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Childhood Frights!

It’s Halloween, and in honour of this holiday of horrors I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on the movie and tv moments of my childhood that scared the living crap out of me.

10. The Wicked Witch of the West
My earliest memory of ever being afraid of something on TV or in a movie is definitely The Wizard of Oz.  I was obviously very young and I don’t know if it was the witch herself, or the flying monkeys, but I just distinctly remember getting very nervous and frightened when watching the scene at the witch’s castle as the guards marched by.  “Yo-ee-oh! Yo-oh!”

9. Thriller
I wasn’t so much afraid of the Thriller video when it came out so much as I was fascinated and curious because it was one of those things that my parents told me not to watch (but did anyway).  My dad pretty much forbid us kids to watch ANY music videos.  Best Thriller memory: the zombie that blows a big blood bubble!

8. The Cave on Dagobah
A kid watching The Empire Strikes Back for the first time doesn’t really expect the sequel to something as delightful as Star Wars to be as dark as it is.  Never mind Han Solo’s carbonite freezing or even Luke getting his hand sliced off—the real scary moment of this movie is Luke confronting his inner demons in the cave on Dagobah. It’s dark… it’s creepy… it’s in sorta-slow-motion… when all of a sudden he draws his light sabre!  He knows something I don’t know!  What’s this?  Holy crap it’s Darth Vader and he followed Luke here!!  OH MY GOD!  Luke just cut off Vader’s head!  But wait, it’s not Vader, it’s....  LUKE!  As a kid I was never quite sure if this was a nightmare, or a ghost, or some kind of Jedi mind trick.  Them Jedi can be sneaky like that, y’know.

7. Evil Superman
There are several scenes from Superman III that scared me as a kid, one is at the end of the movie when Robert Vaughn’s henchwoman Vera gets pulled into the supercomputer and somehow turns into a robot!  But for a kid what’s really frightening is when the hero goes bad.  Like Willy Wonka going mad on the chocolate river, I didn’t quite know how to cope with Kal-El going Koo-koo.  It was very unsettling for me to see the Last Son of Krypton getting drunk in a bar, harrasssing children, and making sexual advances towards Annette O’Toole!  (and then somehow pounding the crap out of Good Clark)

6. Willy Wonka’s Boat Ride
I think every kid watches this scene with a horrified look on their faces.  I think it’s scary not because of the violent imagery of bugs and chicken decapitations, or even the manic crescendo of noise and music—this scene is scary because it actually makes kids think that something’s not quite right in Willy Wonka’s head.  Is he evil?  Insane?  He’s going to kill the kids, isn’t he?  This scene is matched for intensity with the final scene in which Willy Wonka yells at Charlie.  “You disobeyed my orders!!!  You STOLE fizzy lifting drink and DIRTIED my ceiling you DIRTY THIEVING BASTARD!”

5. The Government Steals E.T.
There is only one scene in E.T. that scared me as a kid, and it’s after E.T. is found half-dead in a ravine being eaten by raccoons.  Mom’s just found out about the alien the kids have been keeping, Elliot’s gone loco, and Drew Barrymore is at her snot-nosed crying best.  Tensions in the house are high and suddenly the home is TAKEN OVER!  BY ASTRONAUTS!  And not just any astronauts --- astronauts who walk slow and methodic with their arms outstretched like zombies.  Astronauts who don’t even bother to open windows and doors properly and just walk right through the blinds and curtains as the family screams in terror (an explanation would be nice, thank-you!) and somehow the family’s model train set feels it’s an opportune time to set itself off.

4. Pulsating Tree Root Monster
Space Quest 2 was my favourite computer game growing up and it was filled with some very tense moments for a cheap blocky comedy game.  There was the lovesick Alien queen that would escape from its cell in a fastpaced frenzy ripped off from Alien.  There was also the underwater swamp alien ripped off from The Empire Strikes Back.  Oh, and let’s not forget the gorilla-like security guards ripped off from Planet of the Apes.  But the moment that had me on the edge of my seat was the mazelike pulsating tree root monster that, as Roger Wilco, I had to navigate through without touching… it was very stressful, let me tell you!

3. Princess Mombi from Return to Oz
This “sequel” to The Wizard of Oz starring a young Fairuza Balk as Dorothy was filled with some very frightening scenes such as the crazed Wheelies, the mad Nome King, oh, and let’s see… the mental hospital with screaming children in the basement where Dorothy is taken to get electric shock therapy in order to cure her of her delusions of Oz.  Right.  But the ultimate scary moment in the movie is when Dorothy needs to sneak through a hall of sleeping disembodied heads belonging to Princess Mombi who, of course, wakes up and starts the dozens of heads a-screaming.  And it’s a Disney movie if you can believe it.

2. The Doctor Who Theme Song
Every kid I grew up with feels the same way about the theme song to Doctor Who.  And this is why: we all grew up watching Polka-Dot Door and Today’s Special on TVO.  But for some reason, a programming genius at TVO decided that the show that should be aired immediately following this block of preschool programming is the show with the themesong that made all the kids wet their pants in fear.

1. Jan Svankmajer’s Alice
Flipping through the TV at night on several occasions as a child I managed to come across Jan Svankmajer’s version of Alice in Wonderland.  Part live action, part stop-motion animation, it was hypnotic.  But it scared the hell out of me.  If you haven’t seen it, imagine Alice in Wonderland if it was made by Tim Burton.  But Tim Burton was Czechoslovakian.  And a zombie.  All the characters apart from Alice are animated puppets made from skeletons and dead animals and of course they all have that jerky motion inherent in stop motion.  This was definitely not Disney’s version of Alice, and it has stayed with me to this day (I would kill for a copy on video).  I’m pretty sure I can blame TVO for this as well.

UPDATE:
Okay, I just remembered ANOTHER scary moment from my childhood.  Do you remember that Bert and Ernie sketch from Sesame Street in which we find them exploring an Egyptian tomb and when Bert disappears Ernie is taunted by a statue that looks just like him?  Bert, not believing Ernie, just tells Ernie to sing a song if he’s scared and eventually Ernie and the statue break into a duet of “Rubber Duckie"… I couldn’t find a picture, but this now replaces my number one choice.  THIS was true absolute horror (until the part about the rubber duckie of course).