Benjamin: Exorcist. I was 6 years old and it came on tv; my mom and I watched it, and she kept telling me it was all make believe, but that doesn't help much when you're 6 and still believe in Santa and the Tooth Fairy... I didn't sleep for a couple days... Fortunately, I had a chance to watch it again when I was in high-school and it looked dated and cheesy, so I was able to put that one to bed... of course it was 2 feet above the bed, but that's ok.
Matt: Frankenstein! I was 11 years old. My parents went out for the night leaving me and my 17 year old sister home. Frankenstein was on that night... Way back when we only had four channels to choose from. Well, three, really. What kid watches PBS at night?
My parents told me not to watch it, but I did anyway. I had nightmares and developed insomnia from watching that movie. I should have listened... in this case.
Lori: Sherlock Holmes' The Hound of the Baskervilles. 1 pm Afternoon movie on NBC- the hounds on the Moors were vicious, left people bloody, and gave me nightmares for months.
Val L.: Piranha. Couldn't sleep for a week.
Whitney: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. What a fucked up movie. Children being kidnapped by a fake candy man and locked in the sewer? IT STILL FREAKS ME OUT!!!
Paula: Twilight Zone
Twilight for awhile
became a living doll whose
fangs would climb the stairs.
Chris H.: Uh...Salem's Lot.... you know... that scary vampire movie... freeeeeeeked me out with nightmares for years. I rented it once for Halloween a few years back and was bored silly. Funny how our perceptions differ as kids.
John M. : When I was little, my sisters used to love to watch "Dark Shadows" when we got home from school. It was SO scary to this six-year-old that I still want to cry when I think of it. I came to love the show many years later and love to watch it now, but I still become that scared six year old when the theme song comes on.
Kevin: Frankenstein's Daughter. It was the first movie that actually scared me. Scared the living shit out of me. I had nightmares for several years after that. I had nightmares probably through my whole childhood.
Jay: I had the first nightmare that I still remember when I was five. I was chased by a big, kelly green, cartoon dinosaur- a huge lump with legs and triangular spikes along its spine. I'd watched a program called "It's About Time" about astronauts who inadvertently travel back to the Stone Age. It starred Imogene Coca as a cavewoman, and, according to Wikipedia, it shared sets (and, to a degree, sensibility) with Gilligan's Island". I guess "scary" is in the eye of the beholder.
I may not have remembered the dream today, or much of the year I was five, except that it was also the year that my father died. We lived in an apartment that was linked to his job, so we were forced to move, first to another apartment in the complex and then out of the complex altogether, within a few months. My mother started to work nights to be home in the morning and afternoon. My oldest sister would be the responsible one while we were home alone at night.
I don't remember the first time I saw "Dark Shadows" exactly, but for years I watched it every day after school. One of the most vivid scenes for me was Joan Bennett, playing the Collins matriarch, sitting in the drawing room of the ancestral mansion reading tarot cards. I had a visceral sense of the power of the cards- a tool that could tell you what was around the corner, beyond the edges of the light, could take the sting out of any surprise lying in wait.
And there was more- the bite of a bat would let you live forever; a musty, unused room in a closed wing of the house could be a portal to a parallel universe with an alternate life story; an antique objet d'art could transport you back in time, allow you to change the course of history; your old life in the old house waited for you under sheets and drop cloths until you were ready to live it again.
I don't pretend to have had the same understanding then as I do now of why the stories might have been especially interesting to me. The eye of the beholder, in this case, could have just belonged to a creepy kid who would have been just as creepy had his father lived to an uneventful, ripe old age. I watched "Dark Shadows" faithfully from four to four-thirty every day until it was canceled (and then refused to watch any programs on the ABC network, channel 7 in the New York market, for about a year). I still watched "Creature Feature" and "Chiller Theater"- old horror movie reruns- on Saturday nights, usually home alone while my sisters were on dates and my mother worked her weekend job.
