For writer-filmmaker Bruce G. Hallenbeck, ghosts and ghouls and goblins aren't the stuff of nightmares-they're tools for holding onto the wonderment of childhood

By Peter Hanson

Unless a light is burning in the window, you can barely see the house at night. The locale, on a hilly country road outside of Kinderhook, isn't exactly remote, but the lack of a paved driveway and the way the branches of tall trees droop to the ground help the house blend into the darkness of the rural forest. Cars approaching the dwelling bob and shake as tires grind their way over a craggy gravel pathway. Visitors who step inside the building make the wood floorboards issue creaking noises, and the décor is filled with startling images-the pallid whiteness of a skull here, the horrific mid-howl countenance of a werewolf there. Yet these images are offset by evidence of gentle domesticity, like the impassive white housecat nestled into one of the comfy recliners in front of the television.

The mixture of the frightening and the mundane is a deliberate effect, because for the master of this humble two-story abode-one Bruce G. Hallenbeck-the things that go bump in the night are a big part of what makes this house a home.

Hallenbeck has spent most of his 49 years in this house, first as an imaginative youth infatuated with monster movies and bloody fiction, and now as a seasoned entertainer who makes his own monster movies and writes his own bloody fiction. One reason he stays here is because the place still holds mysteries he can't unravel: Although he wasn't there for the sighting, Hallenbeck says that his late grandmother once saw a hairy beast known among locals as "the Kinderhook creature," which believers describe as the area's answer to Sasquatch, in the woods behind the house.

On another occasion, Hallenbeck himself might have been in close proximity to the mysterious monster. "I had a friend visiting from England," he says, "and I was escorting her out the door one night. I heard something that started as a scream, then turned into a series of howls and ended in a low moan. My friend said, 'Is that a typical American sound to hear?' I said, 'No, I haven't heard that one before.' That's as close as I've been and as close as I ever want to be."

Hallenbeck acknowledges that his active imagination might have played a part in his perception of the unearthly sound: "I'm sure most fantasy writers would love to see a UFO land on their lawn. I've always tried to be an open-minded skeptic when I'm investigating these things. I know that when I see something in the sky at night, it's probably an airplane, and when I hear something in the woods, it's most likely an animal and not a bigfoot. But I've had experiences where I can't explain what I've heard and seen."

As if on cue, a soft thumping sound begins to emanate from somewhere just outside the house. Hallenbeck and his visitor look over to see the cat-on the other side of the house, and therefore not the source of the peculiar noise. "See, even now I hear a strange sound," Hallenbeck says with a smile. "Probably a chipmunk." Probably.

The simple joy that Hallenbeck derives from imagining that there might be a supernatural creature lurking outside his house offers a snapshot of his personality. For even though he's a grown man with a wife and, as of recently, a steady day job with New York state, he's still very much the young boy whose grandmother took him to see countless movies starring Dracula, Frankenstein, Godzilla and other fantastic monsters. He was first published at age 12, when he wrote a letter to the editor of Strange Tales, a comic book starring mystic superhero Dr. Strange, and the same enthusiasm that prompted him to gush about a fictional sorcerer fuels most of his creative output.

Hallenbeck is best known as the director of such movies as 1990's Vampyre, a minor cult film that puts a whimsically surreal spin on bloodsucking, and 1997's Fangs, a compilation movie about the history of vampire flicks. He also is a seasoned journalist who spent the '80s writing about movies for Metroland and other outlets. Most recently, he's settled into a relationship with EI Independent Cinema, a small New Jersey-based distributor, for whom he has written a handful of scripts that are being made (by other directors) into low-budget, direct-to-video thrillers. Somehow, he's managed to spend his whole life re-creating the otherworldly chills that enthralled him during his youth and adolescence.

I remember for years being haunted by the ending of Horror of Dracula, because he turns to dust," Hallenbeck says. "It seemed so magical. I think I'm one of those people who's always doomed to live in the past-when I was 10, I was nostalgic for being 5. I think when the average person grows older, they tend to lose their sense of wonder. But people who are into this genre hold onto that."

