By David Rose
As of late, I’ve been watching a lot of movies with my boys – DC, Marvel, Avengers, Guardians. These are all action movies. They start with a bang and then it’s bang, bang, bang, bang, all the way to the end. Suspense is a lost art.
I went to the library and got some old movies – Moby Dick, Jaws, Psycho – that were built around suspense. These movies got my boy’s attention; Psycho in particular.
Before Psycho there were horror movies, lots of them. We went to the theater and came face to face with zombies, vampires, and werewolves. They scared us to death. It was great fun, and then we went home. The fear didn’t go with us. After all, we didn’t live anywhere near a castle in the Carpathian Mountains, a mysterious Caribbean island, or Egyptian deserts. Our fears stayed in the theater.
Granted, in those days zombies walked around like, well, zombies. They were nothing like the sentient creatures we see today. The only thing slower than zombies were mummies.
Psycho broke the mold. Hitchcock took the horror out of the exotic lands where we were unlikely to go and put it in our shower. That was a place we had to go, and had to go alone. I was twelve when I first saw Psycho and didn’t shower for nearly two weeks afterwards. If it were not for an uncomfortable rash and an intervention on behalf of my friends and family, I would have held out much longer.
As an artist, David Rose won both the Arkansas Governor’s Award and the Delta Award. His works are in the collections of Tim Robbins, Bruce Springsteen, & Susan Sarandon. As a writer he flunked every English class he ever sat in. Born in Woodstock, NY, he is very much a product of the 1960s and never really managed to escape that fabled decade. Visit Rose at www.amazon.com/David-Malcolm-Rose/e/B019GBJI9C/ and on Facebook.