When I hit my teens, I started to put aside horror movies, Poe's stories, Bradbury's, too. I worked hard on my pretension: classic "film" on PBS, Dostoyevsky, the Confessional Poets, Rimbaud via Patti Smith. Many years late, being either a good sport in the video store or an accommodating date, I saw the movie "Pet Semetary," a cautionary tale about revivifying the ones you loved not always giving expected results. As a child, I'd imagined my father risen as Fred McMurray in "My Three Sons," the Robert Reed dad of "The Brady Bunch" or even John Walton, rather than the mean drunk who woke us with my mother's screams as he pulled her hair in the dark living room, who, after a six-pack or two, started fistfights with his brothers and brothers-in-law at every family gathering and sped away with us all in the car, my mother shouting at him to slow down, who took me to bars in the afternoon and made me swear to lie to my mother about where we'd been and, when pressed to confess my lie to her in front of him, lifted his head from the bed just long enough to curse me with "momma's boy!" before he fell back to his stupor.
I can imagine worse things than growing up with a single mother in the 60's and 70's, when women's meager opportunities matched their meager pay, and with an older sister who took up my father's drinking and violence (though didn't hit as hard as he did). Now I can imagine worse things than being chased by a kelly green cartoon dinosaur. Now I know that sometimes, the eye of the beholder imagines even meager hope where a more reasoned eye sees only despair.
John: Oh man, it took a while for my memory to land here, but this was definitely my first "I really think I shouldn't have watched that" experience.
Every summer my family would go down to southern Illinois to visit my aunt and her family. Cousin Joseph was right between my brother and me in age, so we'd spend all our time together. One night the three of us "camped out" in the vacation trailer that was parked in the driveway. There was a little TV in there and we turned it on for the late-night "Creature Feature." I was probably about 7 years old.
We missed the title of the movie, but it involved, among other things, a dank dungeon in which lovely young women were chained up in skimpy clothing, with a dwarf actor as their keeper; the killing of said dwarf by one of the young ladies with a giant hypodermic needle; and a very convincing brain transplant surgery, during which the camera did not for one moment cut away from scalpel cutting into flesh, blood flowing, etc. I don't think any of us slept very well that night.
If anyone knows what movie this was, for God's sake don't tell me.
Steve: I was in high school when "The Shining" was released, but I didn't see it until a few years later because the trailer that I saw in a theater scared me too much. All you saw in the trailer was the elevator doors in the hotel. The camera stayed still, nothing happened (watching it now on youtube for the first time in 30 years I now know that the freaky music was part of what made it so suspenseful)... until finally one elevator door opens and an ocean of blood washes out in slow motion, flooding the lobby and pushing the furniture toward the camera. I'd lie in bed at night with that awful sequence in my head. Watching it now, I laugh at how creepy and brilliant it is, so simple and so over the top. Yikes.
Phoebe: This is a great mirror ball subject! The only problem is, I can not, for the life of me, remember the name of the movie that scared the hell out of me as a child. It caused me to sleep with the lights on for years. A family moved into a house that was haunted, which was a new idea for me at the time. There was a door in the attic where the ghost lived, I believe, or where they ultimately found the dead body of the spirit that was haunting the house. I always thought this movie was called Behind the Green Door, only to find out much later that this was the title of a famous full-length porn film. But the scariest part was that inanimate objects would come to live and try to kill the family. One scene, the father I believe, was on the front lawn, when the rake came to life and tried to attack his leg. In another scene I think all the dishes in the kitchen started flying out of the cabinets at the mother. If anyone saw this movie and remembers the name, please let me know!
Stephanie: I was so scared of the animated version of the Hobbit. My brother also had the album version of it and would play it all the time. The voice of Gollum was so terrifying that when I was old enough to read The Hobbit, I would not touch it because Gollum was just too freaky. I finally got the courage to read it in my 30's. What a great book.
Steven S: JAWS. I wish I had never seen that movie. I was on vacation on Cape Cod (of all places) when Jaws came out. I believe I was in Jr High. I had decided that I could handle it and that it was only a movie, disregarding the fact that I had never had any success ignoring other scary movies.
Jaws ruined my life at a drive-in theatre somewhere near Dennis, MA. The next day, hardly anyone was in the water. And when you eventually got your nerve up to go in, every little thing that touched your foot was a freakin' shark. What used to be swimming or body surfing was now replaced with re-creating the "Oh My God" scene or the opening scene or the kid on the raft scene. On every blanket down the beach, the conversation that summer was about sharks. To this day, that conversation has not ended in my own imagination.
I have always said that if there was just ONE thing I could UN-do in my life it would be seeing Jaws. I still picture the many rowed teeth of the Great White. Even as I write this my body tingles. I am not kidding. My fault. I knew I should have stayed out of the theatre. I'm just too impressionable.
No comments:
Post a Comment