While Maurice Sendak's more popular "Where the Wild Things Are" involves fanged monsters who are oversized and eyeball-y, it has a brave young hero who is relatable to a four-year-old and also features a happy ending. Unfamiliar British vocabulary, references to pill popping, colorless ink drawings of anthropomorphic animals with giant heads sipping tea, tangible sense of discomfort? Less relatable. An easily deceived, morose dog isn't the way to go when choosing a protagonist for a kid's book. I can still recall the suffocating feeling of terror I experienced while listening to my mom reading it.

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Thanks for sharing Amalia! Although I missed out on this SENDAK chestnut, I do remember being creeped out by his mid-70's collaboration with songstress CAROLE KING called REALLY ROSIE. My elementary school music teacher thought it would be a great idea if she taught us the SENDAK/KING traumatizer THE BALLAD OF CHICKEN SOUP. We ended up performing it, along with a medley of other questionable songs, in the gymnasium at the end of the school year as a special treat for our parents. Imagine the looks on their faces when a stage filled with off-key grade schoolers began pantomiming this ditty:

I know some may find it silly, but the character in JOHN CARPENTER's PRINCE OF DARKNESS that is most frightening to me is the student who gets bruised and then ends up absorbing the most liquid from the jar. When she wakes up she still has her cute outfit and cute blond ponytail, but her teeth are black and her skin looks like an unbaked pizza. You may laugh, but her childlike wide-eyed glee as she "opens" mirrors and hisses, "Father!" always gives me the willies.

UNKLE LANCIFER SEZ: Mike, I'm not laughing! PRINCE OF DARKNESS has a haunting quality all its own. Both unusual in the CARPENTER canon and an almost perfect blending of all his most recognizable themes, the "Darkness" in PRINCE is surprisingly pitch black and the stuff real nightmares are made of. Some of that often-silly imagery you mentioned only adds to the creep factor! I, like apparently many other people, have always been taken aback by the film's disturbingly ambiguous end scene(s). Shrouded in static interference and accompanied by barely audible voice transmissions, its apocalyptic fever dream warning from beyond has always gotten to my core. Although hard to pin down, hard to focus on, faulty, digital imagery has been utilized in many movies post BLAIR WITCH, in 1987 this message from this future was suitably ahead of its time. (It should be said, RIDLEY SCOTT used similar staticy, vague visuals to great effect in early scenes of ALIEN as well) If you think about it, recent flicks like CLOVERFIELD and [REC] are all over this first hand, message from ground zero vibe. In the lone case of PRINCE OF DARKNESS though, the techno "transmission" is invading a dreamy subconscious state and involves a supernatural ultimate evil…scary stuff. Interestingly, CARPENTER thinks of PRINCE OF DARKNESS as the second film in an "apocalypse trilogy" that also includes THE THING and IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS. I'm sure there's many viewers who began the film laughing at JAMESON PARKER's massive porn mustache but found themselves later in bed, in that weird blurry state between awake and asleep, wondering where the images in their own dreams originate from.

"This is not a dream..not a dream. We are using your brain's electrical system as a receiver. We are unable to transmit through conscious neural interference. You are receiving this broadcast as a dream. We are transmitting from the year one, nine, nine, nine. You are receiving this broadcast in order to alter the events you are seeing. Our technology has not developed a transmitter strong enough to reach your conscious state of awareness but this is not a dream. You are seeing what is actually occurring for the purpose of causality violation."

NOTE: Audio "samples" from this ominous message are found on DJ SHADOW's album "Endtroducing" and MARILYN MANSON's version of "Down in the Park." Although there is no direct connection, to me, NINE INCH NAIL's entire album "Year Zero" seems cut from the same cloth as well. While we're at it , it also reminds me of one of my favorite record covers, THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN's "April Skies" which, like PRINCE OF DARKNESS, came out in 1987.

When I was a little kid, my teenage sister was a big STEPHEN KING fan. One of her favorite ways of tormenting her little brother was to chase me around the house with the cover of her paperback copy of Pet Sematary, which I was completely terrified of. For those unfamiliar with or don't remember, the original paperback featured a screaming ghastly-looking undead kitty pouncing forward at the reader. I'm not ashamed to admit that glancing at the cover still gives me little chills to this day.

UNKLE LANCIFER SEZ: Zack, thanks for the Traumafession! You just reminded me that my little brother had a terrible issue with a particular paperback himself, it was called The Devil And Ben Franklin and it tormented him whenever we stayed at our grandmother's house. It didn't help that grandma lived right next door to a cemetery (not the pet kind)! This is what Unkle Tomifer sez:

"I had to run to the bed when I turned out the lights. And I would be so mad at myself if I accidently saw it or thought of it before bedtime, because it ruined my night until I fell asleep!"

I can't really blame him, I mean, can you think of a scarier pair than the Devil and Ben Franklin? Eternal damnation is bad enough, but pairing it with a history lesson is just too cruel!