Night Terrors

When I was a kid, there were 3 things that simply terrified me: the Mummy, The Exorcist and Bigfoot.

The Exorcist was such a phenomenon that you really couldn't avoid it if you had a TV in the house. Come to think of it, it's the first "total media saturation" that I can recall witnessing in my life. They showed plenty of clips on TV, and the growling, levitating, green-faced girl scared the hell out of me.

My fear of The Mummy was just the result of a nasty coincidence. The plot of the mummy movie I saw was that someone had removed a broach from the mummy, and then when they x-rayed the mummy, it came back to life, and it wanted that broach back. So it walked very slowly towards wherever the broach was. Well, the week I saw the mummy, my weekly reader had a feature article about this actual mummy they recently x-rayed, complete with pictures of the gristly results. I was sure the damn thing was going to come after me, broach or not.

But those two fears were nothing compared to how much I feared Bigfoot.

See, all of these things got to me because they were all presumably real. (Granted, even as a kid I knew an x-ray wouldn't animate a mummy, but it was a real dead person in there just the same.) And Bigfoot was the most real of all. He could be standing in my yard at night, forchristsakes.

On top of that, for what seemed like a year they ran this commercial incessantly for "Sun Films International's Search for Bigfoot" (I think that's what it was - for once the web fails to produce a reference) which began with this unearthly wail/howl that was supposed to be a Bigfoot call. The sound of it would stop me in my tracks and I would be freaked for about 15 minutes thereafter. (I later discovered my brother-in-law had the identical fear and reaction to that preview.)

So, the other night when I saw the clip below, I was yet again glad to be born when I was. Had this prank been pulled on me, I'd've slumped over dead on the spot.
(Wish I'd have known this series was on at the time. But, thanks to Youtube, it's never too late.)


Direct Link

The look of abject terror on the girl's face is something. She. Just. Can't. Look. Away.