Nightmares: Poems to Trouble Your Sleep (1976)

"Nightmares: Poems to Trouble Your Sleep" (1976, Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Arnold Lobel) is a book of 12 poems on witches, werewolves, vampires, haunted houses, and all things scary. Each poem is illustrated with one or more full-page black and white drawings in a style reminiscent of Edward Gorey. Pelutsky has written several books of poetry for children, but this particular one is out of print as of this writing.

UPDATE 4/13/10 Appears to have come back in print recently in a library-binding edition! Buy it new right now at Amazon or Barnes & Noble!

One of the poems, "The Ghoul", stands out among the others in its sheer gruesome explicitness. It actually kind of shocked me when I first read it as a child, to the extent that it stuck with me long after I'd returned the borrowed book to the public library.

Here is a sampling of the illustrations and interior pages, with the complete text of "The Ghoul" at the end:

THE HAUNTED HOUSE

"Shadows from the dim hereafter
hang from every creaking rafter,
laughing disembodied laughter
in their ghostly glee."
-excerpt from The Haunted House

THE WILL 'O THE WISP


THE VAMPIRE





THE WITCH


THE DANCE OF THE THIRTEEN SKELETONS


THE GHOUL
THE GHOUL

The gruesome ghoul, the grisly ghoul,
without the slightest noise
waits patiently beside the school
to feast on girls and boys.

He lunges fiercely through the air
as they come out to play,
then grabs a couple by the hair
and drags them far away.

He cracks their bones and snaps their backs
and squeezes out their lungs,
he chews their thumbs like candy snacks
and pulls apart their tongues.

He slices their stomachs and bites their hearts
and tears their flesh to shreds,
he swallows their toes like toasted tarts
and gobbles down their heads.

Fingers, elbows, hands and knees
and arms and legs and feet -
he eats them with delight and ease,
for every part's a treat.

And when the gruesome, grisly ghoul
has nothing left to chew,
he hurries to another school
and waits...perhaps for you.

The Tell-Tale Heart (1953, UPA)

One of my favorite scary animated shorts is UPA's 1953 adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart". Actor James Mason (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Salem's Lot, etc.) narrates an abridged version of Poe's original text, told with beautiful, sometimes surreal images in limited animation and effects. I'll assume you're familiar with the story and won't recap it here. But do take a look at the outstanding art in these screen caps, and trust me that it's even more compelling in motion.

Our narrator's hand, catching a moth.

The old man.

And the old man's eye...

Our narrator bides his time, waiting to hatch his evil plan.

The murder is depicted in a series of quick images. The patterned blanket swirls and twists.

The aftermath. Temporary peace for our murdering narrator.

And now the clean up begins.

Police arrive.

A nervous mishap threatens to reveal his crime.

Rather than ending cold when the narrator confesses his crime in desparate madness (as in the original text), here the opening line is reprised as a coda that reveals our narrator is telling his story from a cell.

"True, I am nervous. Dreadfully nervous. But why do you say I am mad?"

This masterpiece (and it is) is buried among the extras in, of all things, the "Hellboy" 2-Disc Special Edition DVD (buy it here). Apparently director Guillermo Del Toro is a big UPA fan and insisted on smuggling "The Tell-Tale Heart" and a few "Gerald McBoing Boing" shorts on this release just to make them available. Thanks, Guillermo!

Bug (1975) and The Brady Bunch

"Bug" (1975) was the last movie produced by horror legend William Castle. I was born too late to experience any of his classic shlocky horror films in theaters (13 Ghosts, The Tingler, House on Haunted Hill, Mr. Sardonicus, etc.), but I caught "Bug" as a grade-schooler when it played on television in the late 70s, and it scared the crap out of me.

"Bug" is not considered a great film by...well, anybody. But it has its moments. Based on a 1973 novel The Hephaestus Plague by Thomas Page, it's about some fire-starting insects (portrayed by what looks like dressed-up hissing cockroaches) that emerge from a crack in the earth and slowly, steadily wreak havoc on a little desert town. Unlike other "bug movies", these insects aren't immediately recognized as a threat. Just like ordinary insects, they are found chirping passively in the front lawn, or scurrying in the dark corner of the garage, and are at first seen as merely a nuisance.

Professor James Parmiter (Bradford Dillman) stars as an entomologist who becomes fascinated with the critters and captures a few for observation in his own home. In one particularly creepy scene, he carelessly leaves the bug cage unlocked.

The little guys creep out of the top of their box, scurry across the floor, and climb all over James' sleeping body.

The bugs are carnivorous, you see, and start nibbling away, drawing blood.

He wakes up in horror.

As a child that was simultaneously fascinated by and afraid of insects, and who had occassionally caught some in jars to keep in my room for a time, this scene really tapped into a very personal anxiety.

There is another scene where a woman is alone in her kitchen, unaware that a BUG has hitched a ride on the back of her clothes.

As she stands around pondering a recipe, the little guy sneaks up her back, into her hair, rubs its little feelers together and ignites a fire in her hair.

The kitchen had always struck me as strangely familiar. "Bug" was released in 1975, a year after "The Brady Bunch" had gone off the air, and both came from Paramount studios. I always wondered if they had used the Brady's kitchen set.

Years later, someone invented the Internet, and I was able to pursue this nagging issue. According to the trivia section of IMDB, the famous Brady kitchen and the "Bug" kitchen are one and the same.

Let's compare, shall we?

Bug:
The Brady's:

Bug:

The Brady's:

Here's a shot from just outside the kitchen area:

And a differently angled, but comparable shot from The Brady Bunch. The saloon doors added for "Bug" really added some kinetic energy to this space.