Childhood Monster Bloghop

            Christine Rains is hosting the Childhood Monster bloghop. How cool is that? Well, hop on over to her blog and you’ll find out just how cool it is.

            This struck an interesting chord with me. Keep in mind that I was the geeky kid who stayed up until the wee hours of the morning so that I could watch the Friday night creature features. For probably as long as I’ve been able to control the television dial, I filled my entertainment hours with vampires, werewolves, giant dinosaurs, and anything else that creeped or crawled its way across the silver screen.

            Most of the time, this did nothing more than elicit wondrous exclamations of joy over the fangoric feast I beheld. I absolutely loved monsters and an over-saturation of them in my waking hours did not leave me shivering under the covers at night.

            Except for one! (Okay, really it was three, but two of them are nearly the same monster so it should only count as two and I’m only going to discuss one of them here.)  That was the 1958 classic: The Blob. Steve McQueen and Aneta Corsaut star opposite an ever-growing scoop of plum jam. Oddly enough, it even had a great theme song written by none other than Burt Bacharach and Mack David that became a nation-wide hit.

            The thing (no, not the original movie) is, that it took more than scary music and screaming women to frighten me. In my mind, I had it all worked out; most monsters had weaknesses that could be exploited and were rather easily stopped by a solid barrier, like a door, or a wall. While thunderous, city-eating lizards gave plenty of warning that they were approaching and you just had to hide until they walked past. I even had a safe location all picked out in case decided to level Phoenix.

            You could throw all of that out the window with the blob. It could ooze its way wherever it wanted to go. It could creep up the bedpost and slide right between the sheets with me and then I was a goner. Even if I did notice it time and threw my brother at it as a distraction what would I do next? I lived in a hot, hot desert. The only thing cold in our house was the freezer and I just didn’t think chunking ice cubes at a mobile, man-eating toast topping was going to save my bacon.

            That remained the scariest movie to me – until I got married and watched Play Misty For Me. That one still gives me the shivers.