While I was a little older (about 10) when I saw this one, on cable, it was still horrifying! Ridley Scott’s work was masterful and it delivered one of the best scares of the 70′s. As was the case for most of my preteen years, I had to sneak out after bedtime and watch this alone and in the dark…unable to scream as that would mean parent trouble. In the flickering ambient glow of my friend, the TV, I learn new folds of terror at Ridley’s hands. From the face hugger’s grab to the very bloody chest explosion and on, the dread just kept building. Then the barest of visual hints of the creature and…WTF! THAT DUDES HEAD EXPLODED!! WHERE THOSE TEETH?! I did bite my tongue and tasted blood…In space, no one can hear you scream.

When I was very young, maybe 8 or 9, I made the mistake of letting my grandfather know about my fears regarding nuclear war.  Before I tell you his response I want to ask you to put yourself in his place.  Your grandchild is looking to you for some kind of comfort.  You are a retired USMC Gunnery Sergeant that fought in WWII and Korea.  So, what do you say to the boy?

Take a moment or two on this.

Here is what I got.  He held up one hand and began to tick off the names of military bases in the area.  In eastern NC during the 70′s there were easily half a dozen or more.  Then he leaned in close, I can still remember the feel of his breath sliding over my face as he looked me in the eye and laid his large hand on my shoulder.  He said, the words that have been etched in my brain since that moment, “Don’t you worry about that boy.  With all those bases around here we’ll be what they call a primary target.  They’ll hit us with an air-burst nuke that’ll take out everything for miles.  We won’t have to worry about it after that.”  I asked if we would die.  He responded, “Yes.”

In his place what else is there to say?  You lie or tell the truth.  It took me years to understand and appreciate what he had done. I had asked an adult question and in his mind it required an adult answer.  I don’t know if I could do that to a child but I can see why he did.  At least he was honest with me.

Oh eM Gee.

After years of searching, I finally found a song that terrified me for years as a child.

As a very small girl, I suffered a very serious burn on my chest. In one of those “I just turned my back for a moment” moments, I manager at the age of 3 to dump a cup of boiling hot coffee on myself. To make matters worse, this was 1973, and clothing was made out of that miracle space age fabric polyester, which promptly melted onto my skin. I can remember the pain, and I remember the firemen coming… after that mot much else. EXCEPT…

I remember being put up in my parents bed for recuperation. There was a tv in their room tuned to PBS so I could watch Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers, etc. At one point, one of those educational music shows came on. 2 women, couple of puppets, and an auto-harp is all you need to teach kids how to make music, which apparently involves clacking blocks of wood together and chanting “ta tee-tee ta ta”. Oh, and this song!

All I can remember is being in pain and still feeling very woozy from having gone into shock. Suddenly there are these puppets singing about stalking people… and there is a potato involved somehow? My child’s mind imagined all kinds of Lovecraftian desert monstrosities just waiting for you to be caught holding a potato in the kitchen so they could come slithering through the sand and up your back stairs to get you.

It looks like I am not the only one with creepy memories of this song, either.

Fuck you! Fuck you! I was 4 years old! FOUR YEARS OLD! I didn’t need to see this during “Happy Days“!!!!

The Hour of the Wolf, “when nightmares are most palpable, when ghosts and demons hold sway.”  If you have ever been alone in the night- and I mean alone. Just you and your thoughts in the darkest hours before dawn, when your soul feels the dread of the world, and you think that the weight of it will crush your heart in the space between one beat and the next.  If that’s the case, then you know what the hour of the wolf is all about.

From a very early age, I could not sleep (insomnia), so I got to know this time of night in an intimate fashion at a tender age.  One of the first times I can remember this feeling, this sourceless dread, was one night during the local station sign off.  It was a vivid stream of images which ended with the big blue earth, and in the background plays “On Top of the World” by The Carpenters while the camera pulls back from the earth.  Farther and farther and farther away.  I felt a sense of leaving everyone behind, the whole world and blackness closing in around me.  So cold and dark, and now even the TV will leave me.  Alone.  Alone with this trepidation for which I can not account.  On the screen, the world is almost gone now, and Karen Carpenter’s words fade out on “the only thing I can find”…  then nothing.  She finds nothing.  Because nothing is there.  Just static now.  Static, and a 6 year old boy who can not name his fear.  No one is in the next room, there is no next room. Everything is smoke.

“Phantasm”, just the music alone could have made a kid wet his pants.  Add to that the “Tall Man”, “Evil Jawas” and “Flying Cuisinarts” to spell brown trouser time!  This drive-in scar session twisted my tender mind at the age of 8.

This was the last time my sister was able to sneak out to the drive-in when she was suppose to be watching me because this movie terrified me and I cried.  I cried like a baby for three solid hours, then my mom got home from work and it was my sister’s turn to cry a bit.

As an adult, I love this movie.  As a kid, it sucked as few things have ever sucked before.

From reader Carolyn:

I used to love watching the old twilight zone reruns as a young kid – but there were a few that absolutely HORRIFIED ME! One starred Telly Savalas as the father of a little girl who was loved by a Talking Tina doll…but Talking Tina didn’t like her daddy very much. F’ing CREEPY! I was always a little creeped out and afraid of all my dolls, though I also loved them very much and took really good care of them – even before I saw this episode – (so they wouldn’t hurt me). True story.

In December of 1979 I was happy, not just because Christmas was coming, but also because I would get to see Star Trek: The Motion Picture!  I loved the Star Trek TV show, so much so that I watched it everyday after school.  How vivid those memories are, sitting there with my grandmother, eating cheese and crackers with Star Trek on the TV.  And then it happened…60 seconds was all it took and the Star Trek logo went from inspiring hope and happiness to a harbinger of TERROR!  The Vulcan transporter accident is one of only three things to ever give me nightmares. 

Fanfiltration’s Mega Set Preview #1 – The top video clips of the week are here

“Man shall become a man eater,” words that chilled me. I was a child and not made for that knowledge. They spend an hour showing all the ways that Nostradamus may have been right about the past and then show what he said about the future. For a kid, the arguments seemed irrefutable. Fast forward the clip 8 minutes to see the images that haunted my mind for years to follow.

Sesame Street’s Mr. Hooper was a wonderful character played by actor Will Lee. He was a grandfatherly man who would spin yarns about his youth in the early part of of the 20th century and tolerated all of Big Bird’s hijinks, urban neurosis (let’s face it, Big Bird was Woody Allen in a boa). Lee died of a sudden heart attack on December 7, 1982, and his absence on the show was acknowledged with one of the saddest and most heartfelt moments in the history of children’s television.