Must be the season of the witch
It’s fun to think about the things that scared us when we were little. Everyone does it!
I used to spend a lot of time on Kindertrauma (“Your happy childhood ends here!”), where people shared the things that kept them awake at night, way back when.
The good thing about the Kindertrauma community was the honesty. You could tell that people were sharing things that actually unnerved them when they were young. They weren’t trying to be cute, or clever, or ironic. So the end result was an archive of truly diabolical… stuff.
I’m taking the same approach here. For instance, I’m not going to suddenly start pretending that I used to have an issue with clowns. Clowns are funny! We used to be good friends with a clown, in fact.
Carrie Get Out Your Pain
I remember walking through Liverpool’s HMV at quite an early age, possibly with the intention of browsing the Mega Drive Games. Yes, this was a while ago.
This apparently involved passing the horror section. Which involved walking past the schlockiest possible VHS cover of Carrie (1976).
For this particular early 90s release, they chose the image of Sissy Spacek post telekinetic massacre, soaked in blood and backed by flames. It was essentially the image above but, I swear to Stephen King, she was looking right at me.
When we actually pluck up the courage to watch any film with a particularly nasty poster, we usually find that nothing can compare to the unholy images conjured by our young and impressionable minds.
The difference with that Carrie box-art is that what you see on the cover is very much what you’ll get when you watch the film. The film is worse, actually, as the cover gives no hint of the intolerable cruelty that leads us to this bloody hellish scene.
The Horse That Insisted Upon Itself
I didn’t see The Godfather (1972) until I was a teenager, but I managed to see the bit with the horse’s head much earlier. I caught a bit of it on TV one night, and I happened to catch the film at the worst possible moment (for me).
You know what happens: A man wakes up to discover he’s been sleeping next to the disembodied head of his beloved racing horse. It’s an unpleasant scene even now, but at least as adults we can reassure ourselves that it’s the sort of thing that only happens to those stupid enough to mess with the Mafia.
But at whatever single-digit age I was when I happened to see this scene, this seemed to be the sort of thing that could happen to anyone, at any time. For months afterwards I was genuinely terrified of waking up to find a horse’s head in my bed.
For some reason, the bit that really stuck with me was the bit where he pulls his hand from under the covers to find it wet and sticky with blood. This became my morning ritual. Before I did anything else, I checked my palms for signs of blood. If my hands were clean, then I could be reasonably sure that my bed was horseless. But I’d still check, as slowly as possible, just to be certain.
The Faces, The Faces…
1999: A school trip to France to see the Bayeux Tapestry, a few WW2 landing sites, and Disneyland Paris. On the way to the ferry the teachers played a VHS of My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), an inspired choice for a coach full of preteen boys.
An even more inspired choice on the part of whoever put that video release together was to place a trailer for The Exorcist (1973) before the main feature. And not just any trailer! The most awful trailer that ever was and ever will be. The original banned trailer from the 70s, the one that’s like a satanic zoetrope alternating between the overexposed faces of the demonic Regen and her possessor, Pazuzu.
It was the wrong thing to see, very early in the morning, when I already had a migraine from the excitement and indigestion from eating my breakfast bars too quickly. I was still seeing those faces when we finally got to Disneyland a few days later.
The Puppets Will See You Now
I was scared of a number of things at Blackpool Pleasure Beach. That rotating hysterical king, of course. And I never, ever plucked up the courage to go on the Ghost Train. The glowing-eyed skeleton reclining on the roof was enough to put me off. Said skeleton is completely static, though I have a strong memory of staring at it for absolutely ages, and watching it move. It snarled as it reached down to grab at passers-by.
Nothing, though, was scarier than the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Auditorium. This is a permanent exhibition of curios from across the world. Its tone is more “strange and wonderful” than “dark and terrible”, but nobody told five-year-old me.
I had to be picked up and carried past this place. I can’t even remember quite what it was about the whole thing that freaked me out so much. There was a photo on the exterior of a man holding a few pool balls in his mouth – the same photo that features on the front of Exile on Main Street, incidentally. I didn’t like that, but it wasn’t that bad. So what was it?
I couldn’t tell you.
I remember once I dared to glance at the interior of the auditorium as I was carried past. Just to confirm my fears, maybe. I saw two people sat behind a ticket desk. Fine. But for some reason, I would later remember seeing two grotesque Spitting Image style puppets working the till. One of them was repeatedly banging its head against the counter, and the other was sneering as it inspected its large rubber hand.
One day I’ll visit the Believe It Or Not Auditorium. I will look those puppets straight in the eye and request a ticket in a calm and measured voice. I will learn all about Robert Wadlow. I’m not afraid anymore.
A Horrid Cassette
If you’re of a particular age, and you’re particularly into Halloween, then you’ve no doubt experienced a spooky sounds tape at some point. This is a tape full of haunted noises to add a bit of atmosphere to your party: Creaking doors, squeaking bats, bubbling laboratories, groaning Frankensteins etc.
My first experience with a spooky sounds tape didn’t go well. The thing I’ve embedded above is merely illustrative. It is not the actual tape that I heard that night. Because the tape in question was so disturbing that it may actually have been cursed.
Among the sounds included on the tape were:
- Person falling off cliff (male)
- Person falling off cliff (female)
- Man having legs whipped off (that’s whipped off, not ripped off, which is somehow worse)
- Elevator full of people falling down shaft
- Ghoul chewing human bones
That sort of thing.
We were visiting our cousins in London, and listening to this tape was apparently such an event that we were allowed to sit in the “good room” – the one we had to keep clean and tidy ready for the Queen’s visit. And I didn’t like it at all. Eventually I gave up and went to join my other cousin in the other room, who I seem to remember was watching a version of The Little Mermaid story as performed by puppets.
See? Puppets are just as good at alleviating nightmares as they are at causing them.
The Head in the Toilet
We used to spend some time in Norfolk, staying in an enchanted cottage in Burnham Thorpe, the birthplace of Horatio Nelson. These trips usually occurred between February and April, so the nights came early and went on forever. And the cottage’s bathroom was located in a separate building outside, meaning we had to briefly brave the cold of nature whenever nature called.
Hanging on the wall of that bathroom was a poster of a bald gentleman, giving side-eye to the camera, with a screwed-up expression that seemed to say “do I know you?” The bathroom was pitch-black when we entered, so he’d always appear quite suddenly when we switched the light on.
We couldn’t even look at him. So at night, we were too scared to even think about going to the bathroom. There was a pot under the bed that we were allowed to use for some, but not all, purposes. Anything more substantial would have to wait until morning, when the everlasting squint of “the bald man” (as we called him) was a little easier to tolerate.
I cannot find the picture in question. Above is a picture of the Fairbrass brothers from the pop group Right Said Fred. Because, when they reached number one with Deeply Dippy, I remember seeing them on Top of the Pops and thinking: It’s him!
Behold the stuff of nightmares:
