Terror, Aisle 13

The That's Entertainment! of horror movies, Terror in the Aisles was a 1984 clip job that collected the best of the genre into one gory, scary fright fest. Hosted by Halloween icon Donald Pleasence and Dressed to Kill scream queen Nancy Allen, the documentary included scenes from such classics as Bride of Frankenstein, Psycho, Rosemary's Baby, Night of the Living Dead, The Exorcist, Jaws, Carrie, Alien, The Shining, Poltergeist and many, many more. (The film's absence from DVD is likely due to the rights for all those clips.)

And although my selective memory had chose to forget it until Kindertrauma reminded me, it also included this wacky "only in the 80's" musical montage set to the tune of the original song "They're Not Very Nice" (the Oscars missed a winner when they passed this one by).

Unlike that song, my most vivid memory of Terror in the Aisles occurred after seeing it in the theater (I was 16 at the time). The friend I had seen it with and I were walking home after the evening screening, and our route took us over a bridge that spanned a local park. About halfway across, we glanced back and saw a man following us. Paying no mind to him, we continued on, only to look back a minute or so later ... and the man was gone. If he had turned around to walk back the other way, we still would have seen him, and he couldn't have jumped off the bridge without being severely injured at that height, let alone without a sound. He had completely disappeared! Needless to say, Donald Pleasence's repeated mantra from the film -- "It's only a movie" -- did us no favors in this particular situation. We made it home in no time.