You never heard such unearthly laughter

Or such hilarious groans

When the skeleton in the closet

Rattled his bones

The Skeleton in the Closet by Johnny Burke and Arthur Johnston

“People are afraid of skeletons.  We all have one inside of us, so they shouldn’t be!”

Ray Harryhausen

If I had my way, I’d have this poster hanging over my bed.  I just like it.  My Wife, however, wouldn’t like it at all and neither my Mother or my Mother-in-Law would approve, so there’s nothing over my bed and hasn’t been for many years.  I guess I’m a little weird in going for stuff like this but I do go for it, I do love itI love it hard, . I just like skeletons and always have.  I have them on underwear, on tee shirts, on postcards, as knicknacks, bric-a-brac, geegaws and toys.  I have a skull Pez and a skull ring and a belt buckle with a skull on it and the zipper on my leather jacket has a skull on the end of it.  My daughter admired it the other day.  I have a skeleton refridgerator magnet that she thinks belongs to her and we get into fights about it (“My skeleton, Daddy.”  “No, honey, it’s Daddy’s skeleton.”  “No, mine!”).  So, yeah,  there’s hope. Horror movie posters used to be so deliciously lurid… I can’t think of a better word than “lurid” for describing how they goosed your baser emotions.  I mean, look at this one sheet for THE CREEPING FLESH (1973) – does it get any better than a skeleton carrying a screaming chick?  (Am I the only one who thinks she looks like Ginger from GILLIGAN’S ISLAND?)  And they’ve done that for years, monsters, bless their hides souls, carried screaming women off to God knows where and done God knows what with them.  (Our own Medusa blogged about that particular phenomenon last Halloween.)  I love the oozing font of the title (in tallow, it seems) and the parenthetical boasting (“More Frightening Than Frankenstein!  More Dreaded Than Dracula!”) that goes right down to the director’s credit (“Freddie Francis… the man who made your flesh crawl with TALES FROM THE CRYPT.”)  You just don’t get showmanship like this anymore.  Why can’t my women understand that? 

Here’s another favorite, for Gordon Hessler’s SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN (1969).  What a great title!  As a kid, the boast of “triple distilled horror” carried a lot of weight for me.  I’d seen wording like that on the liquor bottles in my parent’s dry sink (which my Dad had made out of an old TV cabinet), so I knew SCREAM AND SCREAM again had to be pretty potent stuff.  And the skeleton in the vat of acid there has legs that just won’t quit.  (Well, in this particular moment in time they won’t quit.  Five minutes from now they won’t exist – but you get my point.)  At the tender age of 9 or 10 I must have stared at this unfortunate bird’s hemline for days on end, wondering what I might see if it slipped a little.  I suppose I should have been repulsed by the flesh bubbling off her bones a bit further south but, well, I just wasn’t.  I may have been a pre-teen but I was a male and as such already adept at compartmentalizing.  Kids are complex.  Adults like to believe kids are perfectly innocent and incapable of, well, lurid (that word again) thoughts… but I tapped into a borderline feral rapacity at a single digit age.  (I wouldn’t actually make my bones, so to speak, until I was almost 18 years old; vampires and ghouls and werewolves and living skeletons did not prepare me for the terrors of womankind.)  I realize I’ve taken you on a bizarre ride with this post but I even find myself marveling at how glancing at a couple of horror movie posters from the late 60s/early 70s has tapped me into vivid memories of my formative years, years in which I drank in what life had to offer, witnessed a host of wonders and horrors, and grew gradually into my own skeleton to become the strange but happy fellow I am today.