The Yank-Lime Pie Story |
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10/31/2008 Yankee Origins By Yankee |
Growing up in the 80s meant that I was at the right place and the right time to experience the best that horror had to offer a young, innocent and impressionable mind. I started off like many kids did, by tuning in to the plethora of Godzilla movies that would air Sunday afternoons. Hardly what you would call true ‘horror’, but it whetted my appetite for monsters which led me into the next phase: Universal Horror! Although I had a short-lived fascination for The Creature two years earlier, it was Frankenstein in particular that pulled me into this side of the genre. I believe it was PBS that was showing the entire run of Frankenstein and its sequels, one movie every Friday starting at midnight. It was a coincidence that A) I was up that late the first night (I was only eight and my mom let me stay up while she worked late this one time) and B) I tuned in to that channel just as it was about to begin. For the next three Fridays, I would sneak out to the living room at five minutes to midnight PRAYING that my mom was already asleep and wouldn’t catch me staying up till 1:30 in the morning. While Frankenstein was fascinating at the time, it really did nothing for me in terms of scares. What it did do was pique me into buying a $2.00 book on horror films at the next school book fair. I read the book cover to cover several times. I just couldn’t get enough of the commentary about these classic monsters. Because of it, I was going through the TV Guide each week seeking out airings of The Wolf Man, The Mummy and pretty much anything featuring these monsters. But this niche was easily exhausted as the networks stuck to the same movies over and over. I was almost finished with horror when one Saturday afternoon, my mom tuned in to Dracula (the 1958 Hammer film). This was far from being my first exposure to vampires. For one thing, I was already familiar with the Bela Lugosi’s version of Dracula. I was dragged into the movie theater to see Love at First Bite with my mom (her boyfriend’s idea) when I was six. Later that same year, I was emotionally scarred by Salem’s Lot so I though that vampires were going to be a big problem before seeing Christopher Lee’s rendition. Being that I was now two years past Salem’s Lot, I was mature enough for Dracula not to bother me. In fact, I had really appreciated some things about this version that the other did not have. The action happened “on screen” and there was blood. Oh yes, there was blood! It wasn’t in buckets, but like a vicious animal I had “tasted” blood and wanted more! Much like PBS’ airing of Frankenstein, Hammer’s Dracula films were airing once a week in order. This time I didn’t have to sneak late at night to watch it and there was no objection since my mom was watching them too. (For the record, her watching these had less to do with liking vamp movies and more to do with the crush that she had on Christopher Lee.) Still, despite taking things up a notch, I was still reserved about seeing “scary movies”. I thought that the really scary stuff was OK for adults but too much for me. The following year, I would receive my trial by fire into “adult horror” as I saw it. That trial came in the form of the movie Poltergeist. My mom had a friend that we would often visit on the other side of town. This friend also had kids, including one about my age so it was always fun to visit there for hours on end. Typically, she and my mom would sit in the kitchen while we kids would hang out in the living room. Once on a Friday, the oldest of the kids tuned us in to HBO in time to watch from the beginning: Poltergeist. He said that it was supposed to be a great movie. I didn’t even know going in that it was going to be a scary movie, but once we were already to the scary parts…I was too embarrassed to bail out! At the same time that I was nearly wetting my pants, I was also intrigued. This brought me back to a concept that I discovered a couple of years before when I watched Salem’s Lot: Being more scared after the movie then during. Yes, thanks to Poltergeist I couldn’t sleep a full night for weeks! This would be the first of many times that a horror movie messed up my sleep for weeks on end. And fortunately for me (and you too), I was too stubborn to stop. Poltergeist had broken down the wall I put up when it came to “adult horror.” Things could only get better from here. Poltergeist really opened me up to scarier horror and I pretty much watched whatever my mom would watch on TV even if I knew I would have trouble sleeping afterwards. This included classics like The Amityville Horror and some movie whose name I forget about a fog from a factory infecting this school bus full of kids who became zombie-like (if memory serves). My dedication to horror would be cemented nearly a year later when I watched my first “slasher” on HBO. I had always heard of the Friday the 13th films (only three had been released by then) and was always told that they were very scary. All I really knew before watching part three on HBO was that Jason went around killing people while wearing a hockey mask. Despite reservations that I had about going through another “Poltergeist experience,” I was still pretty gung-ho about watching it. I just figured that I would get through it like I always have. It became obvious that my past experienced granted me some immunity as I wasn’t the least bit scared during or after the movie. I thought Jason was awesome; thought the deaths were awesome and of course the nudity and sex was to die for! Ever since then, I became a horror buff; it didn’t matter the sub-genre or the scare level. I was in for the long haul. Horror would become the basis of my movie rentals, my book borrowing from libraries and most importantly many of the bonds I formed with friends. Horror became a staple in my life and the 80’s were the best time to live in for such a passion.
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To be continued… |
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©2009, 2008 Yank-Lime Pie. All rights reserved. |
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