Little was left of the square. The platform had long since collapsed in a cloud of reddish dust. The last to rush past was a woman in a black shawl, carrying the tiny executioner like a larva in her arms. The fallen trees lay flat and reliefless, while those that were still standing, also two-dimensional, with a lateral shading of the trunk to suggest roundedness, barely held on with their branches to the ripping mesh of the sky. Everything was coming apart. Everything was falling. A spinning wind was picking up and whirling; dust, rags, chips of painted wood, bits of gilded plaster, pasteboard bricks, posters; an arid gloom fleeted; and amidst the dust, and the falling things, and the flapping scenery, Cincinnatus made his way in that direction where, to judge by the voices, stood beings akin to him.
—Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation To A Beheading, translated from the Russian by Dimitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author, 1959
When I was a kid my dad, whose full-time day job was as a route man for National Foods in Clifton, N.J., had to take on some part-time work for our family to make ends meet. We had just moved from a duplex apartment in Cliffside Park to a whole house in Dumont, and I guess things were a little tight. So on weekend evenings my dad would park cars at Hing's, a very popular Chinese restaurant in Englewood. This had been one of my dad's jobs in high school and hence Mr. Hing, who I recall as looking pretty much exactly like Ho Chi Minh, was kind of an old friend of the family and showed my dad a good amount of kindness. The restaurant was good, too, and attracted a pretty swank clientele—Paul Anka was a lousy tipper, according to father.
So I guess I was somewhere between the first and second grades, that is, somewhere around seven years old, on the Saturday night when my mom, with whom I was not particularly pally at that time, suspended my bed time on account of an odd request. She wanted me to stay up with her while she watched a movie, because she didn't want to watch the movie alone, because it was a movie that was apt to frighten her.
I should point out that my mom was not yet thirty at the time; more in the mid-twenties range. My folks had married very young, and I was their first child, which is the only reason her request to me made any kind of sense, although it didn't really make any kind of sense to me at the time really. When I say my mother and I weren't pally at the time, I'm merely being matter-of-fact about our relationship, whose circumstances were circumscribed by the condition of her being in her mid-twenties, my dad being the consciously "easygoing" figure where parenting was concerned, and my mother's kinda hardcore Italian-American perspective about running a household. This perspective was difficult to negotiate around the fact that I was a bit of a problem child, which I don't mean in a cute way; I was very poorly socialized and it was suspected for some time that I had some developmental issues, to the extent that my grammar school gym teacher had gotten the notion that I was "spastic," which notion, once articulated to my parents, resulted in, among other things, me getting a bunch of EEG tests, and undergoing therapy, and stuff.
To make a long story shorter, I was of the opinion at the time that my mother didn't like me very much, and so I was kind of staggered that she was asking me to watch a movie with her. I did not in any way relate to her as a young woman who was anxious about watching a horror movie. On the other hand, I was being offered a free stay-up-late card. And I kind of liked movies. My parents, young Americans that they still were, enjoyed jaunts to the drive-in, and made them pretty frequently, and while my sister, one year my junior, and my brother, four years so, actually slept, I would lie on my stomach craning my neck, gazing up surreptitiously from the turned-down back seat of our Ford Country Squire station wagon, and I would see certain images that stuck with me, such as that of a pie-eyed man in a gray suit trying not to drive a fancy car off of the edge of a cliff.
So. My mom and I stayed up and watched The Haunting, which, it seems worth mentioning in this climate, at the time was hardly an "old" movie. And, panned-and-scanned and interrupted by commercials as it was, it scared the bejeesus out of both of us. I remember the weird talking woodwork did not look like any "ghost" that I was used to from the Washington Irving and Poe stories I had tentatively looked into in the school library. I was particularly galvanized by a shot that seemed to have been taken from a prone position on the floor of the haunted house, looking up to a secret attic door that suddenly opened to reveal the screaming face of a traumatized woman. I remember asking my mom why she was screaming—I did not have the plot-following facilities that I eventually developed—and I remember her trying to explain it, and that trying to explain it took her out of being pretty frightened herself.
I did not immediately try to make my way toward beings akin to me. But I found a couple, in time. This kid Alan who lived across the other side of town, and who had a book with some neat pictures in it, called An Illustrated History of Horror and Science Fiction Films, which I borrowed from him and never gave back. I read up on The Haunting in there; its author, Carlos Clarens, actually disapproved of it, and deplored the "use of anamorphic lenses and film stock instead of allowing the horror to develop from the everyday, the horror of existence which helped make the mysterious beauty and attraction of the Lewton films." I did not know from these "Lewton films," but what Clarens wrote about them made me want to find out. Similarly, it was in Clarens' book that I first came to know the names of Losey and Godard; Clarens was kind of sneaky that way.
