Horror movies on the silver screen: those were the days

Boris Karloff as the monster in The Bride of Frankenstein

I’m aged 12. Attending school in pre-gentrified, working-class Richmond at the Yarra Park State School, a prepubescent version of Blackboard Jungle. Its playground – that term a total misnomer – is a cruel place, where I’m picked on as a middle-class blow-in. Until the arrival of the wildly eccentric Adrian Rawlins, these days memorialised by a statue in Fitzroy. I join in picking on him. But Adrian’s another story.

I’m a member of a local Scout troop that meets in the basement of a bluestone Anglican church. Until I’m expelled for setting the scoutmaster’s desk on fire. But that too is another story.

One night my friend Arthur Hodges and I decide to wag the broomstick warriors and go to Hoyts Cinema, a draughty barn on Bridge Street next to the Richmond Town Hall. I’ve many memories of the place, including local bikies riding up and down the central aisle in deafening approval of Marlon Brando’s The Wild One. It was that sort of cinema.

Arthur and I have snuck off in our scout uniforms to see a double bill of horror movies.

Bela Lugosi as Dracula

Seventy years on, I’m not entirely sure what they were. Almost certainly a Frankenstein with Boris Karloff and a Dracula with Bela Lugosi, the evening complete with a Cinesound Newsreel, Val Morgan slides, movie trailers and, for light relief among the horrors, a cartoon. We sit about halfway down and watch the horror show. Or rather, I watch it. Petrified by the prospect of vampires and monsters, Arthur sits beside me curled in the foetal position, his scout hat over his face. All he sees that night is the inside of his hat.

“What’s happening? What’s happening now?” asks a trembling voice, muffled by the Baden-Powell headgear. And I attempt a running commentary. “There’s lots of lightning and stuff and the creature is starting to twitch! Now it’s sitting up and breaking the leather straps!” Or, “the vampire is sinking his teeth into her throat and starting to suck her blood!” To which Arthur responds with piteous moans as he clamps his hat more firmly on his face, as though it were Ned Kelly’s armour or a medieval knight’s protective crash helmet.

You will be familiar with the terms “cheap drunk” and “two pot screamer” – someone who gets inebriated on even the smell of alcohol. Arthur was the cinematic equivalent, screaming at the very thought of disturbing imagery, no matter how tamely evoked on the screen. He didn’t need to see Boris lumbering around with bolts in his neck, or Bela’s protruding fangs. To even glimpse the goings-on might have caused cardiac arrest.

I don’t think he ever saw – really saw – a horror film. Not The Beast With Five Fingers in which a hand crudely amputated from the wrist of a concert pianist takes on a life of its own and crawls around like a fleshy crab seeking victims to strangle. Or Lon Chaney sprouting facial hair as he transmogrifies into the Wolf Man, before being euthanased by a silver bullet. Arthur never saw Dracula desperately trying to climb into his coffin to escape the first shaft of sunlight. Or Frankenstein’s melancholy monster being driven into the swamp by angry villagers brandishing burning torches.

These days Dr Frankenstein’s dated. Ditto Dracula and the Wolf Man. Now we have Covid and its variants to fear – and the return of that variant on the Addams Family, Donald and the Family Trump. Or local horrors like Michaelia Cash in full banshee mode, or a Barnaby Joyce press conference.

So Arthur, if you’re still around: keep the hat on your face. We dwell in even spookier times.