TV MEMORIES HALLOWEEN SPECIAL - THINGS THAT SCARED ME AS A CHILD.

 

It's Halloween and I hope the spookiest day of the year finds you in good spirits...of all kinds.

It's been a while since I last did a TV memories article (and they did used to be quite popular), so what better time to resurrect the old format than today ? - the day when things generally tend to come back from the dead.

Halloween is a time for being afraid. Not "real life" worries (we have all year to be bothered by them) but instead it's a good time to turn to more fun, cosy terrors. Those little snippets of fear that chill our bones and gladden our hearts at the same time.

What time in our lives do we usually first encounter these things ? Childhood mainly. Usually via TV shows and screenings of old horror movies. I grew up in the late 70's and 80's - a time when that bulky fat CRT telly sat in the corner of the living room was a veritable treasure trove of TV terror. Here then (in no particular order) are some of the things which scared me on telly as a kid.

THE SPIRIT OF DARK AND LONELY WATER

70's and 80's public information films where the stuff of nightmares for many kids growing up in Britain during this era. These little two minute jolts of nightmare fuel where designed mainly to inform and educate people to the many dangers that constantly surrounded them as they went about thier everyday lives.

You name it and it was going to kill you - horribly. Strangers, wet floors, broken glass on the beach, farmyard machinery - all these things had a short, scary film to show you just what fate would have in store for you if you ignored thier potential dangers. These films usually employed shock tactics to get the message across and -even worse - many of them always seemed to be shown during the ad breaks for kids TV programmes.

The worst of all was The Spirit Of Dark And Lonely Water.

This little film warned kids of the dangers of playing near water unsupervised. The titular spirit is a grim reaper style figure clad in a dark black robe. We never see his face but you JUST KNOW that underneath that cowl lies the face of a rotted grinning skull. A rotted grinning skull with the voice of Donald Pleasence no less. Yes - they'd only gone and employed a horror film actor to play the voice of the spirit. He lectures his captive terrified audience in a doom laden monologue about how they would surely DIE if they so much as even looked at a body of water. 

All these poor little kiddies wanted was to watch Tom and Jerry in peace and this big scary bastard was getting in thier faces about death by drowning. I should know because I was one of those kids. To make matters worse I couldn't even swim (still can't) so I wasn't likely to go playing anywhere near water anyway, yet I still had to endure this horror along with everyone else. 

To say I used to dread TV commercial breaks is an understatement - and it was mainly down to this fellow.

THE OPENING CREDITS TO ARMCHAIR THRILLER

Armchair Thriller was an anthology drama series that ITV used to air on Thursday nights during the late 70's. Apart from an episode about a ghostly nun the actual episodes themselves didn't contain much in the way of terrifying content. No - what really got you was the opening credits.

Picture if you will a darkened room, empty except for a single armchair. Creepy music plays over the soundtrack. Suddenly a disembodied shadow figure hovers in front of the armchair. It doesn't so much walk, rather it floats, eerily, it settles down into a sitting position as if watching us watching it. The title card "Armchair Thriller" appears on screen in blood red lettering.

If you weren't already soiling your Planet Of The Apes Y-fronts by this point then you where made from far sterner stuff than I was at five years old. But then...worst of all... a picture of a screaming distorted face appears onscreen to a dramatic sting of music. If the armchair shadow ghost wasn't enough to give you nightmares for a week then this would have DEFINITELY finished you off.

I mean just look at it !!!!!

To make matters worse those bastards at ITV always used to put this picture on screen when advertising what was coming on TV that night. So even if you where canny enough to totally avoid Armchair Thriller whilst it was being broadcast, you still had a pretty much ninety five percent chance of seeing THAT face on your telly at some point in the day, sometimes as early as two o'clock in the afternoon. 

Perhaps it was good idea to just go play outside all day whenever Armchair Thriller was due to be shown. Just to be safe...

THE MAN WITHOUT A FACE - SAPPHIRE AND STEEL

Sapphire and Steel was a Sci-Fi/horror series starring Joanna Lumley and David Macallum as two extra dimensional entities who travelled through time and space putting right dangerous anomalies, this, of course, often put them directly in the line of fire of various other evil extra dimensional creatures, spirits and monsters. 

