This is A Special
Edition of . . . .
KID STUFF
DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 2, No. 28
CORRIDOR of HORROR
Ron Miller
reveals his deepest, darkest secret:I WAS A
MONSTER BOY!
You won't believe the mysterious
goings on in this column!
The Author spent many years
practicing monster behavior in his backyard, so he might be ready
for his teenage years!
By RON MILLER of TheColumnists.com
EARLY IN our courtship, my future wife confessed to me that she was seriously concerned about my possible behavior should I develop hardening of the arteries in old age.
'I mean, you already drag your foot like a mummy when we walk home from the movies," she said. "I don't think I want to know what you'll do if you get to the point where you really think you are one."
Her point was well taken. For her sake, I vowed to stop pretending I was Kharis, the ancient Egyptian guardian of the Princess Ananka, who was buried alive, but returned to life 3,000 years later to once more serve and protect the modern day descendant of his beloved Ananka. At least I'd stop doing it while walking her home from the show late at night.
I also figured I might as well stop pretending I was Lawrence Talbot, undergoing his dreaded transformation into The Wolf Man, when the moon happened to be full as we walked home from a date. I think it really embarrassed her to be out with a guy whose face started shivering with nervous tics while his upper lip began curling into a snarl, especially on a nice, romantic, moonlit evening.
Those were hard to give up, but I guess the hardest for me at the time was not being able to share my uncanny ability to walk like Frankenstein's Monster did just a few hours out of the lab. I had memorized the Karloff approach to the problem: How to convince your audience that you really were like a newborn baby, reacting with surprise and awe when the first ray of sun fell across your scarred and stitched face. I had the look down pat and also could do a pretty fair Karloff "roar."
No, my girl didn't appreciate any of these things, which made her just like most other girls, only prettier. To her credit, she didn't want a conventional guy. She wanted somebody who came at life with zest--and from an oblique angle. Hey, that's me for sure: All zesty oblique angles! As for me, I liked her because she was just exactly the sort of sweet, lovely girl that my favorite monsters loved to pick up and carry away, usually with lots of torch-bearing villagers in hot pursuit.
Speaking of that, I'll have to say it was a subject of considerable controversy among other members of our adolescent group, The Graveyard Ghouls, as to what would have taken place had the monster actually gotten away with the girl. As my friend "Bucky" liked to point out, it was pretty likely The Mummy's sexual equipment had fallen off during his first 1,000 years in the tomb and he wasn't going to provide many thrills for the new Princess Ananka in that department.
I'm not so sure. I'd like to think those tanna leaves they used to boil to produce the elixir that revived Kharis may have contained the natural equivalent of today's Viagra. If that were true, think of the commercials they could do: "If it can jump start a 3,000-year-old mummy, imagine what it will do for you!"
Anyway, I suspect the arrival of a genuine real live girl in my teen life probably marked the end of my era as a "monster boy." I soon realized you couldn't hold onto any young woman of quality if you seemed to care more about monsters. So I gradually gave them up. Well, at least I gave them a lower priority in my life.
But I still look back with a certain nostalgia on my childhood years of monster mania. I now know I wasn't alone. It turns out I was part of a monster-loving generation that also included my website colleague John Stanley, who often is still referred to as John "Creature Features" Stanley, and such other illustrious characters as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Joe Dante, who all have contributed significantly to the genre.
It's my belief that comic books and TV got us started on monsters. I didn't see monster movies when I was a little kid. My parents thought they were dumb, so they didn't take the family to the Frankenstein and Dracula pictures of the early 1940s. They didn't forbid me to see them. I was just a pawn of my parents in those days, so I didn't see any of them until I was about 10 and Universal studios started having kiddie favorites Bud Abbott and Lou Costello "meet" all the classic monsters.
I saw almost all the great horror pictures in the early 1950s when the Universal, Republic and Monogram monsters began turning up in film packages sold to television. Realart Pictures also did regular reissue packages of the classics in theaters. I saw "Frankenstein" and "Dracula" for the first time on such a double bill. "King Kong" was reissued nationally with a huge campaign that featured a little giveaway newspaper about "the Eighth Wonder of the World" coming to your theater soon.
Universal also got reams of publicity in 1954 by introducing its first new monster in more than a decade: The Gill-Man from "Creature from the Black Lagoon," a blockbuster hit in 3-D. Newspapers did retrospectives on the classic monsters, whetting my appetite to see all those fabled films. Remember those were the days before video tape.
But we savvy monster maniacs knew all about Castle home movies. These were silent, cutdown versions of the original monster movies. I bought every one on the market and soon familiarized myself further with the genre by watching those 8mm. movies. (I still have a priceless assortment of classic horror home movies that came with plastic soundtrack records to be played on your phonograph with the cutdown movies, giving them voices and sounds for the first time.)
 |
"The Curse of Frankenstein" with a soundtrack record to play along with the movie. |
Meanwhile, the EC comic line burst upon the kiddie world, giving us the grotesque monster comics like "Haunt of Fear," "Vault of Horror" and "Crypt of Terror," which whipped up monster mania to a froth.
