But my first brush with the macabre, and something rather grisly – I should add, came much earlier…in a goddamn Disney movie.
Netflix dropped a ton of titles on Instant earlier this month and one of the films I was eager to add to my queue and jump into was 1981’s Dragonslayer by Matthew Robbins, who not only directed The Legend of Billy Jean, another favorite of mine, and *batteries not included, but has become a frequent Guillermo del Toro collaborator (Mimic, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, Crimson Peak) as well.
Dragonslayer was a joint venture between Disney and Paramount and it gave us one of the best dragons ever: Vermithrax Pejorative.
I dedicated some hours to revisiting the film. While I think it still holds up (the film jumps right into things from minute one, which took me by surprise, before it slows down a tad only to end with creature-filled excitement), there’s a scene that takes place in the third act that made me realize: “This was the first time I ever saw something horrifying on the big screen.”
That moment comes when Peter (Ghostbusters II) MacNicol’s Galen enters the dragon’s lair to discover a young woman being eaten by baby dragons. Robbins doesn’t shy away from the horror of this feast. The dragons (practical puppets who are obviously limited to what they can do) are nibbling away on her limbs. In one shot, one of the little creatures is gnawing at her angle. Robbins cuts away for a second to present Galen’s disgust and in the next shot, the baby dragon has completely torn her foot off leaving a bloody stump.
This, folks, was, without a doubt, my first introduction to on-screen horror. I was five at the time of the film’s release and I don’t think my parents suspected how gnarly the film would get (it’s Disney, after all) when they took me to see it. But revisiting the Dragonslayer brought back a flood of memories, including the impact the scene had on my young brain. I felt bad for this girl who willingly ran into the dragon’s lair only to meet her demise. Obviously, I didn’t like the baby dragons, but I wanted to see more of them (Too bad, kiddo, Galen skewered and beheaded them good!). I wasn’t entirely scared, I was fascinated.
The fascination with horror has, naturally, stayed with me. But it all started with Dragonslayer, I guess you could say.
How about you, dear reader? Do you remember your first on-screen horror experience? Was it a horror film in particular or perhaps a scene in a fantasy film or another genre? Comment below!
(P.S. – Fuck you, baby dragons. I’m glad you’re dead.)
