The Movies That Warped Us
Posted October 31st, 2007 by Tristan-Beedon
This is a tribute to those movies that twisted our fragile imaginations at too young an age, lying in wait under our beds, hiding in our closets, and generally wreaking havoc on our psyches - they may not scare you anymore, at least not consciously, but the damage is done, and their legacy lives on…
Here’s your chance to weigh in on that special movie that permanently and irrevocably fucked you up. Happy Halloween!
Pods R Us
Having been exposed to scores of inappropriate films of all kinds at too early an age (My parents have a deep love of horror movies that they took every opportunity to share with me - not that they had a choice. I started sneaking out of my room every time they were watching one, plopped myself down behind the couch, and watched until they noticed me and sent me back to bed. After a while, I think they just gave up.), I had plenty of nightmare fodder to work with.
Certain images stuck with me: The dog turning itself inside out and sprouting tentacles in The Thing, the self propelling body bag in Nightmare on Elm Street, pretty much every scene in Halloween…
But as many times as they prompted me to check my closet or underneath my bed, these were basically disposable fears. Fears that were gone in the morning. Fears one could get used to. In the end, they always just made me crave more.
No, the one that really stuck with me was of a far more complex type. ‘Twas Invasion of the Body Snatchers that finally broke my brain (And yes, I’m talking about the 1978 version, which also holds the distinction of being the only remake in history that’s genuinely and indisputably better than the original).
For better or worse, this movie launched me into an entire lifetime of paranoiac tendencies. I never looked at anyone the same afterward. After all, how could you ever really know that your parents and friends weren’t actually sinister aliens bent on taking over the human race? How did you know you weren’t next? Worst of all, how did you know you weren’t already a pod?
The fact that the movie was set practically in my backyard didn’t help, either. There’s nothing to make the fear more palpable than having recently been in the very spots where the action takes place.
The best (or worst, depending how you look at it) part of it all is that it still gets me now. Just the thought of Donald Sutherland’s final, ear piercing, inhuman shriek gets me all shifty-eyed anew, doubting the humanity of everyone around me.
Doesn’t hurt to be prepared…
Every breath you take...
The stray from Cat’s Eye ties together several segments, one of which revolves around a smoking cessation company that literally electrocutes you in this little metal cell while playing the Sting song, which I will never be able to listen to again without feeling a *bzzzzt* sensation.
– Is that real water?!?
Troll in wall
This brings up a very interesting childhood quirk - Freddy Krueger and I were friends in my dreams. He’d pop in every so often and say something funny. I don’t know why I processed him like this when most of my friends were having Freddymares. In my dreams I’d go into my living room, go behind the couch and slide down a crevasse into Freddy’s subterranean chamber. He’d would be hanging out drinking Yoohoo with his knifey hands and we’d watch bizarre 1950’s style TV. We’d even go on adventures!
Now for 3 things that actually did fuck with my prepubescent sleep regiment:
1. Cat’s Eye - TROLL IN WALL: Drew Barrymore is terrorized by an evil little troll that comes out of her wall and attempts to suck out her soul while she sleeps. Scary stuff for a six year old. Also my first memory of wanting a cat.
2. Twilight Zone (Living Doll) - TALKING TINA: Telly Savalas is taken out by his stepdaughter’s doll. He should have been nice to her! Sharing a room with my sister and her “Cricket” doll didn’t help either. That episode still gives me the willies.
3. Savage Harvest - MAN-EATING LIONS: I saw this ultra low-budget TV movie starring a drunken Tom Skerritt when I was way too young. Lions go nuts and attack an absurdly white family in Africa. All the black servants get eaten in gruesome detail. No other plot. When I was a kid walking home after dark from my friend Brian’s house, I would look up the darkened street and imagine a FUCKING LION barreling down on me and shredding my flesh to ribbons. I would run as fast as I could to my well lit front door and slam it behind me.
Ah, childhood.
It took me years to track down this obscure schlock-of-the-week, but now I’m the proud owner of the VHS! Tom Skerritt and his estranged family singing “All You Need Is Love” during a lull in the attack is priceless.
