When I was a little kid, like four or five years old, I would torture myself this way: while everyone else was watching tv in the warm, cozy, well-lit living room, I would sneak off to the dark, cold, empty kitchen. I would stand in front of the door that led down into the basement. Then, I would dare to pull it open just a little bit and look. All I saw was darkness. The wooden staircase vanished into the shadows. But I would just stand there and wait for it.
Click, click, click.
Then, heart thumping, I ran back to the warm, cozy, well-lit living room.
You see, I thought the clicking sound was Dracula walking up the stairs. Apparently, I had somehow seen a vampire movie at the young age and wanted to believe a vampire, perhaps Dracula himself, lived in the basement. I knew it wasn’t true, but I suspended my disbelief, and pretended the furnace clicking on was a member of the undead making his way upstairs.
I was such a stupid kid. Why did I do that to myself? For some reason, I’ve been thinking about the dumb movies and tv shows that scared me as a kid. And being that Halloween is upon us, I wanted to take inventory. YouTube has helped me find clips of all of the ones I thought of, even the more obscure ones.
Here’s a list, in no particular order, of the stupid things that scared me when I was a stupid kid:
Circle of Fear aka Ghost Story: Hippies and Jodie Foster
In the early 70’s, a show called Ghost Story (or Circle of Fear. There was a name change which I don’t get.) came on once a week. This show scared the chocolate milk out of me. I remember two episodes in particular, and I can’t believe YouTube came through and actually had them available.
The episode called Earth, Air, Fire and Water really creeped me out. A bunch of young artists (hippies we called them back then) form a creative studio and start disappearing. They’re spirits ended up in glass jars. This frightened me because I didn’t want to get stuck in one of the jars.
Imagine my surprise when the other episode I remember, called House of Evil, featured a very young Jodie Foster. She played a little girl whose doll house somehow allowed her to manipulate and control her family members. There’s even a house fire which made me afeared.
Jonny Quest: The Invisible Monster
Jonny Quest was the wild west of Saturday morning cartoons. There were gun fights, murder and violence before all those dumb regulations. Johnny, Hadji, Race Bannon, Dr. Quest and Bandit faced a lot of scary-ass monsters. The one that made me wither the most was The Invisible Monster.
This nasty looking giant ameba-looking thing would meander around the jungle at night moaning and groaning. It was invisible at first, but somehow, they made it visible (“make it invisible again, please!” I remember thinking when I was a kid).
Space 1999: Dragon’s Domain
In the mid-70s, there was a show about a space station on Earth’s moon set in the far-future of 1999. That’s Space 1999. I used to watch this show faithfully as a kid, and if I wasn’t a nerd before, I became one because of this show.
So, there’s this one episode I remember watching, and it traumatized me so much that years later, I thought I had imagined it. These astronauts encounter a big, ole alien monster with a million tentacles and a gigantic maw for a mouth.
Apparently, this space octopus had telepathic abilities. It mind-controlled the earthlings, and made them walk up to it, fall down, and slide on its slobbery tongue into its vast mouth. They screamed once they knew they were going to be eaten. A fiery burst erupted inside the monster’s mouth. Then –this is the part that traumatized me– this sucker would spit out a chewed-up, burnt-up corpse of its victim. It did this three times, and the others had to watch, knowing they were next.
Like I said, this scared me. I honestly thought I made it up until decades later, I searched YouTube and found it! The episode is called Dragon’s Domain and according to the comment section, I am not the only kid who found this episode disturbing. Good to know.
Land of the Lost: The Sleestaks
Yes, I confess. The recurring villains called Sleestaks, as featured on Land of the Lost, scared me. Especially when they were hibernating in their caves, they would slowly wake up and start hissing. Run, Holly, run! I had a major crush on you, so save yourself!
Many years later, I looked up clips of Land of the Lost on YouTube and realized –to my chagrin– how dorky the Sleestaks actually were.
Lost in Space: There Were Giants in the Earth
The first season of the original Lost in Space series was actually pretty good. And scary. It was in black and white, which didn’t help for some reason. I remember coming home from school and watching reruns of the show on channel 41.
That first season was scary for a lot of reasons. Dr. Smith was actually evil, not some cowardly clown. The Robinson family (and that smug Major Don West who was always leering at Judy Robinson) encountered lots of scary aliens on the planet they were stuck on. I remember being really frightened when they were in their shuttle van (I think they called it “The Chariot”) and somehow ended up floating in the middle of an ocean. A storm tossed, water was getting inside the chariot, and they were heading toward a whirlpool.
But, what scared me the most was the giant one-eyed pimp that Will Robinson took down. He was pretty bad-ass for a little nerd.
Scooby Doo: All those monsters in the basements
Every week, the gang would come across some monster terrorizing some small town in the mid-west and end up being chased by that monster in some unfinished basement. And remember the groovy music that was always piped in when the chase was afoot. Scooby Doo cartoons were fun, but some of those monsters really scared me. Especially the mummy.
The Lucy Show: Lucy and the Monsters
It’s not the I Love Lucy show, but just The Lucy Show. Lucille Ball plays Lucy Carmichael, and Vivian Vance plays Viv Bagley. In one episode, Lucy has a dream sequence in which Mr. Mooney is a vampire who turns Lucy and Viv into witches. For some reason, this really scared me when I was a little kid. I think it was the trauma of seeing “Lucy and Ethel” turn into old hags.
Aliens: They’re Inside the Room!
Profanity in the following clip:
Okay, I wasn’t a stupid little kid when I saw Aliens in the theater, but I was a stupid college kid. That scene when their scanners are detecting the aliens inside the room, but not seeing them had me trembling as I ate my popcorn.
Andrew M. Friday 
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