Ever since my father confirmed he did participate as an extra in the Swedish-German soft-porn comedy classic Do You Believe in Swedish Sin? (1970) I felt I got some kind of confirmation this road, this path, was mine and mine forever. This was years after I started to collect movies in a serious way, actually on my thirtieth birthday. He turned to me and asked me in a causual tone, "Fredde, did you know I was in a movie once?". Here he is:
I've told this story before many times the last five-six years, a good anecdote to more or less crush all the other ones around. It's really not important, because I started my road into geekery during this date:
1982-08-18
At ten past nine that evening, I was five years old, SVT2 (the second of the two existing TV-channels in Sweden at that time) aired Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack's 1933 classic King Kong, probably the first real genre film blockbuster. My tiny, blue eyes fell in love with that big ape and from then on my life revolved around monsters. The same summer they also aired a couple of Universal's monster classics and my mother, a wise woman, let me see them and explained to me what it was, how they did it and that it was just movies.
Like all responsible parents should do. I never had any nightmares, I wasn't afraid and it started a life-long obsession with genre cinema - or at least the movies outside the mainstream - or those desperatly being so mainstream they stopped being mainstream. I still consider King Kong to be one of the best movies ever made and I've seen it dozens of times since then, on TV, on VHS and on DVD - but I need to upgrade it to blu-ray now. Please remind me.
I actually loath nostalgia, and I'm far from being a pretentious bore who only watch "old" movies. But it's a fact that those black and white movies, that summer 1982, still is very important for me. We're talking life-changing films here, fairy tales of the macabre - far from the correct and patronizing family movies my friends was forced to watch. Interesting enough, later when "V" was aired on Swedish television I wasn't allowed to watch it!
I know the reason. Between those early years and when V came my mother had been born again and suddenly thought everything was dangerous. That's a standpoint she changed again and she's a big fan of Kung Fu and Samurai-movies nowadays and last christmas I gave her my old DVD of John Carpenter's The Thing. Look how happy she is:
I think that photo kinda closes the circle. She introduced me to genre cinema, she forbid me to watch genre TV and nowadays she's probably the only mother I know about who gladly watches Wesley Snipes roundkick terrorists in the face by her own free will.
That's motherly love, I think.
"Ever since my father confirmed he did participate as an extra in the Swedish-German soft-porn comedy classic Do You Believe in Swedish Sin? (1970) I felt I got some kind of confirmation this road, this path, was mine and mine forever."
Have you written a review of this...?
I would like to see that.
"At ten past nine that evening, I was five years old, SVT2 (the second of the two existing TV-channels in Sweden at that time) aired Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack's 1933 classic King Kong, probably the first real genre film blockbuster. My tiny, blue eyes fell in love with that big ape and from then on my life revolved around monsters. The same summer they also aired a couple of Universal's monster classics and my mother, a wise woman, let me see them and explained to me what it was, how they did it and that it was just movies."
I was lucky enough to grow up in a household with a VCR....we rented all kinds of movies.....among them Bullitt(1968) , C'era una volta il West/Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), lots of James Bond and also swedish TV showed TV series like Miami Vice(1984–1990), Mission: Impossible (1988–1990)etc.
Horror was something I never got into.....until later on.
And I love King Kong(1933) too, it should get a Criterion edition with lots of extras.
"I think that photo kinda closes the circle. She introduced me to genre cinema, she forbid me to watch genre TV and nowadays she's probably the only mother I know about who gladly watches Wesley Snipes roundkick terrorists in the face by her own free will.
That's motherly love, I think."
She looks very happy.....how about a Wesley Snipes week here at this blog as a tribute to your mother?
Good essay and thanks.
Posted by: Megatron | February 24, 2013 at 16:56