I was just reading an online forum where one person asked what scared us on TV when we were kids. My kneejerk reaction was nothing: I didn't watch TV as a kid.
That's not entirely true. The year I spent with relatives when I was 5 there was TV to watch. Howdy Doody and Captain Kangaroo. Nothing scary there. At least not to me. It wasn't till I was 12 that our small Minnesota town got its first TV broadcasting antenna on the top of the water tower. I believe it had a 3-mile radius, covering a bit more than the entire town, and carried only NBC. So we watched things like Bonanza, Gunsmoke, I Love Lucy, and a very puzzling show to me, Have Gun Will Travel. Paladin was a bad guy - good guy. It was more complexity than I'd encountered in my young life. Things were one or the other, lines strictly drawn. While I didn't quite know what to think about him, it wasn't scary.
There were shows I hated, but for other reasons. I found The Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy abusive. I didn't quite have the words yet to label my dislike, but at least one of them was always being mean to another one. They were supposedly "funny" - but not to me. Still, not scary.
It's not that I wasn't scared of some things. I was, had a true phobia. Every one of those things was called a spider. I'd gotten bitten by one when young, never forgot it. If a spider was coming down its web from the ceiling, I would be pinned to my chair, since in order to get up I would have to get a foot or so closer than I already was to the spider. Even as a young Mom I had enough residual phobia left that when we had a nature book on spiders I made the kids turn the pages for me so I didn't have to "touch" the spiders. I did manage to get over it to the point I can kill one in the house if necessary, though I taught my kids how to do it first, claiming they weren't scary, so I didn't have to.
While I was reading through the many answers to the question, puzzling over why episodes of Star Trek or Twilight Zone or even the Wizard of Oz scared people, two things popped into my mind. First was another child being frightened while in my care. When I was doing family day care, I took our group to the local library story hour a few times. It was more than reading a kids book while the kids (learned to) listened quietly. Some times an adult was talking or showing other things. This time it was the clown. One person walked, in, already wearing clown clothing. Then the wig went on, the face got painted. The kids were absolutely fascinated. The final piece was a red rubber nose. Suddenly it was no longer a person dressing up. It was something strange and, apparently, horrifying, to one of the kids I'd brought. She started screaming and was inconsolable until we were all in the car and driving back to the house. At her parents' request, it was also our last visit to the library.
Then I remembered a movie that scared me with a long lasting effect while we lived in the small town. Before I describe the movie, I need to point our that the favorite gathering place for many of us on the block was a small gravel pit, dug down as a rectangular hole, covering probably one full lot where a house might otherwise have stood. It was mostly sand, and full of all kinds of rocks. One favorite occupation was breaking small rocks with bigger ones to see what was inside. In winter we brought our sleds there and safely sailed down into the center to our heart's content. The street was outside one rim so there was never danger of continuing that far up that side as to go out into the street and under a car. On super cold days the older kids brought buckets of water to quick freeze and make a bed of ice to slide down. Otherwise we had plenty of snow, and enough loose sand in places so we could climb up out again.
The movie - "Invasion From Mars" - started with a kid waking up and seeing a spaceship landing in a sandpit outside his bedroom. Periodically various adults would walk that way, get sucked down underground, some machine would drill into their heads, and they'd emerge with no memory of what happened. However, they would have this mark on the back of their necks, and whatever made it was something implanted which controlled them. One night the kid snuck out and watched it happen, and there is at least one scene where his parents have both been controlled. While it turns out the kid was having a nightmare, the next night the spaceship really lands.
That terrified me. I knew where the sandy ground was loose enough that something could be under there, a hole might open, I might get sucked down. Of course, it wasn't real. However....
I spent about two years avoiding unpaved ground at every opportunity. Streets which were paved or concrete sidewalks were OK places to walk. I didn't have to think about them, except to stay on them. whenever I left the house. But open ground, even if well covered in grass, were uncomfortable places at best. The gravel pit? I still can't tell you whether I grew out of that fear before we moved away or we moved away first. But I WAS NOT GOING TO BE SUCKED DOWN INTO IT!
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