‘The History of What Scared Me as a Child, and Prepared Me To Become a Modern Horror Writer’ by Michael H. Hanson

I was born near the end of 1961, and here is a not quite comprehensive list of scares and frights, not all artificial, that terrified me, delighted me, occasionally froze my soul, and inevitably vaccinated my psyche to one day become a writer of horror.

For those a little bit older than me to those a little bit younger, perhaps you share some of these same traumatic events. I end these examples in the year, 1975, when I had turned 14, and spent the next 5 years mostly, but certainly not completely, ignoring horror and embracing mainstream Science Fiction. (Though a shortlist of either horror movies or films with scary sequences I watched in my latter years of teenhood include CARRIE, THE SENTINAL, THE FURY, MAGIC, PHANTASM, THE EXORCIST, JAWS, IT’S ALIVE, KILLDOZER, and THE SHINING).
 
Goldilocks and The Three Bears

Being read children’s stories in my preschool days, as well as in Kindergarten, delighted me to no end. But it was probably the tale of this cocky Caucasian chick and her adventure with some of the most dangerous mammals on the Planet Earth that I found quite disturbing. When I would hear this story being read aloud, I kept thinking that something terrible was going to happen during Goldi’s strange adventure, something that often bothered my sleep.
 
1966 THE WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS big screen movie

This was one of a big number of movies I watched at The Family Theatre, Purlacher Forst, Munich, Germany, back when I was one of five army brats living overseas wherever our father, a Sergeant in the U.S. Army, was stationed. Caught it at an afternoon matinee. Yep, this flick gave me nightmares for a few nights. This was the European version where the gigantic evil green Gargantua Gaira, after snatching up a terrified Japanese woman, tosses her into its mouth, and chews on her, spits outward, and grey, shredded rags/clothes splat on the grounds of the airport. In the version that one can now watch on streaming American TV, what lands on the ground after the Gargantua Gaira spits, is an enigmatic bundle of flowers. I’d say of all my childhood villains, the terrifying green Gargantua Gaira reigns supreme!
 
1967 WAIT UNTIL DARK big screen movie

My late mom knew I loved movies, and for some reason that I cannot remember this late in my life she took me one night to see a movie starring Audrey Hepburn, Alan Arkin, and Richard Crenna. Just her and me, not my father, my two sisters, nor my two brothers. Just the two of us. The film ended up being an intense psychological thriller about a blind woman terrorized in her Greenwich Village Apartment by criminals. I was so scared during this film I literally begged my mom for permission to leave, that I knew the way home to our apartment building from the theatre (it was just a five-minute walk away), but she just kept telling me to “hush,” and that we would be home soon enough. Alan Arkin’s creepy character Roat scared the living daylights out of me and I was terrorized by the thought of what he might do to Hepburn’s character Susy Hendrix.
 
1967 FIVE MILLION YEARS TO EARTH (QUARTERMASS AND THE PIT) big screen movie 

This was a Sci-Fi film that I found a lot of fun, except for the fact that it had a really scary edge to it. The whole family went to see it at night. I clearly remember the chilling finale, where the character of the scientist Roney climbs a large, tall building crane and swings it into the gargantuan, flickering spectral image of an insect-like Martian that had risen above the London skyline and was mind-controlling thousands of citizens that had a genetic inheritance granted ancient humans millions of years ago. The crane bursts into flames as it discharges the evil energy. The sight of the giant spectral Martian had me throwing my hands over my eyes in terror.
 
1968 MISSION MARS big screen movie

A laughably bad Sci-Fi film starring Darren McGavin and Nick Adams, was pure joy and adventure for the boy-child I was at the time. It was an afternoon matinee that cost a mere 25 cents at The Family Theatre, where a three-astronaut American Crew land on Mars to suddenly find themselves under attack by strange alien beings known as Polarites. The penultimate scare for me was the screaming image of an astronaut whose helmet’s face-plate has been disintegrated by a Polarite energy beam weapon that has fried his eyeballs into two silvery looking blobs. I made every effort at this point in the movie, where I was sitting in the front row, to will all my atoms beneath the chair itself, but unfortunately, was unable to do so.
 
