MOVIE MONSTER MASH

What is "scary"?

Hideous underground mutants terrorizing innocent people topside? A romantic plan that goes horribly awry? Taking a swim and feeling something brush past your leg that probably isn't, but might be, a giant fish with razor-sharp teeth?

All of the above, actually, as well as anything else the human mind can dream up in those moments when we're feeling our most mortal, our most vulnerable, our most helpless.

Halloween, that day on which we whistle past the graveyard by making fun of the things that scare the stuffing out of us, is almost here. In honor of the occasion, we've asked a few notable Southern Nevadans about the scariest movies they've ever seen.

Why movies? Nothing against scary novels, TV shows or plays, but watching movies -- gathering in a dark room while the flickering griot on screen tells us stories about things we don't want to think about but do anyway -- may well be one of 21st century America's few remaining collective experiences.

We begin our scarific survey with Ray Dennis Steckler and Ted V. Mikels, two Southern Nevadans who know a thing or two about scary.

Steckler, whose directorial resume includes several films in the horror genre, is preparing for the release of what he calls "an extension" of his 1964 cult classic "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies." For Steckler, the Universal Pictures' series featuring "The Mummy" -- the first, with Boris Karloff, was released in 1932, but Steckler remembers 1940's "The Mummy's Hand," starring Tom Tyler, which kicked off a series of sequels -- was the stuff of childhood frights.

"The Mummy was kind of terrifying," he says. "He walked, and dragged his foot, but he always caught the running girl. I never figured that out.

"But he had one hand out in front of him all the time, and his arm was wrapped up in bandages. It was very scary."

Steckler's other childhood scare came not from a character but an actor: Rondo Hatton, whose features were disfigured by acromegaly, a hormonal condition, and who performed in several B-movies during the '30s and '40s.

Hatton, Steckler says, "played the Creeper in a couple of movies, including one with Sherlock Holmes. I used to wake up sweating in the middle of the night after seeing him. I thought Rondo Hatton was at my doorstep."

Mikels, whose list of cult films includes "The Corpse Grinders" and "The Astro-Zombies," is preparing for the release of his latest movie, "Demon Haunt." His most memorable cinematic scare came when he caught "White Zombie" (1932) at a theater when he was a kid.

The plot involves a man who enlists a witch doctor to lure the woman he loves away from her fiance. The problem: She turns into a zombie instead.

"I think that was the idea for the wrapped-up-body Mummy (series) clothing," Mikels says. "And it was scary."

These days, Mikels doesn't find himself scared by movies.

"I think it's harder to scare people now because -- and it's so sad -- too many people making movies really do not understand what makes a good movie," he says. "So you've got a lot of junk out there."

Mikels adds that, of his own movies, 1970's "The Corpse Grinders" seems to be viewers' consensus choice as scariest.

"I was, in my mind, making a camp movie, grinding cadavers into cat food for cats who like people," Mikels says. "Yet, it's still considered a (horror) classic."

By the way: Shanti, Mikel's longtime star, cites as her favorite film scare "The Shining" (1980) with Jack Nicholson, recalling in particular the scenes in the maze.

Shanti, putting on her marriage and family therapist hat -- in her professional life, she's Wendy O. Altamura -- suspects the scene probably taps into our almost universal "fear of the unknown."

Magician/entertainer The Amazing Johnathan is an aficionado of scary movies and, not coincidentally, thrower of the coolest Halloween party around. While he doesn't scare easily, he considers "Dead Alive" -- a 1992 film you also can find under the title "Braindead" -- "the best horror movie ever made."

The film, directed by a pre-"Lord of the Rings" Peter Jackson, involves a mother who dies but doesn't and lots of zombies. "It's just brilliant," Johnathan says. "The special effects are brilliant. It's funny, it's scary, it's got everything."

When he was a kid, "The Little Shop of Horrors," a 1960 Roger Corman film about a man-eating plant, "scared the hell out of me. It was meant to be more or less tongue-in-cheek, but that plant saying, 'Feed me,' that was a terrifying movie when I was a kid."

Flo Rogers didn't see too many scary movies while growing up in England and isn't a fan of them now. But Rogers, Nevada Public Radio's president and general manager, did see "The Time Machine" (1960) when she was about 10 and, Rogers says, "it scared the wits out of my sister and I."

Particularly memorable were the Morlocks, the mutant creepy people underground who fed on the Eloi, the gentle people above. But also scary to Rogers was the notion that evolution wouldn't necessarily be kind, that "when he goes off to the future, some people were living aboveground in sort of a benign peace, and there were scary Morlocks down below.

