One of the things we humans love to do during the month of October is to dwell on just what terrifies us. Isn’t that strange? Can you imagine if any other species, like say penguins, got together annually and watched depictions of what killer whales would do to them if they got half a chance? Or even worse, what undead killer whales would do to them?* For a whole month?
Sorry, I got distracted. Let’s get back to humans. To be fair, movies and television have had amazingly creepy movies and shows since the invention of moving pictures. As far back as 1922, with Nosferatu A Symphony of Horror, movie makers demonstrated that they knew how to make scary imagery. Vampires, werewolves, mummies, and the like have crowded each subsequent generation’s nightmares ever since. Have you ever seen Christopher Lee play Dracula? I mean, look at this:
This is terrifying! (Dracula (1958))
Which makes one wonder how something like this could induce nightmares, which came out almost 20 years later:
Trilogy of Terror (1975)
For those of you who are younger than Gen X, let me assure you that I am not joking. The “Zuni fettish doll” you see here is a stop motion nightmare and helped to terrorize all television viewers in the mid-1970s who weren’t already horrified by disco music.
For Gen X, the 1970s and early 1980s was a magical time, from an entertainment perspective. We were raised watching reruns of The Outer Limits, the Twilight Zone, and Lost in Space. These were classic shows and we loved them. But then the likes of George Lucas, Stephen Spielberg, and even Stephen King came along and rocked our world and nothing was the same ever again.
But the change wasn’t immediate everywhere. For every Jaws, there was a Piranha. And these corny shows and movies still scared us half to death.
Piranha (1978). 3 years AFTER Jaws
The result of growing up during this time was that we were terrified by both legit horror like Carrie, and also by things that will make most anyone today laugh hysterically. In an era when the Puppy Chuckwagon commercial exhibited cutting edge special effects, things like a stop motion doll found it all too easy to carve its way into children’s nightmares.
Pictured: special effects that came out the same year as Star Wars
Which is the subject of today’s podcast, Spooky TV. We discuss the television shows and made-for-tv movies that scared us growing up. We’re not ashamed that some of the cheesy monsters out there made sleep impossible for us. It was a different time, my friends. Let’s talk about what scares us, no matter how goofy.
*Note to self: write a story about undead killer whales.
Spooky Shows That Made Us Hide Under the Blanket