Things That Scare Me #13: Oral Storytelling

This is the print version of a post that appeared on Psychobabble in audio form as my one and only podcast five years ago today. It was part of my long dormant series Things that Scare Me, in which I evaluated whether or not I was justified in being terrified of the many, many things that terrified me when I was an overly terrified kid. Enjoy!

Things That Scare Me #13: Oral Storytelling

My experience with scary stories began when I was four or five years old. My sister was having a slumber party for her birthday and my prankster parents decided this would be a terrific opportunity to traumatize their kids and a gang of neighborhood kids. The evening began with everyone gathered in the living room and perched on their sleeping bags, the lights dimmed, and my mother hovering over us with an arsenal of classic ghost stories. The first one she read was based on an old Washington Irving story called “The Adventure of the German Student”. Irving’s tale is about a college boy who encounters a forlorn young woman in Paris during the French revolution. She wears a black ribbon around her neck, which she refuses to remove under any circumstances. The terrifying denouement of the story reveals her to be a victim of the guillotine who wears the ribbon to tether her severed head to her severed neck. This print story was later simplified for its oral version, re-titled and re-tinted and passed from person to person as “The Green Ribbon”. This was the version of the story my mother told at that slumber party.

The next story was less dependent on plot and more on the way it was told. It was a story called “The Golden Arm”, which tells of a man who marries a woman with a golden arm, an object he covets till the day she dies. At that point, he sneaks out into the night, digs up her body, and swipes it. Creeping home in the night, he begins hearing a ghostly voice calling “Who stole my golden arm?” The phrase is repeated over and over with mounting intensity until, finally, the storyteller grabs the nearest listener and screams “You did!” Everyone jumps and everyone pees.

Things That Scare Me: Case Study #12: Raiders of the Lost Ark

In spite of (or, perhaps, because of) my adult infatuation with all things horrifying and horrific, I was scared of absolutely everything when I was a kid. A television commercial for a horror movie was enough to send me racing from the den in a sweaty palm panic. As an ongoing series here on Psychobabble, I've been reviewing some of the things that most traumatized me as a child and evaluating whether or not I was rightfully frightened or just a wiener.

Case Study #12: Raiders of the Lost Ark

I went into my first “viewing” of Raiders of the Lost Ark with such extreme prejudice that I kept my eyes closed and my fingers in my ears for, essentially, the entire movie. I’m not exaggerating. This “Things That Scare Me” feature is too therapeutic for me to waste time cracking jokes at my own expense. I’m not exactly sure where I got the idea that this movie might terrify me since my seven-year-old self knew virtually nothing about it before my mom dragged my sister, my grade-school best pal Antonio, and me to the theater. I do recall that my parents went on a married-couple date to see it before taking the kids. My guess is that there was some discussion regarding what effect the film would have on their highly impressionable and embarrassingly lily-livered son, which I most likely overheard. Such a conversation would have affected me not only because its topic was the possibility I would see something that might toss more fuel on the eternal flame of my nightmares but also because of the way it probably happened. I could imagine my parents having this discussion in hushed tones, believing themselves to be out of my earshot. These kinds of conversations always hit me as weighty, ultra-serious. What could this Raiders of the Lost Ark movie contain that would warrant such a talk? A graphic autopsy? A monster that turns to the camera and says, “Tonight, Mike Segretto, I’m going to kill you in your sleep.”

Things That Scare Me: Case Study #11: The Wicked Witch Breaks the 4th Wall

In spite of (or, perhaps, because of) my adult infatuation with all things horrifying and horrific, I was scared of absolutely everything when I was a kid. A television commercial for a horror movie was enough to send me racing from the den in a sweaty palm panic. As an ongoing series here on Psychobabble, I've been reviewing some of the things that most traumatized me as a child and evaluating whether or not I was rightfully frightened or just a wiener.

Case Study #11: The Wicked Witch of the West Breaks the Fourth Wall

January 21, 2010: Things That Scare Me: Case Study #10

In spite of (or, perhaps, because of) my adult infatuation with all things horrifying and horrific, I was scared of absolutely everything when I was a kid. A television commercial for a horror movie was enough to send me racing from the den in a sweaty-palm panic. In this ongoing series here on Psychobabble, I've been reviewing some of the things that most traumatized me as a child and evaluating whether or not I was rightfully frightened or just a wiener.