Hallenbeck recalls sage advice he received from the infamous publisher of a fan magazine called Famous Monsters of Filmland, whom he once interviewed for a radio show: "When Forry Ackerman jokingly says 'Don't grow up,' he doesn't mean 'Don't be responsible.' He means 'Keep the dreams in your life.' . . . I think a lot of people get stodgy when they get older, and forget how to have fun. I think now we're starting to realize how fragile life is. I like the adage 'Do well and do good.' It sounds to me like hedonistic altruism-maybe that's because I'm a born-again pagan. But I think people need to remember how to have fun and imagine and dream. I just wish they'd loosen up."

Hallenbeck began making Super-8 home movies at age 13, and at age 19, he became a published author when Moonbroth, a periodical based in the Northwest, printed three of his H.P. Lovecraft-influenced short stories. But Hallenbeck says he didn't become a serious filmmaker until around age 20, when he was exposed to classic films such as Citizen Kane and The Seven Samurai by an instructor at Columbia-Green Community College.

"He opened my eyes to a kind of filmmaking that I hadn't seen before," Hallenbeck recalls. "I started writing film criticism at that time, and it make me look at films in a deeper way. Whereas before I'd been looking at films to get a thrill, now I was looking at subtext and characterization and metaphor."

Around that time, Hallenbeck spread his creative wings by acting in a TV show and several radio plays, while still nurturing his passion for writing stories about monsters and mutilation. He worked briefly for New York state after completing college, then spent most of the '80s splitting his time between journalism and stillborn movie projects. One particularly exasperating experience involved a proposed flick called Grave's End, which Hallenbeck envisioned as a modern version of the gothic frightfests that Hammer Studios produced in the '50s and '60s. At one point, Hallenbeck was flown to England to meet with financiers, and a cast of supporting players from Hammer movies committed to appearing in Grave's End. But the money for the project evaporated before cameras rolled.

"Because of all that frustration, I decided in the late '80s to make my own film," recalls Hallenbeck, who at that time fortuitously met a New York University-trained cinematographer named Tony Panetta. Panetta, an Albany native who had recently returned to the Capital Region, was anxious to use the Arriflex 16-millimeter camera he had purchased, so the would-be auteurs joined forces. "Despite all the 'film education' I have, my heart lies with horror," Hallenbeck explained. "Tony wanted to make an art movie. So we compromised and made an artsy horror movie called Vampyre."

Shot for a thrifty $60,000, the Twin Peaks-style riff on Carl Dreyer's classic 1931 film Vampyr is filled with echoes of Hallenbeck's persona: While the movie is atmospheric and violent enough to qualify as horror, it also is loaded with non sequiturs and odd humor. Just as Hallenbeck peppers his conversation with lines from cult movies, groan-worthy puns and snippets of comical accents, he designed Vampyre to be funny and scary at the same time. "It's a little film that certainly has a lot wrong with it," the director says. "I kind of look at it as my special child, but we got it done. It's very surreal and weird and goofy, but it's been out there twice, and now it's coming out on DVD, so that's something."

In the same year that Vampyre was initially released-by a distributor whose dubious approach to accounting has kept the director from ever seeing a penny for his efforts-Hallenbeck wrote about the "Kinderhook creature" in a Warner Books anthology called Dead Zones. Later, he co-authored a locally published book called Monsters in the North Woods, which is now in its third printing. Throughout the '90s, Hallenbeck continued writing about movies as well, for publications including the glossy periodical Femme Fatales, which is dedicated to starlets who appear in fantasy films.

Hallenbeck's choice to stop writing for Femme Fatales reflects an unusual aspect of his approach to horror, because he quit the magazine when it became too sleazy for his taste. Although his affection for the slinky babes in James Bond films and the busty heroines in Hammer flicks knows no bounds, he draws a clear line between eroticism and exploitation, which differentiates him from the scary types who occupy the lower rungs of fandom. So even though the scripts he's writing feature plenty of saucy clinches, Hallenbeck is still the same guy who cringed when his distributor made him add topless scenes to Vampyre.

"There are certain topics that I don't like, but it depends how they're dealt with," he says. "I think there's a difference between the kind of cheesecake you see in a Vampirella magazine and what you'd see in Hustler. . . . Certainly a lot of what I'm doing now is erotic, and it's written to order, but if someone asked me to write about a necrophiliac running around, I wouldn't want to do that. It's too much for an old geezer like me.

