 My mother never let me watch monster movies when I was a kid. She was afraid I would have nightmares. My mother was a perfectly nice woman, but I always suspected that she was not so much afraid that I would have nightmares—waking up in a cold sweat, terrified, and screaming out, “MOMMY! MOMMY!”—as she was determined to have an uninterrupted night’s sleep. In any case (a case for a psychiatrist, most likely), I was not inculcated with a love of creature features in my formative years. (I wonder if someone can be inculcated by an incubus? But I guess that’s off-topic.) I never even saw the original Universal Pictures Frankenstein, which ran often on television on Channel Nine’s Million Dollar Movie in Los Angeles. Every other kid in my school got to see Frankenstein. And Dracula and The Wolfman and all their sequels. Nope, my mommy wouldn’t let me see The Mummy. She somehow was convinced that I was an impressionable, delicate child. But the biggest impression I ever got was from my elementary school classmates who thought I was a weird little kid because I didn’t get to watch weird little films and join in on their playground conversations about how neat Godzilla was, or how cool The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was. And forget going to the movie theater to see The Blob when I was nine-years-old and just one year away from a double-digit age, surely the entrance into adolescence. I didn’t see the Universal Frankenstein until well into my adult years. Indeed, if memory serves (and memory has been a pretty sloppy server of late), I think I saw Young Frankenstein before I saw Frankenstein. Since then, of course, I’ve seen all the great Universal horror films—including Howard the Duck. Frankenstein is my favorite because it’s so oddly beautiful in design. And because Boris Karloff was a better actor than Colin Clive. And Frankenstein’s monster is not really a monster, is he? I mean, he didn’t ask to be born—or rather, assembled and stitched together. He’s just looking for love in all the wrong places. I mean, a village in the Bavarian Alps? How many good bars could there be there? Of course, his “father” abandoned him, so why wouldn’t he be dysfunctional when it comes to love? On top of that, people are always stopping him and asking him to jump-start their cars. It’s the bolts in the neck you see… Memory is serving up another course and has corrected me. I did get to see two monster movies when I was a kid. One by permission, and one by accident. Mother let me see Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. (Of course, they didn’t, because Dr. Frankenstein was nowhere to be seen. The Invisible Man was nowhere to be seen either, but at least he was in the movie.) Mother figured as it was a comedy, and Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were so silly, how could the film be frightening? But I fooled her. The film scared the shit out of me. The other monster film was of a giant insect variety. But I did not know that when I saw listed in the TV Guide a film called The Beginning or the End, a film about the development of the atomic bomb in World War II to be shown on the late afternoon movie show. I asked mom if I could see it. She had no objections as WWII had been a big factor in her life, and she thought the film would be educational. So she exited to the kitchen to start preparing dinner as I turned on the TV. When the film came on it quickly became apparent that the TV Guide had made a mistake in their listing. For the film beginning to air was not The Beginning or the End about the making of the atomic bomb, but The Beginning of the End, about giant grasshoppers. The grasshopper growth spurt was caused by radiation, so there was that connection. But that didn’t impress my mother when she came out of the kitchen and saw the giant locusts rampaging downtown Chicago. I had seen so much of the movie already, though, that even she didn’t have the heart to make me turn it off. But she told me if I had a nightmare I was on my own. I don’t remember if I had a nightmare or not, but ever since then, I’ve been adamant about not eating chocolate-covered grasshoppers, firmly believing that two wrongs just simply do not make a right. So, given all this, what inspired me to write my latest novel, Creature Feature: A Horrid Comedy? Well, it came from a simple question that occurred to me after a night of debauchery in a seraglio. That’s not true, of course, I just like typing those words. The truth is, I was probably in the shower. Alone, I hasten to add rather sadly. I find many good ideas come to one during a nice hot shower. But when you are in there alone, what the hell else are you supposed to do? Anyway, the simple question was—where do really weird ideas come from? (besides a hot shower). I mean, monsters, and creatures of the night, and blood-suckers, and really angry giant lizards or gorilla-like stompers of not-yet-paid-for cars, and big fat humongous insects that look down on people and say, “Gee, they look just like little bugs”? Not to mention demons from hell and zombies. So I won’t mention them. Especially zombies. I hate zombies. Zombies got no reason to live! To answer that question without leaning on dark psychology, and to find an answer that might lead to some laughs, I wrote Creature Feature: A Horrid Comedy. Why a comedy? Well, with all the real monsters today in our real lives, monsters microscopic, monsters climatic, and monsters political, don’t you think we deserve a few laughs?  STEVEN PAUL LEIVA was kidnapped by Hollywood in his twenties, and toiled there for many years as a producer and writer, working with such talents as Gary Kurtz, the producer of the first two original Star Wars films; Richard D. Zanuck, Academy Award-winning legendary producer of Jaws and Driving Miss Daisy; Chuck Jones, famed Looney Tunes director; Brad Bird, Academy Award-winning director of The Incredibles, and literary legend and screenwriter Ray Bradbury. Steven escaped Hollywood—or was expelled—after producing the animation for Space Jam, pairing the witty Bugs Bunny with the sweaty Michael Jordan. He has received the Scribe Award from the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers. A traveler among several genres, his books include his witty Hollywood thrillers, Blood is Pretty and Hollywood is an All-volunteer Army; his novelization of the indie family film, The 12 Dogs of Christmas; his Sci-Fi satire of first-contact told from the point-of-view of the aliens, Traveling in Space; his comic look at happy-ever-afters, By the Sea; his surreal political fantasia, Imp; his bizarre, possibly audacious, somewhat Sci-Fi novella, Made on the Moon; his contemporary "scientific romance" written in the tradition of H.G. Wells and Jules Vern, Journey to Where; and his latest, Creature Feature: A Horrid Comedy. He has also published a short book of essays, Searching for Ray Bradbury, about his friend and colleague. WEBSITE LINKS: Steven Paul Leiva's Emotional Rationalist blog Steven Paul Leiva's Facebook page Steven Paul Leiva's Twitter page  THERE IS SOMETHING STRANGE HAPPENING IN PLACIDVILLE!It is 1962. Kathy Anderson, a serious actress who took her training at the Actors Studio in New York, is stuck playing Vivacia, the Vampire Woman on Vivacia’s House of Horrors for a local Chicago TV station.Finally fed up showing old monster movies to creature feature fans, she quits and heads to New York and the fame and footlights of Broadway. She stops off to visit her parents and old friends in Placidville, the all-Ameican, middle-class, blissfully normal Midwest small town she grew up in. But she finds things are strange in Placidville. Kathy’s parents, her best friend from high school, the local druggist, even the Oberhausen twins are all acting curiously creepy, odiously odd, and wholly weird. Especially the town’s super geeky nerd, Gerald, who warns of dark days ahead.Has Kathy entered a zone in the twilight? Did she reach the limits that are outer? Has she fallen through a mirror that is black? Or is it just—just—politics as usual!   Comments are closed.
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