Three monsters that frightened me the most as a child were the television, tree, and clown from the movie Poltergeist (1982). Many restless nights were spent hiding under bed sheets praying that the evil screen haunts were not real. That was until a certain nightmarish vision from a relatively unknown director, Wes Craven, completely trumped what I considered scary and introduced me to the true intent of fear.
My grandmother had this tree outside of her house that would, with the right position of the moon, cast a horrific shadow into the living room of her small two-bedroom home. When my siblings and I visited, we usually slept in the living room on a pull out couch next to a window. Outside this window was this tree. During the day the tree was a harmless sapling but at night it turned into a satanic monster hellbent on yanking me and only me from the living room of my grandparents house and doing away with by body.
And, oh, and it was worse with the summer storms.
Here is a scene of that tree in the movie.
https://youtu.be/1qweaPhmWqo
https://youtu.be/QGQr5hCpzr8
Scare got real with the additional element of the television. Often we fell asleep with the television on playing through whatever late night bad that filled the time slot. It was always responsibility of the last person awake to turn off the freaking television because none one wanted to wake up to the sound of the American Anthem. On the television would play various images of America’s patriotic symbols, an eagle, a babbling brook, Yosemite Park – you get the point. The one image that remains vivid to me was the clip of the American flag flowing majestic in its patriotic greatness. The final bit of horns from the anthem sounds, and then beeeeeeeeep. Color bars. Static.
Undercover brother takes an entirely different meaning.
In the movie, Poltergeist, the little girl approaches the television gets pulled into a hellish realm. So, lil J.J. getting up out of bed was out of the question. My solution, play dead. Or rather play like you’re asleep until one of the grandparents, my father, or sister or brother turns off the television and pray that there is nothing outside the sanctuary of my sheet fort waiting to steal me from existence.
On occasion I was brazen to rise from the place where I slept to turn off the television. But I would do so with the swiftness of a ninja, only looking forward and never to my peripherals. And although I did not a five-foot clown doll mean muggin’ me, it was possible he could be lurking out their in the darkness of my grandparents modest home. He shows his face and then what? Cower… Or fight? One of the best scenes of that movie was when the boy tussled with the menacing clown. Dude was a true young boss. He ripped the stuffing out of that mofo and proved something that I never (at the time) thought was true of these movies or in life: You can always choose to fight back.