DARKNESS IN MAGIC CAVERNS:
A nostalgic appreciation of moviegoing

Chill beneath a cadaverously-gray autumn sky, the tiny New Mexico town. That slate moment in the seasons when everything begins to grow dark. The epileptic scratching of fallen leaves hurled along sidewalks. Mad sounds from the hills. Cold. And something else:

A leopard, escaped, is loose in the town.

Chill beneath a crawling terror of spotted death in the night, the tiny New Mexico town. That thick red moment in the fears of small people when everything explodes in the black flow of blood. A deep-throated growl from a filthy alley. Cold.

A mother, preoccupied with her cooking, tells her small daughter to go down the street to the market, get a sack of flour to make bread for the father, coming home from work soon. The child shows a moment of fear . . . the animal they haven't found yet . . .

The mother insists, it's only a few blocks and across the bridge to the market. Put on a shawl and go get that flour, your father will be home soon. The child goes. Hurrying back up the street, the small sack held close to her, the street empty and rilling with darkness, ink presses down the sky, the child looks around, and hurries. A cough in the blackness behind her. A cough, deep in a throat that never formed human sounds.

The child's eyes widen in panic. She begins to hurry. Her footsteps quicken. The sound of padding behind her. Feet begin to run. Focus on darkness and the sound of rapid movement. The child. The rushing.

To the wooden door of the house. The door is locked. The child pinned against the night, with the furred sound of agony rushing toward her on the wind.

Inside, the mother, still kitchened, waiting. The sound of the child outside, panic and bubbles of hysteria in the voice, Mommy open the door the leopard is after me!

The mother's face assumes the ages-old expression of harassed parenthood. Hands on hips, she turns to the door, you're always lying, telling fibs, making up stories, how many times have I told you lying will—

Mommy! Open the door!

You'll stay out there till you learn to stop lying!

Mommy! Mom—

Something gigantic hits the door with a crash. The door bows inward, and a fine spray of flour sifts between the cracks into the room. The mother's eyes grow huge, she stares at the door. A thick black stream, moving very slowly, seeps under the door.

Let me tell you something straight: when I draw my last breath, and finally buy it, and should Cecil B. DeMille have been dealing me straight all those years and there is The Big Hiring Hall In The Sky (though I tend to distrust a man who would have Moses marry Yvonne De Carlo), I'm going to pass up meeting Hemingway and Shakespeare and W. C. Fields and Bogart and Marta Toren first thing on my arrival, and ask to be directed to the alabaster palace in which Val Lewton is spending a happy eternity.

Oh, yeah. He'll be in a palace. Got to be.

Nobody who produced films like The Leopard Man, from which came that scene I described at the outset, could be treated less respectfully by a benevolent God. And I'll walk up there to the palace and find Lewton on the back veranda, telling half a dozen lesser talents how to put together some celestial cinema. And one of the archangels in charge of casting will come up with the old one about, "Yeah, sure, Val, but God's got this chick, see . . . "

And I'll interrupt them and say, "Mr. Lewton, sir, excuse me, but my name is Harlan Ellison and I've got you to thank for me not wasting my life, and for writing all kinds of stories people dug when I was alive, and for making my childhood bearable and . . . well, uh, er . . . "

And I'll lapse into an awkward silence, because he'll smile, knowing all the shadows and mirages behind those inadequate words. He knew what he was all about when he was making those B shudderflicks in the Forties.

But he could not have known, like pebbles tossed into a pool to produce ever-widening circles of impact, how important he was to me. But I know, and I'll tell you; and when you've been told, you'll know why all those martinet pedants of the New York Literary Establishment who still put down moviegoing live zombie lives of half-light. And you'll even understand why auteurs like Bogdanovich can't smell the flowers because they're too busy dissecting them.

You see, I was the only Jewish kid in Painesville, Ohio, about thirty miles east of Cleveland, and you wouldn't think that in Ohio—the Buckeye state, the center of the Great Amurrican Heartland—one would encounter much bigotry. You'd be wrong. They used to beat the shit out of me. Regularly. I was a little loudmouth of a kid, quick as a whippet and ten times smarter than anybody else in town, but that humble greatness wasn't what made them hate me, naturally. It was this Jewish business. They actually believed Jews ground up Seventh Day Adventist babies to make matzohs at Channukah. They called me a kike. I didn't know what it was, but I didn't care for the tone of voice. So I was the green monkey, the pariah. And I had no friends. Not just a few friends, or one good friend, or grudging acceptance by other misfits and outcasts. I was alone. All stinking alone, without even an imaginary playmate.

