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It's hard to think of a more fearsome mom than the bullying zealot played by Piper Laurie in Carrie, Brian De Palma's adaptation of Stephen King's novel about the horrors of puberty gone wild. As if life at school weren't tough enough for Carrie — a gangly naïf who gets pelted with maxi pads when she gets a surprise visit from her period — she had to come home to her chastising shrew of a mother. Sure, Carrie got her telekinetic revenge on the mean girls in her class. But kids with special powers never fared well in these movies. Maybe it was part of a wider cultural warning meant for the flower children of the '60s, who had dared to empower themselves sexually and politically. I don't know. I was 8.
In 1980's The Shining, also based on a King novel, director Stanley Kubrick served up another paranormal kid who also paid a steep price for his ability to forecast the future. Jack Nicholson's unhinged dad took a gradual march to madness that ended with him hunting down his wife and child with an ax in his hand and redrum in his eyes. It's terrifying, of course, to watch a psycho parent foam at the mouth while he stalks his child. But there was also something incredibly sad to me about seeing a psychic kid who knew that his daddy wanted to hurt him but was powerless to stop him. After The Shining, I was 12 and finally old enough to decide that I didn't want these movies to mess with my head. I stopped watching. I was done.
As it turned out, so was Hollywood. In the years since that golden age of psychological terror, scary movies migrated away from Satan and the cerebral cortex. Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th (1980), and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) signaled the birth of the slasher flick, in which demented bogeymen slaughter teens with goofy, gory gusto. Then came the relative peace and prosperity of the '90s, when the Clinton administration presided over the first dotcom boom and a lack of gruesome foreign wars. Good news makes for bad horror. How else to explain Leprechaun and Candyman? Finally, in the late 1990s, Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson dusted off the old scary-movie tropes, soaked them in irony, and made huge hits out of the Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer franchises. Every now and then, Satan would make an appearance in high-concept thrillers like 1987's Angel Heart or 1997's The Devil's Advocate. But Al Pacino in an expensive suit is not scary. Tiny Linda Blair in a bloody nightgown, though — that was shocking and real and continued to turn up in my dreams for years until I decided to suck it up and write this story.
NEXT PAGE: ''I cannot overemphasize how much I didn't want to watch any of these movies again. On four separate occasions, I drove to the video store, rented the Exorcist DVD — and returned it three days later unwatched.''
