02 NIGHTMARES AT 3:00AM

"No amount of mourning will revive the vanished rituals of the darkened theater. The reduction of cinema to assaultive images... to make them more attention-grabbing, has produced a disincarnated, lightweight cinema that doesn't demand anyone's full attention." Susan Sontag, The Decay of Cinema.
[LINK: http://partners.nytimes.com/books/00/03/12/specials/sontag-cinema.html ]
Indeed. The flickering image is so ubiquitous there's hardly anything special about it anymore. Years of casual TV viewing have eroded the ritual; sequels and remakes have lowered our expectations so badly that you can leave the lights on, gab with your friends, take phone calls, put the kids to bed and not miss much. You've seen it already, no matter how many channels are added; there's almost nothing left to recycle. The movie theater is just an extended living room, an elbow-to-elbow nightmare in a multiplexed cellblock. No altar, no ritual.
The ritual should be immersion in darkness, surrendering personal control to overwhelming sensory forces. To give yourself up to a greater, wilder, darker, stranger world than this pitiful one. Disappear for a short while inside a mirage.
I blame Roger Corman and Forry Ackerman for my lurid development. Otherwise I'd never have wasted so much of my life at the drive-in, or squaring my eyeballs at the crack of dawn. I wouldn't be in this crazy business; I'd be doing something nice and safe, like selling hot dogs, tennis shoes, or twisting the icing tube at the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen.
If you were lucky you might catch Mad Doctor of Blood Island or The Crawling Eye at 3:00 a.m. on Channel 9 (WOR-TV, NY). You had to set your alarm for 2:55, sneak past the parents' room, and huddle up to the flickering tube in a dark and nearly silent den. No pause, no fast forward, no rewind; they came at you relentlessly. Black and white shadow-plays. And they were scary as hell.
Well, not all of them. I doubt anyone lost sleep over The Giant Claw or The Killer Shrews. But crude as these films are, they have a spontaneity you won't find in so many commercial products. Sure, you can see the string on the rubber spider, and the two-by-four under the giant carrot. But heck, you just gotta believe. You're safe and sound on the couch, immune from the terrors out there - or are you?
Then something truly repellant comes out of nowhere - a commercial. One moment the Monster From Piedras Blancas is lurching toward you, clutching a severed head and then flick - Tom Carvel and Cookie Puss pop on the screen. What the hell is this? I don't care about Crazy Eddie, Dianetics or Hair Club for Men. What's happening to our heroes while this nonsense is going on?
That was the ritual, the immersion in darkness, the invitation to believe.
Try this tonight: watch a film with the lights out, the phone off the hook. Sneak past your own room if you have to, shun the remote and sit up close, radiation be damned. Immerse - and don't wake mommy.