What movie gave you nightmares as a kid?
No, I did not have a nightmare again like yesterday morning when I took a nap. A friend posted a question on a status today: “What movie gave you nightmares as a kid?” My comment on the status became so long that I decided to turn it into a post on here. I love it when I just naturally say so much that it becomes long enough for its own post. Can the writing process get any easier than when that happens?
I can’t think of any movie that gave me nightmares as a kid, even though my grandmother probably let me watch a lot more stuff then she should have even before I was school age. The only thing that really scared me about a movie when I was a kid was the bus scene in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2. I never had nightmares about it, but I was afraid to ride a school bus so much that my grandmother and my dad took turns taking me to school in the mornings in first grade. In second grade, they had me ride the bus for the first time even though I still didn’t want to. After the first day I rode it, and nothing happened, I was fine, and it never bothered me again.
There are only two things that gave me nightmares as a kid:
- I was seven years old the first time when I saw the Undertaker from WWE. For me, his original looks and sounds were the most intimidating he ever was because he seemed so dark and otherworldly until the year 2000. I have to admit I moved a little faster than usual to get the photo for this post. His voice was the worst of all. I hated it! It scared me to death, pun intended. I used to mute the TV whenever he would talk because whenever I accidentally heard his voice, it scared the crapola out of me. It scared me so much that one time, my Uncle David tried to force me to an Undertaker interview when I was 12, thinking I was too old to be afraid of that, I guess. But it scared me so much that I punched him in the groin to get away from him when he tried to keep me in the room. It wasn’t until July 1997 in the first interview that The Undertaker started openly talking about Kane that I voluntarily listened to him speak unmuted because it was the only way I could understand what was being talked about. But I used to have nightmares about him because of his look, sound, mannerisms, etc. all those years before that. Come to think of it, that could also be why I thought about death so much as a young kid. I was scared of dying and thinking about my mortality at a young age. It was also around that same time that my great-grandmother died. That was the first funeral I had ever been to or death I had ever experienced. So I was questioning death, and the meaning of life earlier than anyone else probably, or at least it was obsessively in the back of my mind more than other people my age probably. Thankfully, that all changed when I was 17 years old, and I first heard about Jesus Christ and what he did to defeat death. That changed my entire life.
2. The other thing that gave me nightmares is an attraction that I enjoy for the most part still today. The symbol of Walt Disney World’s Epcot is called Spaceship Earth. I was four years old the first time my family decided to take me on that ride. The darkness as they are first taking you up that long incline at the beginning was scary enough. But then there is that part where they start taking you back down backward slowly, and it looks like you are in outer space, looking at Earth as they start bringing you down backward. That, combined with the echoing voice of Walter Cronkite, who narrated the ride at that time, was more than my four-year-old senses could comfortably tolerate.
So those are the only two things that gave me a nightmare as a kid. I don’t ever recall getting a nightmare from a movie, although if a scene from a film scares you enough that you are afraid to get on a bus, I would say that is bad enough. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t see Stephen King’s It for the first time until I was older. I might have been afraid to be around drains.
