Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Lost Movie Found
I have just recently solved a long-held mystery in my life. When I was 11 years old, I was in the hospital for some tests. On the last day of my two-week stay, I was watching the local Saturday morning television fare, which included some old black-and-white mystery and horror movies. I didn’t much care about either one of them and paid no mind to their titles or anything else about their credits (actors, etc.). The first one was kind of cheesy, with all the guests at a hotel getting systematically killed off one by one in an Agatha Christie sort of way, and ended with some creepy guy hanging out at the basement stairs saying to the audience, “They think they have the killer, but it was really I who killed them all, and you’d better not tell, or I’ll come and kill you, too” or some silly-assed thing. I had no reason to believe the second movie would be any more frightening than that one, but it was.
I was never afraid of anything as a child – not ghosts, goblins, monsters under the bed or in the closet. In fact, I was never afraid of anything tangible until I was 17 years old, and still yet, the things I am apt to fear are intangible – abandonment, rejection, speaking in front of a group, things like that. The boogie man and monsters under the bed are the least of my worries, both then and now. However, on this day in July of 1968, I saw the one movie – the only movie – that ever scared me, and it scared the flibberty-gibbets out of me in a big kind of way. It scared me so much, I even had to change the channel before the end, so I watched about 1 hour and 45 minutes of it instead of the whole 2 hours. I had no idea what the name of the movie was, when it was made, who was in it or anything other than it scared the living shit out of me. Over the years I have watched out for it in the TV Guide (which I subscribed to and read religiously until a couple of years ago), but I never saw anything that remotely made me think I had found my personal font of filmation fear. I had never really pursued it with the same vengeance as some of my other pursuits, but I had also never heard anyone else mention having seen it, so it pretty much faded from memory, surfacing only occasionally as a reminder that I was not totally fearless after all.
A few months ago, a friend and I were discussing things that scared us as children, and as stated above, I had limited contributions to the conversation (easier to list all the things that didn’t scare me), and I mentioned this movie, still without a name or list of players. She knows that I have great good fortune finding things on the Internet, so she suggested I google it. I had actually already looked on the internet for it at some point in a fit of boredom, but after we talked, I went back and looked again – again, to no avail. So back into the “occasional” file it went.
I am working on retyping a collection of quotes I have been amassing since I was in junior high, and because I enjoy putting creative graphics with certain things (see recipe cards, March 29, 2006 post), I am chasing down interesting graphics on the internet to use with the quotations. One quote came from A&E’s “Cold Case Files” in reference to remembering someone as they used to be, not how they ended up, and I started searching for an appropriate graphic of a cadaver. Of course, there never really is an appropriate graphic of a cadaver, and I quickly realized this, so I started looking instead for a graphic of a skull. Unfortunately, all I found were smiling happy skulls that had grins that looked like Whoopee Goldberg’s smile, and while I have always wanted a smile like Whoopee Goldberg’s (you know – the kind that looks as if you have 208 teeth), I wasn’t at this point looking for a happy skull, so I thought, maybe I should look for one that’s screaming.
I typed in “screaming skull”, and one of the things that came up was a movie poster for a movie of the same name. I clicked on it, and it took me to a description of a movie called “The Screaming Skull”, and it sounded exactly like (and turned out to be) the movie from long ago that had terrorized me. Once again, I felt like I’d found the holy grail, for no real legitimate reason, because finding this movie, and even perhaps buying it (which I will be doing), will in no way change or impact my life, but it was just the fact that its identity had eluded me for so long that made it such a great find. The movie was made in 1958, and even now I don’t recognize any of the players, so it probably ranks as a C or even D movie, since I tend to recognize B movie players from that era. Amazon-dot-com gives it three stars, although a lot of reviewers pan it dreadfully. A friend is planning on buying it for me as a belated birthday present, and I’m really looking forward to it in a weird sort of way. It will be interesting to see if the 11-year-old me is still in there, capable of being terrified beyond words by this movie, or if I will just laugh my head off over it at this late date. In any case, it’s a blast from the past that I’m sure I’ll enjoy, either way.
NOTE: Yes, this is a rerun from Anne Arky Ology. It seemed a festive way to launch my new blog.
I was never afraid of anything as a child – not ghosts, goblins, monsters under the bed or in the closet. In fact, I was never afraid of anything tangible until I was 17 years old, and still yet, the things I am apt to fear are intangible – abandonment, rejection, speaking in front of a group, things like that. The boogie man and monsters under the bed are the least of my worries, both then and now. However, on this day in July of 1968, I saw the one movie – the only movie – that ever scared me, and it scared the flibberty-gibbets out of me in a big kind of way. It scared me so much, I even had to change the channel before the end, so I watched about 1 hour and 45 minutes of it instead of the whole 2 hours. I had no idea what the name of the movie was, when it was made, who was in it or anything other than it scared the living shit out of me. Over the years I have watched out for it in the TV Guide (which I subscribed to and read religiously until a couple of years ago), but I never saw anything that remotely made me think I had found my personal font of filmation fear. I had never really pursued it with the same vengeance as some of my other pursuits, but I had also never heard anyone else mention having seen it, so it pretty much faded from memory, surfacing only occasionally as a reminder that I was not totally fearless after all.
A few months ago, a friend and I were discussing things that scared us as children, and as stated above, I had limited contributions to the conversation (easier to list all the things that didn’t scare me), and I mentioned this movie, still without a name or list of players. She knows that I have great good fortune finding things on the Internet, so she suggested I google it. I had actually already looked on the internet for it at some point in a fit of boredom, but after we talked, I went back and looked again – again, to no avail. So back into the “occasional” file it went.
I am working on retyping a collection of quotes I have been amassing since I was in junior high, and because I enjoy putting creative graphics with certain things (see recipe cards, March 29, 2006 post), I am chasing down interesting graphics on the internet to use with the quotations. One quote came from A&E’s “Cold Case Files” in reference to remembering someone as they used to be, not how they ended up, and I started searching for an appropriate graphic of a cadaver. Of course, there never really is an appropriate graphic of a cadaver, and I quickly realized this, so I started looking instead for a graphic of a skull. Unfortunately, all I found were smiling happy skulls that had grins that looked like Whoopee Goldberg’s smile, and while I have always wanted a smile like Whoopee Goldberg’s (you know – the kind that looks as if you have 208 teeth), I wasn’t at this point looking for a happy skull, so I thought, maybe I should look for one that’s screaming.
I typed in “screaming skull”, and one of the things that came up was a movie poster for a movie of the same name. I clicked on it, and it took me to a description of a movie called “The Screaming Skull”, and it sounded exactly like (and turned out to be) the movie from long ago that had terrorized me. Once again, I felt like I’d found the holy grail, for no real legitimate reason, because finding this movie, and even perhaps buying it (which I will be doing), will in no way change or impact my life, but it was just the fact that its identity had eluded me for so long that made it such a great find. The movie was made in 1958, and even now I don’t recognize any of the players, so it probably ranks as a C or even D movie, since I tend to recognize B movie players from that era. Amazon-dot-com gives it three stars, although a lot of reviewers pan it dreadfully. A friend is planning on buying it for me as a belated birthday present, and I’m really looking forward to it in a weird sort of way. It will be interesting to see if the 11-year-old me is still in there, capable of being terrified beyond words by this movie, or if I will just laugh my head off over it at this late date. In any case, it’s a blast from the past that I’m sure I’ll enjoy, either way.
NOTE: Yes, this is a rerun from Anne Arky Ology. It seemed a festive way to launch my new blog.
# posted by Anne Arky @ 7:09 AM 
