horror film in a completely separate post). As such, I don't really like most slashers but the first Halloween really is a classic as is the first and third (Dream Warriors) Nightmare on Elm Street films. Literally every Friday the 13th flick is absolute fucking garbage and while the first Scream is fine, the series gets progressively weirder to the point where I don't even get what's going on by the third...and there's a fourth beyond it!
I refer to those 70s and 80s horror flicks as time capsules, transporting me to a time of cheap video stores in shopping centers and strip malls, a clear indicator that we were no longer in summer as they gradually took over cable TV for the month. For kid whose father took him to walk to the top of The Exorcist steps before he could barely walk himself, they were an education into the more sinister potential that cinema could offer, a celebration of the darkness as the neighborhood grew colder but something that could and was revisited year-round. It could be something as simple as watching the Thriller music video or playing an old Castlevania game but there has always been a definite appeal to horror as long as it's done well; nothing that feels too excessive in terms of gore, which is another big turn-off in the genre for me. But a good horror flick has always had an appeal all its own in the face of things that go bump in the night.
