I have seen several stories — a lot, actually — about scary movies this Halloween. But we are (mostly) all adults here, and the stories all seem to ask about movies which scared us up to the present time. What about when we were kids? (I’m thinking around age seven or so, old enough to think somewhat critically, but young enough to be easily convinced that the horrible image on the screen might be real.
I was seven in 1960. Those were scary times. The threat of nuclear annihilation was thick in the air, but society was still slumbering in its Eisenhower nap. For my part, I adored two weekly programs, Strange Tales of Science Fiction and Chiller. I spent a lot of hours on the floor, too close to the TV, on Saturday afternoons. Some of the movies were sheer hooie that even a seven year old could spot, others were (I thought) quite good. Two scared me a lot.
The first was “Invaders From Mars” from the early 1950s. The main character was a boy of about my age who sees a flying saucer (it was the ‘50’s, after all) crash-land into a sandpit behind his house. Please excuse me if I scramble plot details a little bit. They are a little fuzzy after all this time. Shortly thereafter a man walks into the sandpit and is sucked into a quickly disappearing hole in the sand. Later on, that same man reappears and commits some act of sabotage. He then drops dead.
The boy tries to tell everything he has seen, but no one believes him, not even his mother. The part that scare me was how the Martians exerted their mind control. They inserted a small object which resembled an old diode into the base of a victim’s brain. After this, the victim does whatever the Martians want him to do. They then explode the diode. Towards the end of the movie, they have the boy’s mother and start the process of inserting a diode into her brain.
The plot was thin and unbelievable, as were the special effects. The Martians were ludicrous. My grandmother said their outfits looked like “green unions suits.” But the idea of that little spinning thing being slid into someone medulla oblongata scared the bejabbers out of me.
The second film was called “X: The Unknown.” It was a “blob” movie. In this case the blob is some mindless radioactive thing than comes out of a fissure in the ground in the Yorkshire moors whenever anything radioactive was nearby. After eating the radioactive thing it returns to the fissure. Every time it eats, it grows a bit. After one large meal at a reactor in a research facility it grows to the size of a house. Anyone who was anywhere near when it passes by receives a fatal dose of radiation. If they are close enough, they melt. (One guy does this, on camera.)The entire film is creepy and foreboding, and quite suspenseful. At the end of the film, one is (well, I was) left with the hint that more such things are down there. And they are hungry.
So...what movie scared you when you were seven years old?