"As far as the sex in genre films, I always thought it was interesting what Jamie Lee Curtis said-she got her start in horror films, but she was never asked to do a topless scene until she did Trading Places, a comedy. So it's not just horror films. In one sense, any film designed to make money is an exploitation film. I think, ultimately, you have to have that element of the damsel in distress. I don't think it's exploitative. I think it's a natural human interest."

Just as Hallenbeck tries to use sex sparingly, he never uses four-letter words in his scripts-not out of prudishness, he says, but because he thinks the vulgarity-heavy dialogue in contemporary movies is unimaginative. Similarly, he thinks there's a difference between a movie about a pretty girl running away from a werewolf and one about a pretty girl running away from an axe-wielding maniac.

"I don't particularly care for slasher films unless they're exceptionally well-made-the only ones I can think of are Psycho and Halloween," he notes. "I've always liked supernatural horror more. I think especially in the wake of what's happening right now, people want to escape from real horror, to be able to walk out of the theater and say, 'That couldn't really happen.' I wouldn't even want to compete with the headlines right now. I don't know a single horror writer who could come up with something as ghastly as what happened on Sept. 11."

Hallenbeck spent much of the late '90s working in relative obscurity, because his last two feature-film projects were held up by postproduction problems. But in the next few months, a flurry of movies bearing his name will hit the marketplace. The first one will be either Misty Mundae, Mummy Raider, a spoof that he wrote for EI, or Blood of the Werewolf, an anthology film from Michigan producer Kevin Lindenmuth that contains Blood Reunion, a Hallenbeck-directed vignette costarring Hallenbeck's wife, Rosa.

Of the woman he married in 1999, the filmmaker happily notes: "There are a lot of horror-movie geeks out there who never find a soul mate. They may find someone who tolerates their interests, but doesn't share them-so it's good that we're a team."

Other forthcoming projects include the Hallenbeck-scripted EI flick The Witches of Sappho Salon, about supernatural lesbian hairdressers, and London After Midnight, the long-delayed action/horror movie that Hallenbeck began making several years ago at a number of Capital Region locations. Plans for local screenings and/or distribution of the various projects are yet to be finalized-fans can watch for updates on the filmmaker's Web site, www.paganhor ror.com-but Hallenbeck says he's thrilled to be cranking out movies after years in which his work went unseen.

"I'm trying to sneak a lot of things into these movies, because, in concept, they're fairly conventional genre pieces," he says of the EI slate that also includes the as-yet-unfilmed scripts Caress of the Mummy and The Brides of Countess Dracula. "I'm trying to do what [B-movie producer] Roger Corman used to do, which is throw in a little social commentary here and there to put some intelligence behind the craziness. I've been told that some of my scripts are too literate and have to be dumbed down. I like films to have something going on under the surface."

Ironically, just as Hallenbeck found his groove cranking out screenplays for EI, he returned to state work. Penning low-budget thrillers doesn't pay the bills, so he decided to get a steady job with health insurance and retirement benefits, at least for the time being. This pragmatic approach to balancing what he loves to do and what he needs to do has defined Hallenbeck's career, as seen by his decision to live in his childhood home instead of relocating to, say, Hollywood. The filmmaker has been based in the Kinderhook house since the early '80s, and he inherited the home after his grandmother passed away in 1993. For years prior to her death, he cared for his ailing relative much as she had cared for him when he was young.

"I feel much more creative here, for lack of a better word," he says of his beloved dwelling. "I really like living in the country. I've got eight acres of land, and it's mostly woods. It's very peaceful. I think because I grew up here, there's a lot of inspiration here for me. A lot of the fantasy I had as a child is still with me. I feel if I'm writing scripts for other people, I don't need to be anywhere but in front of my typewriter. I'd done enough traveling and, writing for Metroland, I'd done enough schmoozing at press junkets and stuff. I never had any desire to go to California-if I was going to go anywhere, it was going to be to England. But England's not a good place to be struggling. I'd rather be struggling here."

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