They're coming to get you, Barbra...

Okay, here's exciting news for horror movie fans as Halloween approaches...

Uh, maybe I should start again. Because I'm not a huge horror fan. Sure, I've seen a few, and I went through a period in my college years when I pretty much rented ONLY horror movies, and the worst the better--I thought the worst ones were maybe the highest form of comedy (I remember pretty much laughing all the way through Blood Feast).

But other than that brief period (which I suppose was ruined by the TV show Mystery Science Theatre 3000) I haven't been much into horror films, so maybe I need to find a new way to start this. Let me see. Let me see...

Okay. Got it...

I mentioned a few posts ago that I used to be terrified of zombies. My fear goes all the way back to when I was 12 years old and saw the film Night of the Living Dead. The film itself is a little scary, and I guess for the time that it was made it was VERY scary (at least Roger Ebert thought so). But by itself it's no more frightening than a number of other films out there. What made the film scary for me was the context in which I first saw it. I was at a summer camp called Trooper Island, which was a Kentucky State Police-run camp for disadvantaged boys, many of whom may have previously gotten into scrapes with the law. No, I was NOT a lawbreaking child, and my family was not THAT poor. But we lived across the street from the state trooper in charge of the camp, and he let my younger brothers and me tag along with him for a week. All day long we did the camp activities with the real camp goers, and in the evenings--while the kids slept together in hot, sweaty cabins--we slept in the air conditioned guest rooms of the main house.

It was scary being away from home and my parents for such a long time. More than that, there was constant talk about a "sea creature" that crawled out of the river and ate children. Even more, I was intimidated by the tough kids at the camp, who cursed a lot and kept threatening to beat up each other--and sometimes me! One kid in particular picked on me every day, until an event that ended the bullying (but that's a story for another day). Another kid--though he was supposedly no older than 14--looked every bit of 22. He was almost six feet tall and overweight and had long, stringy hair that was in his face to the point that you could rarely see his eyes, and he pretty much dominated all of the rest of us. His name was Bophus. I don't think that was his real name, but I never would have asked him what it was. He told me my first dirty joke ever. I laughed out loud at it, though I had no idea what it meant. I still remember it. Ask me sometime to tell it to you (I "get it" now).

And so, on the last night of camp, the police officers decided that it would be a good idea to show all of us ten to fourteen year olds the film Night of the Living Dead. We were all crowded into what was basically a barn. This was prior to the age of VHS or Beta players, so we watched the film on an actual film projector, the kind that if the film wasn't balanced correctly on the reel the image would shake and the audio would accompany it. This happened several times during the film, and occasionally the film would have to be stopped so that whoever was running the projector could pull out a flashlight and fix the thing.

All of this, I think, made the film scarier than it would normally have been. The shaky images, the grainy film quality, it all contributed to a sense of unease. And as the film progressed we kids got quieter and quieter.

At one of the tenser moments in the film, several arms reach through what had moments before looked like solid walls and grab one of the characters. The music coming from the projector rose to a crescendo, and everyone in the barn let out a gasp and recoiled. And at that exact moment, one of the teenage camp counselors, who helped the state troopers in the daytime, burst into the barn. He was dressed in a Halloween costume of the Creature from the Black Lagoon and he was covered with weeds that had been pulled out of the river. I recognized the scream. I was pretty sure the creature was my neighbor John, who was in the same grade as my sister Ann and who was a counselor at the camp that summer.

I wasn't frightened at all by John's Halloween costume, but I was frightened by what happened next. Bophus, apparently, was very much spooked by the "creature." He leaped up from his chair and shouted "Son of BITCH! It's the sea creature!" Then, on instinct I think. Bophus grabbed the metal chair he'd been sitting in, folded it quickly, and brought it down like a weapon right across the top of the head of the creature. I'm sure he'd seen this action performed by many professional wrestlers on Saturday afternoon TV.  I could hear John or whoever was inside the costume let out a curse word, and then I watched as Bophus pulled the chair back up and brought it back down again and again onto the head of the counselor, shouting "son of a bitch" over and over as he did so.  Several of the other kids started shouting, "Kiss his ass, Bophus!" and "Yeah! Get him!" and a couple of the other kids even started to join Bophus in the beating. That's when the movie stopped, the lights came on, and the state police officers jumped into the fray. It took two of them to get Bophus off of the poor teenager in the costume, and I saw a crazed look of fear in the troubled boy's eyes as the police officers dragged him outside. I think several of the other boys who had joined in were just looking to beat someone up, but Bophus had REALLY been frightened by the "sea creature."

About ten minutes later the movie resumed, and the blood in the movie seemed even more real now that I had seen the actual blood on the face and the shirt of my neighbor John, who had indeed been the person in the costume.

The ending of the movie, of course, was deeply troubling to a 12 year old used to the hero prevailing, and I went home that night with images of sea creatures and zombies and folding chairs and punching in my head. And I guess I've been afraid of zombies ever since then.

And the point of this whole post? That you can watch the entire movie online on YouTube for free (Thanks to a copyright snafu by the producer of the film, it is now in the public domain). There are no sea creatures or Bophus's in the film, but still, you can watch it on your computer and see for yourself the genesis of my fear of zombies.




I can't see the video.)