Night Gallery … either The Cemetery or The Doll.
Oh, og, I love the internet.
I wanted to post but didn’t think my reference to a local, southern horror movie TV when I was growing up in the mid-sixties would resonate, but through the magic of google, I found a reference to it:
Sivad and Fantastic Features (see the lower half of the link that comes up).
The horror movies that were broadcast were sometimes obvious in their attempts at terrifying effects and therefore not-so-scary, but the opening scene, where the host (who intros each movied) guides a horse-drawn hearse along a dark, country road (similar to where I lived), then the introduction “Gooooood eeevening. I am Sivad.” scared the living shit out of me.*
Anybody here remember that show and Sivad in particular?
- In a delicious kind of way.
you can stop hating now
Jim’s dead — taking a dirt nap, yanno
Several years ago, when I was teaching Literature to a bunch of jaded 8th graders, I showed them the Twilight Zone episode, “To Serve Mankind”. It was an example of Tone, one of the Elements of Fiction. It’s very much a talking head episode. There’s very little physical action, and for kids born after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the special effects are laughable.
Every single kid was riveted. Every single kid was utterly horrified by the ending. I even got the first class to promise not to tell the ending to the next class. They were happy to cooperate. I later heard from some of their parents that their child would NOT stop talking about it at home.
Heh.
Heh.
Heh.
I do so love being a teacher.
That’s the same episode Otto was talking about. Yeah, that one’d be up there for me. Along with the X-Flies ep.
Oh my God - childhood nightmare relived! The statues voice still gives me the heebie-jeebies.
That ep. was messed up in all kinds of ways. I have been traumatized for life.
awesome job !
“It’s a cookbook !”
A while back I started a thread called Things that creeped you out as a kid. Number one on the list was on, I believe Friday Night Movie. It was The Trilogy of Terror. Not all three-- the troll doll one.
Here’s the ending. . . if you DARE!!!
To Serve Man, you mean?
That probably would’ve scared me at that age, too, except that I sort of knew the ending, having scene the Simpsons episode that riffs on it.
Seeing Eye of the Beholder in school at about age ten was pretty freaky. My first real mind fuck.
I just watched an old Goosebumps episode about a haunted mask, and it actually freaked me out now.
If we’re doing movies, too, did anyone see The Witches? I still have trouble watching the…uh…really scary scene, even now.
If TV movies count, then the kid at the window in Salem’s Lot freaked me the hell out when I was a kid. Doesn’t look as scary now, but in the late 1970s- man, that was some evil shite.
Other terrifying “lights on til further notice” TV movies when I was a kid included Helter Skelter (an early study in skepticism, incidentally- I wasn’t quite as terrified when I learned that the movie really played up mystical/supernatural elements of Manson that were all in fact exaggerated to begin with and attributible to natural explanation) and 1980’s Guyana Tragedy: the Jim Jones Story with Powers Booth (so terrifying that when I saw Booth on Deadwood 25 years later I still thought of him as creepy) and also, like Helter Skelter, they played with the facts a bit (the mass suicide really happened of course, but among other things there were a lot more survivors on the airstrip than the movie implied and several real life characters were merged).
Nightstalker. The one where the Grecian Goddess is sucking the lifeforce out of young women and turning them ancient as a result. Yelled for my Nanna for about a week.
I was also a huge fan of Are You Afraid Of The Dark (I have all 91 episodes on DVD!) but the only episode that ever really scared me was The Tale of the Prisoner’s Past
This is kind of ironic because it was actually one of the “younger kids”-oriented episodes. AYAOTD episodes came in 2 varieties. There were the ones where the protagonists were middle or high school kids, often featuring some kind of romantic subtext and aimed at the teenager audience. The other kind of episode featured younger kids, like between 8 and 10, and were usually “adventure” themed, more comedic and less scary.
Tale of Prisoner’s Past was one of those episodes. It was about 2 kids, an older and younger brother, who go on a tour of an old prison and are haunted by the “ghost” of a prisoner called “one-eyed Jack” who was famous for being the only prisoner ever to escape from that prison (nobody knew how he escaped.) The ghost is very cheesy, the kids’ acting is horrible, and the first 90% of the episode is comically unscary. Eventually the kids wind up going back to the prison at night to investigate the cell where he supposedly escaped from (I don’t know what little kids would be brave enough to do that in real life, but they did.) Anyway, while in the cell, they notice a tiny little space in the wall behind a toilet and squeeze through it. And they get stuck in a ventilation shaft, and find a skeleton - and then they fall into a room below, and the ghost of One-eyed Jack appears and explains to the kids that…
he never actually escaped - HE GOT STUCK IN THE VENTILATION SHAFT AND DIED.
Here I am, like 10 years old, already very neurotic and extremely claustrophobic, and I’m processing what I’ve just seen on this show: the prisoner GOT STUCK IN A VENTILATION SHAFT - - - and presumably STARVED TO DEATH in there (how else could he have died?)
Aw, crap. Thanks for the nightmares.
I would hide under my couch whenever Dr. Who came on. The show itself didn’t scare me, but the opening music… To this day still gives me goose bumps.
Guess I’m kind of a wimp huh?
I don’t think of televised feature films fit this catagory, although I was never able to sit through The Wizard ofOz. Most recently I think it was the Dr Who ep The Empty Child. That creepy little boy - “Are you my mummy?”. Salem’s Lot got to me.
I don’t tend to watch scary things, but those stories just drew me in.
StG
I don’t know if you’re a wimp — but who is Dr Who?
For me it was some Fox show in the 80’s about werewolves that really did it. I must have been ten or so. Man, I didn’t trust anybody for a while after that.
OK, knowing the skill people around here have at figuring out obscure TV shows/films, maybe this can get identified. I was a kid in the '70s and '80s, and watched a heck of a lot of SF and horror on obscure channels. Japanese monster films, '50s and '60s SF, Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and so on.
The identity of a particular film or TV show is eluding me, however. I remember being freaked out at this scene where Jack Palance played a bad guy and was lured (?) into some kind of barn or basement that had straw or something obscuring a big pool of blackish goo. He wanted the good guy to help him out but ended up getting sucked under. I seem to remember that Palance had swindled the good guy out of something. I know this is really vague but I don’t want to add any falsely-remembered details and screw up the chances of identification. Anyone got any ideas?
Doctor Who! British SF/horror show with (usually) bad special effects, lots of monsters, and a theme song that had a kinda spooky, wailing/whistling tune to it.