I met another kid, Joseph, who liked to draw pictures of the monsters from old Universal horror pictures. He was a very shy kid, and underneath the quiet lurked a truly delightful sense of humor. I remember he had this Marvel comics coloring book, featuring Captain America and Nick Fury, one of those narrative coloring books in which each of the to-be-colored pages advanced the story. The final page was a drawing of Captain America and Nick Fury shaking hands, and the caption below read "We did it again, Nick!" And in marker on that page Joseph drew a horizon line behind the two figures, and on that line, between the men, a mushroom cloud. We spent almost every weekend at the Palace theater in Bergenfield watching whatever movie played there, and most of our non-homework-doing waking hours (which, for me at least, were bountiful, because I was an abysmal student) watching movies on television. In seventh or eighth grade, in gym class, sitting out yet another softball game, I was telling Joseph about my weekend plans, such as they were; through some unusual circumstance, I had actually been invited to a party; but, I glibly said to my friend, "I'm not gonna stay too late because Psycho is on Channel 9 at eleven." Our gym teacher, Coach M, who liked to regale his favored students with tales of his antics on the '63 Mets farm team, overheard me and riposted, "What kinda party, Kenny? All boys?" Oh, the humanity.
And the time not spent doing all that we spent on the phone. "Why don't you and Joseph ever talk about anything real?" my mother asked me once, after I got off the line with him one day. I didn't have the wherewithal to formulate an answer, and I was slightly hurt that she didn't know it herself.
The second time I saw The Haunting was in the very early '70s, in my first or second year of high school. There was this guy who was not a whole lot older than the rest of us, this character named Nelson, who ran the A/V department at the high school, and was very up on current equipment and had a couple of Sony Portapaks in his office, as well as a videotape recorder with which he could record stuff off of the television. And one afternoon after classes he invited a couple of the more cinema-sensitive students of his acquaintance to join him and an aspring filmmaker friend of his to watch The Haunting. And it was kind of great because with the tape we could stop, and go back, and look at particular scenes again and again, and zip forward through commercials and such. And Nelson, a big, voluble guy, was a lot of fun to watch a movie with, his appreciation was so palpable. "What a shot!" he bellowed when Russ Tamblyn, frightened at the shifting woodwork, dropped his whiskey bottle (as seen in the screen cap above.)
And so it went. In 1978, at the funeral of a mutual friend who had been killed by a drunk driver, I met the person I refer to on this blog as My Close Personal Friend Ron Goldberg™, and the first thing that I said to him was, "I hear you can recite all the dialogue from King Kong by heart." And he looked at me as if I had just taken a dump on the floor and said, "I don't think this is the appropriate occasion for that." But he got over it and soon he was introducing me to the joys of Dario Argento, going to the blighted Plaza Theater in Paterson to see Suspiria, out of which the projectionist that night dropped an entire reel, to little discernable effect on the film's coherence.
I introduced Ron to Joseph, and I remember in the fall of 1980, after we had all seen The Shining something like nine times already (it had become our default social activity: "Whaddya wanna do tonight?" "I dunno, whaddya YOU wanna do?" "How about The Shining?" "Why not?"), Cinema Village had paired it with Kubrick's much earlier The Killing, and we all went to check that out. There were a couple of likely lads in line behind us discussing the ins and outs of Clint Eastwood's directorial career. "It was only with Play Misty For Me that he began to find his water level," one of them said, a bit too loudly, and Joseph smirked at me and said, "It'd be kind of great if Eastwood just kind of popped up now like McLuhan in Annie Hall, only in Dirty Harry mode, and asked 'What do you know about my films, punk?'" After the films we heard one of the same guys call the pairing "an instructive double bill." He was right, but still.
