Twisted Tuesdays: Shit That Creeped You Out As A Kid
by Tracy Vanity
I asked the Bizarro staff to tell me what shit scared them when they were lil’ demons. Their answers were quite entertaining and random. It shows you that even the most imaginative, fucked up minds can get creeped out by E.T.!
Tracy: Hey Bizarro clan, were there any TV characters, films, toys, etc. that creeped you out when you were little?
Michael Allen Rose (Patron Saint of Sporks & author of Party Wolves in my Skull): Weirdly enough, there was a segment on Sesame Street where Maria would do an impression of Charlie Chaplin from his old silent films. I don’t know if this was because of the gender-confusion, or because of the silence of the character on the screen, but something about those segments sent me crying to my room in terror. (This was when I was very small). I imagine it was just a combination of the unfamiliar things I mentioned above that just creeped me out to a point of incoherent gibbering. :P
Sam Reeve (Pirate, Bizarro editor, X-Mas annihilator, Empress of Awesome, & Weekly Weird Art Curator): I hated ET, thought it was a scary movie.
Cameron Pierce (Exorcist, Elephant Beetle Enthusiast, & author of Die You Doughnut Bastards): The Gate.
CV Hunt (Lucid Dream Alchemist, Jewel Thief, & author of How to Kill Yourself): I had a hard time sleeping at night when I was a kid because of Freddy Kruger.
Rob Harris (Griffin Wrangler & Professional Cheese Sprayer): Watership Down had some terrifying parts in it.
Bradley Sands (Space Travel Agent & author of TV Snorted My Brain): Books with “true” ghost stories kept me awake at night, but I couldn’t stop reading them. I think there was an anthology of true spooky stories that freaked me out more than the rest called The Crystal Skull (or something like that), but I can’t find out any info about it. Also, a TV movie called The Haunted scared me, particularly this scene:
Eric Hendrixson (Chief of the Cannibal Unicorn Division & Bread Boss): Cereal with milk. I had no problem with milk or dry cereal, but when you put them together, they turned into something strange and disturbing.
Also, I thought they built public monuments wherever someone famous died and that they made the statues by pouring concrete over the corpses, so the body was still inside the monument. Since I was in Europe, there were monuments all over the place.
Also Fantasia.
Kevin Shamel (resident zombie slayer, T-Rex tamer, googly eye connoisseur, and author of Island of the Super People): Sleestaks on Land of the Lost freaked me out when I was little. And a couple of the monsters on this old Japanese mecha show. There was also a book about a pond with this huge shadowy ancient thing that wanted to eat swimming kids that my teacher read when I was in first or second grade that kept me out of water for a long time. (it was a huge old turtle)
Jeff Burk (moonshine maker, neon ninja, & author of Cripple Wolf): The 1971 Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It just always filled me with unease. I know Wonka and the Oompa-Loompas wanted to violently violate those kids and eat the corpses.
Carlton Mellick III (wizard, Part-Time Czar, Spaghetti Yeti behaviorologist, & author of Cuddly Holocaust, Hammer Wives, Apeshit, and Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland to name a few of his many, many awesome books): This for some reason creeped me out when I was 5 years old:
Nice answers guys! So how about the rest of you Bizarros? What creeped you out as a kid?
When I was six or seven, I remember being creeped out by the original V series, after having caught a glimpse of one of the lizard people during one of the miniseries. I recall hiding behind the couch and plugging my ears during one of the episodes, wanting nothing to do with those lizards.
I also used to have a recurring dream that scared the crap out of me when I was a kid. I can’t remember what it was all about but remember that there used to be a echo in it and any noise would echo and continue echoing until I couldn’t take the sound any longer and woke up. After a number of years, I thankfully stopped having that dream
February 5, 2013 at 7:14 am
Clash of the Titans scared the crap out of me, but in a high creep factor. I think the stop motion made it surreal. The scenes with Kalibos after Zeus turns him into a nightmare, all the scenes with anything to do with Medusa (hunting her, the bloody bag that spawns giant scorpions, the scorpions themselves), and the fucking Kraken. I wouldn’t get out if my bed at night to go to the bathroom because I was convinced that there were scorpions waiting to get me, or that Zeus would pick me up and I’d wake up in the story and have to fight Kalibos.
February 5, 2013 at 5:29 pm
I loved every minute of it, and woke up early every day as a kid in southwestern ontario to watch the Hilarious House of Frightenstein! The old Librarian character was incredibly creepy, but I watched intently nonetheless. I am now raising my own kids and we still watch this show together. If you’ve ever seen it, you’ll know the show I am talking about.
February 5, 2013 at 5:36 pm
1970′s television at its best!
February 5, 2013 at 5:37 pm
Remember that show Spitting Image? It featured really fucked up, wrinkled puppet versions of politicians and celebs. What’s scary than a freaky puppet Nancy Reagan?
February 5, 2013 at 5:37 pm
Tarantulas, maybe even today. What looked like one bit my right arm as I was lying belly down on my parents’ bed. (And then there was a glow-in-the-dark tarantula toy and a honey bee one, both realistic.)
The first enemy you encounter in the 1997 PC game of “Goosebumps: Attack of the Mutant”, not to mention the Background Music (BGM for short) that accompanied it (I didn’t know how to defeat it back then.).
A woman’s stone head in a ravine full of snakes in The ClueFinders 3rd Grade Adventures: The Mystery of Mathra (at the Monkey Kingdom, mind you); oddly enough, the Four Flowers that you first encounter at Goo Lagoon don’t bother me.
Morty Maxwell’s henchmen of “Outnumbered!” (“Telly” and a dismembered plug for a snake that attacks with electric shocks) and “Gizmos & Gadgets” (CYBERCHIMPS, so left them out in settings or something) of the Super Solvers series of The Learning Company also got me on my nerves. I also thought that the bats of Logic Quest 3D were creepy and deadly when in truth they carry you to a random place in a map.
The BGM of Hide & Species (?) game of “The Magic School Bus Explores The Rainforest” and one track that involves howls of wolves in the PC game called I See SUE … the T-Rex (iirc, the game board that uses it features an active volcano flowing with lava).
Am I saying too much? I’m just sharing what I experienced.
February 6, 2013 at 6:30 am
I remeber both the Gate and the Bunyip thing. What was the Bunyip segment from? It’s driving me mad now
February 7, 2013 at 3:14 am
Oh yeah it was that laugh a minute cartoon Dot and the Kangaroo
February 7, 2013 at 3:37 am