Case Study #10: The Poltergeist face-ripper.


The schoolyard is the campfire of urban and suburban kids. Stories are passed around, myths are related and created. Based on my own experience, most of these yarns involved horrific scenes in popular movies. I recall a friend seeing Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom for the first time and regaling me with stories about still-beating hearts being torn from chests, feasts of monkey brains, eel babies, and eyeball soup. “Nice try,” said I, “but you took it too far. No way am I going to believe that some family-film by Steven Spielberg contains such graphic grotesqueries” (actually, I probably said “gross shit”, as I was ten at the time). Alas, my friend was not having a tug at my leg, and the picture did, indeed, contain all these nasty images and more.


As potent as the Temple of Doom stories were, I was a little too old at that point for them to deter me from seeing the movie. The same cannot be said of Poltergeist released two years earlier. Here we have another Spielberg-created dark fantasy aimed at a PG crowd (PG-13 didn’t come around until 1984, and was partially inspired by the aforementioned Indiana Jones film) replete with pull-no-punches shocks: a goopy kid-eating tree, a monstrous kid-strangling clown, droves of corpses rising from a swimming pool, JoBeth Williams’s ghost-rape.
Everybody loves a clown...

However, the only scene to really make the playground rounds was one in which a guy, apparently, tears his own face off with his bare hands. What this had to do with a ghost story wasn’t particularly clear to me (and, frankly, it still isn’t), but it conjured an image so punishingly violent and grisly that I couldn’t feature it really existed. At the same time, it kept me from watching Poltergeist for several years. When it debuted on HBO and the rest of my family was gathered around the tube to take in its sundry horrors, I was perched at the kitchen table upstairs with the lights off, terrified, listening to all the screaming and screeching emanating from the TV, watching the ample strobe effects from the screen flash through the kitchen like lightning. Why I put myself through this is anyone’s guess, but afterward my family confirmed that the guy-ripping-off-his-own-face scene was very much present and accounted for... as was the guy snacking on a maggoty chicken leg right before doing the deed. Observe:

The Verdict: OK, so the guy is obviously tearing pieces of latex off a dummy head, his hands groping as unnaturally as those of a Muppet. Still, this is some pretty heavy stuff, as the chunks of flesh splosh in the sink, the dummy’s eyes roll up in its head, and the actor’s fingers tear away at his mouth, revealing a skeletal grimace. There’s also the nightmarish inevitability of the act, that sense of being unable to stop oneself from doing something dreadfully self-destructive. And let’s not forget about that self-eviscerating steak. All in all, a sequence of visceral mutilation and surreal grottiness worthy of Buñuel, as well as a rare instance of a cinematic visual being every bit as horrific as any I could cook up in my overactive eight-year-old imagination. Had I watched this when I was eight, rather than cowering in the kitchen, my parents probably would have had to ship me off to the local kiddie shrink. In other words, I was justified in my terror. Quite justified.

October 6, 2009: Things That Scare Me: Case Study #9

In spite of (or, perhaps, because of) my adult infatuation with all things horrifying and horrific, I was scared of absolutely everything when I was a kid. A television commercial for a horror movie was enough to send me racing from the den in a sweaty-palm panic. In this ongoing series here on Psychobabble, I've been reviewing some of the things that most traumatized me as a child and evaluating whether or not I was rightfully frightened or just a wiener.

Case Study #9: The prologue of Twilight Zone: The Movie

In keeping with the ongoing Twilight Zone 50th Anniversary festivities here at Psychobabble, I’m going to delve into one of the more embarrassing installments of “Things That Scare Me.” “Embarrassing?” you ask. “But I too found the opening sequence of Twilight Zone: The Movie terrifying when I was five-years old!” OK. Mistake number one: I was not five-years old when I saw Twilight Zone: The Movie. I was nine or ten, which is well out of the range of acceptability. I mean, this sequence is surely one of the better things in the very hit-and-miss big screen adaptation of Rod Serling’s great series (George Miller’s remake of “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”? Hit! Steven Spielberg’s remake of “Kick the Can”? Great big stinking miss!). But scary? I don’t know. Judge for yourself with your jaded, 21st century eyes.

