Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [28]
Carpenter, O’Bannon, and their friends thought of themselves as rebelling against the realism of the time, as more counterculture than the counterculture. “We were counterrevolutionary,” explains their classmate Nick Castle, who worked on Dark Star. “The revolution was the new wave and experimental film, but they are all influenced by American genre pictures. We just skipped the step and went right to the source.”
BERTHA O’BANNON had gone into labor early in the morning of September 30, 1946. Her husband Thomas drove her to the hospital, helped her to the waiting area filled with pregnant women. Bertha was calm, remarkably so. She had read every baby book, planned on training the baby to sleep alone, and studied feeding times. She took every precaution and knew exactly what to expect. She was ready for motherhood.
One thing she didn’t count on was that Thomas would take her calm as a sign that he could leave the hospital to see a matinee movie. The delivery room was no place for men and, well, it was the Marx Brothers. By the end of the movie, Daniel O’Bannon was born and his father rushed to the hospital to meet him. What he found was a room of babies behind a glass window, and he later wrote about the scene this way:
I looked over the selection of newly-formed humanity in the glass room and picked out the prettiest one I could find. “I’ll take that one,” I told the nurse who was on duty. “That one,” however, had already been spoken for. The only one available was a tiny, wrinkled, red-faced little monster with the crookedest legs I had ever seen. I accepted him.
Thomas O’Bannon was not a Father Knows Best type. Hailing from an old Ozarks family that fought in the Revolutionary War and on both sides of the Civil War, he was blind in one eye after an injury sustained in World War II. He referred to his son as “the brat” and had a habit of poking through his personal belongings. But he also had a mischievous streak. One of his favorite pranks was cutting rings in the grass and calling the press to tell them he spotted a UFO.
The O’Bannon family ran a curio shop called Odd Acres in Winona, Missouri, off Highway 60. Near the shop were small cabins that sold themselves to cars driving by as a sideshow featuring large-scale optical illusions including a stream that ran upward. In one, a room was built on a slant so if you took a photo, it could appear that you were hanging off the wall. It sat in front of a sign that announced “IMPOSSIBLE HILL.”
Daniel was closer to his mother, a nurse who met her husband taking care of him after the war. She was convinced her son had potential since he scored high on IQ tests. But while she wanted him to read literary classics, he would always sneak science-fiction stories and comic books into his book bag. She called science fiction “an evil substance.” O’Bannon didn’t have a telephone until he was ten, and since there was no library, he had to send away for books. At his dinner table, movies and art were off-limits. So was religion. The topic day in and day out was money—to be more specific, why they didn’t have any. O’Bannon, an only child, didn’t need anyone encouraging him to challenge authority. It was plain to him that teachers and parents and the police were not to be trusted. “I was from these origins, but not of them,” he says. “They were so wrapped up in their own dysfunction that I think they barely perceived me.”
The irony is that Thomas O’Bannon was the first person to fully see the eccentric talent in his son. He also probably nurtured it, in his own cockeyed way. Many kids imagine themselves outsiders misunderstood