Big Book of Werewolves. The - Timothy Green Beckley's

Excerpt

I used to hang out on Times Square. Frankly, I found it very inspiring. Ok! It was a bit sleazy, but where else could you get two franks for a quarter, drink an Orange Julius, go to see a double feature and still have money to get home?

True, you had to step over a few winos and the closest thing to Disney on Broad- way at the time was a family of mice playing in the bags of garbage along the curb.

I remember one movie called "The Abominable Snowman Versus The Wolfman." I met the producer years later by "coincidence." Turns out he was a big believer in UFOs and so we had a lot in common to chat about. Some of the films with werewolves in them were made on a shoestring--or better yet--with a bunch of long, tangled wigs purchased in a store on Forty Second Street that ca- tered to prostitutes who walked along what was then known as (we're talking the Sixties here) the infamous "Minnesota Strip". So called because most of the "work- ing girls" came from--well, Minnesota.

I must have seen more horror movies than anyone else hanging around this grimy center of American culture. A lot more guys were squatting in the nearby porno theaters, but the admission cost was three bucks to get in and I only had a fin and a half to spend to hang out all day. And besides I never cultivated an appreciation for the smell of vomit and urine, and the moaning and groaning of the couples on the screen were nothing compared to people being ripped apart by a crazed hairy beast with claws ten times as sharp as Freddy Kruger's nails.

To go back a bit in time, I had gotten hooked on horror movies pretty early on. The house I resided in was haunted, so phantoms and creepy creatures were noth- ing too far out of the ordinary. And I blame a lot of my horrific fantasies on none other than Nancy Davis, who later became the First Lady of the land when she married actor Ronald Reagan. You see, even as a precocious preteen, I was more interested in the macabre than in math. "Donovan's Brain" (starring Nancy D.) was a flick made in l953 in which the brain of a mobster was kept in a jar filled with a pumping apparatus that for all intents and purposes kept him "alive," or at least on the cusp of human survival.

Now this might have been a wild concept in the early Fifties, but don't forget that slugger Ted Williams and supposedly Uncle Walt's brains are frozen somewhere in a similar fashion.

My mother, realizing that this film might have a traumatic effect on my young psyche, made me go to bed before the picture aired on primetime television. Yet through the walls I could hear this incredible sound--this eerie hypnotic pump- ing--going on and on and ad infinitum, as the brain was gaining strength and energy and blood began to flow to it through the use of an artificial pump attached to the brain's arteries.

Well, believe me, mother knows best. From that moment on and for many years, I had to sleep with a night light on for fear of the dark, the sound of the pump seemingly matching the rapid beating of my heart.

As creepy as it sounds--for after all I am now Mr. Creepo, host of low budget, B-movies available in chain saws (I mean chain stores) everywhere--whenever I see a werewolf movie this unholy sensation starts to take over my body. There were films in the Sixties like Curse of the Werewolf and a little later on Shadow of the Werewolf that made my flesh crawl. And years later, when Michael Jackson paid homage to werewolves everywhere with the making of his video Thriller somehow I had to get involved.

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