A distinctive odor isn’t the only thing that can take me on a trip down memory lane!

An article in the New York Times discussing the striking platinum-blonde hair of the Targaryen clan on the HBO series House of the Dragon included a black and white movie still of a gaggle of young children with similar nearly-white hair and a very strange look in their eyes.

And quickly I was a teenager again, watching Village of the Damned with my high school youth group, a 35 mm projector whirring away.

How many of you remember those Neanderthal days — before you could go to Blockbuster Video on any corner and rent a movie for the weekend; before you could have Netflix send you DVDs in the mail; and decades before online streaming services gave you millions of choices?

In those days we mostly watched movies in a movie theater, quiet and in the dark, or on TV with commercials every 15 minutes. What a treat it was to watch a full-length movie in a private hall with a bunch of friends, uninterrupted and unshushed!

For our youth group, movie night was a once or twice-a-year occurrence. Rows of folding chairs would be set up in the auditorium, a popcorn popper taken down from the shelf, and the Bell and Howell projector focused on a slightly tattered screen at the front of the room. We bubbled with excitement as the film was threaded through the projector sprockets and the lights were lowered.

The movie to be shown on a given night was chosen weeks before the big night by the Youth Advisor. The catalog from a movie rental company was studied and an order form and check were mailed to the company, somewhere in Ohio, or maybe California. With luck, the movie would be available and the large, flat spools in their brown boxes would be sent to us, ours to keep for a week or 10 days. Mimeographed flyers on bright orange paper would be circulated to the group members and posted on the walls announcing the date, time, and of course, the movie title.

I am not sure what criteria the Youth Advisor used to choose the films that were shown. There were classics such as On the Waterfront with Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, and Rod Steiger. Steiger made a repeat appearance in No Way to Treat a Lady, a film with no significant value or staying power.

But the oddest choice for a synagogue youth group was certainly Village of the Damned, a supernatural thriller. In the film, an otherworldly event leads to the birth of platinum-haired, precocious. and very weird children with glowing eyes who (spoiler alert) are eventually destroyed by the father of one of the oddlings. But their eyes float away–undead. And our auditorium was filled with laughter as someone in our crowd cried out “Maybelline makes beautiful eyes!” The highlight of another movie night.

And as far as I can recall–the last of those nights. I suspect the administrators of the temple lost faith in the Youth Advisor’s ability to pick appropriate films for at least a nominally religious youth group. Or maybe the price of film rental became too high. For whatever reason, that was the last time I ever heard a 35 mm projector in a small room with a group of friends.

But I will remember the Children of the Damned long after the last Targaryen has his (or her) head on a spike.