The scariest thing about this is the build up: Dan Aykroyd asking Albert Brooks if he wants to “see something reeeeally scary.” Nice establishment of suspense, director John Landis! Too bad you didn’t bring a similarly deft hand to your lame full-length segment in the film, which finds racist Vic Morrow trotting through history as the victim of various violent bigots (I’m not getting into the whole death controversy thing here, though). The problem is that the pay-off is weak: Aykroyd turns into a demon, growls like a cougar, and strangles Brooks. Thud. Still, many people profess to having been scared by this scene as kids, so perhaps I shouldn’t flagellate myself too much.

But then again, maybe I should. And this brings us to mistake number two: I wasn’t actually scared by watching this scene. You see, my mother was the one who watched it. I asked her what happened in the movie, and she began to explain this opening sequence in intricate detail. Once she got to the “You wanna see something really scary” part, my terror had apparently become so palpable that she halted the story, perhaps out of concern that I might piss the bed that night. But that was a bad move on her part, as my overactive nine-year old imagination commenced completing this scene with every horrible horror it could conjure. Had she simply said “Akyroyd turns into a cougar monster and throttles Albert Brooks,” I think I would have slept quite soundly that night. Instead, I had the fear something awful.

The Verdict: Obviously, I lose considerable points for being frightened of something I hadn’t actually seen. But let’s not underestimate the power of oral-storytelling, which utilizes the listener’s imagination in a way that no film could (The Blair Witch Project excluded). The fact that my mother didn’t finish telling me what happened at the beginning of Twilight Zone: The Movie left even more room for my imagination to go nutty. When I finally watched the movie, I was pretty unaffected by it, so I think I score some points for that. Perhaps the bottom line is that I was nine, though. That’s too old to get spooked by an unfinished story told by my fucking mommy. What a wiener.

August 20, 2009: Things That Scare Me: Case Study #8

In spite of (or, perhaps, because of) my adult infatuation with all things horrifying and horrific, I was scared of absolutely everything when I was a kid. A television commercial for a horror movie was enough to send me racing from the den in a sweaty-palm panic. In this ongoing series here on Psychobabble, I've been reviewing some of the things that most traumatized me as a child and evaluating whether or not I was rightfully frightened or just a wiener.

Case Study #8: The climax of Trilogy of Terror



Unlike most of the things I’ve dealt with in the Things That Scare Me series, the one I’ll be discussing today is not something that I first encountered at an exceptionally young, impressionable age. I’m pretty positive I was fifteen when I first caught Trilogy of Terror on TV, and I remember this because that was the age I discovered Led Zeppelin. Late one night, when my parents were out and I had the house to myself, I was flicking between The Song Remains the Same and Trilogy of Terror (and if you don’t understand why a budding Zeppelin fan might be compelled to switch channels while watching The Song Remains the Same for the first time, you’ve never endured John Bonham’s 65-minute drum solo). While The Song Remains the Same needs no introduction, Trilogy of Terror might. It’s a 1975 made-for-TV movie anthologizing adaptations of three short stories by horror maestro Richard Matheson (the cat behind the books that inspired The Incredible Shrinking Man and The Omega Man, as well as classic stories like “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” and “Long Distance Call”). B-movie queen Karen Black stars in all three segments. The first two are pretty lame; there’s “Julie”, the story of a murderous tutor, and “Millicent and Therese”, which is about voodoo and doppelgangers or something. The final segment, however, is a classic. “Amelia” (based on Matheson’s story “Prey”) is a tension-packed piece about a woman who picks up a “Zuni hunting fetish” at the local mall and must fend for her life when the nasty-looking doll comes to life and pursues her with a teensie-weensie spear. The segment is the kind of thing hacks might describe as a “nail-biter,” but I’m not a hack, so I’m going to call it a “toe-biter.” Still the piece wasn’t really terrifying enough to terrify fifteen-year-old me… at least not until the ending (suck on these spoilers!).

So, Amelia has punted the Zuni hunting fetish thingy into her oven, set it to broil, and all seems well. But it ain’t. Following up on her game-winning kick, Amelia opens the oven door to check on the smoldering dolly. Bad move. The oven belches forth a huge plume of smoke, pumping zillions of pyrolysis-ized Zuni particles into the atmosphere and up Amelia’s schnoz. She passes out. The screen goes black.