I turned 53 this year. Although you might not be able to discern this from my Twitter feed, but I've become a reasonably well-socialized adult. While a foot injury kind of screwed up my routine earlier this year, I try to stay physically fit. I even take boxing lessons, intemittently, and my trainer sometimes gives me a compliment that I can actually believe. My relationship with my mom is, among other things, pally. I write about movies, and about music sometimes, for a living, and I like doing that and I'd like to continue doing that, though I'd also like to do other things. This Saturday I'm gonna get up early (which is one reason My Lovely Wife, who likes her Saturday snooze [not that I don't], may not accompany me) and go to Penn Station and take a train to Suffern, New York, right across the Jersey border, and I'm gonna go to the Lafayette Theatre and see an 11 a.m. screening of a new 35mm print of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's great film The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp. The Lafayette is managed by Nelson Page, the one-time A/V coordinator of Dumont High School. Overseeing a theater such as the Lafayette, a 1920s beauty kitted out with a full Wurlitzer organ, was a dream of his from before I ever met him. Running the projector will be Nelson's associate and rep curator Pete, who is also a longtime friend of Joseph's. Pete is both an ace cinephile and a tech genius, and I was happy, earlier this year, to be able to introduce him to another tech genius, Larry Blake, the sound engineer who's worked with Stephen Soderbergh since BEFORE sex, lies, and videotape, and who Bertrand Tavernier heaped much praise on when I interviewed Tavernier some time ago. (Blake helped Tavernier a lot on his ultimately ill-fated, in the U.S. at least, English-language film In The Electric Mist.) Larry and I had a great time at the Lafayette in May for Lang's The Woman In The Window, and I hope to get him up to the theater again while he's in town for something this rep season, which is looking very good. As for this Saturday, Joseph will be in attendance too, and as it happens, My Close Personal Friend Ron Goldberg™, who incidentally has since renounced all things Argento (he mentions "the pornography of violence," I tell him that he's lost it, and then we move on), has just moved to a house pretty close to Suffern, so he might join the gang. The movie is sure to look great on the Lafayette screen, and afterwards, if there's time, the bunch of us may grab a bite down the street at the frankly mediocre pizza place that has the assets of being roomy and convenient and quick. I'm not sure what we'll all talk about, but I'm reasonably sure it won't be "the death of movie culture."
I'm very impressed you were checking out, or at least paging through, Irving and Poe when you were 7. My son is 7 and he mostly brings home crap from the library. It's not really his fault. Books for his age are all mostly crap. There are exceptions of course. I find William Steig to be deeply moving. Sylvester and the Magic Pebble in particular can really choke me up. Of course, Steig wrote adult books for children.
As for movies, I suppose like most 7 year olds, my son is pretty engaged with what's on the computer. Some content more edifying than others. PBSkids.org, for example, has some great stuff. Unfortunately, he's been into the various Disney pre-teen and teenager shows. iCarly comes to mind. I find those shows to be idiotic at best.
Anyway, I've recently been watching a fair amount of gangster movies. I chose a handful of titles form your 50 best list at MSN movies to watch. The Petrified Forest, The Beast of the City, The Maltese Falcon are some examples. I generally, don't invite my son to sit with me having learned from experience that that can force things too much. However, the computer and the TV are in the same room. It's delighted me to see him gradually spend less time looking at his screen and more time looking at my screen. He often gets very interested in the movie and asks so many questions I sometimes can't hear the dialogue. I love the fact that movies, even some old, kinda creaky movies, can have such an impact.
In fact, recently he and I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark on the big screen. While I, watching with 39 year old eyes, found much to object to in the movie, he was blown away. His legs were shaking. He was scared and excited and thrilled. Yes, that's a much more recent movie and Spielberg, for all his flaws, is a genius at pacing. But the movie seemed to have been not simply entertaining to him but it got him thinking as well. A few days later my son said to me, "Why in movies when someone is going to fall off a cliff, and you know they're going to be okay, do you still get nervous?" Movies absolutely still have tremendous power.
And finally, in addition to exposing him to entertainment different than most of the pablum available to kids today, I truly hope that our time staring at a screen together now will provide him with good memories in the future.
Posted by: Chris H | October 03, 2012 at 11:13 AM
My mom made me watch "Cabaret" when I was five. And thus, my path was set.
Really really great piece. Thank you.
Posted by: Fabian W. | October 03, 2012 at 11:33 AM
This was beautiful. Thank you very much Glenn.
Also, why is it that the most honest cinephiles always start their relationships with cinema through the horror genre?
Posted by: rotch | October 03, 2012 at 01:02 PM
I saw "The Haunting" when it came out in 1963. I was 16 and it scared the living shit out of me. Still does. What was has done here is make the ultimate Val Lewton movie. We see next to nothing, but we hear TONS. The soundtrack created for the film is incredibly dense and complex. We hear what seem to be voices speaking something we can never quite make out. Therefore we lean into the screen to hear more, and are perpetually frustrated when we don't. As for sights there's that bulging door, but more important the living characters. Julie Harris is the victim who is also the real monster. It's her desire for a rapprochement with ghosts that propels the plot. That and the phenomenal sets.
This is one of Roman Polanski's very favorite films, and it's easy to see why. Obviously the tracking shots through the castle in "The Fearless Vampire Killers" come from it, but less obviously there's the hotel by the ferryboat landing in "The Ghost Writer."
The woman who suddenly appears in that cubbyhole doesn't scream, BTW. WE do.
FOR WE WHO WALK HERE WALK ALONE.
Posted by: David Ehrenstein | October 03, 2012 at 01:43 PM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sog3etUwtSk
Posted by: David Ehrenstein | October 03, 2012 at 01:58 PM
This is the sweetest ode to the power of movies I've read in quite some time.
