TOP 6(66) CHILDHOOD TERRORS
by
Elizabeth Richards
Here are the top 6 things that kept me up at night as a kid…
6: THE KANDY MAN – ‘HAPPINESS PATROL, DOCTOR WHO’
I don’t think any television show scares the heebie-jeebies out of kids more than Doctor Who. From Cybermen to the Weeping Angels, the writers certainly know how to create the perfect bogeyman to keep kids up at night. But it was the Kandy Man from the episode ‘Happiness Patrol’ that scared me the most as a kid. In this episode The Doctor and his companion Ace visit a colony on Terra Alpha, where all the citizens are forced to be happy all the bleeding time. If they’re caught being a ‘Killjoy’ by the secret police (known as the Happiness Patrol), they’re arrested and fed to the Kandy Man – a sweet-based robot who looks oddly like the Bassett’s Liquorice Allsorts man. As a little girl who loved her sweeties, the idea of a candy that bit back did not sit well with me. I still keep a wary distance from liquorice allsorts… you know, just in case.
5: ‘REMEMBER ME’ BY CHRISTOPHER PIKE
In my early tweens, I was a massive fan of horror authors like Christopher Pike, RL Stine, and James Herbert. One of my all-time best reads was Remember Me – a story about a girl named Shari Cooper, who is murdered and has to solve the mystery of her own death. It had ghosts, murder, cheating boyfriends, and a shocking revelation. But it was the Shadow that gave me chills, and makes this number 5 in my list.
4: GHOSTWATCH
On October 31,1992, the BBC ran a mockumentary called Ghostwatch, starring popular children’s TV presenter Sarah Greene. It was shot as if it were a live news broadcast, covering a ‘live, on-air investigation’ of a house in Northold, which was reputably haunted by a poltergeist called Pipes. Now at the time, I had NO idea this was a drama. I thought it was real, and sat down to watch it with my buddies, thinking we were about to witness a real-life ghost hunt. What larks! Erm… no. It turned out to be 90 minutes of the most TERRIFYING TELEVISION I HAVE EVER SEEN. If you can get your hands on a recording of it, I highly recommend you view it. Then show it to your kids and tell them it’s real, and sit back and watch the hilarity unfold.
3: ‘LITTLE MY’ FROM THE MOOMINS
Back in the 1980s, there was a very popular television show in the UK called the Moomins, which featured these unbelievably cute trolls which—for some random reason—looked like white hippopotamuses, with wide eyes, round snouts and pudgy tummies. I loved them. They were adorable. What I didn’t love was their side kick Little My. She was supposed to be brave and fearless. All I knew is she wanted to eat my soul.
2: SPIDERS
I absolutely and utterly refuse to believe that something with four eyes, eight legs, drains all the blood out of its victims, and can kill me with one bite is ‘more scared of me, than I am of it.’
1: PENNYWISE THE CLOWN
Black City by Elizabeth Richards
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons (November 13th, 2012)
Reading Level: Young Adult
Hardback: 384 pages
Series: Black City, #1
A dark and tender post-apocalyptic love story set in the aftermath of a bloody war.
In a city where humans and Darklings are now separated by a high wall and tensions between the two races still simmer after a terrible war, sixteen-year-olds Ash Fisher, a half-blood Darkling, and Natalie Buchanan, a human and the daughter of the Emissary, meet and do the unthinkable—they fall in love. Bonded by a mysterious connection that causes Ash’s long-dormant heart to beat, Ash and Natalie first deny and then struggle to fight their forbidden feelings for each other, knowing if they’re caught, they’ll be executed—but their feelings are too strong.
When Ash and Natalie then find themselves at the center of a deadly conspiracy that threatens to pull the humans and Darklings back into war, they must make hard choices that could result in both their deaths.
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