If this sounds a bit similar to Doctor Who to you then you're totally right in this observation as Sapphire and Steel was basically ITV's answer to that show. Unlike Doctor Who though Sapphire and Steel had a less jokey tone to it and the storylines where more skewed towards an adult audience (even though it was on at about 7.30 in the evening and plenty of kids watched it).

This terrifying specimen appeared in season two of the series and has gone on to become one of THE most memorable images associated with the series and for good reason.

Sapphire and Steel was one of many TV shows that "I watched but didn't watch" with my Dad, which basically meant that I sat with my back turned to the TV whilst he watched it, occasionally turning round to catch the odd furtive glimpse of the televisual terrors my Dad was currently enduring. I'd occasionally catch glimpses of things like this and that would effectively be it for me sleeping alone that night. 

Sapphire and Steel wasn't the ONLY TV show that I "watched but didn't watch" at that time, there was at least one other and long time readers of this blog will pretty much know what's coming next...

DOCTOR WHO - CITY OF DEATH

I've gone on at length before about how Doctor Who (specifically the Tom Baker years) used to scare the living shit out of me (good scared though, I still used to enjoy it even though I barely dared look at the screen).

One moment stands out above all though and that's at the end of Episode One of the story City Of Death. Julian Glover as Count Scarlioni stands in front of a mirror and literally PULLS HIS OWN FACE OFF revealing this tentacular cyclopian nightmare hidden beneath his flesh.

It looks dated now but pound to a penny it probably scared the crap out of more little kids than anything the modern series cares to serve our way these days.

Speaking of little kids...

THE GLICK BROTHERS - SALEM'S LOT

Vampires can be pretty scary when done right. I'm not talking the pretty boy crap we get in films like Twilight or even good old Bela Lugosi in his Dracula cape (although he IS cool). I'm talking more when we get vampires that come over as properly predatory. A vampire is a dead loved one, come back to life but...wrong. Wrong because of thier newfound appetite for blood. Wrong because the person you thought you knew and loved now only sees you as a potential foodstuff. It's a horrible idea and Tobe Hooper's TV mini series adaptation of Stephen King's novel takes that ball and runs with it.

This sense of wrongness is never more evident than with Danny and Ralphie Glick, two innocent young boys transformed into deadly vampires.

I don't know what's worse - little Ralphie floating outside his brother's window looking to feed on him or the newly vampirised Danny sitting up in his grave to feast on the local gravedigger. 

It's the glowing eyes and that horrible scraping sound as they scratch on thier intended victim's window panes at night, begging to be let in. 

Who wouldn't shit ten bricks when being confronted with this ? I know I did as a kid and what was worse...so did my Dad. He was in his late thirties when he first watched this film, he's now in his late seventies and STILL to this day he can't bear to watch the scenes with the Glick boys floating outside that bedroom window. It's the eyes I tell you...and the fingernails...

Talking of horrifying bedroom encounters...

THE BEDROOM SCENE - THE WOMAN IN BLACK

No, I'm not talking about the early noughties "new Hammer"/Daniel Radcliffe version of Susan Hill's gothic ghost story but rather the earlier TV version that was broadcast on ITV on Christmas Eve 1986. This version lacks the slick budget and big star names of the newer version but what it lacks in glitz it more than makes up for with sheer atmosphere and contains one scene of outright ball mashing terror.

Our hero is spending the night in the haunted house in which the story takes place and is awoken in the dead of night to find the ghostly woman in black hovering over him in bed and staring him down with the most hideous and downright terrifying facial expression I think I've ever seen...

Just imagine waking up in the middle of the night and seeing THAT !!!! It's the mad staring eyes and the malignant grin that promises untold horrors to come. I wasn't a little kid when I first saw this (unlike the other entries in this article) but it still got me where it counts and looking at that face still gives me the creeps even now at the age of fifty. Now THAT'S powerful horror storytelling and acting. The newer version doesn't even begin to come close.

Well, that's just about it for this particular jaunt down memory lane. There's many, many, MANY more things that tickled my fear bone when I was a kid, this is just scratching the surface so I may well do this again some time.

Until that fateful day have a happy Halloween and remember...don't have nightmares...