Originally published October 28, 2019
In the spirit of Halloween, let’s focus on nightmares, scary movies, and those of us who are drawn to that darkness. Some of us are just born that way, with “horror in the blood”.
I was a little kid and I was having nightmares. I was scared to go to bed. I needed a light on. My Dad, who was usually the one on “tuck-in” duty, had to go through the whole bedtime ritual two or three times each night to get me to settle down. Glass of water, “now I lay me down to sleep” prayer, close the closet door, pull the curtains tight, nighty-night…
Half an hour later, repeat.
Mom decided I had been watching stuff on TV that was too unsettling. It was the early 1970’s and the show Dark Shadows, a soap opera set in a gothic manor complete with a vampire and a werewolf, was in reruns in the early afternoon. Now THAT’s a soap opera! So much more fun than Guiding Light! Then there were the afternoon movies. Every weekday Channel 8 would show movies during Dialing For Dollars. Each week there was a theme, like “Western Week”. Sometimes the theme was “Godzilla Week” – a full week of giant Japanese monsters duking it out and bashing buildings. Another theme was “Monster Week”, with classics like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and my favorite classic, The Wolf-Man! Mom determined that this must be the source of my nightmares, so I was banned from scary television for my own good.
Seems like a reasonable reaction. This is exactly what a good mom would do. And my mom was a good mom. The problem was that these were not the monsters haunting my dreams.
The Godzilla movies were exciting. Watching a guy in a rubber monster suit smash a miniature Tokyo was great fun! And werewolves? Ok, those were scary, but I wasn’t having nightmares about them.
My nightmares were grounded more in my real life fears at the time. One of the dreams I can recall went like this: I am walking past the living room and I see Mom. She is sitting on the floor in front of the coffee table and it’s a familiar scene. She is doing her hair and make-up. Beehive hairstyles back in that day often involved a lot of teasing and hairspray. During the process, my mom’s hair would be teased up like CRAZY, sticking up in all directions like a fright wig. It was “finger in a light socket” hair, snarled all around her head. With skill and patience, she would eventually smooth it into a fashionable dome. Her favorite place to do this was the in the living room while watching TV. Once her hair was perfected, she would then do her make-up.
In this dream, she is in the middle of doing her hair, violently teasing the witchy snarled nest with a comb. She looks up at me… and I realize that I am in trouble (yikes!), but I don’t know why. I’ve done something. Something that made Mom mad. Not just mad… ENRAGED! I’m standing at the front door, frozen, trying to catch up and figure out what I did. What rule did I break? What did I say? Her mouth opens in a full scream framed by angry teeth. The worst part – her eyes! Her eyes go white, then turn into spinning red and white spirals. Spinning, spinning, spinning fast… pulling me to her. I grab the doorknob, twist and pull, but it won’t open. I look back. She shakes her head and screams my name the way only an angry mom can. The eyes are still spinning.
I wake up.
There was no way I was about to tell Mom that she was the scary monster in my nightmares.
I should reiterate here- my mom was a good mom. She took care of my brother and me. She loved us. She made sure we had all that we needed. She taught us games and songs. She made grilled cheese sandwiches and always put pickle slices on top, because that’s the right way to serve a grilled cheese sandwich. She also had a temper. She could be scary as all hell to a 7 year old child. She didn’t really need to get physical with us. Just the way she would yell, scream, and the fury on her face – that was more than enough to stop me in my tracks. Seeing her storm across a room toward me with that look on her face… yeah… nightmare fuel.
I never told her. I let her cut me off from Dark Shadows and the other scapegoat monsters.
The truth is, we use those surrogates of fear to cope with our real world terrors. Even as a child, I knew that none of those beasts were really going to come out of the TV to get me. They were safely behind that glass screen, in that box, and actually far, far away in an imaginary world. The Wolf-Man was running through a forest somewhere in Transylvania. I could watch the story play out, feel the fear, a little adrenalin, then turn the TV off. Click. The monster was never real in the first place. I could experience being the one in charge and making my “escape” from the scary thing. That experience is a good thing to have in your gut the next time you have to face something in the real world that scares you.
Horror movies do that for us. They give us the scare, then retreat upon our command. There may be things in our real lives that we cannot control that terrify us and cause us to feel helpless. But in a monster movie? Evil is confronted. Usually, in typical Hollywood fashion, it’s defeated. Well, until the last moment, the closing scene when it rises again (AAAAAHHHHH!!!). But then we turn it off and walk away.
Until the sequel.