Martin Perez
All Horrific Things
Often, I awoke in the middle of warm, damp nights, and stretched to look at the shadowy side of my twin bed, and into the black, black space next to my bedroom wall. I saw a wicker basket that held the severed head of a man whose eyes stared back at me. At least, that is what I thought I saw. It was a recurring dream, a vision, a worry, a fear in our old two-story house near the rumbling freeway in Tucson, Arizona, during the mid-seventies. The severed head gazed at me with intense longing, as if we belonged with each other, as if he, too, were afraid. If it had arms – that creepy severed head – I knew it would reach out to hug me and never let go.
In 1975, my parents relocated from Patterson, California, to Tucson, and into that two- story building when I was only six. My father began work in a nearby mining community instead of laboring in the hot sun of the San Joaquin basin tomato fields. His new employer, Magma Copper, employed over three thousand laborers to take on the arduous task of breaking massive boulders a mile underground. The mine eventually closed twenty-six years later, after promising there was enough ore to last a couple of hundred. It wasn’t a lie. There was enough ore, but copper prices plummeted from a high of a dollar fifty to a desolate low of sixty cents in the mid-eighties. And, while the per-pound of ore bounced back somewhat, the low prices were too much to overcome for BHP, which bought the mine from Magma in the late nineties for 2.4 billion dollars. Basically, any man who sold his soul to the mine like my father, did so under false pretenses.
Our eventual roost in quiet San Manuel replaced our hometown of Cholos and gang activities in Patterson. But before we moved to the supposed financial security of the San Manuel mining community, we listed in Tucson for a while, where I got to experience not only my nightmares but daytime bullying and extreme poverty. Fun for me meant making paper mâché animals or sculptures from bat guano in a local community center with outreach volunteers from United Way, Up with People, or other service groups.
And it was fun. But we were poor.
In no way did I think I was the only child to endure hardships like bad dreams, bullying, less-than-ideal financial circumstances, or even sexual abuse, but it did serve as context for my strong affinity for horror movies, zombie flicks, science fiction, and ghost tales. I clung to the make-believe of frightening things because when the movie was over, real life was much less forgiving.
Danger in real life meant pain, abandonment, ridicule, and embarrassment. In movies, the bad guys got it in the end. Good people survived. Child characters, however, were a special class of protagonists during the early era of filmmaking and abided by unspoken rules that left them largely unscathed. Children almost always survived. Reality, on the other hand, meant a child could be found dead and buried in the deserted outskirts of town years after they were kidnapped or raped, or both. I could not help but imagine what those kids went through. When did they know they were going to die? When did the realization that they only had fourteen breaths, or seventeen eye blinks, or four thoughts about mom and dad left, strike them? Did they know they were already dead?
Movies were it for me. Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, Logan’s Run, Star Wars, The Thing from Another World, The Monster that Challenged the World, Prophecy, It, The Terror from Beyond Space, Hardware, Friday the 13th, Hereditary, Dog Soldiers, Killer Shrews, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Dawn of the Dead, Splinter, Susperia, Gerald’s Game, They Live, Prince of Darkness, and Phantasm were only a few of the movies I watched several times growing up, like comfort food. Except I also ate comfort food. Picture a chubby kid watching movies at eleven at night with a bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream and Doritos while the parents slept.
“I won’t fall asleep,” I pleaded to my parents, hoping to watch a non-Raquel Welsh version of One Million B.C., the black and white movie from 1940, starring Victor Mature and Carol Landis. The movie had superimposed lizards and frogs with horns glued on as dinosaurs. The acting was probably worse. I promptly fell asleep thirty minutes in.
Falling into a light slumber while watching a horror movie or monster movie wasn’t unusual for me. I watched many afternoon flicks with Godzilla, the big gray irradiated beast that was Japan’s analogy for its existential crisis of the fifties and fell asleep until the rubber monster appeared triumphantly. All the speaking parts left me in a slumber. But for fifteen minutes (over an hour and a half film), I was alert and cheered for the monster’s victory. Japan’s fatigue at losing a war only a couple of decades earlier was nowhere to be seen in my young mind. Nothing cultural made its way into my mind. Escape for me simply meant a complete otherworldly experience. Anything to get away. That said, there was something special about nighttime viewing. Dark corners, scary noises, the aloneness, and isolation made late movies worth staying up for, even if only to fall asleep a bit later.
