by Adam Rockoff
But the Elephant Man, Babar, and “the lady who got burned” had nothing on the scariest film. To this day, it’s one of only a handful of movies that I still refuse to watch alone in the dark. When my wife and I started dating, I tried to give it another go and it still freaked me the fuck out. This movie is the Walt Disney Company’s 1980II release The Watcher in the Woods.
The plot of the film is almost inconsequential. A couple and their two daughters temporarily move into a huge English manor. Mrs. Aylwood (Bette Davis), the estate’s owner, notices that one of the children, Jan, bears a striking resemblance to her teenage daughter who mysteriously disappeared nearly thirty years earlier. The melodrama is just background noise. The only thing that matters is that Watcher contains some of the most haunting images ever captured on celluloid. Laugh if you want, but the shot of a blindfolded Karen Aylwood, reaching out in desperation while mouthing the words “Help me,” is as bone-chilling as anything from The Haunting or The Uninvited. The fact that this specter only appears when Jan looks at her own reflection makes it all the more unsettling. Between this and the legend of Bloody Mary, I spent most of my childhood avoiding mirrors at all costs.
Of course, at the time, I knew nothing about the troubled history of Watcher, whose production and theatrical release were a monumental clusterfuck. Watcher was born out of Disney’s desire to make more adult-themed films, following their success with The Black Hole. What ensued, however, was a struggle between producer Tom Leetch and studio brass about how un-Disney a Disney film should ultimately be. The film’s ending was a point of particular contention for all involved. Watcher was rushed into theaters to capitalize on star Bette Davis’s fiftieth anniversary in the entertainment industry. As a result, the groundbreaking special effects planned for the final scene were jettisoned in favor of an ending that was less complicated to shoot—and completely incoherent. Even in an era where star power actually meant something, can you think of a dumber reason to either see, or not see, a film? Because of some arbitrary date related to the leading lady’s history? If I told my wife we couldn’t see the next Sex and the City installment because I wanted to wait for the thirty-fifth anniversary of Square Pegs, she’d rightfully have me committed.
Predictably, when Watcher was released in theaters audiences were confused. But when it hit video soon after, it attracted a whole generation of rabid fans like myself, ones less concerned about narrative cohesion than cheap thrills. Kids who came to sit on Uncle Walt’s lap but instead got their fright card. Even today, I can still give my thirty-six-year-old sister a heart attack by writing “Nerak” (“Karen” spelled backward)—a plot point in the film—into the condensation on a window.
Recently, I was at a film festival where Gary Sherman, one of the horror film’s most underrated directors—Death Line, Dead & Buried, Vice Squad—was talking about how his interest in the genre stemmed from a traumatic event from his childhood. The bodies of three young boys were found naked and bound in a forest preserve near his Chicago home, a case that received national attention as the Schuessler-Peterson murders. Since the victims were around his age, Sherman was terrified. An astute child, he heard that the best way to combat a fear was to learn as much as possible about it. Knowledge wasn’t just power, it was a defense mechanism, so Sherman immersed himself in serial killers and aberrant psychology.
I did the same thing with horror movies.
But curiously, after dozens of viewings of Watcher, I noticed something else happening. Although I was scared shitless of the film, literally jumping off the couch each time a mirror would shatter and Karen’s ghostly countenance would appear, I kind of liked the feeling. I felt energized. Rejuvenated. Alive. I became a fear junkie. Now, this doesn’t mean I was a particularly brave addict. I watched Friday the 13th Part 3 standing in the doorway of my living room, peering around the door frame in case the tension became so unbearable that I had to scurry back to the safety of the kitchen. Just the poster for Curtains, with the image of a small doll coming through the elongated mouth of an old-crone mask, shook me up so badly that I couldn’t even bring myself to watch the film when it first made the rounds on cable.
So every new horror film became a test, a game to see how much fear I could handle. Like all addicts, I eventually built up a tolerance. And the more films I watched, the more I fell in love with them. With their colorful villains and breathtaking monsters. Mind-bending plots and phantasmagoric imagery. Even their rather reassuring worldview; except for a few daring and downbeat examples, good usually triumphed over evil. Although slasher films were certainly the most prevalent subgenre at the time, I sought out all flavors of horror. Gothic ghost stories. Cold War parables. Seventies devil films. Forgotten independent oddities. Even the dusty old Universal classics and their marginally faster-paced Hammer Films spawn held interest, as I understood that they were part of a lineage that seemed to grow richer and more compelling with every passing generation.
Concurrent with my burgeoning love of horror, seismic changes were taking place in the film industry. The early days of home video were a vast wasteland, mainly of pornography and weird promotional infomercials. Shortsighted as usual, the Hollywood studios were initially wary of this new technology. Just as they had feared nearly every other technological innovation since the birth of the medium, they were convinced it was going to completely upend their business model. Ironically, by the time the DVD market cratered in the late 2000s, home video had come to make up a disproportionate share of the industry’s profits. Because discs were priced so low, even casual film buffs could afford to build their own home library. You could buy a new, digitally remastered version of Casablanca for hardly more than it once cost to rent it at Blockbuster, especially if you factored in the inevitable late fees.
