It’s FINALLY October 1st! That must mean that it’s time to kick off another year of Horror And Sons’ Halloween Horrors Contributors Series! Oh, and it’s officially the Halloween season. That’s pretty important too!

For this year’s series, we went with the theme of “Tetraphobia”, or the fear of four. Now, I did not ask our contributors for this year’s series to actually write pieces about being afraid of the number four or things that come in fours. That might lead to a rather bizarre reading experience. Instead, our contributors this year will be discussing films that either released during a year ending in “4” or feature a “4” in their titles. As expected, we received a wide array of film topics for you to digest this October. Hopefully, some of these films are already among your annual favorites, but if this series helps you discover a new favorite to add to your Halloween viewing traditions… well, that’s pretty awesome too!

Now, let’s get this show rolling! As has become tradition with this series, we begin our month-long celebration with an entry from a debuting contributor. This year, that contributor is friend of the site, A.C. Nicholas. A.C. took the liberty of writing his own introduction, and it’s probably much more comprehensive and succinct than what I would have come up with on my own. So, I’ve decided to just use it as is. That said, I would like to add that A.C. Nicholas has constantly proven himself to be an incredibly reliable source of film history knowledge, and one that I am incredibly blessed to consider a friend. I am very grateful to know someone such as him, and to have the opportunity to continuously learn from his experience and knowledge.

I’m honored to have A.C. joining us this year, and I hope that this series turns into an annual tradition for him as it has for so many of our other contributors. 

The Creeping Terror (1964)

By

A.C. Nicholas

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Exploitation-film historian A.C. Nicholas, who has a sketchy background and hails from parts unknown in Western Pennsylvania, was once a drive-in theater projectionist and disk jockey. In addition to being a writer, editor, podcaster, and voice-over artist, he’s a regular guest co-host on the streaming Drive-In Asylum Double Feature and has been a guest on the Making Tarantino podcast. He also contributes to the Drive-In Asylum fanzine and the B & S About Movies website. His most recent essay, “Of Punks and Stains and Student Films: A Tribute to Night Flight, the 80s Late-Night Cult Sensation,” appeared in Drive-In Asylum #26.

“I’ve seen things that you people wouldn’t believe,” the words of Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty in his legendary monologue at the end of Blade Runner. And as I’ve lived a lot longer than Hauer’s character, I’d like to think I’ve also seen things that you wouldn’t believe. But before we get to that, a little history is in order.

Back in the 1970s, film fanatics could only get their fix a couple of ways. One, to use the colorful slang coined by the showbiz trade paper Variety, was to see a film at a “hardtop,” an indoor theater, or an “ozoner,” a drive-in. The other was to watch a film on broadcast television. For exploitation films, that usually meant on the Friday night edition of The CBS Late Movie or on local shows on Saturday afternoon or in the wee hours of the weekend. There were no pay services, VHS tapes, DVDs, Blu-rays, or digital streams. It was catch-as-catch can, and I spent hours combing the newspaper ads and TV listings.

Figuring out what to see was further limited by the film scholarship of those pre-Internet days. Of course, the classic Universal horrors, the AIP Poe films, and Hammer films were well known, even by those who had only a passing interest in the genre, but many horror films were mysterious, unknown entities. I subscribed to the major magazines devoted to horror films—Cinefantastique, Famous Monsters of Film Land, Castle of Frankenstein, and The Monster Times—but academic books were few. You see, horror films in the not-too-distant-past, unlike “elevated horror films,” the critical darlings of today, were considered trash and not worthy of serious discussion. My cousin gave me a copy of the paperback edition of the seminal, but now forgotten, Horror in the Cinema (1971) by Ivan Butler, and I poured over it so much that I knew it by heart. (Butler had a particular hatred of Hammer films, calling them “lurid sensationalism.”)

With knowledge gleaned from these limited resources, if you were lucky enough to meet someone else who’d seen a TV showing of Black Sabbath or Carnival of Souls, it was like something shared by only a select few, a “horror-geek handshake,” if you will. While those films are now much-revered classics, back then, they were things that you read about and hoped would turn up at 1:30 a.m. on Chiller Theater. Other films just fell into your life out of nowhere, as if from another dimension.

Which brings me to one of the most memorable films I ever saw in those wee hours of a Saturday morning: The Creeping Terror, sold to TV by the legendary drive-in distributer Crown International Pictures. I don’t recall knowing anything about it when I stumbled upon it almost 50 years ago. In scratchy black-and-white and produced and directed by one “Vic Savage” (actually the film’s star, Art “A.J.” Nelson), The Creeping Terror can be summed up in one sentence: A sentient carpet from outer space lands in small-town America, proceeds to kill some folks, including some teens at a sock hop, by crawling over them, and evades capture by the military, until it is finally defeated by being hit by a police cruiser.

But that synopsis can’t do justice to the sheer eye-rubbing insanity on display: even worse film making than in similarly incompetent films of the era from auteurs like Coleman Francis, the protruding feet of folks under the carpet monster giving it movement, and worst of all, almost no synch sound, only narration of the plot by some radio guy doing voice-over. (Sources variously report that the film was made mit-out sound (M.O.S.), as the Germans would say, the recorded soundtrack was of such poor quality that it was unusable, or that the soundtrack was lost by the filmmakers. We’ll never know.)

When the broadcast was through, I sat by myself in the dark in stony silence, pondering what I’d just seen. In the morning, my best friend called me. He’d also watched The Creeping Terror and thought it was all a fever dream or that he was suffering from hallucinations. I reassured him that he hadn’t imagined it. I, too, had survived the unspeakable horrors of the carpet monster—though at what cost to my sanity. We proceeded to laugh hysterically discussing all the inane things we’d seen. He wondered how this carpet, a higher life form than we mere humans, had managed to make it across the galaxy to Earth in a spaceship that had only two old-school gauges. As he put it, “one had to be a compass, the other, a gas gauge.”

Years passed, but I never forgot about The Creeping Terror. Much to my surprise and delight, as time marched on and technology progressed, others discovered this hilarious piece of mind-blowing filmmaking, like the Medved brothers in their book The Golden Turkey Awards and the Mystery Science Theater 3000 boys, who riffed on it. A.J. Nelson’s wife wrote a roman a clef about being married to this complete lunatic. Some fans even made a docudrama about the making of the film called The Creep Behind the Camera (2014), with the tagline “Con-Artist. Criminal. Sadist. Psychopath. Movie Director.” If even one-tenth of the things depicted in that film were true, then A.J. Nelson will forever live on as a truly disturbed individual who made one of the worst films of all time.

I’ve seen a lot of films in my life, many of which remain just a faded memory, but The Creeping Terror will forever hold a special place in my heart. Find it, pour yourself a strong beverage, turn down the lights late some night, and return to those days of yesteryear when a maniac made a film about a carpet monster from another galaxy. Your life will be changed forever. I guarantee it.