Notes from a Composer

My father insists that the movie theater or rather many of the patrons in the theater were scarier than anything that was happening on the screen.  Possibly.  I was eleven and not world-weary enough to be wary of the pot-smoking gang of guys sitting in the front seats.  That families and their young children were also sitting in the middle rows softens my impression of just how scary the patrons watching “Halloween” in that run down Upper West Side movie theater in the fall of 1978 might have been.  But my father insists to this day he was more afraid of the surroundings than the movie.

Yet I remember him jumping in his seat in the back row to my left more than once, as was my 16 year old brother David to my right.  I meanwhile was cowering, crouched low in my seat, knees up, chewing on my jacket in abject terror.  The theater and patrons had nothing to do with that.  It was the movie that absolutely terrorized me.

It was also one of the great movie theater experiences of my life.  A total terror filled treat.  It wouldn’t be long till I taught myself the simple if unusually metered “Halloween” theme on the piano, playing the tinkling upper notes and the booming low octaves with relish and the pedal pressed down.

Halloween Theme

I’ve heard theories that what makes a movie the scariest movie one has ever seen has less to do with the quality of the filmmaking or the scares, although it helps, than with one’s age and circumstances when one saw the film.  Most people’s scariest movie is one they first saw as a teen or tween.  Well, I was eleven, visiting my grandmother in New York City with my dad and brother, and “Halloween” was out in theaters and a big hit with audiences and critics.  The ads in the papers touted glowing reviews and the tag lines: “When were you last scared out of your wits by a movie” and “We dare you to see it”.

I was a kid who loved to watch the old Universal and Hammer horror movies on German TV.  Also, American Forces Network TV in Berlin would show a b movie “creature feature” every Friday night and I would often stay up late to indulge.  I pestered my father to take us to see “Halloween” at the neighborhood cinema near my grandmother’s house and he relented.  Permissive 1970’s parenting perhaps.  “Halloween” would prove a whole other animal than those comparatively quaint oldies and b movies I’d enjoyed on TV.

To this day it remains the scariest movie watching experience I have ever had.  “Halloween” is often listed as one of the scariest movies ever made, but most of those lists put “The Exorcist” at the top.  I had also wanted to see “The Exorcist” during a previous visit to New York.  But I was eight then and my parents said there is no way we would see it (not that permissive after all).  However after I was tucked to bed, my parents left me with my grandmother and saw the movie with my brother David.  Or at least that is the story which he loudly, tauntingly reveled in the next day.  I was very upset and didn’t want to believe him.  I’m still not sure whether he really did see “The Exorcist” that night.  I myself did finally see it in my twenties, and though I liked it, I didn’t find it that scary.  Extreme fantasy effects and demonic possession don’t rattle me as much as a creeping menace that modulates to a horror that is grounded in reality.

“Psycho” probably would have scared me out of my mind when I first saw it, except I had already learned its secrets and had seen clips of the notorious shower and staircase scenes when I watched a televised tribute to Alfred Hitchcock before finally seeing the whole movie from beginning to end.  Only the cellar reveal was a horrific surprise for me.  Still I did enjoy playing our video of “Psycho” to a succession of innocent high school friends, watching them be scared half out of their minds.

Back to “Halloween”, New York City, 1978, in a dilapidated Upper West Side cinema that, even though it would eventually be renovated, wouldn’t survive the multiplex era.  While my father nervously smelled the odor of urine and pot in the air, I was sinking ever lower into my seat and clutching my jacket ever closer towards my clenching teeth as the movie progressed.

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