Ch-ch-ch-changes!

Hi gang. I'm going to try something a little bit different today, partially because I like to shake things up and partially because I'm still under the weather.

Today, I'm going to talk a little about movies, specifically, the Top 5 Movies That Scared Me as Kid. I was lucky enough to grow up in a golden age of kids movies, the 1980s. Back then, scares and frights and creepy stuff were a staple of kids movies, and I think that's something that's really missing from movies today.

We didn't grow up to be fucked up because of these films (okay, maybe a little bit), but they served a great purpose: they showed us that life isn't always going to be peaches and cream, that you have to face real challenges to life, you may come out changed, but you WILL get through the bad times. Today, fare for kids (with a few notable exceptions, and I might touch on one or two of those) is pretty damn squeaky clean. You can't dare to scare kids today; their poor precious psyches just can't take it!

Well, I say screw that! If I ever have kids, I'm gonna bring them up on the awesome and twisted films that I grew up with, and it's not going to kill them. Okay, enough of the ranting, on with the fun! Like all my lists, this is in no particular order.

5) The Wizard of Oz

Yep, the classic that has been messing with kids' heads since 1939! This was one of the earliest movies I ever saw, and it's still one of my favorites. For me, the scares largely came in the form of The Wicked Witch of the West, brilliantly played by Margaret Hamilton. I had the luck to see this movie on the big screen (the first time on the big screen for me!) a week ago yesterday, and the scene that always scared me still made me uneasy. It's when Dorothy is in the Witch's castle, and the Witch has left her alone with her crystal ball and the knowledge that she'll be killed in an hour if she can't get the ruby slippers off. When Dorothy is viewing the crystal ball, and her Aunt Em morphs into the Witch, who mercilessly mocks Dorothy, I still get chills. Hell, up until a few years ago, I couldn't even watch that part without covering my eyes! It's a stunning and incredibly image, to see one's beloved foster-parent shift into the evil that is hunting them. **shudder**

4) The Last UnicornAnd that image right there is one of the big ones who scared me: The Red Bull. This movie is about a unicorn who hears from some passing hunters that she's the last unicorn in the world, and so she sets out to find her missing brethren. She finds some traveling companions on the way, and through their journey, they find that an old, rather evil king named Haggard has had the Red Bull drive all the unicorns into the ocean near his castle so that he can view them any time he wants. The scenes where the unicorn confronts the Bull, especially the first scene, are just amazingly intense, and the bull's roar doesn't help matters any!

But as bad as those scenes are, they are NOTHING compared to the scenes of the harpy and Mommy Fortuna's traveling circus. Mommy Fortuna, scarily voiced by Angela Lansbury, is this withered old crone who captures the unicorn and adds her to her strange collection of mythical beasts. The unicorn and the harpy are the only members of this troupe who are the genuine article; the rest are all common animals that Mommy Fortuna has cast a spell upon to make them look like the real deal to the gullible public (like using a tired old lion as a manticore).

With the help of Schmendrick, the magician, the unicorn is able to escape from her cage, but she cannot leave without freeing the harpy. Once freed, the harpy begins to attack the unicorn, but Mommy Fortuna returns to gloat, shouting that they couldn't have freed themselves alone, that she helped them. That garners the harpy's attention, and she swoops down upon Mommy Fortuna, ripping her to shreds, feeding on her. It's a dark, dark scene, and I've always had to turn my head on that one (noticing a theme here? Yeah, I am a wuss, thanks for asking.)

3)The Goonies Okay, mostly lightweight scares here. In case you haven't seen it, The Goonies is a film about a bunch of kids whose families are about to be forced to move from their suburb so a golf course can be built there. The kids find what looks like a treasure map in the attic of the main kid, Mikey (played by Sean Astin), and they set out to find the treasure, in the hopes it can save their homes.

The first stop on the map is this run-down old restaurant, but bad news for the kids, a gang of criminals, Mama Fratelli & her sons, are staying in the place. The kids manage to escape & find their way down into the tunnels below the building, but one of the boys, Chunk, gets left behind in the freezer with a dead corpse. If that wasn't nightmare fuel inducing enough, the Fratellis find him and try to extract info from him about the map and the treasure. Mama Fratelli's mode of information gathering is singularly horrible and wicked: she slaps a blender on the table & threatens that she's gonna stick Chunk's hand in the blender if he doesn't spill his guts.

