Toybox o' Trauma

or, why I still don't like boats. Or any body of water where I can't see the bottom. (And if I can see the bottom, I still don't trust it.) A ramble about a 6 year old's movie logic and phobias.

I’ll get to this asshole later…

Wolfman, Dracula, zombies, and the like never much scared me when I was a kid.

(I did have a concern about Bigfoot because I grew up on a farm surrounded by woods and thought he might like lurking around in the shadows of the barn at night, and six year olds carrying a gun when they went to feed the chickens and such was kind of frowned upon even in Appalachia.)

I didn’t worry because you could shoot those monsters in the face if they showed up at the door or tried coming through a window. As a hillbilly, I understood from early childhood that face-shooting or the threat of imminent face-shooting is a rather effective form of conflict resolution. Granted, I’d need silver bullets for Wolfman, but the Lone Ranger could hook me up. Maybe some holy water in a squirt gun for Dracula (which I thought of when I was 6, but was still deeply gratified that Lost Boys eventually got around to it. I just didn’t know where holy water came from, being raised Baptist.)

So, monsters? Psycho with a knife? Face shooting, then go back to watching cartoons.

THEM is a kaiju flick, even if the makers maybe didn’t know they were kaijuing…

Most Kaiju didn’t worry me too much, you just had to make sure you brought enough gun generally. (That was before some Kaiju got regeneration and started to cheat.) No, I never bought the “Our shells just bounce right off of it” con. I just figured they needed bigger shells, right? My six year old self didn’t know about HEAT rounds and the like, but I figured the Army or Air Force could come up with something shooty enough to drop a Kaiju like a Dutchman with a .22 dropping hogs for slaughter.

I mean, if they had this in the black and white days, then there had to even shootier, bigger, guns for stompy giant lizards, bugs, apes, etc… by the time Technicolor happened, right?

So, for Kaiju? Just bring enough gun.

Now we’re cookin’ with gas…er, well, masers…

And frankly, Kaiju were really more of an elemental force, like a tornado or flood. You just had to get the hell out of their way. If some dumb kid forgot his toy, don’t run back and look for the annoying little turd yelling “Timmy, come back!” That’s Evolution in Action. Just run like heck to get out of the kaiju’s path, and not in the direction its heading.

And if a Kaiju did blunder by and knock a building over onto you, it wasn’t anything personal.

Except for this asshole.

Not only was Gaira (War of the Gargantuas) ugly as a sack of rotten walrus buttholes, he was mean. He wasn’t just stomping around doing the usual Kaiju Random Property and Landmark Damage. He specifically looked for people to eat, peeping into windows and snatching folk up. When he spat out the ragged scraps of clothing from the screaming secretary he ate, that really disturbed my six year old self’s calm.

He was breaking the rules. And the girl? Girls aren’t supposed to get ate. (The nurse in The Blob also messed with me.) It just wasn’t proper. This asshole killed girls.

To make matters worse, he was a one sneaky asshole on top of being mean.

“Hey, dad, I think the net’s snagged on something. I’ll look over the stern and see what we’re snagged…oh. Shit.”

Yeah, first time I saw that scene, I nearly dropped a steamer in my shorts.

This is only part of why I don’t trust water.

Good old, wholesome Disney really messed with me. See, Jaws didn’t trouble me, so long as I stayed out of the damn water. But these guys? They weren’t confined to the water. They could break the rules and reach up out of the water, grope around, and grab you.

“Mommy! Its bunghole got teef!” No, I did not understand squid anatomy beyond grabby arms of terror and death.

Yeah, giant squids and octopi still scare me. Because I still have a ridiculously overactive imagination, and it doesn’t give a third shake on a windy day about what I intellectually know regarding monsters and reality.

So of course, War of the Gargantuas started out as a double-whammy for me.

Even if some of these jerks are susceptible to face-shooting, they can sneak up on you, and that’s a problem.

Speaking of sneaking, this one really messed 6 year old me up. Because this Smucker’s Nightmare Fuel could goop right under a door, through vents, any crack or gap you can imagine. Plus, it ate girls too, and I was pretty sure movies weren’t allowed to kill girls. There had to be a rule about it somewhere.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, the damned Raspberry Horror of Hateful Horror just kept getting bigger and bigger, which was also cheating.

Yeah, The Blob traumatized me as a kid nicely. Which is probably why I like inflicting Shoggoths on some of my characters. Inflict what? No, nothing, never mind…

So to this day, you won’t find me signing up for SCUBA classes, or interested in snorkeling in anywhere but the clearest shallow water, and I still won’t go far from the dock or boat. In fact, I’m just not a fan of boats in general, because some asshole might say “Hey, let’s go out past where we can see the bottom, because it’s not like any horrors lurk in the depths, right?”

And on that note, I’m going to rewatch the made for TV version of Peter Benchly’s Beast, because I love torturing myself. Might also be a little stupid in the mix, too.