Tarkblog

When I was a wee lass, my parents used to bowl a couple of nights a week, which meant that I had to spend the evening at my grandparents’ house.

My grandparents (maternal) are the bastion of 1950s family values. I stayed in the bedroom that was my mom’s growing up, sleeping in the same bed, with the same furniture adorning the room. If I was to go to their house now, the stuff in the drawers and closets would be the exact same stuff that was in there when I was 5. This was not, by any means, a kid friendly room.

My grandparents didn’t have any toys, other than a few that they had kept from when my uncle was my age - and I could only stay occupied with pre-fisher price plastic men for so long. They didn’t have cable or satellite, just whatever the “aerial” picked up - which wasn’t much. Plus, in the evenings my grandfather always watched the local news, then the national news, then the PBS news…again, not very kid friendly.

Anyway, this was also around the time that the movie Nightmare on Elm St. was so popular. And like any dumb little kid, I watched it at a friend’s house - a friend whose single mom didn’t care what we did.

This movie traumatized me - it’s a pretty lame movie now, but in retrospect I had no idea how much Freddy Kruger would haunt my dreams after seeing that movie.

How does this relate to my grandparents? Because I always had the same nightmare everytime I would stay at their house, in this decrepit room, with nothing to do but go to bed. I didn’t want to go to bed, but what else was I going to do? And I’d dream the same dream, week in and week out, which involved chasing and gut tearing by knives of steel.

It didn’t help that one of the network stations started an evening nightmare on elm st. series, which I also watched when I could get away with it. This just made things more complicated. I can still remember a scene where Freddy dunks a guy’s face into a deep fat fryer at a fast food restaurant. They didn’t actually show the act, but damn, that got me.

Then, I got overwhelmed when the made-for-tv-movie “V”, about the colonization of earth by aliens, was put on TV. For some reason, my parents let me watch it. Again, the bad dreams persevered.

A few years later, I was playing with the hick kid from down the road, and he told me about a nightmare he was having frequently: he was being chased by a bull near his chicken coop. I always thought that was funny - I mean, who has dreams about being chased by a bull near a chicken coop?

So hit me back - who traumatized your mind as a little kid? Who (fictionally) still scares you now?

The two people that stand out in my mind right now as just downright creepy are the tall dude from Phantasm and the old lady from Goonies (Mama Fratelli) and Throw Momma from the Train.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 16th, 2005 at 10:11 am and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.