I passed from streetlight to streetlight quickly. I had to. Otherwise my pounding heart might explode. The night was not just dark…and cold. It was out to get me.
Last night, awake from an unsettled sleep, I staggered to my window and was reminded of that long-ago walk. The looming fir tree cast a broad shadow across the yard and over the fence. Within the spearlike shape was a darkness as black as the ink from Edgar Allen Poe’s quill pen. All around it, the full moon cast a cold white glow, pasty as the skin of Bram Stoker’s monster, the one who never saw daylight. Behind the safety of my window, I recalled that dreadful night of my youth.
It had been a dry winter. Little snow, few storms. But the cold cracked your skin and the wind bit into the wounds.
I was working evenings during the fall of my first year in high school. The job was to take tickets at the local theater chain in my hometown. A modest chain: The Grand, The Snyder and The Lake Park Drive-in (of course open only in summer). A modest downtown too, about four blocks of single-story shops serving the nine thousand residents and surrounding farms and villages. The Grand (slogan “Our Screen Talks!”) centered the west side of one block, while The Snyder, named after the family of owners, dominated the next. Our small staff would rotate between the two as needed.
It was the end of 1973 during the holiday break from school, and it was my turn at The Snyder. People were lining up for a very non-holiday show, although, to be fair, it did feature religion. The Exorcist, preceded by a scare campaign of previews that whipped up fear and morbid curiosity, came out the day after Christmas. As we were a secondary market, we didn’t get it on opening day, but when it arrived, people were talking.
I’ve always had a slight taste for horror movies, and the ones that affected me the most have always been those where evil lurked unseen, like the skulking characters of a Steven King novel. Blood and gore will startle, but the foreboding unknown is worse. Startle is momentary, scare goes deeper.
But I only had slight exposure to scary movies in my pre-teen years. When an unlikely group of friends walked into the forest on their way to see the Wizard of Oz, the ominous path scared me more than the flying monkeys. I was as shaky as Don Knotts trying to hold a flashlight while walking through a dark house when I watched The Ghost and Mr. Chicken. And that was a comedy! Many would have found the mid-50s film Creature From the Black Lagoon also pretty campy, but when it glowed in eerie black-and-white from our television, the monster climbing up on shore kept me out of the water.
My high school years, though, would provide plentiful chances to raise the hairs on the back of my neck. And it began with The Exorcist.
I spent my happiest theater days earlier that year when we showed the Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles, the football movie The Longest Yard, and a series of disaster films so popular at the time: Earthquake and Towering Inferno. There were plenty of shocks to be had when trapped in those hellscapes. But I learned, too, in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, that a group of high schoolers should never, ever seek an escape from their troubles in an abandoned country house.
The Exorcist, though, would provide the memories that haunted and endured. A young girl in bed, unleashing hell on the world, blasphemous words erupting from a guttery snarl, furniture and adults sent spinning.
By 1975 the foreboding ramped up with Jaws (a much more believable sea creature) and continued with The Stepford Wives (what was really happening behind closed doors around town?). But the scares were relieved by the campy take on a horror classic, Young Frankenstein, playing as comic relief over the next Christmas holiday.
Another dive into religious horror came with The Omen in 1976, along with the first adaptation of Stephen King’s work, Carrie, a good argument against bullying and prom. In 1977, The Exorcist II was released, which paled in comparison to the first but brought memories back to bone-chilling life.
The apex of high-school frights arrived in a flurry in my graduation year, 1978. Damien: Omen II continued the story of the possessed child, Jaws II kept me out of the water, The Eyes of Laura Mars and Invasion of the Body Snatchers struck fear of lurking unknown, as did the television movie Stranger in Our House, which starred the Exorcist’s Linda Blair and was directed by Wes Craven, who would go on to rule the 1980s with his slasher films. But the capstone of terror that year was the film that started the slasher genre, directed by the man who was the writer of Laura Mars, John Carpenter. That, of course, was Halloween.