When we next see Amelia, this happens… the scene that worked its way into quite a number of my teenage nightmares:

The Verdict: OK, here’s why this scene is so horrifying: she breaks the fourth wall. If the now-Zuni-possessed Amelia had merely called her mom, invited her to her doom, squatted on the floor, and started stabbing the boards, it wouldn’t be so bad. But she looks directly into the camera, creating an intimate connection with the viewer. So, you’re watching this movie that’s two parts crappy and one part terrific, and people are killing each other, and dolls are hunting people, and people are hunting dolls, and you— the viewer— are sitting on your sofa with one hand down your pants and another in a bowl of popcorn, and it’s all fine and good because, hey, it’s not like anyone’s bothering you. But, wait a minute, now they are. Shit, that possessed chick is staring right at you! And she’s got a knife! And she’s smiling at you with a mouth full of plastic, joke-shop fangs! You didn’t sign up for this. Movie characters are supposed to snarl at other movie characters, not at you, innocent viewer! Breaking the fourth wall is perhaps the most personally engaging thing a filmmaker can do, and it doesn’t just work in horror movies. When Eddie Murphy stares into the camera in Trading Places, a joke about how patronizing the two old white guys are becomes a thousand times funnier. When Giulietta Masina takes a quick peek into the lens at the end of Nights of Cabiria, a poignant scene becomes a tear-flooder. So when director Dan Curtis gets Karen Black to look directly into the camera during the final frames of Trilogy of Terror, it becomes much, much, much scarier than any scene in any made-for-TV horror movie deserves to be. In other words, I was absolutely justified in my terror... fifteen-years old or not.

July 9, 2009: Things That Scare Me: Case Study #6

In spite of (or, perhaps, because of) my adult infatuation with all things horrifying and horrific, I was scared of absolutely everything when I was a kid. A television commercial for a horror movie was enough to send me racing from the den in a sweaty palm panic. As an ongoing series here on Psychobabble, I've been reviewing some of the things that most traumatized me as a child and evaluating whether or not I was rightfully frightened or just a wiener.

Case Study #6: Medusa in Clash of the Titans


Word around the playground is that along with a gazillion other oldies currently being remade (Bride of Frankenstein! Say it ain’t so…), a rejiggering of the Ray Harryhausen-masterminded semi-classic Clash of the Titans is on the roster for 2010. Try as new director Louis Leterrier might, there is no way his remake will affect me the way the original did. That’s because (A) he will not be able to craft a Medusa one-tenth as terrifying as Harryhausen’s and (B) I am no longer seven-years old.

For those not in the know, Medusa was the legendary gorgon of Greek mythology who had snakes instead of hair and could turn motherfuckers into stone with a single stony gaze. She pursued her nasty life’s work until Perseus, toga-wearing hero and son-of-Zeus, sneaked into her apartment and sliced off her head for future use.

My first traumatic exposure to Medusa came via a still photograph in an issue of Dynamite magazine that I was perusing in my school library.

While the face of Medusa certainly was gruesome, I had no idea how deeply it affected me until drifting off to sleep that very night. While reposing in that twilighty period between wakefulness and sleepfulness, I saw a face appear over my bed. My initial thought was that the face belonged to my sister, Tina, who adored tormenting me by whispering my name in ghostly fashion from her bedroom down the hall or crawling into my room on her belly only to leap up and roar as soon as she was right beside my bed. After I grumbled “Get out, Tina,” the face floated closer— only the hideous visage was not the hideous visage of my sister. It was Medusa. No shit. I screamed as if I’d been stabbed in the scrotum with a pair of pinking shears as the face wafted toward the floor and dissipated. As my parents rushed into my room to find out what their idiot son’s latest problem was, I realized I had hallucinated/dreamed the whole fucking thing. Now, I wasn’t prone to hallucinations or dementia or anything like that; I just had an over-fueled imagination running on some high-octane Medusa gas.

When I finally saw Clash of the Titans after it premiered on HBO, I was surprised and mildly disappointed that Medusa was not as scary as I remembered her from that Dynamite magazine. In fact, I quickly forgot that I’d been frightened at all and just marveled at how awesomely awesome all of those stop-motion Harryhausen creations were. 

