10th
Doug Bentin on Forrest J. Ackerman
Writing about the death of someone you didn’t know and yet meant so much to you is hard. I know—I’ve done it several times. Every writer in the field of the arts has to give it a shot sooner or later. In film, a favorite actor or director or writer dies and you feel compelled to say good-bye.
I lost someone like that last Thursday, December 4, 2009. He was a fan. The world’s greatest fan of horror and science fiction. His name was Forrest J. Ackerman, or as his adolescent faux nieces and nephews called him, Uncle Forry.
Dr. Acula (another famous nickname—Forry was addicted to the most reprehensible puns) was editor and main writer of the first fan magazine for kids dedicated to the wonders of classic horror and science fiction pictures, Famous Monsters of Filmland, or simply FM. Universal released its Golden Age chiller classics to TV in a package called “Shock” in 1957. I was eight years old then and the movies ran on Houston television after the local wrestling matches late on Friday nights. My mom, bless her, saw no harm in letting me stay up to a ridiculous hour to watch Dracula, Frankenstein, The Black Cat, et al, and it was love at first fright.
The success of “Shock” nationwide led to the debut of FM the next year, and the magazine had a run of 191 issues. 4SJ (“Forrest J”—see what I mean about the puns?) was there most of the way running stills from and extolling the virtues of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Metropolis, The Man Who Laughs, and hundreds of other silent/foreign/obscure fright films I never thought I’d ever get chances to see. I won’t say now what I would have offered in exchange for a single viewing of Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera, but it’s a good thing I didn’t have any siblings.
Can I honestly say that my continuing delight in these films and genres can be attributed to Ackerman? It’s hard to deny it. If it hadn’t been for Forry and FM encouraging my interest in finding out when the “Shock” films were being broadcast, I don’t know how else I would have found out about them.
All of us Forry-fans wanted to make the pilgrimage to his 18-room home, the Ackermansion in Horrorwood, Karloffornia, where was housed what was reportedly the largest privately owned collection of genre movie memorabilia in the world. Capes and rings worn by Bela Lugosi, life masks of the greatest stars, props and scripts. Stories abounded of fans of all ages ringing his doorbell without appointments and being greeted and shown around by the man himself. I suspect he believed that the second best thing about having such a collection—after just living with it—was sharing it with others who appreciated it. Even now, when I see a particularly nifty prop onscreen, I think how cool it would be to own it.
Forry also made appearances in 46 movies, usually in uncredited cameos. Spotting him was a game for his fans, and he can be seen lingering in the background or at a bar in King Kong (1976), The Howling (1981), Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1983), Amazon Women on the Moon (1987), Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive (1992), and as recently as The Dead Undead in 2007.
So that’s it. Ackerman was the guy every geeky adolescent comic book/science fiction/horror movie fan wishes s/he had for an uncle—the adult in the family who had retained his love for all things nerdy-awesome well into his working life and knows that the greatest birthday present in the universe is that new DVD release of Curse of the Vampire’s Bride Meets the Crypt of the Mummy-Woman. In 3-D.