Horror Show

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In 1959, when he was four­teen and I was thir­teen, my friend David took me across the Line from Castlegar, B.C., to Spokane, Washington, to watch movies. Spokane was the first American city across the Line from us. You got there by dri­ving up to Rossland and then to Paterson, which was not a town but a low cus­toms build­ing with over­hang­ing eaves that you drove under slowly enough for the U.S. offi­cial to see you and, in most cases (peo­ple in the Kootenays on both sides of the Line all knew each other), wave you through. If you were two boys on your own, you would be hitch­hik­ing to Spokane, and you would be a Canadian boy and a for­mer German boy cross­ing the bor­der to the United States, and you would be much shorter than the kind peo­ple, sin­gle men mostly, who stopped their cars and picked you up. David talked and joked with these men, and I lis­tened and learned about America and its special­ness. When we got to Spokane the last dri­ver dropped us off on the main street, which was wider than any street I had ever seen and was sur­rounded by high build­ings. Spokane was a real city, not just a town, David explained: it was wide open. There were many movie the­atres; David knew where all of them were, on the main street mostly, and when I walked into the the­atres I was already scared because I was inside a strange, dark place after hav­ing just left an out­side, light place that was also strange. I sat and waited for the hor­ror to start.

We saw a movie called Fiend Without a Face and one called The Amazing Colossal Man and another called The Blob. The American Air Force had dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War ii and from then on an invis­i­ble sub­stance called radi­a­tion floated around in the world. Stories about sci­en­tific exper­i­ments going awry and blow­ing up in sci­en­tists’ faces were shown on screens and depicted in comic books. 

The Amazing Colossal Man fea­tured a sci­en­tist whose exper­i­ments with radi­a­tion failed when his lab blew up in his face and he grew and grew. He became so large that he could step over build­ings and over moun­tain ranges. On the screen you saw his head and then his body rise up over the Sierra Nevada. His face was cov­ered with scars from the radi­a­tion and he was naked except for a loin­cloth (the same kind Tarzan wore, only larger). After he stepped over moun­tain ranges and into towns, he picked up cars and threw them at peo­ple and build­ings. Nobody loved this Colossal Man. He was taller by far than Jeffrey Banigan, the tallest kid in our school, whose father was the tallest man in Castlegar.

In Fiend Without a Face, a force you couldn’t see made stair­ways in build­ings col­lapse, then made the build­ings them­selves col­lapse, made ships sink in har­bours and made peo­ple on the screen dis­ap­pear in an instant. Nobody knew what this force was or where it came from. Music cued you when it was about to strike and you searched the screen for clues about the com­ing event. When the Fiend struck and all you could see was the dam­age, not its cause, peo­ple in the audi­ence gasped, and peo­ple on the screen also gasped or shrieked and put their hands over their mouths, which opened wide and were shown in close-ups. I sat silently and watched as the movie screen seemed to grow big­ger and big­ger with each tragedy. David always laughed in these dra­matic moments.

Spokane’s art deco Fox Theater, newly restored (photo credit)

Some mon­sters in the hor­ror movies in those days were cre­ated by sci­en­tists who had acci­dents; oth­ers came from outer space. The Blob was a red sub­stance that landed in a farm field near a town in the United States. It began as a small piece of jelly, then jumped on and sur­rounded and devoured people’s arms, then their shoul­ders, then their whole bod­ies, then cars, and soon build­ings and entire towns. People on the screen shrieked and ran away in ter­ror, and peo­ple in the audi­ence ate their pop­corn faster as they watched the Blob gob­ble things up. Even the U.S. Army, with its bombers and artillery, couldn’t stop the Blob. The Army shot mis­siles at it and it grew big­ger; the bombs the Air Force dropped on it fed it and caused it to grow even big­ger. David laughed at each new devel­op­ment, and I tried to make my eyes do what they didn’t want to do: close. Finally, one smart sci­en­tist found a way to lure the Blob into the Arctic and make it fall into a crevasse the bombers had blown into the ice, which the Blob couldn’t digest, and that, as the music told you, was the end of the Blob. A voice came out of the screen and said the Blob would one day return. The Arctic, the voice explained, was above Alaska.

