One of J.J. Abrams' first vivid memories is of his family's move from Manhasset, L.I., to the entirely different world of Los Angeles - his courage at leaving everything he knew behind fortified by the elaborate Batcave model his baby-sitter crafted for him as a goodbye present.
It turns out the co-creator of "Lost" and director of the 2009 "Star Trek" reboot was a raging geek even back then. But upon arrival on the West Coast, little J.J. learned his first lesson of disappointment in Hollywood. "I looked in this box at the Batcave - which had been made, I guess it was with papier-mâché - and the thing had been shattered, utterly destroyed," says Abrams, 39 years later.
"All I cared about in the move to L.A. was that the Batcave survive, which it didn't." A few short years later, however, Abrams discovered his father's GAF Super 8 camera and a handful of clay that in the right hands - his - could become a series of animated blotches.
A director was born. "It was a total disaster," Abrams says of his first movie. "But it was the first time I was playing around with a Super 8. It was a thrill that whole week waiting to get that film back."
Flash-forward to 2011. The thrill of running around with his 8-millimeter camera in those magical days in the 1970s dovetailed nicely with the thriller about an unseen creature menacing a small town that Abrams had been mulling around in his head.
The result, "Super 8," hits theaters on Friday. In 1979, Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) is a 13-year-old Ohio kid struggling with the recent death of his mother, his estrangement from his father (Kyle Chandler) - a deputy in their small steel town - and his awkwardness around his first crush, Alice (Elle Fanning). His big chance to get to know her comes with the filming of his friend's movie, a George Romero-influenced zombie shlock shocker shot on the titular camera.
That's why the six kids find themselves at the local rail station late at night filming a scene, only to catch the dramatic crash of a military transport on camera. As it turns out, the train had been carrying something a lot more terrifying than Air Force personnel.