So I made my own worlds.

Worlds cobbled up from the dreams and visions to be found in comic books with Plastic Man and Airboy and the Heap and Hawkman and the Boy Commandos and the Spirit; worlds found in the radio programs I devoured so avidly my ears grew mouths: I Love a Mystery, The Shadow, Lux . . . presents Hollywood, Quiet, Please, The Land of the Lost, Grand Central Station, Let's Pretend. Worlds in the pulp magazines: Startling Stories, Doc Savage, G-8 and his Battle Aces, The Spider, Black Mask.

But most of all . . . the movies.

Oh, God, the movies. For four hours every Saturday afternoon I was taken away from that miserable lonely charnel house of childhood and was permitted to ride beside Don "Red" Barry, swashbuckle beside Jon Hall, sleuth beside Sidney Toler, drool over Ann Rutherford and June Preisser, know fear as Kent Smith knew it and shudder helplessly as Rondo Hatton stalked the streets as The Creeper.

I was a child of the Forties. In a time before the word "alienation" slipped from everyone's lips as easily as a rolling stone gathers no moss, I was a thoroughly, hopelessly, totally alienated kid who could not exist in the real world. And though the studio money-grubbers who churned out those wonderfully awful potboilers could never have known what succor they were bringing to my parched soul, they provided me the only world to which I cared to belong. The world of dreams, of celluloid escapes, of glorious moviegoing.

(You know one reason I hate my sister, Beverly? She is eight years older than I am, see. And when my Mom and Dad would be at the store, downtown, working on Saturday, I was entrusted to her care. She had to get me downtown on the bus, to see the movie. Then she could go off and do whatever dull dumb things girls did in Painesville on Saturday afternoons. Had to be dumb, didn't it? She wasn't at the movie, fer chrissakes! But she used to torment me. She'd dawdle, and chivvy me, and tell me she wasn't going to take me, and then she'd put her dress up in back so her slip showed, and say, come on, let's go. And I'd say, we can't go with you like that, and she'd torment me with, sure we can, come on. And I'd sit down on my bed and start to cry, because I knew damned well we couldn't walk up Harmon Drive to Mentor Avenue and get on that bus and go downtown with her dress up in back so her slip showed. And she'd do that to me for an hour before we left. We always did, of course, but by the time we got downtown I was a nervous wreck. That's one of the reasons I hate Beverly. But that's another story.)

The Lake Theater on State Street in Painesville was the Taj Mahal to me. It was dark and filled with endless magics. Sounds no mortal ever heard: the choking gurgle of a thuggee victim being strangled for the love of Kali; the special whimpering bark as Lassie told some halfwit nit of a child actor that the baby was in a burning building; the insidious laugh of Victor Jory as The Shadow; the thunk of crossbow arrows plonking into the drawbridge of evil King John. Sights no mortal ever beheld: Sabu changed into a dog by Conrad Veidt; Wild Bill Elliott as Red Ryder, beating the shit out of a gang of bullies somehow vaguely reminiscent of the thugs that played in the schoolyard of Lathrop Grade School; Kirk Alyn leaping off a building shouting, "Up, up, and awayyyy!" There was no end to the magic to be found in that dark cavern.

For four hours—with Bingo and two features and three cartoons and a TravelTalk and a singalong—I was in Heaven. A special dark Heaven even more private than the bathroom, which is the only place a little kid can go to, to be alone.

And I knew some day I would have adventures like that. Some day I would walk streets paved with gold, and all the bullies would step off into the gutter when I passed, and my Mother and Father would say, "The kid really knows how to live," because I'd be in business for myself, and even if my partner Miles Archer had been murdered and I didn't know whether the fat man or Joel Cairo had the black bird, even so . . . I'd be competent and tough, and I'd win out.

That was how it was when I was a kid.

Is there nobility in the moviegoing experience? Don't ask me, friend. I don't know from nobility; all I know from is survival and dreams.

And thank you, Val Lewton.