AND THEN IT HAPPENED

I'm far from squeamish.

Peruse my DVD collection and you'll realize that right away. Among the titles I've decided I just can't live without are I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, BLOOD FEAST, DAWN OF THE DEAD, BEYOND THE DARKNESS, MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY . . . you get the (bloody) picture. I'm endlessly fascinated by films--any type of art, really, but it's movies we're discussing today--that explore the extremes of the human condition, that aren't afraid to spill a little blood or viscera or whatever in probing the darkest recesses of our psyche. Or to just get unabashedly gory for my entertainment. I love it, I tells ya.

But I wasn't always this way.

Several years--God, decades really--ago little Scotty would flee from the living room in terror at the merest suggestion of anything scary (Scooby-Doo was an obvious exception). And if it was one of those ones that were bloody or "showed all guts," well then get it out of here before Scott goes into hysterics. There are several anecdotes I could share on the subject, but I'd like to be brief, and besides, I do want to maintain some cred as a horror writer.

I would, however, like to tell you about something that happened to me when I was six.

This would have been 1981, and I was in first grade. Mr. Menhart, my phys ed teacher, was setting up the rickety old projector for a special film. This already had me a little nervous; it was going to be one of those movies, I just knew, the ones that warm you not to go trick-or-treating at certain houses, or about bald men in raincoats that offer rides to children. Those things were SCARY.

I didn't know the half of it.

When the lights went down and the projector whirred to life, I was transplanted into the Citizen Kane of bus safety films, AND THEN IT HAPPENED.

If you've over the age of thirty, you probably know the kind of movie I'm talking about: worn, washed out picture, amateur-hour acting, and a monotonous narrator that comes off as a cross between Rod Serling and Hannibal Lector. This movie showcased just how reprehensible children are on school buses, and how their mean-spirited antics get people killed. And it could've been prevented, of course, if they hadn't been so self-centered and raucous.

A tiny lump of fear formed in my belly as the film began, then steadily grew as dogs, transistor radios, and knives were brought aboard the morning school bus. When the inevitable crash occured (I wanted to look away, but the authoritative tone of the narrator--"Watch what happens when . . ."--wouldn't let me), I was sufficiently freaked out by the tumbling bodies and red Karo syrup. I kept my cool--I wasn't in the safety of my house, where I could scamper away at will, but in school, where you had to, like, behave yourself. But the sadistic little flick wasn't done with me yet, not by a long shot.

The final seven minutes of the movie involved a female bus driver carting her nefarious load of miscreants home. We've had enough establishing shots of a mouse in a shoebox to know there's trouble ahead, but there's more. We've got teenagers kissing in the seats, distracting our Southern belle behind the wheel. One kid ingests a whole bottle of pills and starts puking. That lump in my belly is roughly the size of a Voit basketball, and then the narrator intones, with all the subtlety of the Crypt Keeper, that the bus driver is going to die.

And then it happens.

The mouse escapes the shoebox during a race riot between the absurdly-Afroed black students and the homeliest child actor ever caught on film. One of the little bastards on the bus dangles the rodent in front of the driver who, like anyone responsible for a multi-ton mechanism filled with children, passes out. The bus veers uncontrollably, tires screeching madly on the soundtrack. It becomes very clear that I'm about to puke in my lap.

Blood-spattered kids are tossed around like socks in a dryer. The bus has somehow managed to dive nose-first into a lake, submerged except for the emergency exit, which hangs ajar. Divers and policemen assist traumatized children to safety, where they'll spend the rest of their days thinking about what they should have done to prevent this accident.

Lights up. I raise my hand. "I think I'm gonna barf."

I distinctly remember Mr. Menhart propping mm beside an open window so I can catch some fresh air while I waited for my dad to take me home. I honestly don't recall exactly how upset I was; either I was really wigged out and had to go home, or it was near the end of the day and there was NO FUCKING WAY I was getting onto that school bus. I do, however, remember my dad having a chat with Mr. Menhart, who apologized for showing the movie and admitted (whether in 20/20 hindsight, or to prevent my dad for suing the school for my therapy) that maybe that wasn't the most appropriate film to screen for first-graders.

The film left an impression of me, for sure. Images from it are still burned into my memory, though as time went by I thought about it very little. Even in the search for ghoulish and ghastly story ideas, the movie had little significance, save for the first fucked-up thing I'd ever seen.

Until this past Thursday, when I watched it again.

I hadn't realized just how much a single viewing can inbed itself in one's brain; twenty-six years later the movie is exactly as I remembered it (in fact, the version I saw was missing a few scenes, some of which were the first to surface in my memory when I did think of this film). And despite the hundreds of zombie/cannibal/rape-revenge movies I've inflicted upon myself since then, I still watched it with the same growing unease I did as a kid. Maybe I was reliving the initial experience as I watched, or perhaps it's because the film is one sick bastard. Either way, it was kinda fun to still be scared while watching a movie.

Want to see it?

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVkvvPwvui0

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8BFoPBoq9k

Drive safely, folks.