Creature Stole My Twinkie

Fifty-two horror and mystery movies made before 1948 were licensed for television in 1957, including the Universal horror movies like Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Invisible Man. The famous "Shock Theater" package (Twenty more followed the next year). On television, they became a huge hit all over again and were part of the spark of the Gothic horror movie revival of the late 1950s. One of the side effects of this package was the creation of a subculture of horror fans, particularly among young people. The so-called "Monster Kids" were a phenomenon throughout the decade that followed, providing a reliable audience for the Hammer films and Corman Poe films and Italian horror movies that filled the drive-in movie circuit in the next decade. The phenomenon spilled over into broader pop culture, too, resulting in horror-themed television shows (The Addams Family and The Munsters and Dark Shadows), horror imagery in car culture (also in The Munsters), cereal festooned with cartoon versions of the classic Universal monsters, glow-in the dark model kits, and dedicated horror culture magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland and Castle of Frankenstein (and belatedly, Fangoria). Eventually, the monster kids began to be an element in horror media, in a kind of feedback loop. Stephen King was a monster kid and one of the protagonists in his novel, 'Salem's Lot, is a monster kid. Eventually, they started to show up in movies. You had entire generations of kids who knew the "rules" of horror movies, and you couldn't just ignore them if you made a monster movie. You see this in films like The Lost Boys and The Goonies, arguably The Blob, and (tangentially) Fright Night. The living end of this phenomenon is Wes Craven's Scream, which explicitly lays out the "rules" of slasher films in the text of the film, but that's a late mutation of the monster kids. The traditional monster kid phenomenon was largely spent by the late 1980s. Universal has been trying to revive interest in its traditional monster movies for the last couple of decades with indifferent results, but it seems that the world has moved on from that kind of horror movie. Even the monster kid movies in the 1980s seem like nostalgia pieces when they weren't actively trying to integrate with more contemporary horror movie imagery. Fred Dekker's The Monster Squad (1987) seems like a nostalgia piece. It certainly feels that way to this particular Gen X viewer.

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