A Trip to Boggy Creek in Texarkana, Arkansas

A friend of mine named Hal I went to high school with is a lawyer in Shreveport, Louisiana, and he and I and his little brother and one other guy wanted to see what the real Boggy Creek was in Arkansas, infamous from the film “Legend of Boggy Creek” and “Return to Boggy Creek.” Twenty years ago we were all in Shreveport at the time so it wouldn’t be that far of a trip into Arkansas to see it. We took a van there and I worked nights as a computer operator down in Baton Rouge so I was on a different time schedule at the time, just up there for a visit. There apparently really was a Boggy Creek there, as a sort of apocryphal legend. We were not sure if we would see a southern Bigfoot but the creek was really there. We drove up there and got to Texarkana, Arkansas.

It also happened to be near the birthplace of famed Ragtime composer Scott Joplin (1867-1917). My friend Hal and I both played a lot of piano(I grew up playing ragtime myself and ended up going to music school in Piano Performance) and we wanted to see any mention of Joplin, any historical markers that might be in town. We found a large mural painted in the middle of town against a building commemorating Scott Joplin. We went around the corner and there was an old wooden building and there was an historical marker there stating that that place was the Elementary school of Scott Joplin.

Now that that was complete, we all drove onward. I mentioned to the guys that in both movies that Boggy Creek was a very large river. One of us said that he heard that the legend of this monster was to scare locals and was really believed in certain locales of Arkansas gentry. We drove to a small store to get something to eat, and we all bought chips, candy bars, drinks. Everything we bought there was rotted and fetid. I kept wondering why the store owners seemed so excited that we were buying their stuff.

Then we get to a certain point in the highway. There is a sign that says “Boggy Creek.” We parked the van. We got out. It was a veritable trickle of a creek. You could literally jump over this creek with one hop. Maybe we had gotten so far north that we had gotten towards the source of the creek. There was no sighting of the monster either.

In Louisiana heading into Mississippi there is a swamp called Honey Island. They have a legend there about an actual boggy creek type monster. There is a Honey Island Swamp Tour that has been going on for years. There is also a Loup Garou Legend, a sort of werewolf. There was a great episode of that with Darrin McGavin in the Night Stalker. Other than that, Louisiana does not have any other legends of monstrocity except for racketeering governors.

Speaking of local filmings, I often wonder that when they filmed the first silent Tarzan movie in Abbeville, Louisiana in 1918, in the swamp, whether Edgar Rice Burroughs actually travelled there during the filming. I have an old copy of the silent film. I have seen several photos of Burroughs on the sets of various movies. Abbeville is in the middle of nowhere, Louisiana. Down in the swamps 150 miles east of New Orleans, and far below Lafayette, Louisiana. Deep in Cajun country. A learned friend of mine said that a mummy movie was ‘set’ in a New Orleans swamp between Hammond, Louisiana and New Orleans, but wasn’t actually filmed there.

Burroughs was born in 1875, was in the US Cavalry when they were on horseback in the wild west, and later lived in Chicago and had a wife and new family, tried to make a living from everything from Vacuum Cleaner salesman (like Lovecraft who rewrote a vacuum cleaner manual but still was not hired by the company he sought a job at) to selling pencils at a little stall in the city. He failed at everything. Dozens of jobs. Then he read a pulp and thought he could do that. He wrote “Under the Moons of Mars” under the name “Norman Bean” and then Tarzan for the pulps, and the rest is history. I have a typed letter from him on Edgar Rice Burroughs stationary, written while he was staying in Hawaii and addressed to his daughter. A few months from the date of that letter he witnessed the Japanese planes as he was playing tennis, as they were flying over him on their way to Pearl Harbor. He was a war correspondent during WWII. He died in his sleep one night after reading a comic book.

