The "It's Alive" Baby Is Back...Only Now There Are Three Of Them

As Halloween approaches I eagerly await the horror show explosion that almost every channel has this time of year. I get disappointed that I never have enough time to sit and watch more of them. Before the introduction of VCRs and cable available everywhere you would either have to go to the theater to see the movies or wait several years before it came out on tv (gosh Tim must be OLD!).

Back then - before I was de-sensitized by all the horror movie watching I later did- some of the promos for the movies were enough to scare me into not wanting to take a chance at watching them. Living out in the boonies we had one security light on a pole that was halfway between the house and barn. That was the only light for more than a mile around, so it got very dark and very very scary living there, especially if you'd just gotten through watching a horror movie because now you knew that there was something hiding under your bed, waiting until you got good and comfortable before dragging you away to some unforeseen doom. One of the movie ads that I remember and that scared me was for "It's Alive". It showed a crib while a lullaby played, then as the camera came closer a claw flopped over the side of the crib. I liked that movie a lot, though it was pretty much a 'B' movie with pretty poor special effects, but still...there could be a deformed monster baby that made its way into my neck of the woods, couldn't there? The commercial that scared me so bad that I didn't want to see the movie at all was "Phantasm". I can still hear those chilling words..."If this one doesn't scare you.. you're already dead".

Later on, when I got married and moved to the city, I discovered cable tv. I got to watch a lot of those terrifying movies and a whole lot more I hadn't heard of... in the daytime... in the city... surrounded by houses, people and lights. I got hooked on horror films. I found out that some of them weren't as scary as I had thought when I first saw them, and many were laughable. But with newer and better effects and different scare tactics the movie industry has managed to stay afloat in the horror category. Nowdays I can't wait until the terror-fest begins!