Shocking scenes just aren't scary

Halloween is on the horizon, and the cable TV stations have blood and gore available with a click of the remote.
But while a good chunk of those movies are repulsive, few of them are really scary.
To qualify as really scary — back in the day — a movie had to either be shown at a Saturday matinee, at a midnight screening at the Hines or be televised on late night TV after your parents had gone to bed and when you shouldn’t have been watching.
For kids growing up in Jay County in the 1960s, that meant movies shown by hosts like Selwyn or Sammy Terry, easily parodied characters who were often working double-time as the station’s weatherman or sports guy but donned make-up and a goofy accent to try to fill the breaks and introduce the commercials. (Count Floyd on SCTV was the best send-up of these guys.)
The movies themselves came almost exclusively from Universal’s library of B-pictures: “Dracula,” “Frankenstein,” “Bride of Frankenstein,” “Creature from the Black Lagoon” and more of that ilk.
At the movie theatre — the Hines in Portland, the Main in Dunkirk or the Key in Redkey — you’d encounter more recent issues. There, the focus was often on outer space and the effects of radiation — something we’d all read about and heard about and didn’t understand — on the human body.
So one week we’d encounter poor old Glen transformed into “The Amazing Colossal Man” because he witnessed an A-bomb test and wasn’t properly protected. Then the next week we’d encounter “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” who grew tinier and tinier after becoming engulfed in some sort of mysterious cloud that was presumed to have been caused by one atomic experiment or another.
Another week would pass and it might be “The Attack of the 50-Foot Woman,” whose actual size seemed to change a bit because the special effects people weren’t sticklers when it came to detail.
At its best, Hollywood might offer you something like “Forbidden Planet,” which I vividly recall watching at the Sky-Vue Drive-In, which actually had echoes of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.”
At its worst, it might be something from Castle Films, like “The Tingler” or “Dr. Sardonicus.”
But always, whether it was late-night TV or the movies, the scare was there.
The difference is, there was just enough scare.
And what you didn’t see was scarier than what you did see.
I’m not sure when that changed.
I was a movie critic for a time in the 1970s, and I think that’s about the time the line was crossed.
I’ll never forget watching “The Exorcist” in a screening. It scared my socks off.
But about a year later, I found myself watching an aging Vincent Price in a gory, crappy, pointless shock-fest. There was nothing scary about it. It was just stupid.
Showing the horror — with fake blood and special effects — had far less impact than making us imagine the horror. And something was lost.
It’s enough to make me nostalgic for our old buddy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Now, there was a guy who knew what Halloween is all about.