This isn’t one of mine, but my brother’s.
As a kid, I heard several times from our mom that when my brother was little he had a terrible nightmare about green shoes. It wasn’t until decades later that I was watching the Looney Tunes “Wearing of the Grin” that I realized that was what probably caused it. Asked bro and he was shocked that, yep, I had figured it out.
When I was like 4 or 5 I was at grandma’s looking through my dad’s old superhero and Archie comics and I found this which scared the living shit out of me. I stuffed it at the bottom of the stack and tried to forget it existed.
Just a few weeks ago, nearly fifty years later, it popped up on one of my favorite blogs, Stupid Comics. One look at the splash panel and I knew immediately what it was and had a mild PTSD reaction. In retrospect, I can’t blame myself for being scared; check out that fourth panel from the bottom.
This is my new favorite website.
I know, right?? An awesome place for lovers of old comics and snarky humor.
Movies, schmoovies, I was traumatized by a trailer.
The Dark Secret of Harvest Home was a 1978 TV miniseries based on a 1973 novel. A young couple moves to a community in rural Connecticut, and discovers that the townsfolk practice a fertility cult that involves the ritual slaughter of a “Harvest Lord”, chosen from among the town’s men, every seven years. If any outsider sees their rites, the women who lead the cult pluck out his eyes, or cut out his tongue.
The trailer was a climatic scene where one character, to whom this was done, takes off his black glasses to reveal…eyesockets stuffed with cotton.
This literally gave me nightmares. I most emphatically did not watch the miniseries; although I did a few years later read the book, the first horror novel I ever read.
That was in 1978. The year before, I walked out of Damnation Alley, a post-apocalyptic tale of a group of Air Force veterans crossing a nuclear-ravaged America and battling giant mutated scorpions and flesh-eating cockroaches. In one scene, Paul Winfield is swarmed by the roaches, and, in his panic, climbs into a burned-out car. Goodbye Paul, and goodbye young Slow Moving Vehicle, who noped out of the theater with his eyes firmly closed, and waited in the lobby for his friends to finish. (Tangentially, Damnation Alley was supposed to be 20th Century Fox’s big summer sci-fi blockbuster of 1977. Until it was overshadowed by the studio’s other sci-fi film released that year: Star Wars.)
I was creeped out by the ads for an early 1970s movie, which featured a picture of an ape with a television instead of a head. I think it was a spoof-ish movie, something like “Kentucky Fried Movie”. Anyone know what movie that was?
The Groove Tube.
Ahhhh!
PS Thanks