David said after­ward that it would have been smarter in this movie to bomb the Blob with an atom bomb or lure it into a rocket ship and send it back into space where it had come from. He said the Blob could also have come from Russia, which was a red kind of place, or from other evil coun­tries that the United States had come to hate and needed to fight against in the inter­ests of free­dom. Germany, for exam­ple. Blobs always came from such places, David said, which fea­tured, among other things, stu­pid sci­en­tists. He said movies like this, where good beat evil, were all come­dies, and when I dis­agreed and said they seemed seri­ous, David said America was the kind of place where when dan­ger­ous things hap­pened it was also funny, and this meant Americans liked to laugh in the face of dan­ger. He said the Japanese, on whom Americans had dropped the atom bomb, were a dif­fer­ent breed of peo­ple than North Americans, and the Germans, who had also been beaten up by America in the war but had not had an atom bomb dropped on them, needed to be beaten too, to teach them a les­son, espe­cially the les­son that you shouldn’t drop bombs on freedom-loving peo­ple. He said the German gov­ern­ment had been plan­ning to drop an atom bomb on America, but the plan blew up in their faces when the American Air Force bombed German sci­en­tists’ lab­o­ra­to­ries with nor­mal, not atomic, bombs; he said if the Germans had man­aged to fin­ish their atom bomb and drop it on America, every­one in America would have turned into a colos­sal man, taller by far than Jeffrey Banigan. Wouldn’t that have been funny?

The peo­ple in the audi­ence who laughed like David did when the peo­ple on the screen screamed and fled in ter­ror from the Colossal Man or the Blob or the Fiend that had no face, were Americans who, I imag­ined, were used to cat­a­strophic events (for exam­ple, Pearl Harbor). These movies came from their coun­try, and when the music swelled and the hor­ror increased, and it sounded like a cel­e­bra­tion on the screen, I under­stood what an impor­tant place America was for its cit­i­zens and their large emo­tions. Horror, I thought, besides mak­ing you scream, can also make you silent: it is larger in every way than real­ity. When David and I walked out of the movie the­atre after a dou­ble fea­ture, which is what these kinds of movies came in (you saw them in the after­noon), the evening light in the wide main street of Spokane shone in from the sides, and I was sur­prised to notice that Spokane had no moun­tains around it, which all towns in our part of B.C. had. The light, blocked by no moun­tains, made the dust that floated around in the air above the street shim­mer and glow, and the dust, I imag­ined, must have come from a nearby desert or at least a prairie, which, I knew from Western movies, sur­rounded American towns and cities. The dust, made vis­i­ble by the slanted light on Spokane’s main street, also reminded me of the dust float­ing around in our movie the­atre in Castlegar when you looked at the light beam thrown by the pro­jec­tor run by Mr. Musselman, who was also the school jan­i­tor, from up there in the booth. Boys flat­tened their empty pop­corn boxes and spun them into the light beam, and the boxes curved through it like lit-up space­ships zoom­ing down to Earth, and kids cheered and adults got mad and said the pro­jec­tor beam would set the pop­corn boxes on fire.

When we hitch­hiked back to Castle­gar it was dark and the lights on the car dash­boards flick­ered and their glass reflected the faces of the men who’d picked us up and who, I imag­ined, knew every­thing there was to know about elec­tric­ity. David sat in the front and talked to these men about our adven­tures and I sat in the back and lis­tened to sounds that were both real and not real. It was dark and com­fort­able in the warm, spa­cious back seats of cars in those days, and it was easy to imag­ine you were in a space­ship cruis­ing down toward Earth and get­ting a close look. When we got to Patterson, the dark shapes of the moun­tains sloped down with their thick ever­green cover: Patterson is in a high val­ley behind Rossland (where our ski hill was), and when you got to the bor­der and crossed its Line you were in the mid­dle of a moun­tain pass. The high­way sloped up from America and then down into Canada (or up from Canada and then down into the usa, if you were going the other way), and as we drove under the eaves of the cus­toms build­ing I always thought about the German story called “Die Sieben Meilen Stiefel,” “The Seven League Boots” in English, which I learned as a kid. In it the boy gets a pair of boots that enable him to travel seven miles (leagues, in English) with a sin­gle step: he walks mostly across prairies and low hills because the coun­try in which the story takes place has no moun­tains to speak of.