The Unholy Four: Films That Freaked Me Out

On the topic of movies that emotionally scarred me or freaked me out – where to begin? Ever since I was traumatized by the trailer for Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965) incongruously slipped into a kiddie matinee of the animated film Gay Purr-ee (1962) that I attended with my mother and sister while a fresh-eyed youngster, I have fruitlessly sought out other such experiences. I can’t narrow it down to a single film, as I have countless favorites; all of them leaving me scarred and freaked out in a positive way. When pressured to come out with a specific film, I must cite four titles, two of which are acknowledged classics, one a routine programmer, with the fourth and final one considered a lavish and expensive misfire.


The first, Them! (1954), screened on TV while I was a very impressionable tyke haunted me for years afterwards. Everyone recognizes this film as being the first and best of the giant bug movies of the Fifties. To an eight-year-old boy just beginning to recognize the mechanisms of the world around him, Them! is an especially horrific experience. Beginning with a traumatized little girl roaming the Nevada desert clad in a bathrobe and clutching a doll, Them! tapped into my very real fears as a child. Dependant on adults that could be snatched up and eaten by giant ants, I was keenly aware that my suburban security was a tenuous one. Unlike other creature features of its era, Them! builds up slowly and gradually before its unconvincing mechanical beasties arrive. Until our first full-on glimpse of the ants during a desert windstorm, we hear a high-pitched whine with the characters being killed off screen. In one memorable early sequence, two policemen discover a trashed general store; ants swirling around some spilled sugar serve as a foreshadowing. As one policeman goes off to headquarters, the other hears a distinctive wail in the high desert winds. Walking outside camera range, the policeman lets out a terrified scream. How effective is mere suggestion …


What made Them! so unsettling for myself was how realistic and in tune the film was to the mundane and everyday world that surrounded me at that time. Unlike other horror films that were usually set in some undefined middle European locale or shadowy castle, Them! was set in a stark universe of military barracks, clinics and sewer systems. More disconcerting still was the anxiety expressed by all the grownups in the film, unable to comprehend the mysterious menace swirling all around them. Older people were supposed to know everything, and keep little kids like me safe from harm. Viewing the film today, my favorite scene is the one in which a lady psychiatrist trots out a long stream of clinical terms intended to diagnose the traumatized girl’s condition. A whiff of insectoid joy juice under her nostrils sends the girl cowering in a corner shrieking “Them! Them! Them!” This scene would have a personal resonance for me later on, when I too would be diagnosed as a troubled child and be subjected to other “hit and miss” analysis by concerned adults.


The Saturday afternoon creature feature wasn’t done with me just yet. The following week, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) was broadcast. Also set in the ordinary and commonplace, Don Siegel’s classic of paranoia left me quaking in my knee pants. In a small California town, very much like the small California town I was growing up in, pod people from beyond the stars arrive to take the identities of the family next door. Other than the few shots set in a greenhouse – where alien pods regurgitate unformed human replicas in geysers of soap bubbles, there were no conventional monsters. The creatures in Body Snatchers are your friends and family, smiling and welcoming, only dropping their guises when other human beings’ backs are turned. The snotty, superior condescension of the pod people are in fact reminiscent of an impatient adult lecturing a child.

Body Snatchers has many themes and ideas that are far too terrifying for the unprepared youngster to grasp. How do we know the teachers at school really have our best interests at heart? The friendly policeman that we’re supposed to go to if we’re lost in an unfamiliar neighborhood, how do we know that he’s not some malevolent monster from outer space? William Cameron Menzies’ Invaders from Mars (1953) had many of the same ideas, but relied on a dime store surrealism to offset its scares. The one-two punch of Them! and Invasion of the Body Snatchers on my fragile mind was almost too much to bear. Don’t trust the squeaking noise you hear late at night down the hall from your bedroom …. And furthermore, don’t trust the people who say they’re your parents asleep in the next room!


Speaking of family, yet another film that I saw with my mother and sister in 1972, at a regal downtown theater usually reserved for Walt Disney children’s matinees set my brain awhirl with all manner of cinematic possibilities. Tales from the Crypt (1972), directed by Freddie Francis is not even five minutes old when a pre-Dynasty Joan Collins bashes in her loving husband’s brains out with a poker all over the evening newspaper. More grisly shocks were in store. Hearts torn out, hands lopped off, wicked wardens falling into walls of razor blades – it wasn’t fit for a young boy that had heretofore been nursed on Comics Code-approved pap. I spent most of the film hiding my face in my hands and I loved every last minute of it.