Redrum! Redrum! (The Shining again)
Unlike the kids at school who whispered on the bus about Freddy, Chucky, and Jason, my elementary school years were quite sheltered. I was a scaredy-cat and a crier, the kind of kid who ran from the room bawling after the first ten minutes of The Dark Crystal. But those scraps of kiddie horror that managed to reach me were as fascinating as they were terrifying: I sat up late at night worrying about ghosts and wrote stories about Frankenstein and the Wolfman. My subconscious was brimming with macabre imagery, and I’m happy to say that it was Stanley Kubrick who finally set my imagination free.
In fifth grade, my parents finally decided I was capable of being home alone after school. While they worked and my siblings went to day care, I naturally took this opportunity to indulge in all sorts of rebellious activities. I watched forbidden gangster rap videos, spoiled my dinner, and of course hunted through my parents’ video collection for R-rated movies. Consistent with their protective ways, my folks’ video selection was quite conservative save for a few R-rated comedies and a video called The Shining graced with a picture of a scruffy man with crazy eyes. “Perfect”, I thought.
The Shining had mind-blowing imagery I previously couldn’t have imagined: elevators full of blood, corpses in bathtubs, axe murder, and of course the ghostly girls in the hallway. I rewinded their scene over and over, squealing with horror and delight every time they said “Come play with us, Danny…come play with us FOREVER.” Danny was younger than me, but I still identified with him enough to be horribly disturbed by his father’s attempt to kill him and his mom. The Shining blended fantasy and reality in a way more complex and challenging than anything I had seen before. Jack changes from normal guy to homicidal maniac, and he experiences things that may be hallucinations or may be an amorphous evil force- either way, it was more vague, and therefore scarier, than Universal Monster movies. This movie opened my eyes to the idea that scary wasn’t just Dracula in a graveyard, and under the right circumstances the family could be terrifying.
The Shining
I don’t like horror movies. I don’t like movies where people die and its not part of a dramatic story arc. I probably shouldn’t be contributing to this forum, but I am so listen up! When I was a kid my sister and I saw The Shining on TV. My mom said that it was the scariest move she’d ever seen. She saw it on a date once back in the day and it spooked her so she didn’t really want us watching it, but we kept it on. I’ll tell you something about The Shining, alot of the psychological terror is lost on an 11 year old. We thought it was the funniest thing ever! Some guy was hacking down a door, the film and costumes were all seventies and old, there was a weird little kid and his talking finger, and a bunch of crazy idiots running around in a maze. What’s so scary about that? We just chalked it up to something that was scary back then but its lost it edge in the age of (relatively) modern cinema. I had the privelage of watching The Shining again about 3 years ago and I’m happy to say that it scared the crap out of me. Creepy ghost twins, uber-creepy ghost butlers, crazy Jack attacking his wife and kid with an axe. I finished that movie curled up in a ball, wide eyes glazed over in fright, rocking in place trying to shake away the ghosts that had jumped out of the screen and into my head. Fucked me up good and proper. Does it still count if I was warped by a movie as an adult?
Nightmare on Elm Street
For the rest of my life, I will have a completely ridiculous fear of extending any part of my body over the edge of a mattress or couch, especially when I’m alone in a semi-dark room, because Freddy Kreuger’s gonna reach out from under my bed and catch me with his sharp-ass blade fingers and slice off my limbs. Yay sneaking out and watching scary movies when you’re too young and being scarred for the remainder of your existence!
– Is that real water?!?
Aliens
When I was about six or seven (the years in Key West kind of blend together, as do most years when you are young) I saw Aliens for the first time. And honestly, I didn’t remember much of it in the years to come except the part that gave me nightmares until I saw it again as a teenager. I don’t know why my mother let me watch this movie, but at the time I guess I was persuasive enough. It was from this point, however, that I fell in love with sci-fi and horror movies, and began to share in my parents love of gore. The day we bought a DVD player was the greatest moment in our movie lives, when we watched Starship Troopers and used the slow-mo on all the gruesome gore moments. But back to the moment in Aliens that terrified me for nearly a decade – towards the end, when Bishop is ripped apart by the queen alien. His ooey-gooey white innards are stretched to the point of breaking, snap apart and he yaks up white goo, all the while screaming (did he scream or was I?)The aliens didn’t scare me, the blood and guts and face-fucking little finger aliens didn’t even bother me. No, it was Bishop’s white innards, his body like a beetle pulled apart by a little boy, that freaked me the fuck out.