And there were the "midnight shows" on Halloween and Fridays the 13th. They usually included a live show by some performer like The Great Toussaint, whose primary mission was to dodge firecrackers tossed from the audience while trying to scare the weak-kneed among us. In truth, most boys and girls went to "midnight shows" just to stay up late and make out without parental supervision. In contrast, we "monster boys" went to see the movie that followed the live act, usually something insipid like "The Cat Creeps," but occasionally something stirring like "The Mad Monster."
Being a zesty character, I wasn't content to just watch movies and read about monsters. I wanted to get in there and make my own monster movies, playing all the great parts. I bought a used 8mm. movie camera from a friend and started making movies with the help of various friends and neighbor kids. We collectively called ourselves The Graveyard Ghouls.
I knew I wasn't going to be able to build a monster laboratory or duplicate elaborate makeup effects like the hirsute Wolf Man or scaly Gill-Man, so I dreamed up a critter I called "the graverobber." This was usually me in a shabby overcoat and battered hat, filmed obscurely from a distance, scuttling around in sinister settings. One of my pals lived next door to an abandoned reservoir, which became one of our standing sets because it had enormous concrete walls and a desolate-looking landscape that a couple of homemade crosses could turn into an ancient cemetery.
That same kid, whose name was Bob, also invented our first "mad-lab" device: A pair of thin metal rods that he attached to a battery and an old starter off a Model T Ford. When he threw a switch, an electric bolt would travel up the rods, wink out at the top, then start over again at the bottom. It looked very Hollywood--and very lethal. Bob tested it out by electrocuting a lizard, so we knew not to stick our fingers in between those rods.
Our other favorite location was Woods Lagoon, which is now the yacht harbor in Santa Cruz, Calif. In my youth, this was a murky place filled with stands of tule reeds, bubbling pools of stagnant water and little streams that ran between islands of bushes and reeds. We found a raft made out of oil drums and planks that our various monster-victims would use to pole their way into the swamp. It was always a surefire shocker for a monster to wade out of the reeds, roaring, and grab somebody off the raft. However, I lost interest in playing those parts because there was so much muck at the bottom of that swamp that you ruined whatever shoes you had on and emerged with feet stained black with what looked like oil slick.
In my final filmed performance as a monster, I crept up out of the swamp behind a cute girl named Sandy and carried her off. I was a very thin monster in those days and the one false note in my performance was the fact that I practically staggered under the load of cute Sandy, who was rather voluptuous. Let's face it: I've never seen a movie monster look like he couldn't carry the girl out of camera range. Thumbs down.
Another one of the guys kept busy perfecting his makeup techniques. He became quite professional at making monster masks and we all expected him to head for Hollywood right after high school to become the next Bud Westmore. Of course, we weren't through with junior high yet, so that seemed a long way off. In just a few months, he had a regular gallery of grotesques on his bedroom wall.
As the creative force behind our filmmaking activities, I kept striving for new sensations. I'd seen a pretty scary movie in 1948 called "The Amazing Mr. X," which featured a transparent spirit effect. I couldn't do those effects with my 8mm camera, but I figured light and shadows could do a lot, so I tested my technique out one night on my little brother, waking him up from a deep sleep to warn him I thought I'd seen a ghost in our room.
As he blinked sleep from his eyes, I pulled a concealed line that opened a door where I'd hung a white choir robe from church. The shimmering white robe seemed to sail at us from a dark corner--and my brother let out a scream that woke up half the neighborhood. I'll have to admit the effect was so good that it even scared me, though I never admitted that to my brother, who still talks about that night as his scariest moment ever.
That caught me a little hell from my folks, but I figured it was worth it to know I was developing into quite a director of horror sequences. Eventually, I moved on to doing my own monster makeups. I made my debut as Frankenstein's Monster at a church Halloween party and certainly attracted major attention, especially with the massive forehead I had built out of putty and attached to my own forehead with spirit gum.
Actually, I attracted even more attention at school the following day. It turns out I had plastered the darn forehead down over a sizeable chunk of my own hair. I tried and tried to get it off and finally ended up having to chop off my bangs to get my monster forehead loose. When people asked me what happened to my bangs, which now were about half an inch long and stuck straight out, I told them it was a new hairstyle called "the awning look."
As you might imagine, I did not start any new trends with that look.
I remember one night when several of us decided to meet at Holy Cross cemetery, so we could assess the cinematic quality of that old graveyard at dawn, when we figured it would be shrouded with mists. But getting up in the middle of the night wasn't easy for the fangless ghouls I hung out with, so I was the only one who showed up and spent several hours huddled next to a mausoleum. I can tell you now that the mists never developed, but I picked up a pretty good chill, followed by a fever. I'm sure that's why someone invented the fog machine--so the camera crew wouldn't have to spend too many nights around mausoleums, waiting for the mist.
