Terrifying Things
As a child, I was exceptionally wimpy, meek, and timid. I was basically terrified of everything. I wasn’t one of those kids reading Stephen King or Christopher Pike or R.L. Stine or anything even remotely scary. I wouldn’t even watch Are You Afraid of the Dark? when it came out, because I was absolutely sure this children’s show would deeply traumatize me. And once, an episode of Reading Rainbow gave me such bad nightmares that I had to go wake up my parents. Thinking back, I sometimes wonder how I even survived my own childhood.
Anyway, I started thinking about this when I was looking at this AV club piece on terrifying entertainment and this IFC list about the scariest moments in nonhorror movies.
The second list really resonated with me, because as a kid, I NEVER watched scary movies. All the things that really scared me were from nonhorror sources (including some of the ones on that list), or involved me having an extremely mild brush with something more traditionally horrific. And they were usually things I saw on accident.
So I’m going to go ahead and list, in no particular order, five things that absolutely terrified me as a child, starting with:
1. The art in the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books.
Okay, so this one actually is horror-related. Just looking at the above cover still kind of scares me. I feel like every stupid kid at Camp Winnebago had this book, and they made sure to bring it to sleepover night. And I was always pissed at them. Those books were full of terrifying pictures that I didn’t want to see, and the other campers were certain to show me things like this, or this.
That’s some horrifying shit! Especially for someone who didn’t learn to ride a bike until he was 10.
I don’t remember if the stories themselves were scary, because I did my best to avoid hearing them.
