The other day I saw an old movie coming on I hadn’t seen in years, “The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas.” Now don’t get me wrong, if you aren’t close to my age or a little older, you’ve probably never heard of it, it’s alright it wasn’t Oscar material, but it’s a pretty good movie though. It’s about a group of guys going after the Snowman, or Yeti as it’s called around the mountains. It was made about 1957, black and white, and the special effects, well it wasn’t a Die Hard, but they were alright. It was classified as a horror movie, but by today’s standards it’s almost funny. No blood, no guts, but the thing of it is, if you could get your kids to sit down and watch it, it would probably scare the pants off them.

I don’t watch many horror movies, maybe it goes back to when I was little and we use to go to the theater a lot back then to see the matinees. They would be showing the coming attractions, and sure enough there would be one for something called “The Hand,” I’ll never forget that one. There would be some creepy music, and then the announcer would say something like “The Hand crawls,” then on the side of this lady’s bed you would see a cut-off hand crawling up the side of the bed, and I don’t know who screamed louder, us or her.

That’s like the “Snowman” movie, you really only saw them once, but in the back of your mind you saw them every where. They had one scene, this guy’s hurt in the tent, and all of a sudden the creepy music starts, then the tent starts moving. Then at the bottom of the tent, first a finger then a hand reaches under the tent flap, and grabs one of the rifles, and the guy starts screaming. Hey, all you saw was a hairy hand, what’s so scary about that? Well, you weren’t watching the movie around midnight. Then a few scenes later you finally get to see one, in the shadows, then he walks up, and you only see half his face! But his eyes say it all, and you are almost as mesmerized as the guy looking at the Snowman. He wanted to get out of that cave, me I was looking for the remote!

As I watched the Snowman, I got to thinking about another movie that had just about the same effect on me: “The Creature from the Black Lagoon.” Any of ya’ll out there remember that one? I was little back then but it freaked me out! I don’t remember much about it, but it had something about a boat, a pretty girl, and this thing that walked like a man, and looked like it had a head like a catfish. Every now and then you would see a hand just reach up out of the water and snatch a guy off the boat, and that girl would just stand there screaming. I don’t know which was worse, the hand or the screaming!! Me, I would have grabbed me a 30/06, and tried to blow it away, as I was walking on water getting away from that thing. But then the movie would have been over too quick.

I was talking to a friend of mine a few years ago, he’s a little older than me, but he remembers that movie REAL well. He use to live out in the country, out past Johnson Swamp, and while he was in school he use to help out at the theater. Well, they had run that movie that night, and he caught a ride home, right to the edge of the swamp. Needless to say he had to walk the rest of the way home, right down the road through the middle of the swamp, didn’t I just mention they had just run the movie “The Creature from the Black Lagoon”? You guessed it, about half way through the swamp, something squalled out in the woods … he ran the rest of the way home!!

I guess that’s why I don’t watch horror movies any more, the imagination’s gone. Back then it wasn’t what you saw it’s what your mind saw. The other night we were eating supper and they were doing an autopsy on Csi, NCIS, or something, and we didn’t even pay it any attention. We have become so jaded, that we know it’s not real, so we don’t even pay it any attention.

Till tonight when you go to bed, after reading this, you might lay there and wait for that hand to crawl over the edge of your bed.

Sweet dreams.

You can reach Robbin Bruce by e-mail at robbinbruce@yahoo.com.

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