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Horror Gimmicks in Movies

When television burst upon the American scene in the late 1940s there was felt to be a need to give the public something that they could not get on television. Arch Oboler (b. 1907- d. 1987, pioneer of the "Inner Sanctum," "Lights Out" radio programs) was the first to devise a gimmick for his movie “Bwana Devil” known as 3D. Oboler was a radio pioneer who thought the 3D effect using polarized lenses and the showing of various objects being thrust at the viewer would revolutionize cinema. This did not work as well as planned because extended viewing caused headaches and blurry vision. After an initial mid-fifties boom 3D died out until the early 1980s when it enjoyed a brief revival. The two abominations "Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn" and "Spacehunters: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone" come to mind. Recently, I've sat like a good dad through "Spykids: 3D" and "The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl," but missed "Coraline" in the 3d version.

A master of the gimmick was the lowbudget filmmaker William Castle(born as William Schloss 1914- d. 1977). In “House on Haunted Hill” with Vincent Price, this movie used the gimmick “Emergo." This consisted of a plastic glow in the dark skeleton suspended on a theater wire which appeared to move into the audience at the climax of the movie. After an initial skeleton injured a Castle employee, a lighter skeleton was devised that did not work any better due to pranksters shooting it with BB guns. Castle was undaunted by this gimmick's failure and developed his most famous gimmick for the Vincent Price movie “The Tingler" was “Percepto,” which was an electrical shock device attached beneath the seats of moviegoers. During the climax the Tingler monster is supposed to invade the actual theater and to stimulate the monster effect, where the monster invaded the spinal column, thus “tingling" them to death unless they screamed. The theater owner pressed the percepto button, giving his audience an equivalent shock. William Castle even had a chair in his office wired with this gimmick. Most theatres could not afford this so they would have ushers use buzzers.

Other Castle innovations were the “fright break" where the audience would hear an announcement in the theatre nearing the end of the film that if they were too frightened they could leave the theatre and get a full refund and “Illusion-O,” which was a variation on 3D because each audience member could look through a blue or red tinted plastic to determine the outcome of the movie.

In Castle's “Macabre” a lesser gimmick not actually used in the course of the motion picture was the act of taking out ”fright insurance" on theatergoers although some suggested a “boredom insurance." being better for that film. Other Castle pictures such as “I Saw What You Did” contain no gimmicks. In "Mr. Sardonicus" audience members were given thumbs up or thumbs down voting device so they could decide whether Mr. Sardonicus could be cured and live or instead die. Of course the audience's actions had no difference in the outcome of the movie.

William Castle produced "Rosemary's Baby" and early in his career did second unit work on one of Hitchcock's earlier films.

A later 1950s film entitled “My World Dies Screaming” used a gimmick called “psychorama." It is the now banned use of subliminal editing into a movie. This movie edited such horrifying objects as skeleton pictures and the word “blood," and coffin pictures for periods of less than one second at different points in the movie. This gimmick did not work for this particular movie, although some theater owners used it successfully to raise concession sales. Laws were changed to prohibit this in the late '60s.

Another gimmick user was Ray Dennis Steckler (b. 1938 d. 2009). He created the gimmick of “Hallucinogenic Hypnovision" for his movie “Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed up Zombies.” This gimmick told audiences they would be actually surrounded by movie monsters, which ended up being theater ushers dressed up as movie monsters wielding cardboard knives when a spinning wheel appeared at various times in the movie. It was also used for a later movie entitled “The Maniacs are Loose.”

One of the most famous gimmicks used in movies was “Sensuround" originally used for “Earthquake” and later used for the theatrical release of the TV movie “Battlestar Gallactica.” This featured a device which shook the theater seats during the earthquake sequences. Theaters unable to afford this gimmick found they could achieve an equivalent effect by turning up the sound volume of the theaters to maximum volume. In later years the quality of stories was looked upon as being more important than the use of gimmicks and no major gimmicks have been used in recent years. But for students of cinema looking and examining these gimmicks over the years, these make for an interesting sidelight.

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