Sometime in 1982, my family went to see E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. I don’t personally remember seeing ads for it or being particularly interested in watching it, but going to the movies was a big deal as a kid in rural Minnesota. Besides, as a 5-year-old, I’m sure I had little say in the matter. I assume it was advertised as a family-friendly story about friendship and acceptance, featuring a cute alien and a curious young boy, so the folks were fairly confident that we three boys (me being the youngest) would love it.
And it terrified me.
Firstly, that alien ain’t cute. I’m confounded by the notion that anyone ever saw the slimy, bug-eyed, snake-necked beast adorable. The plush toys modeled after it, maybe. But not that thing on the screen.
Secondly, apart from the creature’s appearance, there’s a lot of horror in it. From E.T.’s jump scare in the cornfield, to the mind-controlled frogs, to the men with guns and the ones in white suits, this was not a movie that young Paul found wholesome. My parents say that my dad had to take me out of the theater until it was over. While lying in bed at night, for weeks, I imagined that giant head popping up over the side of my bed and shrieking that shriek that Elliott heard upon their first meeting.
By all accounts, I should have been steered away from frightening movies for life. In addition to E.T., I was scared by a lot of things fairly easily. Uncle Deadly (“The Phantom of the Muppet Show”) made me very uneasy. My older brother (or maybe a neighbor kid) gave me nightmares by telling me about the clown doll scene in Poltergeist.
But after my first E.T. experience, I really started on my horror movie path in the same way that countless before and after me have: at a middle-school sleepover. The movie was Friday the 13th Part III, which funnily enough was released the same year as E.T. I know I knew who Freddy Krueger was at that time just from classmates talking about this scarred baddie with knives for fingers, so I’m sure I at least knew who Jason was. But I hadn’t met him. I had never seen him slice a guy in the crotch with a machete. I never saw him shove a pitchfork through a biker or cut another’s hand off. I never saw him squeeze a dude’s head until the eyeballs popped from their sockets. I never saw him get up again and again and again, after getting stabbed in the leg, smacked with a log, hung by the neck, and chopped in the head with an ax (and right through his brand new hockey mask, no less).
I can’t honestly say why that movie didn’t make my stomach turn. In a bad way, that is. And my real love of horror movies didn’t really take off until much later, even though a friend’s cool older sister getting us in to see Child’s Play when we were 11, and I rented a number of the Faces of Death series from my local video store in high school. However it happened and for whatever reasons, here I am as a 40-something-year-old and they’re almost the only movies I watch these days. They can be funny, and dramatic, and thoughtful. The acting, directing, and effects can be legendary and revolutionary. And yet, as great as I know they can be, I will watch a notoriously terrible horror movie in a heartbeat. Explain that.
I now own multiple copies of Friday the 13th Part III, which is my favorite in the franchise apart from the original. I just watched Child’s Play again, before watching the 2019 remake for the first time. I’ve seen Poltergeist a bunch of times and love the clown doll scene.
And maybe one day I’ll finish E.T.
Mostly Spooky Movies 