1968 First Grade Fire

Late in December of 1968, in my First Grade home room (while I was a U.S. Army Brat in Purlacher, Forst, Munich, Germany), we had a little Christmas celebration. My home room teacher placed small white candles on each of our desks. She then used a lighter and lit all of our candles. She then turned off the overhead lights. Next, we began singing “Silent Night, Holy Night.” A short time later, it might have been a few, or several seconds, I just don’t remember this late in life, there was a sudden SWOOSH sound to my right and a short flash of light that I noticed in my peripheral vision. Simultaneous to this I felt a slight rush of air pass across my face, from left to right. Less than a second after this a terrible scream erupted from my right. The lights immediately came on and I saw my teacher sprint in a blur, from left to right, across the width of the front of the room, while holding a partially folded green U.S. Army blanket, with the front green chalkboard acting as the background. A sickly, oil-like stench filled the air, as I, and all my classmates just looked about ourselves in shock. A moment later we saw the teacher pick up the girl who sat two seats to my right. She was wrapped in a smoking blanket. The teacher yelled out that everyone must stay seated and she’d be right back. She ran out the exit door with the girl. I don’t remember any more details about that day. I don’t remember the name of that girl whose frilly, diaphanous dress had turned into a blazing torch in less than a second. I don’t think I ever found out exactly what had happened to her, other than the possibility that for some reason some part of her dress had just gotten too close to her lit candle. I remember she survived the incident, but never returned to the classroom after Christmas. I remember the entire class joined in to create a giant Get Well Card for her. My home room class went to the Base Hospital to visit her and deliver the card, but when we arrived we were told she could not have any visitors that day, and we were taken and shown a few rooms in the hospital like some kind of field trip. I completely forgot about this incident over the next couple of years. One day, while visiting my parents during college break in my mid 20’s, I was outside the house when a Mack Truck flew by on the nearby street. A sickly burning oil smell filled my lungs. This smell bothered me for several hours until I basically, without notice, instantly remembered the whole horrifying ordeal that had occurred years ago in my First Grade Home Room overseas. I approached my mother and she quickly confirmed remembering that incident, but could not remember the name of the girl who had been tragically burned. This memory has haunted me over the years. I described it in my second book of poetry, JUBILANT WHISPERS. And yep, this really did happen to me.
 
1969 THE VALLEY OF GWANGI big screen movie

Another afternoon matinee adventure which cost 25 cents to view and a mere 10 cents for a long, thin white bag of buttered popcorn. Those were the days. It started slow and the whole cowboy background was okay, but the fun really began when we enter the strange valley and the Ray Harryhausen stop-action-animated dinosaurs became the true stars of the flick. The truly terrifying part for me was at the end where the lead characters of James Franciscus’s Tuck Kirby and Gila Golan’s T.J. Breckinridge, are chased into a huge cathedral by a hungry T-Rex. The scenes of the big scary dinosaur hunting the movie’s heroes through the shadowed cavernous church had me shaking in horrified expectation. 
 
The China Doll

During a Sleepover at my house, when I was about 8, in the late 1960’s my older sister acted out her variation of the oral tradition of late night ghost story, “The China Doll.” My sister turned off all the lights in the living room where my friend/next-door-neighbor and I were sitting, bug-eyed, on our sleeping bags. My sister creatively used a flashlight to light her face when describing the terrifying face of the evil little porcelain China Doll that was recently gifted to a spoiled rich girl who cared about nobody but herself. Her parents were murdered/stabbed by an unknown intruder two nights in a row, where the naughty daughter heard a strange noise each night, like the sound of tiny feet running across floors in the house.

My sister would whisper the words “ticky ticky ticky” while moving her right index and middle finger like they were small legs running across the living room floor. The tale ended as something opened the girl’s bedroom door on the third night, hopped onto her bed, moved across the covers, until the girl pulled the blanket off her head to see the China Doll holding a sharp knife over its head, with a terrible expression on its face, screaming a terrifying scream. This part of my sister’s performance was accentuated by holding the flashlight like it was a butcher knife, with the beam of light pointing downwards across her snarling face while she screamed as loud as she could. Yeah, that little inappropriate, trauma-inducing, late night Asian ghost story stuck with me for years.
 
