It
began with the slow, ominous thunder
of
funeral bells, the creeping groan
of
a creaking door, then the hushed,
whispering
voice of a woman intoning,
“In the dead of night,
When the moon is high
And the ill winds blow
And the banshees cry
And the moonlight casts
An unearthly glow,
Arise my love with tales of woe.”
The
camera would cut to a coffin,
its
lid rising slowly to reveal
an
ashen faced ghoul with dark, shrunken cheeks
dressed
in black, gloves and hooded cape
who
introduced himself as Sammy Terry
with
a deep, diabolical laugh
and
would bid us welcome
to
Nightmare Theater
just
as at the end of the night he would
wish
us “Pleasant nightmares,” before
sending
us off to bed with the same
sinister
laughter.
It
was the Friday Night Monster Movie Bash
and
no youngster growing up in central Indiana
during
the sixties or seventies could fail
to
recollect WTTV’s resident horror host
and
his sidekick, George the rubber spider who spoke
in
a high pitched chitter that only Sammy could understand.
So
camp and obviously fake
yet
it never failed to frighten us.
The
movies were of secondary interest;
bad
1950’s B-films of bikini clad babes
being
pursued by atom age monsters from the sea,
giant
insects, robots from outer space
and
bug eyed behemoths from the deeps
sprinkled
with an authentic classic
like
“Dracula” or “Frankenstein” or one of those
lush
gothics from Hammer Studios.
Instead,
we watched for Sammy’s dry
gallows
humor and comically
convoluted
commentary
or
that night’s cinematic snack.
We
always had to beg our parents to stay up late,
promising
extra chores and dismissing their concerns
that
such ghastly images would give us nightmares
or
that we would grow up to be psychopathic killers
or
even worse, Democrats,
wearing
them down with a child’s insistent persistence.
We’d
pan pop our popcorn, slather it in real butter
and
salt then leave half of it uneaten
when
the movie’s frights became too much
for
our eight year old brains,
spend
most of the night peering at the screen
through
spread fingers and giggling
as
we tried to out-scare our siblings.
Later,
in our bed, all assurances to parents aside,
those
horror flick beasts, no matter how cheesy or faked,
would
follow us into our dreams to chase us
through
the nightmare labyrinth of sleep
but
it was Sammy who came to us most often,
rising
from some dark grave to pull us
screaming
into his dungeon where even George,
that
rubber, dime-store Halloween prop
was
transformed into a hideous, fanged giant
from
the blackest reaches of Hell.
