CHILDHOOD TRAUMA THEATER - LARGE MARGE

Unless you are a liar or grew up somewhere like Bangladesh, at at least one point in your childhood some part of a movie should have scared you as much as it is humanly possible for a person to be scared. The impetus could range from as reasonable as, say, the Exorcist or Predator's mouth to as lame as the Care Bears movie, but the intensity of the terror was the same. Obviously, there's no fair way to go back and assess whether the movie was actually that scary or you were just a pussy…to reach the same level of fear now you'd pretty much be required to be awoken in bed by a monster holding a gun to your face. But what if you hadn't seen the movie since the time it bugged you out, and you watched it late at night after getting extremely stoned and tape-recorded your immediate reaction? Hopefully that should do the trick, because it is exactly what we're going to do every Friday from now until we run out of things that have scared people.

When I was around 5 or 6, I rented

Pee-Wee's Big Adventure

from the grocery store. I scared pretty easily at movies ( pretty sure I cried at the part in

Poltergeist

when the tree slices up the kid's face), but nothing came anywhere near the scene here where Large Marge's is telling Pee-Wee about the worst wreck she's ever seen and she goes, "it looked like, THIS!" The thing her face turned into literally made me black out in terror. I remember the first like half-second of the transformation and feeling this wave of chills sweep over me and then the next thing I know my mom, who'd been on the other side of the house, is pulling my face out of the pillow into which I've evidently been screaming at full-force for the previous 30 seconds. It totally did me in dreamwise for the next week. What was a little weird about it though, was I was never able to mentally picture the face after seeing it. It was like it just existed in this inaccessible recess of my mind as the worst thing you could possibly ever see. A few years later the movie was on TV and I tried to watch the whole scene again to "overcome" it, but I pussied out right as she was saying "THIS." "[

huge gasp

] Ha! Holy shit! Those fucking eyes…[

simultaneously laughing and panting

] those things are bad news. [

slowly regaining composure

] Whew. I actually felt the same set of chills I remember from when I was a kid. The whole thing's so quick—I think that's what makes it so bad, the lack of warning. That and the eyeballs with the little tiny pupils. Do you think it's supposed to be cause she's all ramped up on trucker's speed [

other voice in room points out that it's not supposed to be Marge but the dead body she saw

] But it was her, cause then when she drops him off at the truck stop it turns out she's a ghost, remember? [

boring argument not worth transcribing

] "Anyways, having gone back now and just watched it again, I'd say the scene is slightly less real-scary than goofy-scary, but with a healthy dose of startle. It is, however, way more intense than I was expecting it to be. Also, I think it bears mention that at the time I first watched it, I don't think I had seen much claymation outside of Gumby, so the goofiness might not have registered at all. To my mind it was like I was seeing some creature from

Doom

." ERIK HENDRIKS