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Thursday, August 9, 2012

What Was Your Childhood Monster?

I write a lot of horror into my games.  I love horror movies and books and pretty much have dedicated all this writing to horror and horror-themed RPGs.  So you might be wondering what is it that scares, or rather scared, me.

Tree Monsters.

Well a specific one at least.

Back when I was young I remember watching this movie on KPLR-TV Channel 11 out of St. Louis.  It was an old 50s horror film called "From Hell it Came".  My gods it was terrible.
But the monster in it, a cursed tree that grew out of the grave of a wrongly condemned man, freaked me out to no end.

I am not sure why.  Maybe it is because trees are alive and they are everywhere.  I think too it was the noise it made. The monster was called a "Tobonga" but in my young mind it became "Taboo the Tree Monster" and I must have freaked out pretty hard cause to this day I still get grief for it from my family.  I even get "gifts" of little tree monsters for Halloween from them.

I have never made a tree monster that I thought worked well enough to match the memory of fear (not the fear itself, that is long gone) I had then.  I did create Druthers for various games and I think they have a link to this guy.  Though I did buy this bit of art to come up with something.  I still might.

Yeah. So I was never afraid of witches. I loved them back then too.  Scarecrows freaked me out for a bit.  But the real horror is in walking, back from the dead, killer trees.


I am posting this as part of Christine Rains: What Was Your Childhood Monster Blogfest. 

And check out here new novella, Fearless.



You can sign up too!

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9 comments:

  1. APAugust 9, 2012 at 12:23 PM

    E.T. is mine. Yes. The one from the Spielberg movie. I had a nightmare about him coming out of my closet in a blanket with that glowing finger murmuring at me, and woke up screaming. Weirded me out ever since.

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  2. Christine RainsAugust 9, 2012 at 12:42 PM

    I've never heard of that old film, but now I have to check it out. Some trees do have that creepy aspect. Have you ever heard of the game Munchkin? They have a special extra card called the Redneck Buggering Tree! *LOL*

    Thank you for sharing your monster with us and for helping promote my novella.

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  3. JohnAugust 9, 2012 at 4:42 PM

    Tobonga! I used to love this movie when I was like 5-6 years old, the tree stump monster was so frickin' scary. I seem to remember it sinking beneath quicksand at the end of the movie. For the life of me, I couldn't remember the name of it, so thanks for putting this out there.

    Alas, it is not available on Netflix.

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  4. Susan Gourley/KelleyAugust 9, 2012 at 8:18 PM

    I never heard of that movie, but trees are scary in the dark. They move around and make noise.

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  5. Shannon LawrenceAugust 10, 2012 at 9:19 PM

    I have a special love for creepy, unusual old trees. However, there is a bit of the nightmare behind them. It was Poltergeist that did me in for trees, though, as I haven't seen this movie.

    My monster: http://thewarriormuse.blogspot.com/2012/08/childhood-monster-blog-fest.html

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  6. LaurenAugust 13, 2012 at 9:06 PM

    I like pretty much anything green. I think I'd have to go so far as a mutant venus fly trap. There was a movie about that too, as I recall. I can't remember the name.

    Lauren
    Lauren-ritz.blogspot.com

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  7. AnonymousAugust 13, 2012 at 10:25 PM

    Reading this post, now you have me thinking about tree monsters. My monster was the witch from The Wizard of Oz, and I also remember a scary talking tree in that movie.

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  8. Little OdoAugust 17, 2012 at 9:17 AM

    My actual sleep time nightmares were generally end of the world scenarios filled with monsters that were unkillable through everyday means - e.g. vampires and werewolves. I'd always be the last to survive out of my friends/family and then they'd come to get me. I always escaped by jumping over a cliff with the juddering wake-up that generally brings.

    Other than that I wasn't really scared of much monsters wise, but the bongs on the News at Ten (on BBC TV during the 1970s) played havoc with my mind all night if I ever heard them before I fell asleep.

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  9. Justin S. DavisOctober 1, 2012 at 9:36 PM

    I'm cross-posting Tabonga here, just so you know he's always waiting just for you...simply lurking, right on the periphery of your blog....

    TABONGA LOVES YOU!!!

    --

    And since fair is fair, I actually had two "childhood monsters". Saw Jaws in 1st grade, and it gave me nightmares for years...but then I read John Russo's Return Of The Living Dead in 4th grade, adding zombies to the mix. And until I was a teenager, I obsessed every time I went into a public building about "zombie escape routes" (climbing into ceiling tiles, worming into cabinets, etc). Yeah. Just yeah.

    So, for over 3 decades, I've had shark AND zombie nightmares...and sometimes even combined.

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