By Patrick F. Cannon

When I was a mere lad of four or five, my dear sister Kathleen often took my brother and me  to the movies. At that time, Braddock, PA – where I  was born – had three theatres. As I recall, the Capital got the big features after their downtown Pittsburgh run. We typically went to the Paramount, which showed mostly westerns, serials (which we called “chapters”), and occasionally a horror film or two. One day, the bill featured The Mummy and The Wolf Man.

            Boris Karloff, that versatile British actor who also starred as Frankenstein, was the Mummy and Lon Cheney Jr was the poor soul who morphed into a hairy creature every time there was full moon. I remember vividly, after more than 80 years mind you, being unable to sleep that night, thinking every sound  was either the mummy or Dracula (or both) creeping up on me. Thanks, Sis!

            When I was ten, I saw the best of all the horror movies, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. During this classic film, the boys run into not only Frankenstein, but our old pals ‘Dracula, of course played by Bela Lugosi; and the Wolf Man, still the hairy-faced Lon Cheney, Jr. Funny stuff, as I recall.

            The horror movie has never gone out of fashion, and often with the same suspects. Director Guillermo del Toro just last year released his own take on Frankenstein, based as all are the others on Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel. My favorite is Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, starring Gene Wilder as Doc Frankenstein (pronounced Frank En Steen!), and Peter Boyle as a song and dance monster.

            Interest in creatures like these comes in waves. The novelist Anne Rice put vampires front and center in 1976 with the publication of Interview With a Vampire, which featured the blood sucking escapades of a French noble named Lestat de Lioncourt. In case you aren’t up on these things, vampires are creatures who never die, so long as they get a regular fill up of human blood, which they usually get from a comely blonde, who  then becomes a new vampire. And so on. The moral? Beware of people with longer than normal canine teeth. Proving his versatility, Lescat was played by Tom Cruise in the movie version.

            Mummies are a sub species of the walking dead. The idea here is that they rise from the dead to  wreak vengeance on the raiders who have desecrated and robbed their tombs. Brendan Fraser appeared in a series of movies based on the idea; and our stalwart actor Tom Cruise showed up in 2107 in a  remake of 1932s The Mummy. Not sure whether he played the mummy or his intended victim (or maybe both?)

            A Zombie is a reanimated corpse from the Voodoo tradition of Haiti (I think). But it is the “walking dead” of the good old USA that should cause the most concern. I’ve lost count of the number of movies and TV series that have set thousands of the gaunt and pasty risen dead loose on communities throughout the country. They are of particular concern to me as I live in the Village of Forest Park, which because of the number of cemeteries within its borders, is said to have far more dead than living residents. If some day they all rise from their graves, we’re in big trouble, particularly if their leaders look like Tom Cruise.

Copyright 2026, Patrick F. Cannon