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Hello Dreadies! It’s been awhile since I’ve sent a Scalpel your way, but I’ve got just the little nightmare to tickle your funny bone…



This story involves The Texas Chain Saw Massacre; a young Doctor Gash; my eight-year-old, impressionable and unsuspecting brother; and a game of Monopoly that ended in the most horrific of ways.

As a child of the 80’s, I grew up during the golden age of slasher horror. And the advent of the video rental store gave us all a chance to see the movies that had heretofore been only available at the theaters. Now you could simply go to a store and… rent a movie?! Who would have ever thought of such a thing? This was the trailblazing, groundbreaking time that was the glorious ’80s!

However, at first, the system was far from perfect. As I mentioned in a past article, the Rite Aid drug store in our cozy town of Catskill, NY, circa 1985, had the first video rental we’d ever seen. To illustrate the setup, it wasn’t your traditional display with VHS boxes on the wall; rather the images from the front and back of the movie boxes were printed out and slid into a panel, four films per panel. Then you flipped through the panels like checking out posters in a store. Each film had a corresponding number that you wrote down or remembered and brought to the clerk. As this was the only video store in town, most of the films were usually out, so you would bring a few choices up with you, which would undoubtedly lead to a conversation like this:

You: “Can I get number 335?”

Clerk: “Sorry, that’s out.”

You: “How about number 118?”

Clerk: “Sorry.”

You: “Number 211?”

Clerk: “Yup, we got it…Oh no, sorry, that’s out too.”

They eventually got the brilliant idea to put little tags on all the movie panels which signified if the film was available or not, thus drastically cutting down on your interaction time with the movie distribution specialist, or as he was more commonly known, the Rite Aid Video Desk Clerk.

As you flipped through the panels, you saw all the usual suspects for the time: Return of the Jedi (this was before you had to refer to it as Episode 6: Return of the Jedi), Ghostbusters, Vacation, Beverly Hills Cop and Gremlins just to name a few. It also had some of the great horror films of the time: Friday the 13th was represented up through The Final Chapter and, although Freddy Krueger was the new guy on the block, A Nightmare on Elm Street was there as well. But nothing called to us the way the final panel did. On that panel was initially just one film, and that panel terrified and intrigued us relentlessly. It was partially the cover art of the film, partially the title and partially the quote from Rex Reed on the box which said, “The most horrifying motion picture I have ever seen.” That panel contained The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

I don’t remember exactly how my friend Steve and I convinced my mother to rent The Texas Chain Saw Massacre for us at the tender age of 11, but she did. It wasn’t the most shining example of exemplary parenting, but in her defense, she obviously wasn’t up on her 1970′s cult horror films. And honestly, if you can keep kids quiet, you do what you have to do. So there we sat that afternoon, surrounded by GI Joe figures, watching one of the most disturbing films ever created.

If this wasn’t bad enough, about three quarters of the way through the film my brother Ryan comes home. My little brother. My eight-year-old little brother. And what does he do? Seeing how there’s a pile of GI Joes on the floor and a movie on TV, he plopped right down next to us and watched the end of the film. You know, the entire dinner scene with Marilyn Burns tied to the chair screaming bloody murder, Grandpa and the hammer and the tub to catch the blood, the rotten meat on the table, Jim Siedow freaking out and Leatherface chasing her through the woods, dropping the saw on his leg and going ape shit when she escapes, now completely insane. There I sat, we all sat, in stunned silence (probably clutching a Snake Eyes figure to my chest) knowing nothing would ever be the same again.

In an even more unfortunate turn of events, my parents had a regular volleyball game they played on Thursday evenings. So they took Steve home and left me to watch my brother for a couple hours. Another five-star parenting moment. But even with the film still fresh in our minds, we felt we could handle this situation. Alone in the house shortly after a pre-teen viewing of Texas Chain Saw? We could do this. Heck, we were 8 and nearly 12 years old. Practically grown-ass men.

I should add we lived a secluded area, and many of the neighbors heated their homes with a wood stove. And you probably can see where this is going. Although we couldn’t see our closest neighbor, we could hear him. He was, of course, cutting wood with a chainsaw. How ironically terrible. And although both of us heard the saw, neither of us would acknowledge it. I think we figured as long as we didn’t mention it, it wasn’t there and things would be okay. We decided to play Monopoly to take our minds off our inevitable impending doom.

Now for the final scene… there we sat, alone in the house, playing a Monopoly game that no one gave a crap about or was even paying attention to, listening to the neighbor (please God let it be the neighbor) cut wood with a chainsaw. The saw eventually stopped (but believe me, the damage had been done) and it began to get dark. As I said, we lived in a wooded area, on top of a big hill. Living on the hill allowed you to see headlights coming up the driveway when someone arrived. If you didn’t see headlights, you certainly didn’t expect the front door to open.

We didn’t see the headlights. I don’t know why we didn’t see the headlights of my parents’ car as they returned home, but we didn’t. All we heard was the front door open unexpectedly and everything after that was just a blur. Absolutely sure it was Leatherface that had just opened the front door, I bolted. I don’t know where I was running, I just ran… leaving the eight-year-old to fend for himself. However, he didn’t harbor the same delusions of escape I did. His now freshly-warped young mind told him the best thing to do would be to simply get this over with. He turned around and just lay down on his back in the middle of the Monopoly board (houses, hotel and all jabbing him in the back). Basically saying, “I’m not going to make this difficult for you. Just afford me a similar courtesy and make it quick.” Well, he didn’t actually say that word for word (what impressive linguistics it would have been for an eight-year-old) as much as his body language communicated it.

My parents walked in on this scene… one child cowering behind a hutch in another room and a ghost-white eight-year-old lying spread eagle in the middle of a Monopoly board with fake money and real estate deeds strewn around room and the thimble stuck to the side of his face and an orange $500 bill clutched in his sweaty hand. It was perhaps then that they realized they needed to be a bit more diligent in policing their children’s movie and television content. Thankfully that policing never happened and it is because of that lapse in parenting common sense that I am here with you on Dread Central today!

If you dug this story, be sure to check out the original volume, Doctor Gash’s Tip of the Scalpel: Childhood Horrors Part 1: Cuatros Cuertas.

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