FRIDAY NIGHT MONSTERS

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.