I don’t watch Scary Movies. My definition of “Scary Movie” is rather broad, broad enough to include Mother May I Sleep With Danger? (which I managed to get through only by the strength of my deep love for trashy Lifetime movies), broad enough to have resulted in a fair amount of ridicule over the years, and unless it’s in black and white or there are spies involved, I pretty much stick to comedies, romantic or otherwise, with the occasional drama thrown in for good measure. I am used to being mocked for my fear of Jacks-in-the-Box and the fact that while clowns do not scare me they do cause me to be suffused with embarrassment and ennui, and I am also used to the derision that arises when people learn that the film responsible for my prohibition on Scary Movies, the film that scarred me so deeply that it haunts me today, was made by…Disney.
In my defense, anyone who is roughly my age knows firsthand that Disney made some seriously twisted shit in the late 70s and early 80s (Return To Oz, anyone? Remember those christless WHEELIES??) under the guise of “family entertainment.” I saw them all, because I was in day care five days a week, before and after school and all day in the summer, and on rainy days there is only so much you can do with a passel of feral children. Alas, I have to question the judgment of the assortment of women (mostly named Lori, for reasons passing understanding) in charge of my care, for it was their choice of video that led to that fateful, traumatic viewing, at the tender age of eight, of The Watcher in the Woods.
This synopsis is fairly complete, and here (if you DARE!) is the original trailer:
See? SEE?
Here are what I remember as the salient terrifying bits:
–Family moves to creepy English manor, near some creepy woods. Creepy Old Bette Davis, in one of her very last roles, lives nearby. We meet Bette when our main character (a teenaged girl with terrible hair), nearly drowns and Creepy Old Bette appears and seems to be trying to speed up the process by pushing her further under water.
–The main character’s younger sister becomes sort of…benignly possessed, and decides to name her new puppy “Nerak.” She begins writing “NERAK” in unnatural backwards letters in the dust on a window, and when a townsperson gasps at the sight of the writing, we see that from the outside it reads “KAREN.” BECAUSE NAREK IS KAREN SPELLED BACKWARDS! Karen is the name of Bette Davis’ daughter, who disappeared during some (creepy!) barn ceremony 30 years ago.
–Whenever she looks into a mirrored surface, the main character sees a blindfolded girl keening “HELP MEEEE!” Sometimes this is accompanied by the glass cracking. Said blindfolded girl is Karen, trapped in another dimension(?).
–All this mirror horribleness culminates in a scene at a fair’s funhouse (why a girl who has been seeing things in mirrors would agree to enter a funhouse in the first place is a matter for another time) in which our heroine is surrounded by mirror-trapped ghostly blindfolded Karens begging for help and cannot find her way out and I nearly soil myself.
–The music is not merely creepy, it is aggressively so. Go back and watch the trailer again if you don’t believe me. Play the WITW score over a video of gamboling kittens and you’ll never be able to look at a kitten again without seeing its tiny, sinister teeth, like needles, and the unholy snake-like quality of its kitten-y pupils.
Watching The Watcher in the Woods left me with nightmares for three solid weeks, and I was afraid of mirrors and the way windows get all reflective at night for YEARS. During the initial nightmare period, I vividly remember sobbing in my bedroom at three in the morning with all the lights on (window shades down, obviously), wondering whether I’d ever feel safe and un-scared again. The idea that some people might WANT to be scared, for FUN, seemed like about the stupidest thing I’d ever heard.
I was eight, yes. And I had an uncommonly vivid imagination, and already possessed the somewhat obsessive, ruminative nature that results in images etching themselves in my brain and tormenting me long after they ought properly to have faded. BUT! I maintain that The Watcher in the Woods is a legitimately terrifying movie at any age, “Disney” label or no. The director, John Hough, was chosen because he had directed “The Legend of Hell House” (definitely NOT a family movie), and the Wikipedia page for The Watcher in the Woods hosts this bizarre, yet telling, sentence:
Producer Tom Leetch pitched the project to Disney executive Ron Miller, stating that “This could be our Exorcist.”
“THIS COULD BE OUR EXORCIST?” Really, Disney? REALLY? Your EXORCIST? Is that necessary? What will be your DEEP THROAT?
Ahem.
Anyhow, I was reminded of the movie recently because I saw a few moments of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Now, there are many terrifying aspects of this show, to be certain, but what bothered me was one of the women, Kyle Richards.
She looked…familiar. Where had I seen her before?
OH, WRITING CREEPY-BACKWARDS STYLE IN MY NIGHTMARES, THAT’S WHERE.
I will not be watching the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. I turned it off even before I could see if Ms. Richards had a dog named Nerak.
Yes, I was scarred by a Disney movie. I admit it. I do not apologize.
Do you have a fear for which others relentlessly mock you? Tell me all about it. This is a safe space.
About Alexa Stevenson