The highlight of that film, which literally jolted me out of my theater seat with every muscle tensed, occurred (spoiler alert) after the audience assumed that the horror had ended. Young Jamie Lee Curtis, the battling babysitter, had prevailed over the masked monster who had been terrorizing the darkened homes on her leafy residential street. She collapsed, bloody butcher knife in hand, in front of the furniture where she had finally felled the masked killer. She was breathing heavily, eyes unfocused. Silently and quickly, without a spike of shrieking movie music, the monster sat up behind her. We saw him before she did.
Later, in a college film class, I would learn that that was not the first time audiences were shocked by the abrupt reanimation of an evil killer. It came in the 1967 movie Wait Until Dark, where Audrey Hepburn played a blind woman and Alan Arkin appeared at her door, a thug searching for something she unknowingly had in her possession. The film, adapted from a play, masterfully used darkness and foreboding, and even when you knew it was coming, the scare was visceral.
But back in 1973, my senses were not prepared for such a fright. Coming out of some turbulent pre-teen years, I was easily spooked. Yes, I would find my way, and retreating into movies (and voraciously reading books) helped. Film was an escape but also a window to the larger world, unimaginable experiences beyond what I’d find on the farm or in my small hometown. Working at the theater brought me great joy.
Until that winter night. I had been tasked with “staying late” after the second showing of the film had started. At that point, our full complement of three staffers was not needed. Only one had to stay behind to sell popcorn if anyone got up during the film and make sure everyone exited the theater after the show had ended. The projectionist would lock up.
We dimmed The Snyder’s lobby lights when the show began. The strongest light came from the bulb inside the popcorn popper that would keep the corn a bit warm, and white light from the marquee that sent beams through the glass doors onto the carpet.
The person staying late could sit at a couple of spots in the lobby but was not to sit in the theater. It was necessary to keep an eye on the front doors as well as the concession stand. However, The Snyder had a “crying room.” You entered this semi-private space through a door in the lobby. Inside was a row of seats behind a large window pane. With a speaker on the wall and a view of the screen, parents with fussy babies could sit in this room and still watch the film. Of course, for this movie, on this late night, in the dead of winter, there was nobody like that in the audience.
So I went in. Through a window in the door, I had a direct view of concessions and could see if anyone came in from the street or out from the theater. This was an acceptable spot for the person staying late. It was private and safe. Except on this night, with this film, it was anything but.
I entered the room after the film had begun, possibly a half-hour into it. The screen was all blues and blacks. Night on a foggy city street. Spiky low fences gated small yards in front of a row of brownstones. A lone streetlight lit the wet pavement. And down the street we saw the back of a man who walked slowly toward that light, his briefcase hanging from one hand. The priest was visiting the house. The exorcist had arrived.
I do not recall anyone wanting popcorn, but I stepped in and out of that room repeatedly over the next hour or so, just to calm my nerves. Trapped, by myself, alone in a chair behind the glass, the dialogue and soundtrack assaulted only my ears, and the scenes reflected off the room’s glass portal. I was drawn into a film’s horrific world as I had never experienced before. It was as though, in that room removed from other humanity, I was an observer of reality, a voyeur on the dark world of demonic possession.
And then, when the movie was over and the audience dispersed, I had to walk home.
At midnight in winter, even the town’s main street was deserted. My family home was also on Main, just fourteen blocks from the train depot that anchored the far end of the street. From the theater, I had about twelve blocks to go.
Streetlight to streetlight, I sought the pools, yet felt myself caught in them like the doomed priest who was sent to fight evil. The blocks of brick storefronts gave way to darkened homes, whose large front-yard trees cast shadows that no light could penetrate.
Anyone rising from their bed to look out of their window would see a hulking, hunched form, bundled in a bulky winter parka, his heavy gait making progress slow as he stumbled over sidewalk cracks and tried to rush through the frigid night.
The homes gave way to a church, my family church in fact, which loomed mute and useless beyond its crusty lawn. I crossed the one street with stoplights, which at that hour were just flashing yellow, and passed the broad city park with its fenced and covered outdoor pool and stark tennis courts. Another two blocks of dark houses and I would be home.
That night, in my basement room on my extra-long twin bed, I didn’t get much sleep. I just stared at the dark, thinking of the horror that was surely just beyond the window.
To appreciate a classic in the jump-scare genre, rent Wait Until Dark online from a streaming service.