h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've been having nightmares about giant gorillas for pretty much all of my life that I can remember. It's nearly always a case of a giant gorilla being loose and *wanting* me for some reason, and then I try to hide, but the gorilla always finds me. I always squeeze into a small hiding place hoping it would be out of reach of the gorilla, and always prove to be mistaken. I fear the gorilla will grab me and crush me. In the dreams it never actually gets to this point, but the fear is very intense. I'm still getting dreams like that ... and they trouble me quite a bit, indeed.

... well, I knew all this time that these nightmares probably come from my having watched the King Kong movie of 1976. I didn't watch it in 1976 (when I was four years old), though, but probably a year or two later. We watched it in the drive-in in Pretoria.

Now, I know I watched the movie, but I couldn't remember anything in it being particularly scary. I mean, I loved gorillas. At the same time I remember having read a book specifically about great apes, and having drawn lots of gorilla pictures. I even fantasised about making my own King Kong movie once I was 'grown up'. So why should I be getting King Kong nightmares?

The thing is I tried to remember the movie but I could remember almost *nothing* about it! Not even what Kong looked like in the movie. And also I could never get a video of the movie either.

Well now thanks to the wonder of YouTube I was able to find this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZDz5hc_qpI

The 'log scene' from the 1976 movie (but the version I saw didn't have the cat in it ). I would say that would be pretty scary for an impressionable 5- or 6-year-old ... and it has the 'theme' of someone trying to hide from the giant gorilla as it tries to grab him.

There may be more such scary scenes in this movie that might explain further features of my nightmares ... I hope I can find the entire movie sometime. Anyways I am of the belief that it helps to understand where fears or things that trouble you come from.

Space Patrol used to have me hiding behind the sofa on a Sunday afternoon

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1zUTXy7sqA&feature=related

That's an interesting one, lil. It reminds me of one we had in the US.

All I can say is, I think if the subconscious wants to tell you about something scary, it just latches onto whatever symbols it can find in your inventory of images.

Neither of those things would particularly frighten me.

On the other hand, cartoons gave me nightmares. I'm talking about 1950s cartoons on a black-and-white tv set.

Yosemite Sam going to Hell, now wasn't that funny? Woody Woodpecker growing old...the unhappiness of Casper, the Friendly Ghost...I hated cartoons, and mostly still do, because of their irresponsible epistemology...there was the incredibly stupid 'Beanie and Cecil' joke about 'No Bikini Atoll', ha, ha, jokes about nuclear testing aimed at small children...

For sanity, I watched 'The Twilight Zone'. It only scared me once.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfGWvexg90w

Hi there Lil and thanks for coming in with a comment!

You know I also had the habit of ducking in behind the chairs and sofas when I was ... well, about three to five years old. I used to be really scared of a couple of clowns on a really silly TV show. Later I got a bit scared by programs like 'Space 1999' (which was translated in Afrikaans as 'Alpha 1999'. Ridiculous rubber monsters, but as a very young child they were pretty scary! There was also a show about UFO's and I got scared a bit from it, and did get a nightmare or two clearly premised on one of the show episodes.

Those puppets can be quite creepy looking! Over here I can remember there were also such puppet TV shows: 'Stingray', and 'Thunderbirds'. But I didn't find them scary at all! I remember, I used to go watch those shows at the house of some English friends, and I think I started learning a bit of English with them. I certainly learnt the word 'puppets' very soon.

Later we had a similar marionette show that was made right here in South Africa called 'Interster' (Inter-Star) which was rather hilarious.

Anyways. Dmitri, I wouldn't know much about black-and-white fifties cartoons! I did get horrifying nightmares and disturbed visions about things I saw in some children's TV shows in the seventies, but I don't know if that was irresponsibility on their part or weirdness on my part.

Looking at some contemporary cartoons though, there are some pretty horrible things in them. I will speak about it with my nephew Christiaan when he's a bit older, I have already seen him getting scared by some cartoons ... now, of course, he's a bit older (6 years) and I think a bit more mature, but of course, still just a little boy.

Anyways thanks for the twilight zone link! It was a rather interesting series ... of course I never got to watch it in its original context, instead only having seen some of them a few years ago when we first got satellite TV. I got myself a book about the series a while before that, because there are ideas there that might stimulate me towards getting ideas for my own writings ...

Rod Serling and Richard Mattheson were brilliant writers. (You would be surprised at how much scifi you know that originated with Mattheson, starting with the Incredible Shrinking Man.)

It might look quaint to a modern audience, but in its own context it was ground-breaking. Scifi born in the Cold War. The episode I linked to was so terrifying because Serling was directly attacking the evil at the heart of American paranoia. (Subject for entire novel or book-length rant, I spare the reader...)

But on the subject of film/tv material that frightens children, I think that is why it varies. It's a matter of what we identify with.

As a small child, I was frightened by men in grey suits. Even though my father wore one 6 days a week.

I was afraid of the implications of that overdetermined social order. And I was right to be.

Thank goodness, by the time I was 18, we were all wearing bell bottoms...

My Nan said I had a very vivid imagination... and that if she caught me peeping through the crack in the door again, she would turn the telly off!

A peeping lil.

*giggles*


Then at the Saturday matinee, if there was a creepy sci-fi film shown, I could be found standing near the doors looking over the partition

Of course, I told my younger siblings I was going to the loo

Hi there again Lil and Dmitri! Dmitri, I've now watched all three parts of that episode. Sadly I already know the story having read the book ... but I like to see how it is visually portrayed, or *not* portrayed, leaving things to the imagination ... today it can be done with horrifying (or utterly lame - depending) computer graphics. Actually that story comes from Jerome Bixby and was adapted to TV by Rod Serling. It really is very frightening - people in such a situation (of course nothing like that could ever happen in real life I really would be quite interested in your book-length rant Dmitri!) *would* probably act like that and even 'censor' their own thoughts to stay alive. Or at least the ones who don't will end up like Dan Hollis and only the ones that do, will remain.

You're right. Serling was using the story to dramatise a phenomenon that was all too familiar in the 20th Century. Everywhere.

Serling was a Jew, he knew. When I saw that, I was a couple of years past having discovered the insanity in my own backyard.

Self-censorship? Nah, doesn't happen. It's only an accident that there's a word in German like Gleichschaltung...