Once I get over my crushing “goddamn you, end of summer” depression, I quite like fall. Especially October. And Halloween! This year, I feel like I’m on the road to renewal, after a particularly harrowing September. And a rocky year, over all. I need things to look up, I really do.

With that mildly sad introduction, I bring you (hopefully) the first in a series of essays and recollections about scary movies.

Dr. Cyclops was an easy one to start with as it is on Turner Classic Movies as I type. TCM rocks the movies, even though Ted Turner, colorization, and global media greed makes me want to shriek. And not in a good movie-scream way.

Dr. Cyclops is a jungle-based mad scientist who invents a person-shrinking machine — and uses it. That’s kind of all you need to know.

This movie stands out from other gimmicky mad-scientist movies. For one, it’s damn old: 1940, and shot in the ever-jangling Technicolor. It’s refreshing to see a movie like this that wasn’t made in the 1950s. As fun as the movie posters and plots and theremin scores are, I find all those Cold War, black and white, parables-for-Communism to be glacial of pace, bland of leading man, and oh-so, ever-so “fifties.”

But in this one, the good guys get shrunk down to sub-Barbie size (Dawn-size, perhaps?) and don’t talk much at all; they’re too busy dodging cats and dogs, handling oversize matches and needles, and looking pretty adorable. I love tiny!

Albert Dekker*, as Cyclops, does most of the heavy lifting, so to speak. What a man. He refrains, kindly, from chewing the scenery, and offers up a compelling lonely/gentle/evil combo that I liked.

The special effects are quite effective. Rear screen projection, giant rubber hands, wrongly proportioned props — check check and check. Try to remove your jaded, CGI’ed lenses and see how cleverly done it is. The rest of the movie looks good, too, and we have some nice shots of tropical birds. I love birds!

The soundtrack is annoyingly fussy and busy — every second is filled with the orchestra echoing every action and nuance on the screen. I hate most soundtracks, especially those that wear alot of flowery cologne and poke me incessantly with their sharp little elbows.

But was it short? 76 minutes, friend! That’s the kind of length that almost guarantees a good mark in my book.

Scary factor is about negative-50 to anyone walking the planet today. But I like to think about audiences in 1940 and how this might have been a disturbing film, their eyes and minds a lot less world-weary than ours.

Coming up: I will face a demon head-on, by watching a movie I have not seen since it scared the living crap out of me when I was about 8 years old. Just for you!

*Albert Dekker: rings a bell, does it, you Hollywood Babylon-reading gossiphound? Yes, Albert apparently died a lurid and gruesome death. You can Google for the details, if you desire. But know this: he was also a California legislator, a vocal anti-McCarthyist, and a big hunk of yum. I shan’t preach, but I don’t like to see such an obviously considerate, intelligent, and human guy get turned into a tawdry joky footnote just because he got caught — and you didn’t (yet).