In 1979, what became in my adulthood, one of my favorite flix was released, The Warriors.  I didn’t see this one until we got cable in late 1980 or early 1981 but I found the Baseball Furies very disturbing.  It was a combination of the bats, face paint and not speaking.  They had the feel of angry spirits or ghosts.

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.

Again with the sex ed films. This one is rather popular on the interwebs at the moment, and has the most disturbingly uncomfortable scene of auto coitus interruptus parentis ever committed to film. So, weather you saw this film as a kid or…. actually had something like this happen*shudder*… this one goes out to you.

This is one I saw on cable when I was about 14 or so. If I could have burned my eyes from their sockets at the time I would have. The movie was “Slapstick of Another Kind” and not only must it put Jerry Lewis and Madeline Kahn in to incestuous positions but it is compelled to explain just what incest is and to do so in an uncomfortable way. This is done for a cheap laugh (which didn’t work) and also just in case you happen to be an audience member that is either too young to know or too sheltered to know what incest is. I myself could have gone a few more years (AT LEAST) with out such a creepy demonstration. To Hollywood I say; thank you for this complete and utter piece of SHIT!

Every kid heard it. Earwigs would crawl into your ear as you slept, crawl in your ear, and eat through your brain. The fact that the very sight of an earwig triggers a gag reflex for most doesn’t help it’s unearned reputation as a gray matter muncher. For the record, earwigs are no more likely to crawl in your ear than any other insect… and yes, there is a truth in that statement that I will leave unsaid for now. Sleep tight!

Everyone remembers the episode of “Twilight Zone” where the guy has the earwig planted in his ear and it eats its way through his brain. He manages to survive this horrific ordeal, only to discover that the earwig was, in fact, female, and has laid her eggs on her “tour de neuron”, which will soon hatch and begin feeding on him from the inside out. The problem with this story, aside from the biological fancy of it, is the fact that is WASN’T on “Twilight Zone”. It was the far creepier (and in my opinion superior) Rod Serling project, the Night Gallery episode known as “The Caterpiller”.

To add to the horror of this episode, the actor playing the victim was actually dying of stomach cancer at the time this was filmed. According to reports, he actually stopped taking his pain medication in order to portray the agony of having his brain devoured by insects.

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

Looking back on everything, it seems like lots of people were out to terrorize kids, or at least me. Maybe it’s a natural thing for humans to want to frighten one another or maybe my family is just “extra fun”. Well, this time it was my grandfather. Between the ages of four and seven, most Saturday afternoons were spent with my grandparents. My grandfather would go up to the front room and watch old horror movies, sometimes I would go with him. Looking at these movies now is nothing, but then, it was creepy stuff. Extra creepy on those days that the movie marathon continued beyond dusk. On those chilly evenings the room was lit only by the TV’s glow and a low fire in the fireplace. On just such a day we watched “The Creature from the Black Lagoon”…

It was months before I wanted to be near the water again.

What kind of twisted mind decides it’s cool to make a movie about a little girl who is basically being destroyed by reoccurring nightmares about burning to death?? Again, another book I read before seeing the movie. Just the cover art alone made you want to pee in your Famolares. The copy of the book I read had photos from the movie, and somehow I got it into my head that this meant the book was based on a true story. *SHUDDER*

My grandmother had the book “The Legacy” (she also had “Mommie Dearest”, which is a completely different set of childhood fears, but I digress). I read the book as a kid, and ended up skipping swim class for a year. I didn’t see the film version until I was much older, but the remembrance of past terrors stuck with me as I watched the hideous drowning sequence unfold before my bulging eyes. Growing up asthmatic, drowning or suffocating were frequent childhood fears, and the unreal violation of trust in the laws of physics of this scene left my mind wondering “that couldn’t happen… could it??”

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.