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I should point out that I was no garden-variety scaredy-cat. I laughed my way through old Dracula movies, for instance. But the devil was my bete noire. Practically speaking, this made for some seriously neurotic behavior that's tough to admit even now. I refused to swim in the deep end of the pool for fear that it was a trapdoor to hell. I refused to flush public toilets. (I can't remember the devil connection there, but it made sense at the time.) I believed that antique stores and old houses were breeding grounds for very bad things. And then there was the sinus-clearing, adrenaline-laced jolt of fear that gripped me whenever I found myself in a darkened room alone at night. I felt vulnerable to attack at all times — at home or at school, during the day or at night, sleepless in my own bed or pulling a stealth border crossing into my mom's room.
Rosemary's Baby spawned Hollywood's satanic-child fixation in 1968, which also happens to be the year that I was spawned. (Coincidence, right?) The movie, adapted from Ira Levin's novel of the same name, told the story of a New York housewife (Mia Farrow) who gradually realizes that she's been impregnated by the devil. It inspired a generation of filmmakers with its radical notion that the Prince of Darkness was much scarier if you took him out of the fiery dungeons of hell and deposited him in the nursery. It also chipped away a little at my faith in the essential goodness of mankind. Five years later, William Friedkin set out to make the Godfather of horror movies with his ultrarealistic adaptation of William Peter Blatty's best-selling novel The Exorcist. He ended up with nothing short of a $160 million-grossing cultural phenomenon that racked up 10 Oscar nominations along the way. Friedkin's masterstroke was making us feel as if we understood what it was like to be in the room with the devil — his sexual deviance, potty mouth, and all.
To be fair to Hollywood, the new generation of horror films came at a time when movies were hardly the only place where America's youth was under attack. The triple whammy of Vietnam, the Hell's Angels killing at the Rolling Stones show at Altamont, and the Charles Manson murders had fueled a sense of disenchantment and godlessness. It was a gruesome time, and the devil was as good a culprit as any for all that senseless violence. Head-trippy horror movies, at least, allowed people to experience their worst fears in the relative safety of a darkened movie theater.
And what could possibly be scarier than the idea that the quiet kid in the back of your grade school class might be the Antichrist? In 1976, in The Omen, Damien came to oversee the apocalypse. But what was most visceral and unsettling about the movie was not how global it was but how intimate — how it made viewers root, with mounting desperation, for Gregory Peck to murder his beatific little boy. The movie offered proof positive that the family was no longer a safe haven.
NEXT PAGE: ''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.''
