Monday, February 8, 2010

Seconds of Terror

Hey, movie trailers! Stay tuned, kids! But before I get into the bulk of this post, let me clarify a tangential point I made in an earlier rambling bit of discourse...

I was reading back over my posts, as I do, and I realized that I'd said a few posts ago that my dad was never big on movies. I left out an important word there: "horror." My dad's never been huge on horror flicks. He's always been more of an action and comedy guy, and I can't tell you how many times we've sat together just drenched in tears of laughter watching old Pink Panther movies, or Wile E. Coyote employing every invention from ACME in hot desert pursuit of a scrawny blue bird, or the oft-mentioned Young Frankenstein. It's just that horror has never been his particular cup of tea. As evidence, there's the fact that he nearly leaped 9 feet in the air from a seated position during The Exorcist; a feat that nearly broke the world's record and for which there is still a memorial plaque in Lanett's city hall to stand proud testament to my pop's athletic achievement. So, no. Not big on the horror movies is my old man. Big on physical comedy, an unapologetic fan of "Road Runner" cartoons, devotee of action stars from Bruce Lee to JCVD and from Arnold to Sly. And hell, he's the main reason I ever watched one of the greatest films ever made, Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. So no complaints from this quarter on his taste. Just a bit of clarification there before we get to the meat of the matter...



Holy christ. Movie trailers. TV spots, particularly. These scared the bejeesus out of me back in the day. The above one, for Dario Argento's 1977 classic Suspiria is one that I remember. The great thing about these is that they felt free to just throw some nonsensical bullshit at you that wouldn't have anything in particular to have with the movie at hand, but would just scare you senseless. A similar approach to the above was used in the trailer for Roger Watkins' Last House on Dead End Street...



Or hell, maybe they ripped that off from Suspiria instead of vice versa. It was the same year, and they ripped off elements from at least two other movies in its promotion: the "It's only a movie..." tagline from the (similarly titled) Last House on the Left and the "demonic little girl with the turnaround head" from The Exorcist. So I'm going to assume that the unscrupulous bastards who distributed the movie (without Watkins' knowledge -- he didn't even know that the movie had been playing under that title, or that it had ever been released) just ripped all of that off from the get-go. But if you're a prepubescent kid and you're seeing this stuff just pop up all unannounced on TV, it's going to scare the unholy hell out of you. And that was what was so frightening about it all: there was no warning. You'd be watching Sanford and Son or something, having a grand old time, maybe you'd see some "John Davidson Sings the Hits of Tony Orlando & Dawn" commercial, and then, POW! -- you're reduced to a quivering blob of jelly trying to hide from the short, sharp shock of the unexpected TV spot. Man, the one that did me in, though, was this...



I mean seriously. Who does that to people? Just 30 seconds of a ventriloquist's dummy in extreme (and tightening) close-up, reciting some insane rhyme that tells you absolutely nothing about anything, which concludes with the line "Magic is fun!...when you're dead," and some ultra-realistic eye motion. Who were these goddamned monsters??? Can they be punished now for their past crimes???

Going way back, the first one that got me was this one...



It's 1974, and there's something wrong with the Davis baby...It's Alive. Even the posters got to me, based purely on this TV spot. And from the same year, there was this unrelenting montage of pure, unbridled eeeevillll...



Now, you'd think that maybe being traumatized by these things would have forced me to run like hell from anything having to do with horror movies. But instead, it had the opposite effect. Because the folks in advertising may be evil, but they're evil geniuses. There's something intoxicating about the buildup and release of adrenalin you'd get as a kid seeing these blasts of fear. It's like a minute-long rollercoaster ride that tempts you with the notion that if *these* things are bad, the movies themselves might just kill you! And so you'd dare yourself. You'd quietly wish that these TV spots would come on, just to see if you could make it through them without screaming this time. And the thing is, as completely silly as these ads are today, they still creep me the hell out. I'm sitting in a dimly-lit basement right now, typing this blog entry while watching and re-watching these clips, and I'm almost literally on the edge of my seat, looking over my shoulder at every random creak I hear. These traumas don't disappear. I don't know if kids today have anything comparable. Stuff might be more explicit now, and you can probably get away with a lot more in a trailer nowadays than you could back in the 1970s; but with most modern movie trailers, you get the feeling that you've been told the entire movie by the time it's over, even if it's just a minute-long TV spot.

So now that we've gotten movie trailers and TV spots out of the way, next time, I think I'll talk about longer-form horror on TV from my days as a kid. Including the golden age of the TV Movie of the Week.