"I think we did actually glom onto H.G. Wells' sort of sociological critique, that some people did better than others and that the folks who lived underground would be unsatisfied."

Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" also gave Rogers a memorable childhood scare.

"I'd say it was one of my scary movies, except I couldn't watch it all the way through," she says. "I don't think I've ever seen it all the way through."

Author Vicki Pettersson, whose novels -- "The Scent of Shadows" and "The Taste of Night" -- are set in a demon-haunted Las Vegas, got a serious shiver from "The Ring," a 2002 film about a videotape you really don't want to rent.

Pettersson -- her latest story appears in the just-published anthology "Holidays are Hell" -- saw the film between shows during her previous life as a showgirl at the Tropicana. "Even with my girlfriends commenting and squealing around me, I still freaked out," she recalls.

The film was one of few she has seen that "convinced me to suspend disbelief. The suspense was much more terrifying than any slasher flick, the protagonist wasn't TSTL (too stupid to live) and I could easily say to myself, 'If I were in her position, that's what I would do, too.' "

Even creepier: When Pettersson went home and told her husband about the movie, "and that he was absolutely, under no circumstances, to bring that film in our house, he picked up a tape he'd rented just that night and said, 'You mean this one?'

"I think my neighbors heard me scream."

Francisco Menendez, chairman of the film department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, cites as his scariest movie Steven Spielberg's 1975 "Jaws."

"One reason was because it was not supernatural," he says. "It was just: You're in the water, and in that water there could be something underneath you that eats you."

Menendez saw "Jaws" when he was 13. "I was already making movies, but it was the first movie I went to see where everybody screamed and everybody clapped and everybody gasped collectively in the movie theater. It was an incredible experience."

Brian DePalma's "Carrie" (1976) also provided a good adolescent scare.

"As kids we used to have 'Carrie' parties," Menendez says. "We'd put up in front people who'd never seen 'Carrie' and stand behind them. And just as Carrie's hands reach out from the grave, we'd push them toward the television set."

David Schmoeller, who also teaches film studies at UNLV, lists "Tourist Trap" (1979),"Crawlspace" (1986) and "Puppetmaster" (1989) on his own Creepy CV. He agrees with Menendez that "Jaws" ranks as "one of the greatest monster movies of all time."

As a kid, Schmoeller's best scare came from "Creature From the Black Lagoon" (1954) which, he says, featured "a very well-executed monster and it was very realistic. It had those fins, and the hands were webbed. I had nightmares."

These days, not much on film scares him. "I've been to Oz, and I know how it's done," he explains. "I've been behind the curtain, and it doesn't work for me."

Novelist H. Lee Barnes, whose latest book, "Minimal Damage: Stories of Veterans" is in its second printing, isn't a horror movie aficionado. But he does count among the scariest movies he has ever seen "The Wolf Man" (1941) with Lon Chaney Jr.

"You never saw the gore," Barnes says, but when the characters went to dark places where they shouldn't be, "you knew that hand was going to come out of somewhere. You never saw the gore but you saw the expression in the faces."

Suggestion "is far more wonderful" than gore, Barnes adds. "I saw the worst kind of gore in Vietnam, and gore's not scary. It's repulsive, in a way. But I think when (a story) hits our subconscious fear, it has more impact."

"I think the Wolf Man has that atavistic sense to it, that all of us have this primitive desire in us to actually act out our violent ways. And we don't want to see it in ourselves, but there it is in front of us."

Penn & Teller's Teller says the scariest movie for him is "Man Bites Dog," a 1992 pseudo documentary in which a camera crew documents the everyday life of "a very cheerful, tremendously charming, comical serial killer."

"You can't help but fall in love with this guy who's a serial killer," Teller says.

"It's the most deeply disturbing movie I've ever seen."

"In terms of a charming, lovely Halloween horror movie, I'd say 'Martin,' (1977) the George Romero movie," Teller continues. "Martin is an attractive young fellow who just happens to need to drink blood in order to stay alive.

"And there's nothing of the usual vampire stuff. None. The only thing he has in common with vampires is he needs to drink blood."

For Teller, the most memorable scares come not from computer-generated imagery, but good performances, vivid characters and a great story.

"The thing is, if you try to impress me with CGI, give up. I'm no longer impressed you can create the most grotesque monster in the world. I'm apt to shrug. I'm much more fond of things that touch my mind and my heart."

Contact reporter John Przybys at jprzybys@reviewjournal.com or (702) 383-0280.