"He was a very shy kid, and underneath the quiet lurked a truly delightful sense of humor... The final page was a drawing of Captain America and Nick Fury shaking hands, and the caption below read "We did it again, Nick!" And in marker on that page Joseph drew a horizon line behind the two figures, and on that line, between the men, a mushroom cloud."
Classic. I think we've all had a friend with that kind of sense of humor. Is this the friend you mention here from time to time, Mr. Failla (hope I remembered the spelling correctly)?
Posted by: Tony Dayoub | October 03, 2012 at 03:39 PM
Thanks, Tony. And yes, same guy!
Posted by: Glenn Kenny | October 03, 2012 at 03:44 PM
Thanks for the plug, Glenn. Just got back from inspecting the Blimp print and it's a beauty that will look great on the screen Saturday.
To keep your theme going, here is our HorrorThon lineup for October 19-21:
Friday 10/19
7:30: The Shining (digital)
Saturday 10/20
1:45 - The Wolf Man (35mm)
3:45 - Dracula’s Daughter (35mm)
7:30 - Double Feature: The Pit & the Pendulum (new digital)) PLUS The Premature Burial (35mm) plus vintage snipes, movie trailers, etc., between the features.
Sunday 10/21
1:45 - Dr. Cyclops (35mm)
3:45 - The Black Room (35mm)
7:30 - The Mad Magician in Polarized Real-D digital 3-D – East Coast Premiere!
Posted by: Pete Apruzzese | October 03, 2012 at 09:38 PM
Terrific piece. I was traumatised by Poe around that age, and remember seeing bits of Masque of the Red Death on TV, enough to give me colourful nightmares. Thankfully The Haunting didn't come into my life til I was old enough to, whaddayacallit, compartmentalise.
Posted by: Paul | October 04, 2012 at 09:36 AM
Great piece, enjoy Saturday!!
Posted by: atk | October 04, 2012 at 12:23 PM
The Haunting played fairly regularly on Vancouver TV in the late 60s, when I was just about a teenager. I used to bet myself I could watch 15 minutes of it alone, in a room with the door closed and the lights off. I always lost that bet. I'm pretty sure I'd lose it today.
The Exorcist came out 10 years after The Haunting, and it's a fine film, but it changed the genre forever and not for the better. Since then, instead of horror engendered by the fear of what we don't know, we have gotten horror engendered by the fear of what we do know to be at the top of the stairs: detailed and disgusting images.
Posted by: Kevin Michael Grace | October 04, 2012 at 12:25 PM
A walk down memory lane. Really good stuff. Say 'Hey' to the gang!
Posted by: MSK | October 04, 2012 at 10:21 PM
Joining the pile-on for what a great film it is, though I have to do another shoutout, because my first exposure to this material was the original novel, which in its own way does just what the movie does in an equally harrowing way. Considering the fact that she also did The Lottery, We Have Always Lived In the Castle and that's just the undeniable stuff, Shirley Jackson's name isn't mentioned half as much as it should be these days.
Posted by: Grant L | October 06, 2012 at 02:21 AM
Indeed. She's as unique and indelible as Patrica Highsmith.
Posted by: David Ehrenstein | October 06, 2012 at 09:26 AM
Another vote for this movie! Scary as the screaming face is, it's the two women staring at the door that makes me wring my hands in terror every time. Helps, too, that the cast is uniformly terrific---the women are obviously compelling, but let's spare a thought for Russ Tamblyn's ability to actually invest some feeling into what is, on the page, a pretty dull part. Clarens' complaint is interesting, though, and I see exactly what he means--- Lewton's horror films, even the ones Tourneur directed, have a deliberate lack of visual exclamation points that makes everything feel genuinely uncanny; the visuals aim for eeriness rather than traditional scares. The Haunting is much more a traditional spook show; you can feel a film-maker trying to make you jump, particularly with the voice-over and the occasional fast dollies or quick cuts.
Posted by: That Fuzzy Bastard | October 06, 2012 at 01:30 PM
One of your best-ever posts Glenn. Takes me back to happy memories of my own movie-obsessed childhood and college days.
Posted by: Account Deleted | October 07, 2012 at 09:40 AM
This is lovely, Glenn. Bravo. These things stay with us. "Mysterious Island" on TV, watching with my dad; "Funny Girl" at the theater w my mom. A few years later, the three of us at the most cynical PG-rated double feature ever: "The Getaway" and "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean."
Hope to see you before too long.
Posted by: Michael Phillips | October 07, 2012 at 12:39 PM
Did you have the "Movie of the Week" when you were a kid? I grew up outside Philadephia in S Jersey, and channel 17 had a "Movie of the Week", where one film was played at different times of the day for an entire week. I must have watched "A Night to Remember" at least 20-30 times growing up. It was in frequent rotation. And yeah, my mom was none too please with her couch potato son.
Posted by: raygo | October 10, 2012 at 12:16 PM