Thursday, April 05, 2007

My First Movie

This past weekend I shelled out all of twelve bucks to own the very first movie I ever saw in a theater: Darby O'Gill and the Little People. My dad took me to the Wayne Theater to see it when I was three years old. And I had nightmares for years afterwards. This was something my dad didn't expect from taking his precious and precocious little daughter to her first Disney flick, but then, he didn't know about the banshee and the death coach before hand. In all, I loved the movie. But the banshee stayed with me. And appeared regularly in a recurring dream until I was about ten or so.

I'm sure I dreamed about the banshee before the recurring dream took hold, but the first time I had the dream had to be after I had turned four. That year, we went to Schenectady to visit my Aunt Grace (my dad's sister) and Uncle Sal and my cousin Marietta (who later shortened her name to Mari...we haven't seen each other for more than thirty years...). At that time, they lived in a white clapboard house on a big corner lot in Scotia. On their broad front lawn was a cement pedestal and a shiny gazing ball--I was enchanted by that. But in the little shed behind their house was something that ended up terrifying me: a big wood bin with a hinged lid--big enough for me to hide in, as I vaguely remember us playing hide and seek. Big enough for a banshee to lurk in.

That was the crux of the recurring nightmare: That I opened the lid of the wood bin and a banshee--a banshee that looked just like the one in Darby O'Gill and the Little People--was waiting there for me. Waiting to chase me. Waiting to catch me and throw me in the death coach and float alongside it, screaming, as it bore me up into the sky toward oblivion. Shudder!

I've seen the movie since then, maybe a couple of times. And I recall it fondly, even though I have a hard time recovering the terror I felt nearly fifty years ago. After all, I'm an adult. I know that the banshee was animated--although I still think it's creepy as hell. But the terror the dream inspired? That's still in the back of my mind, lurking like the banshee in the wood bin.

I'm going to watch it again in the next few days. Fingers crossed I'll rest easy after doing so!

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2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I wonder if we might have been at the same showing..?? I was about five, and I saw it at the Wayne, too. I remember being horrified at the banshee, and that black death carriage. Yikes! I haven't seen the movie since but would love to. Didn't the banshee show up twice...once on the mountainside and once just outside the door? Brrrrr, but that was scary! Ah, the sweet memories of childhood. :)

Beth

10:00 AM  
Blogger Cathy VanPatten said...

We might have been! I think there was a short subject about leopards or cougars or some big cat as well, but that didn't scare me. The freakin' banshee, though... yikes!

7:51 PM  

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