The Verdict: OK, on the one hand, Medusa sure was ugly, and the mere sight of her could turn you to stone, so who’s to say a photograph wouldn’t be just as effective as an in-person tête-à-tête? On the other hand, I think we can all agree that hallucinating she was in my room was taking things a bit too far. So considering these specific circumstances, I’m going to call myself out as a wiener. However, if I’d just been a bit freaked out, I would have deemed it righteous fear.

May 13, 2009: Things That Scare Me: Case Study #5

In spite of (or, perhaps, because of) my adult infatuation with all things horrifying and horrific, I was scared of absolutely everything when I was a kid. A television commercial for a horror movie was enough to send me racing from the den in a sweaty palm panic. As an ongoing series here on Psychobabble, I'm going to be reviewing some of the things that most traumatized me as a child and evaluating whether or not I was rightfully frightened or just a wiener.

Case Study #5: Madame

As I detailed in my earlier post about the film Magic, puppets can be very, very scary. And anyone who suffered nightmares after witnessing the cackling, hook-nosed, hook-chinned witch in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves knows all too well that hags can be equally traumatizing. Combine the two, and you’re talking about an Evil pulsating with the power of a zillion red-hot pokers.


Actually I’m talking about Madame.

Madame was the muse and instrument of one Wayland P. Flowers Jr. Flowers developed his act around the wise-cracking, sexually suggestive shtick of a puppet that apparently oversaw a brothel. Madame also oversaw my nightmares. I can still recall the one where she skulked out of the shadows behind the bookcase in my bedroom and… I don’t know… did something terrifying, I guess. Maybe I can’t recall very well, but I can recall.

In 1982, Madame starred in her very own syndicated sitcom called “Madame’s Place” in which she traded quips with the likes of Corey Feldman and Judy Landers’s boobs. Despite Madame’s terror-inducing visage, I’d still tune in every week. Call me a glutton.


The Verdict: I was justified in my terror. Lordy, was I justified.

April 30, 2009: Things That Scare Me: Case Study #4

In spite of (or, perhaps, because of) my adult infatuation with all things horrifying and horrific, I was scared of absolutely everything when I was a kid. A television commercial for a horror movie was enough to send me racing from the den in a sweaty palm panic. As an ongoing series here on Psychobabble, I'm going to be reviewing some of the things that most traumatized me as a child and evaluating whether or not I was rightfully frightened or just a wiener.

Case Study #4: “Norman Bates” music video

I was about seven years old when my family first got MTV, and I’d rush home from school every day to vegetate in front of videos by the J Geils Band, Eddie Grant, Pete Townshend, the Police, the Tom Tom Club, Adam and the Ants, Devo, Joe Jackson, Madness, Talking Heads, Split Enz, The Vapors, and the rest of the lot. However, there was one video I’d dread to see. It featured a bunch of dead-eyed freaks chanting the words “My name is Norman Bates, I’m just a normal guy” over a disturbingly robotic rhythm. I can’t quite say what so troubled me about this video, but I remained on my guard for several months every time I switched on MTV, ready to bolt as soon as I heard the words “My name is…”

Years later I learned that the song was simply titled “Norman Bates” and performed by a British group called Landscape. With the aid of that endlessly useful resource You Tube, I was able to revisit the video that so freaked me out as a lad.


The Verdict: Wow, this song is terrible. Repetitious, boring, amateurish ‘80s synth pop at its very worst. However, the video is a decently shot homage to Psycho and is actually quite good when compared to much of the crapola that polluted MTV during its earliest stages. But scary? No, no, a thousand times no. Diagnosis: wiener.

April 16, 2009: Things That Scare Me: Case Study #3

In spite of (or, perhaps, because of) my adult infatuation with all things horrifying and horrific, I was scared of absolutely everything when I was a kid. A television commercial for a horror movie was enough to send me racing from the den in a sweaty palm panic. As an ongoing series here on Psychobabble, I'm going to be reviewing some of the things that most traumatized me as a child and evaluating whether or not I was rightfully frightened or just a wiener.

(Incidentally, The Onion recently posted an article with the exact same premise as this series. While I seriously doubt that I’ve been ripped off, as I’m sure I’m the only one who reads Psychobabble, I just want to point out that I’m not going to allow such repetition to impede the continuation of this series. Onward and upward.)

