I am especially sympathetic when I remember the onscreen horrors which once befell me
It’s bedtime and my son is hopping on the spot as he takes a little extra time to brush his teeth. He reaches out his hand for mine as I walk him to his room, fussing slightly as if he intends to ask me something. As I switch on his reading light, he buffers by the bookshelf.
“Can you stay a bit?” he asks, his lip trembling like a shaken leaf.
Now that I look, his whole body is trembling. His mouth is formed into a quivering arch. His fingers fidget by his sides. I ask what’s wrong. Near tears, he swallows. Finally, in the plaintive voice of a very small cartoon mouse, he asks: “What was that thing?”
The thing to which he’s referring is It Has No Name, the baddie from the Doctor Who episode we’ve just watched, a parasitic alien that latches on to its victims, possesses their minds, and kills anyone who gets in its way. I’ll admit that when I describe it like that, it does sound terrifying. But we hadn’t noticed the effect while he was watching.
He’s been increasingly enjoying Doctor Who, a rare show that he, his mum and I watch together as a family. That said, he generally prefers the sillier episodes. (Last year’s Space Babies, in which an entire spaceship of hyper-intelligent babies must confront a bogeyman made from literal bogies, being a standout.) But he’s also come to enjoy the darker end of its PG-rated thrills and has rarely exhibited any particularly strong negative reactions while watching, not even to the episode that’s now left him standing before me, traumatised.
As movie monsters go, It Has No Name is not the scariest committed to screen. It is, in fact, almost completely invisible and, aside from one very blurry and obscured shot late in the episode, boasts no visuals at all. Instead, its presence is known by some creepy lighting effects and the faint trill of the indecipherable speech it whispers into its hosts’ minds. Again, on typing these words, it is becoming clearer to me why it’s had such an effect. It’s just I keep forgetting what my son is ready for and what he’s not.
He’s still not quite seven years old but, in most respects, he cuts quite a sophisticated figure. He loves facts. He loves maths. His love of chess often tricks me into thinking he’s older than he is. It’s only occasionally apparent that he’s still experiencing so much of life’s rich pageant for the first time.
Finally, in the plaintive voice of a very small cartoon mouse, he asks, What was that thing?
I should have remembered my attempt, some months ago, to show him Jurassic Park, a film that blew my tiny mind when I first saw it. I was, admittedly, a year older than he is when it came out and so fanatically obsessed with dinosaurs that I don’t remember it scaring me at all. I greeted it like the high cinema it was. And to the probable distaste of everyone who knew me, it quickly became roughly 90% of my personality. This may have included my frankly quite brave choice to walk everywhere with an old Cornflakes container I’d filled with Jurassic Park stickers, figures and factsheets that I termed, regrettably, “my dino box”.
In my son’s case, possibly because he’s that bit younger than I was – quite probably because he’s less of a massive freak – Jurassic Park’s effect was somewhat different. He squirmed through the first appearance of the T-Rex and hid his eyes from the velociraptors. What I’d hoped would be a bonding exercise turned instead into something of a grind – a chastening exercise in mapping the frontiers of his endurance, purely to satisfy my own nostalgia. Within minutes I was fast forwarding through the scary bits, before turning it off halfway through and making a mental note to try it again when he’s older (or more of a massive freak).
Once my son is settled in bed, I tell him it’s good to get a fright sometimes, because it shows us the power of stories. You can’t save your first big scare for “when the time is right”, because then it wouldn’t be scary. Finding those raw nerves, even learning to enjoy them, isn’t just part of enjoying art, it’s part of growing up.
Afterwards, I step downstairs to tell my wife what’s happened. She’s appalled, of course, and we share our guilt over the trauma we’ve unknowingly inflicted.
She asks about my own earliest telly scare. I blanche a little, recalling the now-forgotten Saturday morning CBBC programme Pigsty, a live-action show featuring three anthropomorphic pigs who ran an American diner attached to a recording studio. I was haunted by their frightful pig-human costumes, which clearly throttled their ability to speak their lines live, meaning their dialogue – American accented, despite the show taking place in the UK – was dubbed over the hideous porcine gurning that comprised their grisly performance.
Laughing, she insists that no such show existed. I turn to YouTube and find three episodes staring back at me. We click and watch a snippet of the Day-Glo tedium that once left me so shell-shocked I didn’t sleep for three days. She is quickly in hysterics.
“Isn’t it funny what hits you when you’re that young?” she says.
“Yeah” I say, my lip trembling, my mouth dry, my fingers fidgeting by my sides. “Yeah, it is.”
Photograph by BBC Studios/Bad Wolf/James Pardon
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