Spooky season is upon us. In addition to decorating the neighborhoods with jack-o-lanterns, cobwebs, and headstones, scary movies are binged by cinephiles like myself. This includes the classics like The Shining, The Exorcist, Psycho, as well as classics from stars of the iconic Universal Monster movies (such as Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff). Outsiders would expect cinephiles to follow high standards when it comes to watching movies to put us in a festive mood, right?
On the contrary. We welcome all horror films. Not only do we welcome the ones that pushed boundaries and have lingered in our nightmares for decades, but we also even appreciate the ridiculous that leave us questioning how they could have been satisfied with the final product. While we believe that movies should be a shared experience so we can discuss how the filmmakers left an impression on us, we also love trash-talking a movie filled with ham, cheese, and camp (quite the adjectives). If anything, they are so bad that they are good.
Many months ago, I was catching up with a fellow cinephile, Father Hugh Vincent Dyer (my former chaplain while at Quinnipiac). During our phone call, Father Hugh Vincent shared that one streaming service was offering Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space, generally considered one of the worst movies ever made. Inquiring whether I would watch it, I emphatically told him that if I was going to watch a universally panned movie, it would have to be in a social manner because I was not going to waste two hours of my own time subjecting myself such a catastrophe. I needed to be sitting near someone who could mutually roast the movie with me.
True, there are drama movies that are incredibly bad, but they turn out more cringe-worthy than amusing. I believe it is because we, the audience, know the filmmakers sincerely tried to put out a film they thought would move us, but fell flat on its face. B-movies were cheap experimental productions, which is why they mostly consist of horror and science-fiction. Jack Nicholson appeared in many films by legendary B-movie producer Roger Corman and has always shown appreciation for the opportunities that were afforded him by his collaboration with Corman.
But true appreciation for the bad movies comes when it becomes a shared experience. As soon as something ridiculous happens on-screen (horrible delivery of a horrible line, terrible special effects, nonsensical narrative, etc.), a roasting competition has begun among the audience. And because it is a movie that has been edited and distributed to the masses, there is no mean-spirited affect akin to hecklers of comedians or musicians (well, no direct affect). After all, this hobby led to the creation of the series Mystery Science Theater 3000, in which a terrible movie is played while the silhouettes of science-fiction characters in the foreground heckle this main feature… which I ultimately consider ironic turn of events because B-movies were made to accompany the main feature. Perhaps the only way to for a B-movie to get a turnout is to strive for poor artistic quality?
This practice of eagerly watching bad movies is also part of life as a cinephile. We start off seeking the masterpieces that stimulate our hearts and minds. But we are never satisfied and always seek more films to watch, and inevitably we stumble upon the bad ones. I personally watch the movies to check them off my list, as if I was browsing the catalogue. But they have lived on in throwaway clips that TV shows we grew up on, and by watching the B-movie as adults, we can experience a nostalgic flashback, as well.
Tonight, I venture into Ernest Scared Stupid, in which Jim Varney’s character awakens a cursed troll that begins terrorizing the town. But in my childhood, the troll freaked me out for turning the kids into wooden dolls. It nauseated me, because a sliver of logic made me realize that if the characters were changed from flesh and blood into a non-animated substance, then they would be dead. Maybe I was thinking a little too much, even for an eight-year-old?
Here’s to all the movies: the good, the bad, and the ugly (no, not the Sergio Leone western, but that is certainly worth writing about later).
The City of Cinema 