If you're wondering what happened to all these marvelous monster movies we made, the answer is nothing. We did a lot more planning than we did filming. In fact, film was expensive, so we never actually finished a complete movie. Anyway, most of the fun was in looking at the "dailies," usually while drinking quart bottles of soda and laughing so hard we nearly wet our pants.
What attracted me to monsters? Hey, there's the million dollar question. It's only a guess, but I think a lot of us guys identified with grotesque characters, especially in our puberty years when we seemed to be somewhat mishapen and physically screwed up ourselves. I was about to come down with a world-class case of teen acne that soon would make me envy all creatures who lurked at night or wore masks or wax faces in public. Speaking only for myself, I closely identified with the living dead because that was pretty much what I saw in my mirror during my early teens.
Still, those monsters from the 1930s and 1940s were awfully sympathetic anyway, especially compared to the mad slashers of today's movies. The Mummy was just a very loyal, lovelorn dude who wanted to protect his girl from all harm. He couldn't help the fact he was all rotted to pieces. And the Wolf Man didn't want to rip and tear people whenever the moon was full. He was only that way because a werewolf bit him and gave him the curse. He wanted to howl at Monday Night Football and the Dallas cheerleaders, not the moon. Frankenstein's Monster was the most pitiful of them all. He was a dead guy who suddenly woke up with his revived brain in a body that was the equivalent of a jalopy some teenagers had patched together from a bunch of stolen parts from assorted vehicles. The only way he was ever going to get a girl of his own was to con some mad doctor into building one out of some leftover dead girl parts.
I finally outgrew my monster mania, though I think I was nearly 40 before I could skip the latest creature feature and not suffer withdrawal symptoms. As a small-town boy without portfolio--nor any particularly great expectations in life, I had dreamed of coming face to face with my idols--the uncanny Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney, Vincent Price and John Carradine. I wanted to tell them how much they had meant to me as a kid. Most of my pals had outgrown their monster mania long before me, so I'm sure they thought my dreams were as bogus as those awful patchwork 8mm movies we made in the early 1950s.
Most of the original Graveyard Ghouls turned out to be quite successful men with nice families and solid careers. Bucky never did spend a night in a graveyard and the last time I talked with him he said nobody ever calls him Bucky anymore. Tom did head for Hollywood with his makeup kit, but came back disenchanted. He became a radio deejay for awhile then ran a pawnshop with his brother. Bob only electrocuted the one lizard that I know of, but he turned his mechanical skill into a wonderful career. He died of a heart attack while still a young man.
As for me, I was too late to ever meet Bela Lugosi, but I did come face to face with all the rest of my old idols. I spent an afternoon in Monterey with Karloff in the 1960s while he was doing a play there and found him to be a warm, good-natured and thoroughly un-monsterly man. He seemed touched to learn that a young newspaper reporter had grown up thinking of him as a role model.
Before that, when I was a student at UCLA, I spent several hours with Lon Chaney at his home on Lankershim Boulevard, just a few blocks from Universal studios. He was also a great guy who showed me photos of all the monster makeups he did for fun, but never could do in pictures because of union restrictions. I didn't own a car then, so he and his wife gave me a ride to the nearest bus stop and wished me well on my writing career. I remember standing on Highland Avenue, waiting for my bus, thinking, "The Wolf Man just gave me a ride!"
John Carradine, one of the better Draculas and the best-ever Bluebeard, entertained me in his hotel room in Palo Alto, Calif., in the late 1960s while he was in town to perform as Shylock in Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice." He was great on stage and a fascinating storyteller in person. I eventually published my interview with him in Castle of Frankenstein magazine.
Vincent Price became a sort of buddy when he was the host of PBS' "Mystery!" series and gave me his home phone number if I ever needed to ask him anything. He was an amazing raconteur who could talk on virtually any topic and considered his monster roles in films like "House of Wax," "The Mad Magician" and "House of Usher" to be just facets of a much larger career. The last time I saw him alive was in a fancy restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. I was having lunch with Sam Elliott, but I couldn't help hearing that Vincent's wife was chewing him out bigtime over lunch at the next table. I had to wonder if he was tempted to pour hot wax over her when they got home or saw her in half with his buzzsaw.
Even though I spent my childhood dreaming of monsters, they were really fairy tale monsters and I don't think any harm was done. I shudder to think what I'd be doing now if I'd grown up on Freddy, the blade-fingered "Nightmare on Elm Street" monster, or any of those ski-masked coed-slashers of today. Even though we called ourselves The Graveyard Ghouls, my pals and I were good kids who didn't vandalize cemeteries or conduct satanic rituals with drug-crazed naked girls. I guess we did burn a lizard, but I've felt rotten about it ever since.
© 2001 by Ron Miller.
You can comment on this column or contact Ron Miller with an email to: talkback@thecolumnists.com
| Home | About Us | Archives | Talkback | Shopping Mall |