Small wonder that Roman Polanski was, shall we say, compelled to direct Tess in 1979. This is the text used on the one-sheet ( standard-sized movie poster ) for “Tess”
“She was born into a world where they called it seduction, not rape. What she did would shatter that world forever. She was a poor man’s daughter, an aristocrat’s mistress and a gentleman’s wife. She was Tess, a victim of her own provocative beauty. Columbia Pictures is proud to present a film by Roman Polanski], based on the classic Thomas Hard novel. ‘TESS’. As timely today as the day it was written”.
I’d forgotten this one when originally posting. My college housemate Don convinced me to go to a midnight screening of David Lynch’s Eraserhead. When the first shot of the infant was on screen I was so upset and nauseated that I left the theater. Despite some cruel ribbing from my housemate, I refused to go back in. We went home. To this day I cannot look at stills or footage of that creature.
I’ve posted about this before. The commercial for the horror movie Suspiria.
No scenes from, or even a description of the movie itself. No, it was the back of a woman’s head as she sings a little song. “Roses are red, violets are blue…” . Could have been a shampoo commercial. Until the head turns around and it’s a skull. IIRC it was shown in the afternoon, maybe not between cartoons but definitely before the dinner hour on channels that a kid would be watching. Feck me. Seeing it once was enough to make me run out of the room when it came on. I don’t even want to look it up in order to link to it
I can remember being terrified by the trailer for the 1979 horror movie Prophecy. The movie itself, as I found out later, was a pretty schlocky piece of silliness about a bear mutated by industrial waste. But the trailer was just a series of drawings of a developing fetus, each drawing more obviously monstrous than the last, with a scary voiceover talking about how horrible this creature would be when it was born.
Freaked me right out. Every time I went to a movie in those days, I used to pray that Prophecy would not be one of the trailers that they showed.
I’m sure he did learn lessons! I was on a Betsy Byars kick at the time, and I think all her books had exactly the same plot (basically good kid has a character flaw that defines them, encounters some crisis, comes out the other side having learned a Very Important Lesson). All her other books I found very comforting. This one, not so much.
When I was about 8, I read a one-book combination of Mark Twain’s "Tom Saywer " and “Huckleberry Finn” for kids in a German translation. I haven’t read the books since then (though I have the originals on my Kindle and plan to one time), but one bit scared the hell out of me, and I’ve never forgotten it. I don’t know if I got all the details right after 45 years, but this is how I remember it:
Tom and Finn have an arch-enemy called Indian Joe (or similar), and he goes missing for weeks. In the end, the boys find his body in a cave in which he obviously got lost and starved to death. One detail I remember is that he apparently ate his last candles out of desperation, and that gave me the heebie jeebies.
My scariest dream was when I was seven years old (give or take). Jiminy Cricket ate me. While I was being swallowed I saw what looked like a film leader - where the numbers were counted down. Every time I see that (and the Foreigner 4 album cover) I think of Jiminy Cricket.
I vividly remember babysitting a couple of neighbor kids one night. I was 12 or 13, I guess. They had gone to bed and I was watching The Birds on TV. When it started to get intense, I had a song running in my head - Simon and Garfunkel singing Somewhere They Can’t Find Me.
To this day, when I hear that song, I’m back in the Nash’s living room, scared but unable to look away. Don’t know if that counts as trauma, but it sure creeped out the younger me.
When I was pre-K my great aunt took me to see The King and I in Radio City Music Hall. For some reason the very first scene when the Siamese sailors came to the ship (it is very fuzzy) scared the crap out of me and we had to leave.
The Cowardly Lion’s appearance scared me every year when I watched Wizard of Oz.
And the original Invaders from Mars scared the crap out of me, possibly because we had a sand lot in our backyard. That at least was a reasonable cause for fright.
I had to read it in high school, although I was a few years older. IMO, anyone who gives an impressionable teen any Hardy novel to read should be charged with child abuse. I swear, the selection of novels we were given to read in high school was designed to stifle the love of reading in anyone by making you want to kill yourself. Tess, Great Expectations, McTeague, The Jungle.
Whoa. They gave you McTeague? Who the fuck reads McTeague anymore, except for people like us?
that has some serious nightmare fuel in it. Especially the amputation of Trina’s fingers after she gets lead poisoning, and her eventual murder by McTeague. And the final scenes in Death Valley, of course.
I’m always surprised by how many people can’t listen to American Girl (and sometimes Tom Petty in general) due to it’s use in Silence of the Lambs. Stuck In The Middle With You/ Reservoir Dogs, I can understand, but IIRC all that happened in Silence of the Lambs while that song was playing was her driving.
Well, if you think about it, a lot of ‘classic’ literature meant for young folks contains horrifying things.
Anyone remember Grimm’s Fairytales? Hansel and Gretel features an adult luring children in and putting them in an oven. There’s also Little Red Riding Hood, with the wolf who likes eating children.
My husband’s mother is German and there’s even more of these sorts of stories - she read to him from a book called Der Struwwelpeter with similar stories. A lot of these tales feature some pretty severe consequences for misbehaving children, including one where a tailor cuts off a child’s thumbs when he doesn’t stop sucking them. He’s 65 years old and still remembers some of these awful stories.
A lot of American YA literature also features kids whose parents are mostly or fully absent and the kids have to make it on their own. Some of them are Newbery award winners. While I suppose for some kids that’s a fantasy they can afford to indulge, I wonder what kids who are actually living that life must think. In reality that doesn’t tend to work out too well.
