You Never Forget Your First Horror Movie

Being an adult is all about being afraid

The first horror movie I ever saw was a werewolf flick called The Howling.

It is a terrible B-movie, but don’t tell that to my 12-year-old self. The Howling was a profound spectacle to that little boy. I remember bubbling skin, bared fangs, and naked women. Oh, yes, naked women. You have to understand that this was the ’80s. Nude photos were a rare commodity. Little did I know that 30 years later, in the distant future, everyone would be naked.

The movie taught me valuable life lessons. For example, you always need more silver bullets than you think you do. Also, sometimes the things we’re scared of are hiding, and sometimes they’re not.

I watched The Howling behind my parents’ backs. In sixth grade, all children are weird little cat burglars exploring a world ruled by despotic adults intent on keeping all of the fun chained up in the basement. The movie came out in 1981, but it wasn’t until the summer of 1986 that my folks rented it. In those days, renting a movie was a big deal. An event! It was like going to the movies, only you could eat scrambled eggs.

Our brand-new VCR, a Betamax, was the size of a pizza oven. You could hear gears groaning as you fed it videotapes the size of bricks. The Betamax transformed the basement. Suddenly, there were nights when the door was closed, and kids were forbidden from going downstairs. The adults were watching R-rated movies. “R” for “Really good, if not better, than any movie 12-year-olds were allowed to see.”

The closest I had ever come to watching an actual R-rated horror movie was when I saw a black-and-white fright fest about giant rubber spiders. Eventually, as I grew up, I would watch aliens explode out of chests and masked maniacs murder horny teenagers with machetes.

During dinner, I overheard my folks talk in hushed tones about The Howling. “The special effects are amazing,” they whispered.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Just a scary movie,” my mother said.

I persisted, turning to my dad and asking if he’d been scared. He repeated after my mom. It was “just” a scary movie.

What kind of movie could scare my dad? This was inconceivable to me. We’re talking about a man who threw his hands up in the air on roller coasters. And my mother? She was the moon and the dark was afraid of her.

I never knew either of them to express fear. Instead, they were always whispering around me. They’d turn their backs on me and conspire.

They murmured about how to pay the bills. News of an impending hurricane was immediately followed by mumbles about what to do. They huddled in shadows after coming home from the hospital where my sister was in a coma, the result of a terrible accident. The night she lost control of her car on the highway, there was a late-night phone call and a closed bedroom door.

I’d ask them what was wrong and they’d just smile. I shouldn’t worry, they told me.

I knew they were hiding something.

Suddenly, it seemed like the Ark of the Covenant was downstairs — a sacred object of supernatural power that could scare my dad… and they were keeping it a secret.

“I want to see it,” I said. My tone was matter-of-fact and bloodless.

My mother laughed and squeezed my cheeks. Then, adoration morphed into fierce authoritarianism. “No,” she said, which meant: No you can’t watch the scary movie, no you can’t ask if you can watch the scary movie, and no there aren’t any appeals or petitions.

Luckily, on Mondays, I had an hour and a half after school before my mother finished her work at the church. A window of blessed freedom, my chance to fight the hypocrisy of the Mother-Father-Industrial Complex. Operation: The Howling was a secret agent mission. With a cat burglar’s nimble fingers, I diligently removed the movie tape from my parents’ dresser, as if the slightest movement would set off hidden poison darts. I leapt toward the TV with the tape under my arm. I landed on my feet, squatted, and sniffed the air. I slid the tape into the robot’s rectangular maw and turned on the television.

I was not prepared for what I saw.

The Howling wasn’t just a werewolf movie. At least not to me. Not that there’s anything wrong with fang-and-fur flicks — it’s a solid genre. Rather, The Howling was a ridiculous Reagan-era monster movie that exploited fears of the time — and my own fears about growing up. There are serial killers and bad mustaches and a soft-core sex scene between two people who turn into werewolves while humping.

The plot of The Howling is simple: A TV anchorwoman traumatized by a serial killer is sent by her therapist to a hippie colony that is actually a pack of free-loving werewolves. The end of the movie offers up two twist zingers. The high point is, of course, a scene where our heroine is cornered by someone she thought was dead. Instead of running, she strikes a frozen pose of terror and watches the villain transforms into a giant wolf. His forehead pulses. Canine claws poke through flesh. A wolf’s snout punches through his face.

I remember watching this scene in total awe. I didn’t know at the time that I was watching a preview of adolescence.

At one point, I stopped feeling afraid. I became quiet. I let the movie pass through me. I sat through the credits and slowly went upstairs for a Pop-Tart. I contemplated the movie I had just witnessed. I must have looked like a priest praying over a communion wafer. That night, I had a dream: I was a werewolf and my mom didn’t recognize me.

I left the tape in the Betamax. By the time I realized this the next afternoon, my mom had already found the movie in the machine, put it in its box, and returned it to the video store. The Betamax was empty. But I was not in trouble. That night I hung out in the kitchen and read comic books while my mom made dinner.

“How did you sleep last night?” she asked.

“Oh, fine. I slept fine.” That was a lie, of course. Being an adult is all about being afraid, but not letting on that you’re afraid.

“Good,” she said.