1970 COUNT YORGA, VAMPIRE Drive-In-Theatre Movie

When we first moved to my mom’s home town of Massena, NY (from Germany) during the span of one year where my father served a single tour in Viet Nam, for a couple of weeks between duty assignments, my dad moonlighted as a projectionist at the local Route 54 Drive-In Theatre. And one particular weekend summer night I rode with my father to this night job, and sat in the room adjacent to the second story projection booth to watch this corny low budget horror film through a large glass window. The scene near the end, where one heroic character is holding up a makeshift cross while walking towards a retreating Count Yorga, while unknowingly being stalked by two female vampires behind him, well, let’s just say that sequence really freaked me out.
 
1972 THE NIGHT STALKER TV Movie

You’d think sitting in one’s living room watching a TV Set that not only wasn’t all that large, but had the kind of resolution that would be considered unforgivable to today’s Cinephiles, and surrounded by two parents and four siblings, I would feel quite safe. Nope. Not gonna happen. I’m sure a lot of you out there remember this little horror gem. Near the end of the film, the whole sequence where INS Reporter Karl Kolchak (played by Darren McGavin) and FBI Agent Bernie Jenks take on the terrifying vampire Skorzeny had me rocking back and forth in my seat in barely suppressed fear. 
 
1973 DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK TV Movie

Oh boy this one gave me the willies for quite a while. A few years after her top-notch role as Mattie Ross in the movie TRUE GRIT, Kim Darby plays a young housewife who moves into a new home and accidentally frees three small inches-tall goblins, who spend the movie trying to capture her and drag her down into a cavelike domain behind a once bricked up fireplace in the basement. All the closeups of the small creatures communicating in the dark definitely gave me the heebie-jeebies, and made it very difficult to go to sleep that night.
 
1975 “Dragon’s Domain,” SPACE 1999 TV Show

After watching reruns of Star Trek and UFO for a few years, Space 1999 was a fun little romp with semi-serious adventures each week that catered pretty well to my young teen Sci-Fi sweet tooth… that is, until the night I watch this nightmare inducing fright gem. A small spaceship graveyard of lost/decrepit mostly alien ships is a truly chilling setting. And in this graveyard lurks a Lovecraftian, tentacled monster that seems to appear in one particular ship, as if from another dimension, whenever human beings (or presumably other sentient aliens) arrived, and attacks. Possessing telepathy to first mesmerize its victims, telekinesis to force them to move toward it, and then wraps tentacles around them to drag them into its maw. And then the truly horrifying punchline to its actions, it spits them back out as regurgitated charred remains. Yeah, this episode of the show ends with the good guys killing the big bad monster, but a couple of sleepless nights definitely followed this night of creepy weird TV Viewing.
 
1975 “Story Three: Amelia,” TRILOGY OF TERROR TV Movie

Yep, this was a TV movie that featured three separate stories, each one starring actress Karen Black playing different lead characters in all three short films. The most famous of the shorts is the third one, “Amelia,” which tells the tale of a woman who purchases a terrifying-looking Zuni Fetish Doll for her anthropologist boyfriend for his upcoming birthday. She accidentally breaks a small chain on the doll which kept the evil spirt of a Zuni hunter trapped within it, whereupon, it comes to life, and a running battle between human and crazed doll breaks out that made my eyes bug out and my blood boil. The large teeth and gargling scream of this rampaging little monster freaked me out to no end. The surprise ending is a great twist. And yes, this led to a few sleepless nights. And yes, the entire trilogy was written by the renowned writer, Richard Matheson, which explains the effectiveness of fear in this short film.

And there is my confession… much of what branded my soul with an eventual penchant for penning scary stories. How about you folks? Did any of these quoted movies and/or TV shows light a fire inside you during childhood?