The exhausted dad: The subjective face of terror

Pennywise, Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers… none of them can compare to the VHS cover of a Mickey Mouse cartoon.

The things that scare us as kids are often unpredictable and ridiculous. I remember seeing the face of Freddy Krueger for this first time as a very young kid and thinking, “What’s the deal with this goofy looking dude?” (As a Ninja Turtles fan, I said “Dude” quite a bit).

On the other hand, I also remember waking up one evening and going to look for my parents, who were watching “Misery.” I only saw a few seconds of it, but I remember Kathy Bates holding a sledgehammer. Long story short, Kathy Bates haunted my dreams for YEARS.

Horror aficionados lovingly refer to these moments as “kindertrauma,” with somewhat tame horror-tinged projects like “Beetlejuice” and “Gremlins” imprinting on young viewers in terrifying ways. For some reason, it often results in a future love of such artificial terrors. I went to see “Jurassic Park” as a kid because I loved dinosaurs. I left the theater terrified of Velociraptor and couldn’t sleep for two nights, but now it’s my favorite movie of all time. Kinda messed up if you think about it.

But even with genetics at work, you can’t predict the things that will scare your kids. The scary bits of “Jurassic Park” didn’t phase my kids at all, but a wayward corpse in “The Goonies” I forgot about gave my oldest daughter a jolt she still reminds me of three years later. “Why would you show that to me?” she says.

Back to that Mickey Mouse cartoon for a second. I remember opening this VHS tape on Christmas around the age of 5 or 6, and it featured Mickey trembling in a dark hallway while being followed by two tall shadows with white eyes. I couldn’t tell you the name of this cartoon because I. Never. Watched. It. Not once. I treated that VHS like “The Ring,” and kept that thing from unleashing a long-haired ghost girl through my television screen.

I’m sure it was nothing, and yet, part of me still feels the shivers I felt as a kid, wondering about what terror poor Mickey faced in that hallway. That’s why I couldn’t easily dismiss my oldest daughter’s first “scary movie.” She was 5 and watched the “Curious George Halloween Special.” It was objectively NOT scary, but because she loved “Curious George” so much, any disruption to that universe proved scarring. In this case, the story features the legend of “No Noggin,” a headless scarecrow who haunts the countryside and likes to kick the hats off unsuspecting passersby.

He doesn’t have a head, so, you know, he resents people who wear hats.

Anyway, my daughter did NOT like No Noggin, which, I think, turned out to be nothing more than Jumpy Squirrel building a collection of hats to store his nuts? But she talked about it for months, and when we went trick-or-treating that year, she trembled at every shadow and worried about hat theft. Her costume didn’t even have a hat.

A few years ago, we took our entire family to see “E.T.” on the big screen, and after, whenever I mention the movie, my oldest son, who was maybe-5 at the time, talks about “Creepy White E.T.” I always try to clarify, “Oh, you were worried and sad that E.T. might die?” He’d respond, “No. I don’t care about that. He just looked creepy.”

It’s literally the only thing he remembered from watching “E.T.,” a movie I imprinted on in the opening seconds the first time I saw it at a similar age. How could he find poor, shriveled, almost-DEAD E.T. to be a threat?

Luckily, we showed the movie again to everyone this Halloween season, and, now that he’s 9, my son enjoyed the movie much more and didn’t flinch at the pasty fella this time. I worried, however, that my youngest son, now 5 himself, would be terrified of the same image, and so I spent most of the movie whispering him the plot just before anything could surprise him on screen.

Well, white E.T. didn’t scare him at all (it made him very sad though), but he REALLY didn’t like that guy with the keys. The mere sound of jingling made him jump. It’s an understandable reaction (he’s made to seem like an adversary, if temporarily), but on its face, it’s just a ring of keys. BUT… if you think about it for a second, why does he have so many keys? Does he have a dungeon in his basement?

I’d still rather face him than whatever beastie wanted to murder Mickey.

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Tyler Wilson is a freelance writer, full-time student and parent to four kids, ages 5-11. He is tired. He can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.