When my parents were young marrieds, they saw “Psycho.” My mother liked — still likes — buzzy films from talented directors, and it was revolutionary. Movies in 1960 didn’t just dispose of their main characters in the first 47 minutes. The now-iconic moody, brutal shower scene takes only 45 seconds, with 78 camera angles and 52 cuts, and invokes the power of the unseen. Alfred Hitchcock’s most famous film, “Psycho” has a screechy-strings soundtrack, which my parents called “chicken noises.”
My mother was so terrified that when my dad drove the babysitter home, she locked him out of the house until he promised not to scare her. But for the rest of his life he, a trickster, could infuriate her with a knowing smile and high-pitched squawk.
Later, as a widow, she once went on a date to “The Silence of the Lambs,” thinking the movie was about a farm. Imagine how well that went.
Growing up, I saw just a few horror films. “The Birds,” which I was accidentally allowed to see on TV five years after its 1963 debut, cost me a lot of sleep. People of my generation still bond over certain images of this master work, also from Hitchcock, where birds turn against humanity.
“The guy with the eyes!” we shriek, covering our own, remembering the dead farmer with the pecked-out hollows.
“The Birds” was the most watched television film of the time and held the record for four years, until the nicer but not a whole lot lighter “Love Story” came along.
It’s October, and our beloved Crystal Theatre has been running the annual Spooktober theme: “Weapons,” “The Shining,” “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” “Train to Busan” (zombies) and “Rocky Horror Picture Show” on Halloween weekend. That last one alone I’d see (again), a little jumpy but with great music.
“The Shining” (1980), though … even the promo image — of Jack Nicholson’s toothy grimace in his famous “Heeeere’s Johnny” moment, an improvisation transforming the chipper intro to “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” into derangement — is disconcerting. I hate scary movies.
Films are immersive, extremely involving, and, to me, lines blur, as they do for the protagonist in “The Shining.” What is imagined becomes too real.
In high school I sat through “Carrie” passably, though jumping half a foot at the final scene, but mostly considered the Brian De Palma now-classic to be sympathetic and tragic rather than threatening. I almost hit the wall in college, when “When A Stranger Calls” (1979) came to town. The first 23 minutes put it on Collider’s list of 10 Most Terrifying Movie Opening Scenes of All Time, as a high-school girl, babysitting in a big, dark, quiet house, receives repeated phone calls. A man’s weirdly polite voice asks, “Have you checked the children?”
Another line in the film is from a police sergeant: “We’ve traced the call. It’s coming from inside the house.”
Those lines gave me some bad moments over the years. Psychopath films like that are the worst and, unlike Frankenstein-style monster movies, way too relatable. My sister Meg, who lives in Manhattan, avoided elevators for days after “Dressed to Kill” (1980), and if you’ve seen it, you know why. Frankenstein won’t show up at your house or building. A menacing person could.
“The Shining” did me in. The psychological thriller, directed by Stanley Kubrick, was from the Stephen King novel inspired by a night he and his wife were the sole guests in the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, just before it closed for winter and at a time when the author, like the protagonist, was struggling with recovery from alcoholism. The movie was filmed not at the Stanley, but largely in England, on stages emulating the grand and rustic interior of the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park, California. An opening scene is from Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park, Montana, and exterior shots of the imaginary Overlook Hotel are of the Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood in Oregon.
This film, too, was innovative, using the then new technology of a Steadicam. In a 3,800-word review for The New Yorker, Pauline Kael discussed this “marvellous invention” for stabilizing a camera: ”Kubrick uses it spectacularly: we glide behind Danny (Lloyd), the boy in peril (he looks about five), who is at the center of the film, as he pedals his low-rider tricycle up and down the corridors of the huge Overlook Hotel.” The “visual feat,” she wrote, “is joined to an aural one: The sounds of the wheels moving from rug to wood are uncannily exact.”
Snow amplifies an overwhelming sense of isolation as Nicholson’s character, Jack Torrance, descends into paranoia and delusion and threatens his wife, played by Shelley Duvall, and small child. I wanted to bolt from the theater when he chases the wife into a bathroom and starts chopping through the door as she tries to push their son out a window. And when Scatman Crothers, a rescuer on a snowmobile, is in peril, I would have left, but was paralyzed. That was that. Never again.
The only time I broke that credo was when my husband, Mike, away traveling, said I should see “The Sixth Sense” (1999, M. Night Shyamalan).
“It’s really good,” he said. “It’s not that scary.” So I watched it that night and cursed him.
“Oh,” he said later. “I forgot about the opener.” Well, I sure remember.