Horror Movies with Mom

In 1979 Mom took us to see Dawn of the Dead in Akron, Ohio. Halloween City, USA. I remember there being a haunted schoolhouse, a haunted laboratory, and haunted hayrides galore. At that time of year, it wouldn’t have been unusual to see plastic vampire teeth at Sunday school.

Heading to the drive-in my brother and I shared the backseat of our brown Pontiac. The car had only two doors but vinyl acreage for elbows and popcorn. Mom was a skilled dressmaker and that year my brother wanted a checkerboard outfit with patches of white and black. I was a demon. My costume was easy enough for me to make by myself. Yellow sheet. Fake blood from a white tube. Aforementioned plastic vampire teeth. Presto.

While in Cleveland we listened to soul music on am 1490. Harold Melvin, the O-Jays, the Commodores. But at the Akron drive-in we probably laughed at whatever was on the radio, half scared anyone might overhear. Eventually, the airwaves splashed the inevitable—that Boris Karloff imitator working in his “lab late one night” or the good old boy who “ain’t gonna let no haint” run him off.

I was eight. The opening scenes of Dawn of the Dead bailed out my nerves then flooding with close looks and crew cuts and faces my skin color—raining in from the other cars. What haints were they looking at? My stepfather at the wheel in a burgundy leather blazer and denim cap? My mother, hair like a lion’s mane, smoking menthol cigarettes in dark sunglasses too big for her face? Or my brother and I inhaling second-hand race and class resentment along with handfuls of buttery popcorn?

I remember my mother adjusting the speaker by her window so we could hear. Sirens. The ghetto. A swat team kicks the door in. It’s a raid. Until that woman (no junkie I’ve ever seen) sinks her ashen face into that man’s neck and three thick rivulets of blood jet down his back.

Did they hit the floor before my jaw?

Rivulets 1. Jaw zip.

I went on to lose more, thanks to horror movies. All sense of security in water, for one thing. That happened after Mom got us to watch Jaws on cable. I found that ironic, as she never came to the beach with us. Neither did my stepfather, except for that time I was six and that old man called him the N-word.

Unlike those spaces, this viewing would happen in the safety of our own living room. No one else there to gawk at the mixed-race family. Plus, it’s carpeted. What could go wrong?

Plenty, as it turned out. For starters, there’s that scene of the girl treading water. How symbolic. She’s happy, waving. Fortuitous for us. We’re spectators. We don’t mind a bit of the arena to spatter our commoners’ robes. Bad news semaphore flags for her, however.

The tug that pulls her from her chin-above-waves presumption lurks in every waterlogged scene. It pulsates from the depths and rapidly diminishing silences of the song (until you become the silence and satiate the musical beast’s heart rate). And I have been certain that the same evil hides in the underthigh gullies of every bath I’ve taken since. It is always just one smooth Jacuzzi tile away from the pads of my toes. I’m still certain of it. As sure as I am that no malevolence whatsoever swims in that dreadful model—claymation’s usurper—the visible shark of Jaws.

The shark we see falls far short of the one we don’t. It’s the shark we can’t see that scares us, the one beneath the waves. The film glimpses those depths but it can’t take us to them. Except at the cellular level, of course, where the swimmer’s final terrors are written in ancient books, tattooed on orphans, and repeated by cloudy-eyed passersby, bums or cabbies or the elderly (any oracular deformity will do in a pinch—a...