The other scene that made me a little jumpy as a kid is later on. I always found it to be an awesome scene, but it made me nervous. Along the trail of the map, the kids come into this room with a giant pipe organ made out of human bones. Yeeek. When they translate the Spanish map clues, they find that they have to play the song that is written on the map to proceed, but because of an accident earlier, part of the notes are burned and smudged. The other bad news is that wrong notes cause sections of the floor to drop out, and the Fratellis are closing in on them fast. It's a fast-paced, intense scene, and I think it may actually be my favorite scene in the whole movie now.

2) Return to Oz Okay, this one is a liiiiittle bit of a cheat because I didn't actually get to see the movie until I was an adult (only because we could never find it in our area; believe me, I made my parents look HARD!), but I had the graphic novel adaptation of the movie, so it was pretty close to seeing it.

This movie is a prime example of dark, fucked-up 80s kids films. Where to start with it? Okay, how about the fact that Dorothy gets taken to an insane asylum because her aunt and uncle think something is seriously wrong with her because she talks about her adventures in Oz? No? Well, what about the Wheelers? That's a hell of a lot of nightmare fuel there!

The Wheelers are kind of what they sound like: they're these guys with incredibly long limbs who have wheels on their feet, and they're the first enemy Dorothy meets in Oz.

The other big scares come from the main villains of the piece, though: Princess Mombi and the Nome King.

Mombi gets the worst scares in my book. She captures Dorothy and puts her in a tower, intending to take her head. See, Mombi has a collection of magically spelled heads, and she can change them at will, just like we'd change clothing. When Dorothy escapes the tower and steals Mombi's Powder of Life, she accidentally wakes one of the heads, and they all start screaming her name at the same time as Mombi's headless body comes searching for her. It's damn frightening, even for me now at 32!

1) The NeverEnding Story
*sigh* One of my most beloved films as a kid, and it still holds up well for me now. But man, are there some scary scenes in this sucker!

Okay, I'm gonna talk about the scary characters before I hit on the main scene that petrified me as a kid. There are so many characters in this movie who can induce frights, and they're not even all bad or scary folks. The first one who always frightened me was Morla, the Ancient One. She (? I was never sure as a kid or even now) is this giant turtle living in the Swamps of Sadness, and she's incredibly, incredibly cranky. I guess I would be cranky if I was sneezing every few minutes, but she shows so much animosity towards Atreyu. That's why I include her on this list.

I know some people find the Rock Biter (he's the one directly to our right of the girl in the middle of the poster) to be frightening, but he always just kind of made me sad. He never scared me; I just kind of wanted to cuddle him, especially towards the end of the movie.

Next, the wolf, Gmork. He was sent with a mission: to kill Atreyu and keep him from succeeding on his quest. You really only see glimpses of him until nearly the climax of the film, but his glowing eyes were frightening, and when he finally meets Atreyu in a cave and they learn who the other is. . ugh!

My final one isn't really a character as such, but you can't talk about this movie without mentioning the Nothing. The Nothing is the force sweeping through world of Fantasia, and it has caused the Childlike Empress to become deathly sick. Atreyu's quest is to find a way to defeat the Nothing & cure the Childlike Empress. But how can you defeat something that has no body? The Nothing is this black entity flowing through Fantasia, and anything it touches, it disappears, like it never even existed. People, places, animals, plants, everything. . . poof. That's such a scary thought, something that can make you disappear as though you were never even there.

And now, the scene that scared the pants off of me, and it still makes me jump. On his quest, Atreyu gets directed to the Southern Oracle by Morla; however, it won't be a simple trip to visit the Oracle as it is guarded by two giant sphinxes. These sphinxes can see into your heart, and if they see any uncertainty there, any sign that you are not firmly on your quest's path, their eyes open and emit this beam that chars you.

Atreyu goes headlong along the path to the Oracle, against the advice of the gnomes who helped him previously. As he walks towards the sphinxes, he spies the remains of a knight he had watched try to pass earlier. He slows his pace, becomes a little apprehensive, and as he nears, the face-guard of the knight's helmet flies open, showing his burned and charred face. *shiver* But it doesn't end there. Atreyu is now uncertain, and the sphinxes sense it; their eyes slowly begin to open the nearer he gets. I'm not going to completely spoil the scene in case you haven't seen the movie, but I'll just say it's a heart-pounding scene.

And there you have it! The five movies that scared me half to death as a kid. All things willing, we'll get back onto our schedule tomorrow, and I'll share issue #2 of Fables.