I was in junior high, and still a big horror movie fan, but it was something I could feel myself outgrowing. This disappointed me. I’d invested so much time in watching “Chiller Theater” and “Creature Feature,” in reading “Famous Monsters of Filmland” and “Castle of Frankenstein” and “Vault of Horror,” in writing my own stories about things like Dracula and Frankenstein joining forces to defeat the Invisible Man. I believed you couldn’t have too many monsters in one story.
These days, though, I mostly wrote science fiction, and I’d stopped begging to be allowed to stay up late to watch “Night Gallery” or movies like “The Hands of Orlac.” It just didn’t seem so important anymore. I felt like I was betraying something that had made me happy for a long time, but it wasn’t something I could control.
Phantom of the Opera, though—I could still get excited over Phantom of the Opera. I’d read about it in Carlos Clemon’s “Illustrated History of the Horror Movie,” a book that had been my bible, and not just because it had a picture near the end of a topless woman taken from Jean Luc Godard’s Alphaville. I knew how rarely screened the silent Phantom was, how few copies still existed, how influential it had been on the horror movies of the thirties. All of which I’d said to mother, in my effort to persuade her to go.
“Where did they get this copy?” she asked.
“There’s this couple who live right in Middletown. They have a whole private collection of silent movies. It said in the article they used to be actors themselves.”
“Interesting,” my mother said.
The screening was in one of the classrooms. My mother and I got lost trying to find the building, which made me start to panic we’d be late, but we eventually stumbled over the right place. There wasn’t a big crowd, maybe twenty people. I’d thought that a college classroom would look different from my Junior High, but it was pretty much the same. We found seats in back, and within a few minutes of our arrival the husband of the collector couple got up to introduce the film. He was old, white-haired and frail-looking, and very boring. I already knew everything he was saying, about how long it had taken Lon Chaney to do his make-up and how they’d put special tinting on the Masque of the Red Death scenes. I wasn’t interested in listening to some white-haired old guy. I wanted to see the movie.
I loved it. There was no music, just the drone of the projector, and the screen was a little small to see well from the back, but I was thrilled anyway, completely entranced. When Lon Chaney in his skull-face makeup was sitting on top of the pole, the image all tinted red, I wanted to call Carlos Clemons at home and thank him for letting me know this film existed, for getting me here.
Then the film snapped. It was familiar sound to me, it happened all the time at school, but usually during some nature film about frogs or “The Red Balloon.” The collector quickly rose from his seat and switched on the lights, headed over to where the torn film was whipping around in the projector. I turned to my mother.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“It’s good,” she said. “Even better than I remembered.”
“You’ve seen ‘Phantom’ before?”
I couldn’t believe this had never come up, during all my imploring of her to bring me here. But then, I’d never thought to ask.
“Oh, yes. When I was a little girl. I was scared for a week. I’m surprised it still holds up.”
“Who would take a little girl to a movie like this? Why were they showing silent movies in the Bronx?”
“It was at some school or something. Just like this. My brother dropped me there, to get rid of me, I think. I saw a lot of silent movies there. Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton. You’ve never seen any of those, have you?”
“No,” I admitted.
“That’s too bad. Some of them are very good.”
“Hey, you guys want some halvah?”
My mother and I looked up. Standing in front of us was a big, misfit-looking guy, young, bearded. I’d noticed him when we came in, sitting by himself. He looked scary, in a different way than Lon Chaney on top of that pole, but scary in his own right.
I didn’t know what to answer, because I didn’t know what halvah was.
“I’d love a piece,” my mother said.
The misfit broke a section off what looked like an all-white candy bar and gave it to my mother. “I heard you talking,” he said. “I heard you mention Harold Lloyd. Did you ever see ‘Safety Last’?”
“The one on the clock,” my mother answered.
“Yes. It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”
“I like Keaton the best. The scene in the windstorm. Where the barn blows right past him.”
The guy nodded rapturous agreement. “Great scene,” he said, and turned to me. “You want to try some? It’s good.”
I took the piece of halvah he offered. It was odd, sweet and buttery. The taste was familiar, but there was something about its texture different from anything I could remember ever eating before.
“In ‘Way Out West,’ the scene on the train…” he began, but then the lights went off and the movie came back on screen.
Lon Chaney was still amazing, all those costume changes, the scene where he pilots his boat down the black water of the sewers of Paris. I wondered if I’d ever enjoy another horror movie as much as I was enjoying this one. I doubted it, and knew I should focus on this enjoyment, savor it.
But what I really wanted was for the film to snap again. What I really wanted was another piece of halvah, and to listen to my mother and the misfit talk some more about Harold Lloyd.
