SCARED SILLY : What’s Wrong With Us Anyway That We Pay Good Money to Have Bad Guys Jump Off the Screen and Frighten Our Pants Off?

She was green!!!

She had been horrible enough those first few times when she was black and gray, but now that the old Philco had been replaced by a new 1964 model RCA, that hideous apparition stepped out of that explosion of smoke, and she was green!

It was horrible, terrifying, ghastly, far worse than I remembered from the year before. It gave me nightmares.

But the next day at school, that’s all anybody talked about: the Wicked Witch of the West in sickly, living, pea-green on color TV. Crawly and reptilian. Absolutely evil. Worse than ever. Awful, awful, awful.

How we loved her.

Margaret Hamilton, God bless her, was the worst thing any grade-school kid could imagine: that hatchet face, that hawk nose, those threatening buck teeth, those frigid dagger eyes, those fingers like talons. That voice. Straight from kid hell. And now, through the miracle of the latest video technology, she looked like brackish pond slime. It was marvelous.

We would have traded Dorothy for her in a minute, and her little dog too. We would have thrown in the Tin Man and the Wizard and Auntie Em and every Munchkin in the place in a heartbeat, just to see more of the Witch. And another flying monkey scene wouldn’t have been bad, either.

She was as good a symbol of downright rottenness as we could imagine, and her timing was perfect, according to Orange County suspense author Dean Koontz.

“If the Witch hits you at the right age,” he says, “she hits you as a symbol for chaos and evil and death, and that can stay with you. Whatever frightens you in childhood remains fearful as you grow older.”

(For Koontz, who missed a complete screening of “The Wizard of Oz” as a kid, the witch took a back seat to Frankenstein’s monster. “That stayed with me,” he says. “That particular archetype of the man-made sort of creature that is uncontrollable remains a very frightening image. Maybe that’s my Wicked Witch.”)

We loved Margaret Hamilton as children (amazingly, she was a kindly and beloved schoolteacher before she took on the role of the Witch) because she scared the daylights out of us. And we love her still because we remember how much fun it was when she scared the daylights out of us. Many of us continue to creep into darkened theaters trying to find some adult incarnation of the Wicked Witch of the West so that we can continue to have the daylights scared out of us.

There are few things, it would seem, that we love more than a good soul-jangling fright. For some of us, it’s better than baseball, better than pizza, better than Christmas, better than sex. We will gladly skip lunch and save the money to pay such people as Alfred Hitchcock or Freddy from Elm Street or Stephen King or the slasher du jour to get that adrenaline gushing.

Feed Robert Shaw to a shark, and you’re a hero. Get Linda Blair to talk like George C. Scott with tonsillitis while her head spins around and you’ll get rich. Give people a severe case of the creeps while they read alone, in bed, at night, and Letterman’s ratings will dive straight through the floor.

What’s the matter with us, anyway?

Nothing that a little feeling of superiority would not mitigate, Dr. Lee Gislason says.

“What happens in a horror movie, for instance,” says Gislason, a psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry and human behavior at UC Irvine, “is that people know that the movie has a beginning, a middle and an end, and that in the end they’ll come out of it alive. If you were

unsure of that, you probably wouldn’t go in. It’s a vicarious way of working through various horrible situations you might have been in yourself.

“I don’t think it’s so much the thrill of being scared as it is the feeling of mastery and of living through it.”

Not that the thrill isn’t fun. When he was a boy, Gislason says, “my buddies and I would watch the Frankenstein movies until late at night and then go sleep outside. We were a little scared watching the movies, but (sleeping outside) would add to the scare. Every little sound was frightening. Some of the guys would lose it and have to go in.”

However, it remained for Hitchcock to hit Gislason where he lived.

“For myself,” he says, “it was the shower scene in ‘Psycho.’ I was probably 16 when I saw it. I don’t recall having a shower since without the door locked.”

Things were not quite that visceral in 1931--a true watershed year for horror--when things were less gory and more Gothic.

That year marked the movie debut of a hideous, godless, rapacious, fiendish, evil, blood-sucking monster, a character so awful that he terrified thousands of viewers into heading straight home and bolting themselves in tight until daybreak.

Today, the Count teaches children how to count on “Sesame Street.”

Of course, Count Dracula does not have quite the bite he used to. In his Muppet incarnation, the Count is positively cuddly, and his cheery pseudo-Transylvanian accent couldn’t chill dry ice.

He is hardly the same ghastly presence that descended those shadowy stairs in the person of Bela Lugosi for the first time in 1931, causing renewed and rabid interest in crucifixes, garlic and mirrors.

