The Scene He Had Just Described

Sometime between 1978 and 1983, I was visiting my friend Dave at his home in Huntington, West Virginia, when he told me about an obscure gothic horror movie he’d seen as a kid. He’d gone with his mother—that’s how young he was.

Dave described a scene he called “RatFace,” in which a man strapped a woman to a chair and placed a cage containing a rat over her face. He then removed a partition, allowing the rat to attack her.

I had never seen or heard of this film or scene.

Just as Dave finished describing it, I reached over and switched on the television. Neither of us knew what was on. This was regular cable TV, long before DVRs, and we weren’t playing a recording.

The EXACT scene Dave had just described appeared on the screen.

Dave and I looked at each other and said, “WTF?!”

Neither of us knew the movie’s title. Even now, whenever we meet, we look at each other and say, “Do you remember that night?!” Then we laugh and shake our heads.

Decades later, looking through an old issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland, I finally identified the movie as Horror Castle, also known as The Virgin of Nuremberg, starring Christopher Lee.

I bought a VHS copy on eBay, made a copy cued to that exact scene, and mailed it to Dave. I left the tape unlabeled and used a fictitious return address to preserve the eerie mystique of the original event.

Surprise, Dave!

In seventy years of life, that remains the strangest, most uncanny coincidence I have ever experienced. Dave says the same.