PZ’s Podcast: The Crawling Eye

Here is the childhood memory of a conversion.

An eight-year-old boy attends his first Saturday matinee and his world is changed forever.

He and his little friend Marty walk twenty blocks of the city’s streets in order to see The Crawling Eye. The title alone, with visions of a slithering alien eye, is guaranteed to ignite interest, at least among little boys, and not so little boys. The movie delivers what it promises.

But I never saw it!  I was so undone by the first two minutes — “Didn’t you see?  He didn’t have a head!” — that I ran out of the theater, shaking with fear.  I never actually saw the crawling eye. For I couldn’t stand to sit there another second. Shaking, on the sidewalk outside, I gasped out some words to Marty: “I can’t stay.  I’ve gotta go home…. That was   so   gross.”

Yet here was the start of an Unchained Melody.  I couldn’t believe the Power of the thing, this movie, sitting in the dark.

So I recovered, and lived, in order to die, another day.  

As it happened, next Saturday they were showing The Alligator People.  There was a God.

Listen here.