An unintended result of the studios’ trepidation was an immediate boom in low-budget home video distributors, which sprang up to meet the public’s insatiable desire for product. Since these distributors couldn’t get their hands on studio releases, they were forced to fill their pipelines with the only films they were able to license—more often than not, horror and exploitation titles.
This was a game changer. Before this, these B movies could only be seen in independent theaters, usually in large cities, and at the occasional drive-in, which were already few and far between. Although I lived only forty-five minutes from Forty-Second Street, the mecca of the famed grindhouses, I had as much chance of visiting these fleapits as I did Kathmandu. We went into Manhattan exactly once a year around Christmas to catch a Broadway musical and gawk at Macy’s holiday window displays. And although I would have gladly traded in my Guys and Dolls or Oklahoma! tickets for a showing of Women in Cages or The Corpse Grinders, I seriously doubt anyone else in my family would have considered this an appropriate holiday excursion.
Once sleaze became available to consume in the privacy of one’s home, the grindhouses lost much of their appeal, unless you were an exhibitionist or Pee-wee Herman. The dilapidated seats, atrocious acoustics, and cum-covered floor weren’t accoutrements worth preserving.
More recently, we’ve seen a similar scenario play itself out with pornography, as physical media like magazines and videos/DVDs have gone the way of the dinosaurs. It’s all about safety, convenience, and cost. The more I think about it, the more baffling it is that there’s still a market for any non-Internet-distributed porn. How many copies of Swank can the Pakistani owner of my local liquor store possibly be selling? And to whom? Who in their right mind would shell out fifteen bones for a single issue in light of the free and unlimited selection online? And while we’re on the topic, what kind of lunatic purchases pornography at an airport newsstand? But a lot of people do, right? I mean, literally every airport I’ve ever been in has a robust selection of dirty magazines. There must be a compelling reason for them to keep stocking this smut. And that reason can only be that there’s still a demand for it. Forget religious profiling, which I really don’t have a problem with. We would be
well served if TSA agents focused most of their attention on travelers buying airport porn. Because any person who must have it now, and can’t wait until they return to the privacy of their home or hotel room, isn’t the kind of person you want roaming the cabin at thirty thousand feet. What do they plan to do with it anyway, join the Mile-High Club with themselves? Plus, anyone who has no compunction about buying porn not only in public, but in an airport of all places, in plain view of babies, grandparents, and Franciscan nuns, is obviously a deeply disturbed individual.
That said, I sort of feel bad for kids today. After all, trying to procure pornography before you’re old enough is a noble time-honored tradition. Disabling the Net Nanny on the family computer can’t possibly hold the same illicit thrill as trying to buy dirty magazines at the corner store, holding your breath in anticipation while the teenage clerk decides which is more important, enforcing the store’s age restrictions or possibly pocketing a fiver.
Believe it or not, I still have my family’s very first VCR displayed in my office as a retro conversation piece. It’s a behemoth of a machine that came with a remote control connected to the system by an actual cord. Ironically, I’d love such an obsolete feature today, as I spend an inordinate amount of time searching between the cushions of the couch for one of our fifty thousand remotes.
In November 2013, the wires were abuzz with the news that Blockbuster had finally given in to the inevitable and closed its remaining three hundred stores. My first reaction was shock. Neither I nor anybody I knew had any idea there were any Blockbuster stores still open. We assumed the last one went out of business around the time Andre Agassi started losing his hair. My second reaction, however, was sadness. Unlike my more militant spiritual brethren, I never viewed Blockbuster or any of the larger chains, such as Hollywood and West Coast Video, as the evil empire. They served a necessary function. If I needed to rent When Harry Met Sally for whatever reason, I was glad they were well stocked. But since my tastes ran closer to Shocking Asia, which, surprise, Blockbuster did not carry, I had little use for them. So although I certainly won’t miss anything about the stores themselves, I do lament the end of an era. To me, the video store was what the record shop was to my parents’ generation, and what, according to Norman Rockwell, the counter at the corner drugstore was to that of my grandparents.
I remember the huge clamshell boxes, prominently displayed to catch the eye of discriminating cinephiles browsing through rows of tapes. The gorgeous artwork and scenes of carnage on the back covers promised unspeakable horrors, making me dizzy with anticipation. Or that might have been the smell of mildew, day-old popcorn, and industrial disinfectant that hung in the air. But either way, there was no mistaking the ambiance.
Back in the day, my best friend, Mark Cichowski, and I would ride our bikes down “the path,” a narrow crumbling concrete bridge that spanned a meandering creek. It connected our hometown of North Brunswick, New Jersey, with the neighboring hamlet of Milltown. Milltown’s Main Street looked like a set from a Frank Capra movie, practically unchanged since the 1950s. Nestled among a pizza parlor, Irish bakery, pharmacy, and Catholic church (whose billboards, years later, my cousin would deface because they ran graphic antiabortion ads) was the Book Swap. It was nothing more than an ordinary used-book store that seemed to stock an inordinately large selection of Harlequin romance paperbacks. In the back of the store was a small section of VHS tapes for rental. I can’t remember if they were literally all horror movies or if those were the only ones that caught my eye. But I needed to see them. This was easier said than done.