In recent years, he even hawked a children’s cereal in cartoon version as Count Chocula (there was a kind of companion cereal called Frankenberry, starring you-know-who on the box).

What has become of that pantheon of wonderful monsters from the 1930s and ‘40s who, in later movies, had sons and daughters or took brides or met one another or merely returned? The Wolf Man, the Mummy, the Invisible Man? And all the scaly or slimy creeps, such as Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Blob and, God help us, the Smog Monster?

Sadly, they’ve mostly been relegated to the nether world of low camp, the monster equivalent of Palookaville. They have become questions on Jeopardy! Faces that appear only on Halloween. Herman Munster does not show up in children’s nightmares.

Admit it. If an 8-foot-tall green man with a flat head, droopy eyelids and bolts in his neck walked into the room right now, you wouldn’t scream, you would take him home to meet the folks.

After all, when a monster starts to feel like a member of the family, it’s pretty easy to shrug it off as mere horseplay when he chucks a little girl down a well or bites a few house guests and turns them into zombies.

“Count Dracula isn’t as frightening now as he was 40 years ago,” Koontz says. “Some of the symbols and the mythological things wear out. So we find new expressions for them, we upgrade them.”

“Alien,” for instance. Hideous, unstoppable, cunning, utterly vicious and relentless, a remorseless mechanical hybrid and ugly to the power 10, it makes Godzilla look like a pet gerbil. Still, it’s easy to think back to Count Dracula lurking in the shadows when we see Sigourney Weaver about to come face to face with her modern blood-lusting monster.

But, Koontz says, such upgraded fiends are really nothing new.

“They draw people in by referring to archetypes that have been part of storytelling for thousands of years,” he says. “The more imaginative the piece is, the more it speaks to the soul.”

The Wolf Man was pretty soulful in his time. So was that great white shark. And in centuries past, so were Kali, the Thuggee goddess of death who inspired thousands of strangulation murders in India; and Chernobog, the European mountain demon who brings the dead to horrible life each Walpurgisnacht (he shows up in the penultimate scene in Disney’s “Fantasia”); and the Russian witch Babi Yaga, who flies through the air and feeds on human bones, and the Irish banshee, who screams at the doors of homes where death is about to enter.

These were pretty creepy in their day, and still are. But here in multiracial, multireligion America--where there is no dominant, historical, unifying national ethnicity or faith upon which to base superstitions, folk tales and ghost stories--we have come to rely for our horrors, more and more, on the most frightening presence of all.

“All those ‘Halloween’ and ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ films are all about guys with chain saws or knives or whatever, and the reason they’ve been successful is that they reflect a fear that the most frightening thing is us,” Koontz says. “They boil daily fears that we have down into an essence: the craziest crazy you can think of.”

The truly ghastly modern terrors, author Harlan Ellison says in this month’s issue of Harper’s, began to appear with the gruesome debut of a deranged Englishman with a razor.

“Everything that scares us today dates back to Jack the Ripper,” Ellison says. “He is still the operative icon of terror. He may be small potatoes by current standards--a guy mowing down 25 people in McDonald’s with an Uzi--but the Ripper started it. He created the form.”

Small potatoes indeed. That form--the methodical, demented, murderous human monster--is the one who haunts many of our dreams today, not a rubber lizard stomping on Tokyo streetcars.

There was the meek Ed Gein (on whom the Norman Bates character in “Psycho” was based), a cannibal who wore his victims’ skins and danced in the moonlight in Plainfield, Wis., in 1957. There was the suave Herman Webster Mudgett, who built a rambling house in Chicago fitted with secret rooms specifically for the purpose of killing and dismembering hundreds of women in the 1890s.

There was the bizarre Charles Manson, who brainwashed his followers into killing at random in 1969. And now there is the Mephistophelean Richard Ramirez, another random killer, murdering and raping in the name of Satan.

These far-too-real terrors, however, fail to offer the same sort of delicious delight we feel when we slip on a pair of plastic fangs and an opera cape and cover our faces with talcum powder for the parties this weekend. They don’t make us scrunch lower in our seats and reach for a friend’s hand on the chair arm when the weird music begins to swell on the screen, signaling the beginning of a good, solid bite to the jugular.

And they make the Wicked Witch of the West, crooked and green and hideous, seem like your eccentric aunt.

You can have them. Fun fright needs an element of fantasy. And that’s what Halloween is for. After all, why dress up like Ed Gein (who was a pretty dreary-looking farmer) when you can wrap your entire body in dusty gauze and stumble around like King Tut?

One thing, though. The Witch still scares the life out of me.