Why Watching Old Monster Movies Soothes Me

At least movie monsters play by the rules

“I’m going to take the head off, it’s of no use to me anyway,” Baron Victor Frankenstein, played with perfect sociopathic upper-class English charm by Peter Cushing in “The Curse of Frankenstein,” says to his horror-stricken mentee as he wields a silver carving knife to decapitate the man whose body he has just stolen from the gallows.

The real horrors of America right now receded as I jumped into the cheesy, calming magic of this monster movie, the first color film adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus. My intrusive thoughts about the murder of immigrants and peaceful protesters, the fate of kidnapped children and their parents, the terrorizing of Minneapolis and the nation, the arrest of journalists for asking questions, and the prospect of an unknown world order and WWIII were momentarily curbed.

I had been flipping channels (yes, I still have cable TV, TIVO, and a remote control) to escape the unbearable deluge of human suffering on the news when I landed on Cushing’s familiar cheekbones. I think I was 16 the last time I watched Curse of Frankenstein, a 1957 production by Hammer Films, the legendary B gothic horror studio, where B stands for both British and B movies.

Immediately, my nervous system was dulcified by the familiar story and the mostly unseen gruesomeness of Dr. Frankenstein exhuming bodies for the parts needed to create a man and give him life.

“Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?” Dr. Frankenstein asks, holding up a large hand, fingers up, severed at the wrist. “The hands of the world’s greatest sculptor!”

Then there is The Creature, played here in his 6’5” hulking splendor by Christopher Lee in the first of many brilliant Hammer pairings of these two actors. But in this film the real monster is Dr. Frankenstein, who believes himself to be above all moral and institutional norms, who considers himself so special and brilliant as to be able to create life and when it disappoints him, to torture and then destroy it. In the film, Dr. Frankenstein uses the creature, who doesn’t know better, to kill off his pregnant maid when she threatens to reveal their affair.

When I was a child, every afternoon my mother would turn on Dark Shadows, the vampire soap opera, on our tiny black and white portable TV as she started her ironing in our big kitchen on Castro Street. First the shirt collar (cue huge waves crashing on the Maine coast in front of the Collins family mansion) and the cuffs, then the placket along the buttons, then the sleeves and finally the chest and back.

By the time I was ten, I was obsessed with the monster, horror, and sci-fi movies of the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. My film school was “Creature Features,” broadcast on KTVU-2 in Oakland and hosted by the cigar-smoking, soft-spoken Bob Wilkins who sat in his yellow rocking chair next to a coffin and a skull with a candle in it. I watched it religiously on Friday nights and again on Saturdays after Soul Train.

Some of my favorites are classics, some are delightfully terrible: “Dracula” (Universal, 1932), “Frankenstein” (Universal, 1931), “Freaks” (MGM, 1932), “The Blob” (Paramount, 1958), “The Day of the Triffids” (Allied Artists, 1963), “Plan Nine from Outer Space” (Reynolds, 1959), “Night of the Living Dead” (Image Ten, 1968), “Eraserhead” (American Film Institute, 1977), but my favorite monster has always been Godzilla.

Though I was a white, middle-class San Francisco pre-teen, I thoroughly identified with Godzilla’s rage at humankind for fucking up the planet and the urge to stomp cities with my growing feet, sweep away military offensives with my tail, and blast weapons trying to limit my rampages with my atomic ray breath.

I still remember the time that Wilkins showed “Son of Godzilla” (Toho, 1967) and after the closing scene where Godzilla and baby godzilla Minilla are snuggling on Monster Island as the snow falls (caused by a military weather machine the humans hoped would force them into hibernation), the camera cut to Wilkins with tears streaming down his cheeks from under his big black glasses.

“That scene gets me every time,” he said, genuinely. “Let’s watch it again.” And he replayed that last scene all over again.

Now that was a horror movie show host with a heart.

Running across Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee that day on Turner Classic Movies day transported me back to a sweet time when monsters played by the rules, unlike in reality where the monsters of this administration recognize no laws of God or man.

Vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein, mummies, zombies, Godzilla, and other monsters help me believe momentarily in the idea that we can set the world to rights again with pitchforks, fire, wooden stakes, silver bullets, sunlight, salt water, electricity, and human courage and cooperation.

Sometimes the world’s agony spurs me to volunteer or make donations, but when I’m engulfed by fearful futility from doom scrolling, I look to pre-1980s monster movies to find my center.