I knew that Tales from the Crypt was based on EC comics that were snatched up and banned long before I came on the scene. I also knew that the comics were the work of William Gaines, the avuncular hippie-like publisher of Mad magazine, a humor periodical enjoyed by myself and my parents alike. I was totally unprepared for the succession of grisly shocks at this matinee. I was simultaneously appalled and delighted – this omnibus of horrors appealed to my childlike sense of right and wrong, while shocking me with all manner of sights and sounds.


Tales from the Crypt was Amicus Productions’ most popular film to date. Based on the American EC horror comics such as Vault of Horror and Haunt of Fear, Tales from the Crypt was one in a long succession of portmanteau films the studio first began with Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors. William Gaines allegedly had mixed feelings about the result. Producer Milton Subotsky allegedly hated the film’s grimness, yearning to return to the escapist musicals he had started his career with, such as Rock! Rock! Rock! As a director, Freddie Francis was capable of masterpieces (The Skull, 1965) to some of the worst dreck imaginable (Trog! The Vampire Happening, Son of Dracula). He would enjoy later success as a world-class cinematographer and would keep steadily working right up until his death in 1999.


Viewing it today, where it is paired with its far inferior sequel Vault of Horror (1974) on a Midnite Movies Double Feature DVD, Tales from the Crypt remains a superior horror programmer, still vastly superior to the uneven HBO TV series that bears its name. Its importance to me was in that it forced me to look at the people behind the camera, being keenly aware that this blood-drenched flick was originally the work of a man who flooded newsstands with a beatific, grinning Alfred E. Neumann offering up laughter and good cheer. I began to actively seek out other films directed by Francis, and began to appreciate the transition that the written word takes before it is brought to the screen. Where Them! and Invasion of the Body Snatchers had twisted my head around with fright, it was Tales from the Crypt that had twisted my head around to the notion of art in cinema.


The fourth and final film in this roundup is one that is included in many horror genre surveys, although it is generally not considered to be a “horror film.” The Day of the Locust (1975), director John Schlesinger’s adaptation of Nathaniel West’s novel of Hollywood life in the Thirties, is not well remembered today, but the film had a far greater impact on my budding mind that The Exorcist (1973) did a few years earlier.

Centered on a collection of film factory fringe types a few steps away from the soup lines, Locust features an impressive cast. William Atherton plays Todd Hackett, an up-and-coming art director with eyes on aspiring actress Faye Greener (the incredible Karen Black) who lives across the way in a crumbling Hollywood duplex with her ex-vaudevillian father (Burgess Meredith). The characters try to claw their way up the tinseltown ladder with no success, and Faye must turn to prostitution in order to pay for her father’s funeral. Faye then sets her eyes nebbish accountant Homer Simpson (Donald Sutherland) as a potential meal ticket, but things fall apart at a disastrous drunken orgy. All the characters converge at a Hollywood movie premiere, where Homer brutally stomps a child to death in a fit of anger and despair. The crowd rises up in mob vengeance to kill Simpson, and transform into faceless monstrosities –the “locusts” of the title -- in a hallucinatory riot.


The Day of the Locust, in its wild and expressionistic final half hour was by far the most horrifying thing I had seen on film up to that point. Seeing it in my confused adolescence, I was drawn to the sexual undercurrents running throughout the film and was left breathless by the orgasmic intensity of its climax. Far more importantly, Locust would smack me across the head with its brutal truths. A native of Bakersfield, I grew up in the shadows of the Great Depression, acutely aware of all the people around me who had come to California in search of a dream. Most found disappointment and despair, and carried on a vicarious life through the popular media. The displaced Okies and Arkies from the Dust Bowl worshipped their movie stars and ball players and politicians from afar – but would rise up and smash their idols if inclined to do so.

Actor Karen Black appears to have a similar “love/hate” relationship with the film. When I asked her to autograph a poster The Day of the Locust at a movie convention, she threw up her fingers in a sign of the cross. Later, she would inscribe one of her glossy 8 x 10’s of her as Greener in the shadow of the Hollywood sign with one of her choice bits of dialogue. “Hollywood parties – PUKE! Best to you Greg! Karen Black.”


When it came time for me to make my own horror film about Bakersfield, I made sure to include plenty of clips from The Day of the Locust. With able assist from editor extraordinaire Damon Packard, footage from the riot scene was interwoven with my story about a young male hustler who falls under the influence of an evil group of powerful homosexuals. Entitled Lords Part One, the six-minute short is a meditation on a local legend that is just as true as any other story to come out of Hollywood.


Of the four films mentioned above, I see no real common thread. Them! Beware of giant ants. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Beware of other people. Tales from the Crypt. Be aware of the people behind the camera. The Day of the Locust. Be aware of the power of cinema. Perhaps the best we can all hope for is to simply remain aware ….