First Person : A Filial Fondness for Tales of Terror

My father would have loved “The Blair Witch Project.” Not for any nouveau cinematic technique reason but simply because it’s scary.

There have been very few truly scary movies in the last 30 years, and my father recognized this. But before that, in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, there were some classics. Coincidentally, those were the years of my growing up, and my bond with my father was cemented with the B-horror movies of that era--particularly, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

Just why the “Body Snatchers” resonated so with the two of us I’m not sure. After all, we’d been through them all: “Creature From the Black Lagoon,” “It Came From Outer Space,” “Horror of Dracula,” “Invaders From Mars.” At each showing, I’d cower with my hand over my face, peeking through my fingers, while my father sat next to me and beamed, as if I were being bar mitzvahed at every Saturday matinee.

Our joint appreciation of the scarier things in life was largely unspoken, at least on my father’s part, yet implicitly acknowledged as a reason to hug. For weeks, months, years after seeing the “Body Snatchers,” we would relive the scene in which Dana Wynter (Kevin McCarthy’s girlfriend in the movie) changed in a split second from sweet, beloved “Becky” into an unfeeling pod person--still, I believe, the most frightening moment on film.

It wasn’t as though this was the only thing we shared. He was a Little League coach and taught me how to play baseball. In their prime, he and my uncle--apparently a wicked left-handed pitcher--were forced to turn down minor league offers from the Chicago Cubs because my grandmother was convinced that professional baseball players were no-good bums. (What would she think of today’s athletes?)

And, of course, we would suffer together, long-distance, throughout our lifetimes with the apocalyptic misfortunes of the Boston Red Sox. “They stink” were the words he uttered most often during our weekly Sunday morning phone sessions.

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But the groundwork for our later relationship was laid by “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” which conveyed the exhilarating cinematic fear that we were among the last humans left on Earth and that just about everyone else had been taken over by alien pods that sucked the soul out of them while they were sleeping.

Even in Boston, where I grew up, it was common knowledge among aficionados that the movie was filmed in Sierra Madre. So when I came to L.A. to look for a house after The Times hired me 11 years ago, my first sightseeing spot was not Disneyland or Universal Studios. It was the eerie town triangle at the intersection of Baldwin Avenue and Sierra Madre Boulevard. This is where the aliens distributed the human-sized pods to the townspeople, to be placed next to family members while they slept.

I called my wife back East and pronounced: “I had a couple of hours free, and guess where I am?”

“The Pacific,” she said. “It must be beautiful.”

“No, Sierra Madre--where the body snatchers lived.”

“Oh . . . right,” she answered in a tone that cried out, “The kids and I are heading back to the human race now. Join us when you can.”

Undaunted, I crossed Sierra Madre Boulevard and climbed a set of stairs that brought me to what I thought was the office building where actor Kevin McCarthy, the doctor-hero of the movie, had watched from his window in horror as the pods were being unloaded.

Standing in the dark hallway of that building, I got the chills. I later called my father to tell him of my excursion to these hallowed spots. He didn’t say much, but I could feel him shudder over the phone.

The prevailing interpretation of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” is that it reflected the paranoia of the McCarthy era, in which inhuman communists were seen everywhere trying to steal our way of life from us. In retrospect, I have an idea that it also scared the bejeebers out of post-Holocaust Jews, who suffered from their own paranoia--often, it may be argued, justifiably.

My father rarely spoke openly about such things, but I occasionally sensed a preoccupation with the anti-Semitism threat. My theory is that it was much safer--and more enjoyable--for him to experience the make-believe persecution of the entire human race by extraterrestrial plants (or giant ants or undersea monsters) than to contemplate what had happened in the real world in World War II. And maybe by indoctrinating me into the subculture of B-horror movies he somehow felt he was protecting me against the real stalkers of the world. (My annual ritual of viewing a horror movie after observing Yom Kippur, the day of atonement for Jews, might in some way tie into this.)

All this speculation, of course, may be totally off base. It could be that my father simply liked a good scare and appreciated it when it was delivered effectively (which would also explain his obsession with the Red Sox, who found new ways to court disaster each summer).

I never explored this question with him before he died a year ago. But I did think about him recently as I put a comforting arm around my 11-year-old son, who cowered next to me in the movie theater as we watched “The Blair Witch Project.” And I smiled.

Joel Greenberg can be reached by e-mail at joel.greenberg@latimes.com.