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The first horror movie I ever saw probably wasn’t technically a horror movie. My aunt was babysitting me and some of the neighborhood kids down the street, and it was a pizza-and-Video-Factory kind of a night. The older kids wanted a horror movie, and as a particularly fraidy-cat tween who desperately wanted to fit in, I outwardly went along with this plan but inwardly started shaking in my boots. Since I could remember, I had avoided occasions where I’d have to watch the popular horror of my youth. This was the very early ’90s, before Scream ignited the teen-horror revival, so what was popular were trashy, bloody seventh-sequels to franchises like Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Just from the schoolyard, I knew enough about Freddy and Jason to know I didn’t want to know any more.
At the video store, though, we didn’t settle on Freddy or Jason. Instead, we opted for a video cover with a woman’s face floating barely above the ocean surface, a movie called Dead Calm. I knew who Nicole Kidman was because Tom Cruise was one of the biggest movie stars in the world, and he’d starred with Kidman in Days of Thunder and Far and Away. I’ve still never seen Days of Thunder, but I vividly remembering having seen Far and Away, watching Kidman as a feisty Irish immigrant en route to the Oklahoma land rush. I also remember Tom Cruise passed out and naked but for a bucket covering his privates, and while you think that would be incidental to a story about discovering a lifelong love of horror movies, it isn’t quite. As a nascent gay kid who didn’t know the half of all there was to know about himself, it’s telling that my first experiences with horror were with a glamorous future Oscar winner who was familiar to me solely for peeking under that bucket covering Tom Cruise’s privates.
Looking back, Dead Calm was a very gay first horror movie, even if the plot has no queer elements whatsoever. Kidman and Sam Neil play a rich Australian couple grieving the death of their young child in a car accident. In order to cope and to keep their marriage together, they take their yacht out for a vacation. While out on the water, they encounter a disabled ship and its sole surviving inhabitant, played by Billy Zane, proving conclusively that if you are traveling by boat, make sure Billy Zane is not on board. Zane’s story is that the rest of the ship’s passengers died by food poisoning, and we all know he’s lying, but he’s just so handsome. Kidman’s character is intrigued, and Neil’s character is jealous, and those of us at home know Zane’s a psycho, because the movie we’re watching has “Dead” in the title, but watching it play out results in a sexy, scary little thriller, one that will satisfy any lifelong urges to see Nicole Kidman shoot a harpoon gun.
So, yes, my first experience with the horror genre was in point of fact a sexy thriller starring future Oscar winner/gay icon Nicole Kidman where the plot is that she’s drawn into danger by the allure of Billy Zane’s immaculately tanned chest. Of course, sexuality in horror movies isn’t exactly a rare commodity. I’m sure many a straight lad was coaxed into some really complicated feelings watching topless women parade around in all those slasher movies. Still, my Dead Calm experience was really quite telling of the direction that the rest of my life was going, and that direction was gayward.
The truth of the matter is that all of my earliest experiences having the crap scared out of me all involved glamorous actresses. Nicole Kidman introducing me to the horror genre was a bit like an old witch casting bones predicting that my life would prominently involve writing about and obsessing over actresses. And speaking of witches … Anjelica Huston.
I’m pretty sure my scarring experience with The Witches came right around the same time as Dead Calm, only this time I had zero idea what I was getting into. The pedigree that The Witches was sold on was the one-two punch of Jim Henson (Muppets! I loved the Muppets!) and Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory!). I must’ve already seen The Addams Family by this point, because I recall Anjelica Huston being a draw for me as well, and it sure wasn’t because I was a tween obsessed with Prizzi’s Honor. And then I saw the movie …
Just from anecdotal evidence, I can say that The Witches was one of the cruelest and most scarring bait-and-switches ever experienced by my generation. To a person, everyone who remembers seeing The Witches as a child recalls being scared to near-death by the horrific makeup of the witches in their true form and how insanely scary Huston’s lead performance was. With the hindsight and wisdom of adulthood, I know that Roald Dahl books were deeply fucked up and The Witches director Nicolas Roeg directed the dead-child horror classic Don’t Look Now, but back then I was mostly just wounded that Jim Henson would terrify me this way. Still, as scared as I was, I was blown away by Anjelica Huston, a screen presence as indelible as anyone I’ve ever seen. This period in her career was a kind of gothic indulgence that married two of her best assets: that remarkable visage that could be inviting and terrifying at once, and a sneaky gift for dark comedy.
By far, however, the horror experience of my impressionable youth that best predicted my trend towards an actressexual adulthood was the one that didn’t involve a best actress winner. (Wait, that’s not true, but Julianne Moore was only in a supporting role, and … I’m getting ahead of myself.) Rebecca De Mornay’s titanic lead performance in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle was a terrifying and awe-inspiring piece of over-the-top horror that has stuck with me for 25 years and counting.
The storyline is simple, a tale as old as time. Claire (Anabella Sciorra) is an exceedingly meek wife and mother whose disgusting and creepy OBGYN molests her during an examination, and when she reports the abuse, he kills himself. Unbeknownst to Claire, this suicide sends the OBGYN’s pregnant wife Peyton (De Mornay) into a tailspin that most prominently includes a graphic miscarriage. The sight of a distraught and screaming De Mornay hemorrhaging from the waist down was but the first of many scarring moments for this pre-teen! Some time later, after Claire has had her baby, Peyton is out for revenge and does so by manipulating her way into employment as Claire’s live-in nanny. Plots to murder Claire and usurp her family ensue. Julianne Moore (there she is) shows up as Claire’s best friend and ends up suffering a horrific fate in a greenhouse.
Rebecca De Mornay was my Freddy, my Jason. She was the monster who frightened me but also held my rapt attention. I’d have ponied up for a half-dozen more movies about Peyton if the studios had decided to keep resurrecting her like her horror contemporaries. And while De Mornay herself isn’t talked about the way that actresses like Nicole Kidman, Anjelica Huston, and Julianne Moore are, she still gave the kind of high-drama, borderline-campy actressing that I have gravitated towards all my life. She’s Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, Kathy Bates in Misery, Goldie Hawn in Death Becomes Her, Megan Fox in Jennifer’s Body, Robin McLeavy in The Loved Ones. This isn’t the only horror I have claimed as my own (we do contain multitudes), but every time I see a towering performance of female power and psychosis in a horror movie, I will forever feel a debt of gratitude to Rebecca De Mornay for opening that door.