The mining town seemed sleepy and nondescript, like the monster movie’s “talking parts.” San Manuel lulled residents to sleep with its regular Christmas parades, store decorating homecoming contests, fireworks on the fourth, short swimming pool hours, a one-room library that was a company home without a kitchen or bedrooms, and the routine “howdy neighbor” greeting from locals. Unfortunately, the exposed layer harbored an undercurrent of its own horror. Suicides over the years, sexual abuses, family fighting, stealing, and even embezzlement littered San Manuel over the decade and a half it took me to get from grade school to graduation. This was not any different from the rest of the world and the tragedies that occurred. Even when the mine closed later, the small town seemed to inherently propose a fake sense of a safer, more intimate experience of life. Of course, dangers were always present, but realities of discomfort and family pain surfaced more when the closure struck. And, for many disillusioned workers, there was a deeper toll. Make-believe wasn’t just for imaginative Mexican American boys like me, who enjoyed horror movies. Idyllic only existed in the pretty billboards that promoted the rural community, and in the minds of the men that were lured to the higher-paying jobs underground, again, like my father.
Whether San Manuel, Patterson, or Tucson, my childhood fears, both real and imagined, and scary movies all colluded to create a distorted filter for my adolescence. I fervently sought even more solace in film. It is a tight bond that lasted my entire life. I had fond memories of all things horrific, if only because it kept me from thinking too much about all horrific things.
The Thing That Couldn’t Die was a 1958 black and white movie directly tied to my nightmares. The movie featured Andra Martin and William Reynolds dressed like June and Ward Cleaver and begins with a young woman who uses doweling rods to find an evil buried close by in the countryside. The girl insists that the townsfolk shouldn’t dig up where her rods lead them, however. The promotional reel for the movie proclaimed, “The grave can’t hold it…nothing human can stop it.” While the townsfolk initially cast the girl aside and excavate a box with, unsurprisingly by this point, a severed but very alive head, the movie unremarkably plays out with the head hypnotizing the residents to do its bidding and become its slaves or something or other. But never mind all that. It was the severed head that did me in, and whose likeness was the stuff of my nightmares.
I did not have the means to search for the movie in the 1970s, even if I had wanted to. I had happened upon the celluloid gem only once while watching those late-night flicks. There was no internet, though, no YouTube, no way of tracking the source of my nightmares. We still had seatbelt-less cars and spiral, corded phone lines. I knew the disembodied head existed somewhere in the world other than my dreams, but I wasn’t sure what, or how, or from whence it came. When I did have the means to track the film down as an adult, I no longer wanted to find my source material. I’m not sure why, but I can venture a guess. I was cautious that the horror fell into one of two categories. First, it could be a movie that, upon rewatching, would disappoint me, unable to withstand the test of time, or other exams of the mind, like, ostensibly, maturity in movie-going taste, or deeper perspectives in life. Movies like Night of the Gargoyles and Kingdom of the Spiders, with William Shatner, proved that dissatisfaction with second viewings of beloved cinema as an adult was possible. The other possibility would be I still find the movie uneasy. While less likely, more problematic as an adult.
My life of movies, in particular horror movies, including zombies and their brain delicacies, serial killers and creepy murderers, giant lizards, kids who see dead people, and androids fighting Brad and Janet, and other strange music from film, oddly enough, binds me closer to the rest of humanity, and that can’t be all bad. It’s a shared experience with coworkers, school classmates, friends, and strangers. Even if some experiences are difficult for me to speak about on some level, like the irrational rumination regarding a severed head more than thirty years removed, the movies and surrounding corollaries affected me enough to deserve consideration. I expect I am not alone in movie influences. Only by reflecting upon my life can I stand a chance of understanding it. Facing my fears is important. Perhaps, possibly, just maybe, facing them alongside each other can be a little easier, and if not, then a little more entertaining.
The small towns of San Manuel and Patterson, and the big city of Tucson, were not just locations in my youthful history. They were places full of anger and emotion, as if personifications of things feared, lost, loved, and found for the residents of the communities and their circumstances. In other words, they were every town and suburb, every city and community in the world. Each fell short of the promises they made to “make a life.” Cozying up in a room to watch a monster movie, then, provided renewed hope not found in the regular world, in regular places. It was an indulgence that allowed for suffering, fear, loathing, depression, hatred, love, adoration, encouragement, and, alternatively, the ability to turn the channel, pause for a restroom break, or to get off before getting thrown off.
Martin Perez is a Mexican-American MFA student at Vermont College of Fine Arts and a previous Writing Fellow at St. Mary’s College of California’s MFA program, focused on creative nonfiction. He has a BA in creative writing from the University of Arizona and graduated summa cum laude. He currently lives in Tucson, Arizona, where he teaches English in a private high school.
A selection of previous work:
Banner Art:
Minersville, PA, Jason Baldinger, IG: @cheeverloophole
