Bits and Pieces by Whoopi Goldberg

Author:Whoopi Goldberg [Goldberg, Whoopi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing

CHAPTER NINE

I’m at an age and stage in my career where I get asked, “Is there a part you’d still like to play?”

I’ve got an answer.

A monster.

That usually gets a raised eyebrow.

I’m not talking about a female villain or a monster bitch mother-in-law type. It’s not a metaphor, you know. I want to play an actual monster.

Horror movies are in my DNA. I like ’em. They make me happy. No slasher films. I don’t want to be scared by anything like reality. Give me a good ol’ Dracula movie or some giant Japanese reptile terror.

When I was a kid, we had Chiller Theatre on our TV every Saturday night. WPIX, Channel 11 in New York. The host was John Zacherle, this guy with a sunken-in face and weird eyes, dressed all in black. He was fantastic and the scariest man I’d ever seen. He would introduce the movie of the night and then come back on at the commercial breaks. The breaks were done live, so you never knew what was going to happen with him.

My mom, Clyde, and I would make up our Jiffy Pop popcorn before the opening credits of the show, which showed this gray and dead-looking hand coming up through the dry desert ground.

Godzilla, The Crawling Eye, Mothra, The Wolf Man, and things like giant leeches falling from New York skyscrapers completely captured me. I didn’t even know these movies were called horror. I thought they were good entertainment that happened to be scary.

The famous Hammer horror movies also rolled out when I was young: Dracula: Prince of Darkness, The Plague of the Zombies, Kiss of the Vampire, The Gorgon, all the really good ones. We’d go see them first at the RKO theater on the corner of Twenty-Third Street and Eighth Avenue; then a few years later, they’d show up on TV. I still scour the TV listings every week to see if any of them are playing.

Yeah, the plotlines can be ridiculous. But they’d still get you jumping. You get that all-over feeling of knowing you’re going to be surprised or shocked. Like in Trilogy of Terror: Karen Black gets attacked by a wooden doll that is about fourteen inches tall. It’s a tribal Zuni hunter doll that comes to life and attacks her legs with a knife as she walks through her living room. Then it hacks its way through her locked bedroom door to get to her, making croaky animal sounds. At some point, it seems ridiculous that she is locked in her own apartment and can’t seem to open a window and toss the doll out, but that’s how it is and you just have to go with it. Seems like an ugly doll with pointy teeth coming to life couldn’t scare the shit out of you, but it does.

Same with seeing Jaws in the movie theater when I was a teenager. At first, I remember thinking, Oh, my God, I’m seeing a movie about a shark? Then, there was the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.