The Undying Monster

The natives pushed back as hard as they could, but slowly, terrifyingly, the huge door started to open. Then the giant ape burst through, sowing fear through Skull Island — and the living room of my family’s brownstone in Park Slope.

I was all of five, and I had stumbled on the original King Kong on television. I didn’t switch it off. Instead I turned down the volume and hid behind the couch. Every time I peeked, things only got worse: now Kong was chewing on a native like a toothpick; now he was squashing another into the mud with his giant foot. My dad tells the story of how he got home, found the television on, silently, and then noticed the top of my cowering head. On screen Kong ran amok. My dad asked if I was okay. “I’m fine,” I reportedly said. Then — and I remember this distinctly — he leaned over and switched off the set, and Kong was gone, and waves of relief rolled through me.

Fast-forward about 36 years. My son, Dean, is about to turn eight. He was completely unfazed a few years ago when I first played the original King Kong for him. “Look, look — this is scary,” I said as the Skull Island climax began, eyeing him but getting nervous myself. I felt a little of that old hide-behind-the-couch instinct coming on. “What?” Dean shot back as Kong rampaged. “He looks so fake.”

Cat People

Why had I been scared and not Dean? He has certainly been exposed to all kinds of computer-enhanced on-screen mayhem that my childhood self could never have imagined. I wondered: have those fast-cutting kaleidoscopic images of action dulled his senses, paved over his fear receptors, and denied him the joy of being scared by a movie not filled with blood or over-the-top special effects? Part of me had clearly loved this feeling when I was five; otherwise I would just have turned the set off.

So with Halloween here, I decided to try a little experiment. Can my jaded seven-year-old be scared, or at least have his pulse set racing by a little old-fashioned smoke-and-mirrors, black-and-white movie making? Not with a slasher flick like Halloween that would leave him permanently scarred, mind you, and that would require me to take up permanent residence on his bottom bunk, but with movies where the terror is off screen, hidden by that giant door. I would stay away from the classics — Frankenstein from 1931 with Boris Karloff is too scary, I think — and pick movies I’d never seen.

Some children can’t be frightened by a film no matter what; others refuse to enter the room at the mere hint that a scary movie might be on. Each parent has to decide how far to go. Dean falls somewhere in the middle. He likes to be scared, relishes the thrill, but within limits. So for the past few weeks he and I have watched a series of clever horror movies from the 1940s, including a few exciting recent releases. I’m happy to report success. Dean has learned to allow his imagination to frighten him, and he doesn’t seem any the worse for wear.

Hangover Square

As a bonus he has also learned some lessons about cinema. He can now tell, almost instantly, when a character appears who was created solely for the purpose of being killed. And he has even learned some lessons about life, like this one: when you are alone with the bad guy, and he is pouring you a drink, and he asks if anyone knows that you came to meet him, you always answer: “Yes, yes. Everyone knows! I told everyone I know that I was coming! Totally.”

Our first retro cinematic terror trip took us to the films of Val Lewton, who made a series of highly literate, imagination-stoking horror films in the 1940s. His stable of directors, then just starting out, included Jacques Tourneur, who would go on to make the noir classic Out of the Past, and Robert Wise, who would later direct The Sound of Music.

Many of Lewton’s films, the most famous of which is Cat People (1942), include techniques that became the basic building blocks of scary movies that followed. Dean, alas, wasn’t impressed by Cat People. It didn’t help matters when I had to explain that the cat in the title might not be a real cat, but more likely a metaphor for repressed physical desire. He gave me a blank look.

Tourneur directed Cat People and our next selection from the set, I Walked With a Zombie, a reworking of Jane Eyre set in the Caribbean. Dean enjoyed it, and found the ending involving zombies wading into the surf “creepy,” but didn’t seem overly worried by the various untimely deaths.

I had better luck with The Body Snatcher, a period adaptation of a Robert Louis Stevenson story that features a nuanced, chilling performance by Karloff. His character sells body parts to doctors for medical experiments, and eventually begins killing people when the cadavers run out. Bela Lugosi gets on to the kill-for-parts scheme, and the two meet in private. Karloff offers him a drink before asking, “Does anyone know you are here?” “Oh no,” Dean said. “He’s going to get him drunk, and then he’s going to kill him.” Spoiler alert: Dean was right.

The Body Snatcher

Three mid-’40s horror films directed by John Brahm: Hangover Square, The Lodger and The Undying Monster are loosely comparable to Lewton’s. The Lodger is a variation of a time-worn plot, in this case Jack the Ripper, and stars Laird Cregar, a heavyset actor with a singular ability to look really troubled. Dean paid rapt attention to this one, even if in his excitement he kept referring to the Ripper as the “Roger.”

And here, finally, terror took hold, as it had in that Park Slope brownstone so many decades ago. It was not what the viewer sees, but what one of the Ripper victims sees, that brought it on. She looks at the camera as the lens gets closer, her eyes darting from here to there. Is anyone nearby who can help her? She is so scared she cannot scream; she tries, she struggles, but it just won’t come out. It is a wonderful example of horror-movie making where you are scared even though you don’t see what’s terrifying, and you don’t even hear it. You are trapped in a foggy, black-and-white dream where your mouth opens and delivers only silent acknowledgment that you will soon be dead.

Afterward, in our apartment, silence.

Dean broke it.

“Now that was scary!” he said.

I spent the night on the bottom bunk.