Author: unkle lancifer

I love your site! So many buried memories…

My dad was a big slasher/gore fan, and he never had second thoughts about letting us kids watch with him. By the time I was 6, I'd seen enough red Karo and latex to be effectively desensitized. So it wasn't the usual horror staples that traumatized me. No, the one scene that still haunts my nightmares is from a made-for-T.V. movie called TERROR ON THE BEACH.

I tried to find the actual scene, but my memory is really hazy. I know it involved something floating in the water. I thought it was a body, but after watching the only youtube clip I could find, it looks like the bad guys are traveling with a male blow-up doll.

Is this what kept me up at night?

I'm hoping you can help me track down the actual scene.

Thanks!

UNK SEZ: Jessica, I had completely forgot about 1973's TERROR ON THE BEACH! I too caught that one on television at a very young age. It is remarkable how much it resembles WES CRAVEN'S THE HILLS HAVE EYES which would not come out for another four years (1977). No luck finding the scene you remember, but I have a hunch that the body you saw floating in the water was, in actuality, a mannequin that the hippie aggressors drug around with them. From what I've gathered, there is not much actual violence in this made-for-television thriller. Lack of violence aside, you can't beat a cast that includes DUEL's DENNIS WEAVER, LOOKER's SUSAN DEY and Oscar winner ESTELLE PARSONS (BONNIE & CLYDE.)

NOTE: T.V. movie and ESTELLE PARSONS fans, you can currently check out THE UFO INCIDENT based on the famous Betty and Barney Hill case starting HERE!

This scene has haunted me for a while. I was going through a vampire phase during the 6th grade, and had fallen in love with THE LOST BOYS. I loved the bloody effects and the dark humor. Well, since I liked it so much, my father got me one of those "two-for-one" packs, vampire themed, with a DVD copy of THE LOST BOYS. The other DVD was FRIGHT NIGHT, which my cousin Derrick told my parents was perfectly okay for me to watch, and no worse than lost boys. And, for the most part, it wasn't. In fact, the blood throughout the first half of the movie was nothing compared to the constant slashing in THE LOST BOYS. I liked it a lot, and it would have been my new favorite if it weren't for one terrible scene: The death of Evil Ed.

I think what made it so brutal was the fact that, unlike the guys in THE LOST BOYS (who, to me, all looked like full-grown adults), Evil Ed was just a kid. He was probably my favorite character in the movie. Now, I would have been more than okay if he had simply been staked and died as a werewolf. But he didn't. After screaming his brains out for a good forty seconds as a hellish dog-beast, he turns back into a 14-year-old kid. And then he continues to squirm in agony, making possibly the most gut-wrenching noises ever recorded on film.

But I would have been okay if it weren't for a single shot. Just the two second shot of the young boy, covered in blood and throwing his head back, eyes full of unimaginable pain, still has the ability to chill me. He doesn't die in a comic way, or a "gross" way. He dies in the exact way that you would expect a 14-year-old with a table leg through his chest to die, screaming in agony. For such a light movie, it's an incredibly intense and heavy scene that STILL makes me feel more ill than anything in a SAW/HOSTEL movie. Needless to say, I ran from the room and didn't watch it again until last year when I turned fifteen. But every time I watch it, those screams stick with me for days after.