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