I am the product of an overprotective mother. Well, overprotective for the seventies; today she would probably be cited by the Department of Child Services for gross negligence. For example, we spent a few weeks each summer at the Jersey Shore, where I attended a “day camp” run by teenagers more interested in huffing glue than looking after a bunch of unruly kids. Despite my being an excellent swimmer, not to mention the oldest in the group, my mother insisted I wear a life jacket into the ocean since “you never know how strong the undertow can be.” As a result, I was teased mercilessly by all the other campers, who were probably convinced I was the aquatic version of the boy in the bubble.
On the other hand, my friends and I built a dirt bike course in the middle of the forest, complete with ramps made from rotted wood off of which we’d jump over mini bonfires like pint-sized Evel Knievels. Nowadays, if one of my kids so much as gets on their bike without a helmet, I begin to hyperventilate.
Thankfully, my mother was extremely open-minded when it came to my media consumption. Well, open-minded or clueless. I tend to think, or at least I hope, she might not have known exactly what Last House on the Left was when she rented it for me when I was in sixth grade.
By that time, my mother had come to terms with the fact that I loved horror movies. Since the Book Swap was a wholesome family-owned business, they forced her to sign a “consent form” that stated in no uncertain terms that she was giving me permission to rent movies rated R specifically for violence—as opposed to those movies rated R (or even worse, unrated!) because of sexual content. I know, it seems ridiculous. Cultural commentators love to point out the disparity between America’s attitudes toward sex and violence, with the latter being far more permissible in mainstream entertainment. As opposed to, say, enlightened Europe, where lovers frolic au naturel on public television while violence is severely regulated. I never thought I’d say this, being pro-vagina and antigun, but as a parent with two young kids I actually find it much easier to explain away fictionalized bloodshed. Because of their diet of video games, Cartoon Network shows, and Lego battlefields, my children at least have a frame of reference for death. But two naked people in strange positions and making guttural noises? This is a discussion I’d like to put off for at least a couple more years.
As much as I truly want to shield my kids from the prurient for as long as possible, there is something to be said for good old-fashioned honesty. Oftentimes, the things we say to protect children inevitably create even more confusion. For example, I must have been no more than five or six when I saw my first Playboy. Some older kids had stashed it in the woods near my house and my friends and I came across it while we were sledding. When I told my mother, she calmly explained that Playboy was just a magazine for grown-ups. Obviously, this was a less than satisfying answer, so naturally I pressed her on what specifically made it so. She finally gave in and told me that Playboy featured photos of deer slain by hunters as well as the cancer-riddled lungs of smokers, blackened with tar and other by-products of cigarettes. What’s ironic is that I would have found it perfectly understandable that men enjoy looking at pictures of naked women—I certainly did, even at that young age—but I could never for the life of me grasp why anyone would want to see this other shit. To illustrate what a powerful hold childhood lessons have on the psyche, even in the face of conflicting but accurate information, when I was in college and actually subscribed to Playboy, I would still subconsciously look for the dead deer and diseased lungs between the centerfolds and celebrity pictorials.
But I digress . . . Once Mark and I made our selection from the Book Swap, we would stop at the nearby convenience store to stock up before returning to my house for hours of uninterrupted viewing. Sweet Jane might have been living on reds, vitamin C, and cocaine, but we preferred a cocktail of Hostess CupCakes, Fun Dip, and Jolt to get us through the marathon screening sessions.
Over those lazy weekends we’d plow through quite an eclectic selection of films, determined less by taste than by what the Book Swap currently had in stock. We watched The Thing over and over again, marveling at Rob Bottin’s makeup effects and fast-forwarding through the “boring” parts, which were, of course, all the talky scenes that didn’t include dogs splitting apart and chests bursting open. We found Mausoleum unspeakably funny and nearly wore out the VCR’s tape head rewinding the scene where tiny heads sprout from the breasts of former Playboy Bunny Bobb
ie Bresee. And we had our minds blown by Sleepaway Camp. Sure, the film’s gender politics might have escaped us, but sometimes a girl with a dick trumps all.
Growing up, my family actually owned a video store called the First Row. The reason this doesn’t figure more prominently into my childhood is because the store was located about an hour from my house. The more significant family business was actually a dairy farm, founded by my great-grandfather, which, over the years, spawned a chain of convenience stores along the mid-Atlantic coast. How a video store fit into that mix I really don’t know, but we owned one nonetheless.
During one of our occasional visits to the First Row, a life-size cardboard advertisement for the exploitation film I Spit on Your Grave stood right next to the counter. The image was one of the most well-known and striking in the history of B-movie poster art: the posterior of a woman clad only in a torn undergarment clutching a bloody knife. The tagline is also genius: This Woman Has Just Cut, Chopped, Broken, and Burned Five Men Beyond Recognition . . . But No Jury in America Would Ever Convict Her! The display was so overt—and so inappropriate for a family video store—that the film took on a disproportionate sense of importance for me. I assumed it had to be the ne plus ultra of exploitation. Years later, when I finally saw the film, it was one of the few that actually lived up to its billing—it was even more extreme than advertised.