Terror Tuesday: From the Shadows

Welcome to another Terror Tuesday. Leaves are starting to color, nights are touched with a chill and things are crawling out of their graves…

Have been watching a lot of old Dark Shadows episodes lately; specifically, the Leviathan sequence. This is where the show’s main character, vampire Barnabas Collins, comes back from the past with a strange box containing the essence of a creature, who, once let loose in a ritual room, grows in spurts and bounds from a child to a man (and reverts to his monster form), and does lots of nasty things between. The Leviathans are an ancient underworld bunch who want to regain control of the surface world. Mixed in with that story line are Chris Jennings’ werewolf troubles and Quentin Collins’ search for his lost love, Amanda Harris, and subsequent struggle to bring her back from the Land of the Dead.

I watched all this as an eight-year-old kid…with my mother. On a particular episode the other day, Leviathan-child-grown-up, Jeb Hawkes, resurrected some zombies. This was daytime TV in the ‘60s, don’t forget, right after kids got home from school. And these walking dead had eyeballs dangling mid-face. Quentin Collins was buried alive. A werewolf was tearing up folks in the woods. So I am wondering how it never bothered me as a kid and just how I got away with watching it at all. My father cut me off of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and The Wild Wild West for excessive fight scenes. Yet, somehow, I managed to watch this ghoulish and pretty frightening for its time soap opera. I tried showing an episode to my 11-year-old niece, who watches and reads Twilight. She practically ran screaming from the room the moment a dangling eyeball showed up and I felt bad. Kinda. Well, maybe a little snickery, too. Odd that today’s CGI-infested scary stuff was nowhere near as disturbing to her as the use of make-up and a half a ping pong ball for a dangling eyeball.

Which makes me wonder even more why I got to watch it and, though it scared me, why it didn’t send me into therapy. I actually find some things in it bother me more now than they did then! At least, now that I “get” some of the moral implications.

But, mom, what were you thinking? Don’t you know letting children watch something like that might warp them irrevocably? Turn them into, oh, I don’t know—gasp—horror writers?

Jeez.

My name is Chloe Everson…and I kick demon ass…
THE CHLOE FILES by Howard Hopkins
In the tradition of Sookie Stackhouse and Buffy, The Vampire Slayer…
In paperback from http://www.bn.com/ and http://www.amazon.com/