Case Study #3: Trailer for the film Magic

Released in 1978, Magic was one of those “crazy ventriloquist expresses his craziness through his dummy” stories that had already been done in the British film Dead of Night (1945), episodes of “Twilight Zone”, “Tales from the Crypt” comics, and about half-a-gazillion other places. Still Magic is a decent little movie with Anthony Hopkins working his creepy mojo as the ventriloquist, but what really gained the movie infamy was its trailer.

Apparently, this commercial only aired on TV a few times before it was pulled because stations were inundated with calls from the irate parents of kids who had been emotionally scarred by it. I was four in 1978, and I remember exactly where I was the one and only time I saw this commercial (I was being babysat by a nice old lady who lived down the block). While neither my parents nor the nice old lady placed an irate call to any TV stations on my behalf, I was absolutely horrified by it, the content of which was so utterly traumatizing that in subsequent years I was unsure whether I’d actually seen the commercial or merely nightmared about it. 

The Verdict: On the one hand we have a ventriloquist dummy (always creepy) in unflinching close-up reciting a poem worthy of an Alvin Schwartz book and a final eyes-rolling-back-in-the-head flourish to ensure no one mistakes this for The Muppet Movie. On the other hand, the dummy sounds like Bugs Bunny. Still, that is one fucking creepy dummy, and knowing that enough other kids were screwed up by this thing to get it yanked from the air forces me to conclude that I was justified in my fright.

April 3, 2009: Things That Scare Me: Case Study #2

In spite of (or, perhaps, because of) my adult infatuation with all things horrifying and horrific, I was scared of absolutely everything when I was a kid. A television commercial for a horror movie was enough to send me racing from the den in a sweaty palm panic. As an ongoing series here on Psychobabble, I'm going to be reviewing some of the things that most traumatized me as a child and evaluating whether or not I was rightfully frightened or just a wiener.

Case Study #2: Stranger in Our House (aka: Summer of Fear)

Following two super low-budget horror flicks that are now regarded as genre classics—The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes— Wes Craven brought his schlock-shock vision to the small screen with a movie called Stranger in Our House (1978). The film starred Linda Blair as Rachel, a teenage girl skeptical of her cousin Julia (Lee Purcell), who has come to stay with Rachel’s family after her parents die in a mysterious car accident. As it turns out, Julia’s got some evil juju running through her and makes it her mission to cause trouble for Rachel and her kin.

I distinctly recall my mother watching this flick one afternoon when I was a kid. Initially, I was merely disturbed by the age-old concept of “I’m the only person who realizes you’re a monster and everyone else thinks I’m crazy.” 

The most frightening moment arrived after Julia is inevitably dispatched at the end of the movie. During the closing credits we see her reeling in sickening slow motion with those creepy contacts in her eyes. “Wait, so she’s not really dead?” I wondered, now having been introduced to not one but two deathless horror clichés. Of course, she was dead. I just didn’t grasp the fact that the closing credits weren’t a continuation of the film, but a sort of recap.

The Verdict: About ten or fifteen years ago, I noticed that Stranger in Our House was being shown as a late night movie on TV, and I made sure to stay up and check it out to find out if it still packed a punch. What I saw was a cheap, crappily acted crap-fest with crappy special effects that wouldn’t scare a six-year old. Only they did scare a six-year old… me. Ergo, I was a wiener.

April 1, 2009: Things That Scare Me: Case Study #1

In spite of (or, perhaps, because of) my adult infatuation with all things horrifying and horrific, I was scared of absolutely everything when I was a kid. A television commercial for a horror movie was enough to send me racing from the den in a sweaty palm panic. As an ongoing series here on Psychobabble, I'm going to be reviewing some of the things that most traumatized me as a child and evaluating whether or not I was rightfully frightened or just a wiener.

Case Study #1: TV Commercial for the Haunted Mansion in Longbranch, New Jersey

If you grew up on the East Coast during the late '70s/early '80s, you too may have been terrorized by this ad that aired every Halloween season. The Haunted Mansion later burned down, no doubt the culmination of the years of bad vibes this commercial shat out into the cosmos.

The Verdict: I think I was pretty justified in my terror. The doofus in the cloak and the guy dressed as Dracula notwithstanding, there are some fairly frightening images in this commercial, like the rat-petting cave lady and the fence-leaping ghoul (which haunted my nightmares for many, many years). The narration and music are pretty creepy, too.