A True Story from the Author’s past:

Even as a child, I loved going to the movies.

I loved seeing movies. I still do. But seeing them at home, even in this modern era where almost any movie you might want to see is available to you at the touch of a button, is not the same thing as seeing them in a theatre. There is a certain epic quality to seeing a great movie while sitting on a plush seat in an auditorium where you are just one of many laughing or cheering or gasping or weeping, that will never be matched by the home experience, which is so perversely so uninvolving by contrast that people routinely take breaks three or four times in the course of ninety minutes. Movies at theatres swallow you whole. Movies in your living room offer many avenues for escape.

So as a kid I went to the movies a lot, and I got to appreciate the finer or more appalling qualities of various theatres. This one always had the stickiest floors. This one had the best popcorn. This one always had sound bleeding over from the adjacent auditorium. And so on.

The theatre with the biggest fucking attitude problem was the Mamaroneck Playhouse.

You have no idea.

I used to go to that theatre a lot because they ran monster movie double-features as weekend matinees. Bliss!

But its manager must have suffered a terrible case of post-traumatic stress syndrome, because when you got there, there was always a long line of customers leading out the door and onto the sidewalk, due to his policy of not allowing the audience in until he gave them a piece of his mind. These are the rules, he’d tell us. Any horseplay, and you will be ejected. Any smoking, and you will be ejected. Any thrown objects, and you will be ejected. This is a civilized movie theatre, he would say, angrily, and you will act like people, not animals!

He was really, really angry about this.

It must have burned in his breast when he went home at night.

I must have heard this speech half a dozen times, and as a result I would sit on my hands throughout any movie, too terrified to move.

One time the first show on Saturday was switched, without adequate warning in the newspaper, to an Italian-language version of the film. I would later check the newspaper and see that under the ad for the movie I wanted to see, a tiny six-point advisory that the first show that day would be in Italian. I didn’t find out until I walked into the lobby and found a line of forty moviegoers, mostly adults – it being one of the rare films those days that appealed to me as well as adults – listening to the Cinema Nazi grimly going through the same instructions in Italian. The adults looked nonplussed, the kids frightened. I didn’t speak Italian, so I gathered that I would not understand the film, and left.

It was the first time I can recall ever hearing a translation of a speech that I by then knew by heart.

Eventually, that guy stopped hectoring his customers. He may have been fired. He may have received complaints. I don’t know. But the occasional double-features went on.

There was another odd thing about this theatre: when they showed monster movies, they didn’t advertise the names of the movies. They just advertised: MONSTER MOVIE DOUBLE FEATURE, a grab-bag that just as often meant a couple of Godzilla films. They had this additional weird habit of cutting off the opening titles. You wouldn’t get the AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL PRESENTS A FILM BY SAMUEL L. BRONKOWITZ, DOUG McCLURE IN GRONK THE THING FROM BEYOND SHEBOYGAN, in stages, you would get a savage edit omitting the titles and then the first scene of the movie. Then, there would be an equally rough cut after THE END, shutting down any closing titles.

I have absolutely no idea why they did this, unless it was the cheap-movie equivalent of a drug store spinner rack illegally selling comics or paperbacks with the covers ripped off and returned to the publishers for credit.

As a result, there are movies I saw there, in those days, that I never did manage to identify. I know that one of them was DESTROY ALL MONSTERS and that another was WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS, and that still another was THE KILLER SHREWS, but there are others that have remained anonymous to this very day.

And here’s the thing that leads us into the final stretch: as a young boy, I was never scared by horror movies. I found them pleasing to my imagination, and I thrilled to the misadventures of Larry Talbot and the Frankenstein Monster and so on, but they were escapist entertainment to me; the premise that a scary movie could actually penetrate through your defenses and leave you deliciously disturbed afterward, let alone change your fictive landscape, was completely alien to me. It never occurred to me that this could be so. Despite the well-meaning advice to my parents from well-meaning relatives that oy, such nightmares they would give me, horror movies were, to me, harmless movies. Comfort food.

So this is the context for me, age 9 or 10, attending an unspecified MONSTER MOVIE DOUBLE FEATURE, nodding through the manager’s finger-wagging lecture to his patrons, and sitting down for a double feature that I expected to absorb with a kind of Zen calm. The first movie had its titles cut off, and was about a slow-moving walking tree that almost proved too much for a band of stiff actors to deal with; I now believe it to have been FROM HELL IT CAME, though I never saw that movie again and have frankly never wanted to.

(I later filched the name for a somewhat acclaimed short story that served as functional sequel to the movie that followed after the break. I watched that first film with placid, unaffected enjoyment, my pulse rate never changing.)

And I waited for the second movie to start.

And — as was normal in this particular theatre — I had no idea what that second movie would be.

Folks, in my life I have known any number of books, and any number of movies, that changed me forever. With movies seen before I hit 20 the titles include 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY; HALLOWEEN; believe it or not THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE; TWELVE ANGRY MEN; CONRACK; THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER; PATHS OF GLORY, bloody BORN FREE, if you can hack that; MALTESE FALCON; THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE; THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY; LAWRENCE OF ARABIA; CITIZEN KANE; THE GODFATHER; SEVEN SAMURAI. Some good, some great. All pivotal to my imagination.

And beyond their respective quality, they all arrived at a time when I needed them to arrive, and they all colonized my mind. I would never be able to shake them.

And I still see movies that I’ll never be able to shake. That’s how you know you’ve seen a great one. You feel the roots being planted.

I will not claim that the movie that followed was better than any of those mentioned above. I have a reasonable sense of proportion about such things.

I will say that for a sheltered suburban kid who thought Horror was an implicitly comforting genre that could never, ever hit him where he lived, a kid who expected nothing more than a banal balm to finish out an afternoon’s double-feature, a kid who by then already had the vague idea that he wanted to be a writer someday, there was no advance warning that the title about to come up would rock him to his very bone and plant seeds that are still being harvested by his Muse, forty-five years later.

It’s not that this movie was better than all the others. It was that it arrived, and was internalized by him, earlier than all but one or two of the other touchstones: his first clue that horror, and by extension art, not only can be disturbing, but should be. The sons of bitches who ran the theatre didn’t even cut off the opening titles.

The packed audience screamed their asses off.

I was nine or ten years old and only prepared for the likes of FROM HELL IT CAME, when this thing appeared before my eyes, and altered what it touched.

Nine or ten years old, my heart pounding so hard I thought it would leap out of my chest with this apparently crappy little film that I had never heard of.

Nine or ten years old, having my mind absolutely blown by that ending, and realizing, with perfect clarity, that even if you provide a menace, the monster has to be us.

Then growing up to become a writer of among other things, deliberately disturbing stories.

That, Ladies and Gentlemen, is how I first saw NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.

Tags: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Assholes, Bad Movies, Born Free, Citizen Kane, Doug McClure, Frankenstein, From Hell It Came, Godzilla, Halloween, horror, Lawrence of ARabia, Movies, Night Of the Living dead, Seven Samurai, The Godfather, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, The Killer Shrews, The Maltese Falcon, The Poseidon Adventure, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, True Stories, Twelve Angry Men, Westerns, writing | Category Commentary, Horror, Movies, Writing