Introduction: Little-Kid Neurons in the Nightmare Tunnel

When I can’t sleep, I watch B movies.

I'm talking about the kind of movies that are allowed -- through lack of oversight, lack of funds, mad vision, or some combination of factors -- to go screaming off the rails. Movies untethered from reality. Scary movies, or ones that want very badly to be scary but just are not. Movies that know they're utterly silly and revel in that fact.

This goes way back. I was 5 or 6. Our local library in Delta, OH, gave a showing of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (which, I know, is not a B movie, but there's a certain spirit I'm talking about here, just stay with me). So there's me and a bunch of other little kids sitting on the floor, watching the story flicker across the library wall, no idea that this movie is about to pry open our craniums and tattoo our brains with images we will never forget.

Because, like The Wizard of Oz (which occupies its own real estate in the movies-for-kids dementosphere), Willy Wonka starts out in a real world of drab hues, and then it lets us into that colorsplosion of a candy factory, and there's Augustus Gloop sneaking off from the main tour group to drink from the chocolate river, and, whoops!, in he falls (or is he pushed?), and it's all great fun until he gets sucked under and pulled toward the tubes that pump the chocolate.

Wait a minute, hold on, what's this? Even in my little kid brain, I knew that Augustus Gloop getting sucked under was a line crossed into unknown territory. Everything I'd seen before this had taught me nothing truly horrible ever happens to little kids, and if they fall in the water, they splash around and yell -- they don't go under. But Augustus Gloop goes under, and nobody does anything to save him (more new territory). His mother expects Willy Wonka to do it -- "Dive in! Save him!" she commands -- but Willy starts munching on candies as if eating popcorn at an engrossing movie and says, "Oh, it's too late, he's had it now, the suction's got him." And it does, because there goes portly Augustus Gloop, squeezing impossibly and horribly up through that skinny tube.

That image of Augustus Gloop shooting through the tube hit my consciousness like a bullet -- but that was just a primer for what was coming next. Because next Willy loads what's left of the tour group onto a boat, and they head straight into a tunnel, and at first it's just a fast ride past seizure-inducing arcs of light and into a red glow, and, okay, this is odd, but like Charlie's grandpa says, "It's fun, too!"

And then the psychedelic nightmare images start flashing across the walls as the boat races past.

Go ahead and click on the image below for a video of the scene. I'll wait right here. And while you watch it, roll this little nugget of context around in your mind: I watched this movie in the public library of a tiny Ohio village, right on the wall in the children's section where anyone could glance over and see it, and no outraged adults complained or tried to get the whole thing shut down to protect our delicate little minds. The Seventies were different times.

I wish I could go back and see the reactions of the other kids sitting around me on the library floor during that scene. Maybe they were terrified, maybe their little psyches were scarred for life. I don't know, because in that moment, the other kids didn't exist. There was just me, absolutely immersed in what I was seeing on the wall. It was horrific, but I wasn't scared. Fear never entered into the experience. Fear is what I would feel a couple years later when neighborhood kids convinced me that aliens had landed and were killing people off one by one in the dark. I have a very clear memory of that feeling of helpless terror, so I can say that what I felt during Willy Wonka was not fear, but fascination. My little-kid neurons lit up, lined up at attention, and said: Ohhhhhhhh! On just the other side of normal, there's this completely different world! It's creepy and weird and riveting! Anything can happen there!

So what Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory gave me was an appetite for the surreal, for the unexpectedly scary and fantastical. That was my first exposure to what I love in the spirit of B movies: that sense that anything can happen. When a B movie jumps the curb and veers into the wilds of non-audience-tested, budget-restrained anarchy, sometimes the result is, well, a bone-headed, cerebral trauma-inducing dud. But now and then, inadvertent or by design, it's a wonderful, unexpected thing.

Highbrow and big-budget movies can fall on either side of that same fence, and plenty of my favorite movies belong to one or both camps. But B movies make that Willy Wonka bullet still lodged in my consciousness heat up because you just never know for sure whether that stick of gum will swell you up like a giant, miserable blueberry or grant golden-ticket access to insane bursts of brilliance -- even if those bursts are sometimes muted by Elmer's Glue-adhesed effects and acting that could be outdone by your local elementary school ensemble.

In this blog, we (that's me and my occasional guest bloggers) will pick our way through the muddy, slimy, gooey terrain of B films to undertake a spoiler-filled search for those moments of brilliance. We will look so that you don't have to.

You're welcome.