Hot days of cold terror

Conventional wisdom categorizes summer movies as escapist fare -- oversized, roman-numeraled epics designed to whisk you from your banal existence to lands of adventure peopled by toothsome hunks and lithesome babes. The summer movie is supposed to take you away. Like Calgon.

But actually, the essence of summer movies might be fear -- big, whopping, cold-sweat-inducing fear, whether it’s rooted in long-held anxieties or new phobias created for you courtesy of the movies. This is what we seek when we abandon the warm summer sunshine for the darkness of the multiplex. Well, that and the air conditioning.

Summer terror is not your typical cinematic, Freddy Kruger-Michael Myers kind of fright. At its best, it’s the kind you find in the newspaper. Charles Manson, Richard Ramirez and former Interior Secretary James Watt or a good old conspiracy theory are scarier than anything Hollywood could cook up.

Put something identifiable and frightening from life on the big screen, and you’ve got a blockbuster. Or at least you’ve got my attention. I grew up in the age of the disaster movie, a whole genre dedicated to exploiting contemporary anxieties. No real villains, just a very angry Mother Nature taking aim at man’s inexhaustible hubris.

Take “Airport.” Released in March 1970 and featuring a huge blizzard, it may not strike anyone else as a summer movie, but it caused me to agonize through most of my summer vacation that year. I saw the movie not long before going on my first airplane ride in July. Every passenger on that flight became a potential Van Heflin, tensely gripping a briefcase and ready to cash in that big insurance policy in the sky.

That was all I needed. To be sucked out of a depressurized cabin at 30,000 feet. It wouldn’t take a very big hole to yank an undersized 7-year-old from his seat. Nothing those Air Canada stewardesses could do was going to make me feel any better, because “I’ve seen the movie, lady! You think a toy airplane’s going to calm these nerves?”

Five years later, “Jaws” became the archetypal summer fear movie. The solitary swimmer being pulled under by the maritime killing machine, accompanied by the incessant John Williams score -- talk about things that go bump-bump in the night. I was leery of the ocean before I saw the movie. (Too big, too dark. Say, what just brushed against my leg?) Afterward, forget about it. The closest I get to the beach these days is the southbound lanes of the 405.

The thing is, a kid stepping out of a summer encounter with sharks, plague, volcanoes or errant comets has time to obsess, to wallow in the images of doom and pale salvation. I must have seen “Jaws” three times that summer (as well as every summer they rereleased it). And it wasn’t enough to see the movie repeatedly. I took up the habit of “movie reads,” using the book to replay the movie in my head in even greater detail as I read it in weekly installments at Vons while my mom shopped for groceries.

Page by breathless page I’d turn, Mr. Williams’ bump-bumps filling my head as I waited for the store manager to tap me on the shoulder.

“Hey, kid, what do you think you’re doing?”

And there was sex -- sex that they’d somehow left out of the movie! It’s almost incredible to ponder now.

Sex can also be scary when you’re young. Fascinating, but scary. Some of the appeal of teenage sex comedies no doubt lies in the vicarious thrill of seeing others experience the humiliations that lie ahead of us. Cheap thrills like “Porky’s” or any number of imitators also serve to lodge those fears deeper in our subconscious.

As kids, summer was defined by our vacations from school, brief periods of independence, of being dropped off and picked up from the movie theater, free to spend hours in the dark experiencing the fear that awaited within.

Which may be why for adults, as the summer ticks down, it feels somehow incomplete without a movie that catapults you into some looming, outsized fear. Just as the quiet dread of a Sunday night can take us back to a time when our lack of preparedness for a calculus test left our stomachs in knots, the long, hot days of the year seem to be imprinted with a longing to revisit the delicious terror only a child can feel.

I’m always ready to slide right back into it. The Brits had me shaking last year with Danny Boyle’s zombie movie, “28 Days Later,” which had implications of SARS and mad cow disease and all manner of modern plague written all over it. And when the guy sitting next to you sneezes in a film like that -- there’s that theme from “Jaws” again.

This summer’s fear factor entry appears to be “The Day After Tomorrow,” about global warming run amok. It may be frightening, and it may be silly, but look at the faces of the kids around you as they’re leaving the movie. Behind a few sets of eyes, the wheels will be turning. Clouds will suddenly look suspicious, shifts in the weather alarming. And a nightmare fantasy or two later, the obsession of a summer will be taking root.