Nightmares at Grandma’s House
Growing up, I was lucky to have my maternal grandparents live close enough that we could have frequent visits to their farmhouse. They did not live on a massive farm, rather, in a tiny speck of a village that somehow had residential property on a main street containing a farmhouse, a full-sized barn with a chicken coop and enough land to have sizeable vegetable gardens requiring a tractor to till the soil. All while still having a proper yard, complete with flower gardens and an enormous - and terrifying - German Shepherd that lived in the doghouse and kept watch over everything.
In the late ‘70s/early ‘80s, the two-storey white farmhouse with green trim was usually a place to run wild. As children do at their grandparents, we really had very little rules or structure in our day. The chores, like picking carrots or sorting clothes pegs, were kind of a fun amusement for me. Most of the daytime was filled with adult-free adventure. Exploring the barn and wandering through the acres of nearby conservation areas would be top of the list on a sunny day. When the weather turned gloomy, I could while away the hours looking through her collection of paperbacks. Top-selling books, far too scary for me to read, but I loved looking at the covers and reading the descriptions. It was a pattern for me to be intrigued by those scary titles, and know I wasn’t yet ready to dive in.
Recognize this? Exhibit A in Blue Mountain Pottery designs.
The house was massive to my eyes. Considering ours was a family of four, this house had raised eight kids raised in it, so there were lots of rooms, even though my aunts and uncles often double-bunked as children. It was filled with the popular knickknacks of that time: blue mountain pottery, plates with the Pope’s face on them, and those weird little spoons people collected when they travelled to exotic places like Niagara Falls or Montreal.
At night though, this familiar second home underwent an eerie transformation. It became a place of shadows, with little light projecting from the table lamps. Only two rooms offered a reprieve from the night, with lights shining brightly, beckoning me to escape the darkness.
Up the flight of stairs, you would find the game room. Formerly two bedrooms, with windows overlooking the barn, in my time, it contained a pool table (with both snooker and billiards balls), a dart board and a bar. The décor was equally memorable. Lobster traps and those wine bottles that were wrapped in wicker. And linoleum. So. Much. Linoleum.
Depending on how many of us were spending the night, that is, if my cousins were also staying there, I’d be forced to sleep in one of the remaining upstairs bedrooms. Forced to leave the brightness of the game room and make the terrifying walk through the dimly lit hallway, past the hare from hell.
The deadly Rabbit of Caerbannog, from Monty Python & the Holy Grail.
Before Monty Python’s knights squared off against the killer rabbit, as a young child I had to deal with pure nightmare fuel in the form of a brown, taxidermized hare that stood upright. It was on a side table, which meant it stared down at me with creepy glass eyes. Worse still, the jaw had been hinged, so that its teeth would open and close, ever so slightly if I didn’t tiptoe as I tried to sneak by. It was an ugly monstrosity in the daylight.
At night, accompanied by the creaks of an old house and the scraping of branches against the siding, this creature could challenge any horror movie monster and win.
Downstairs was the safe space at night. The second room that offered bright light was the kitchen. As with most farmhouses, it was the hub. No one entered the house through the front door, it was always through the kitchen. Off this room, there was a bathroom, the entrance to the storeroom (which led outside facing the barn and contained the beer fridge) and the entrance to the cellar. It was also where Perry Mason could be found.
On quiet nights, despite having a full-sized television in the living room, Grandma would turn on the tiny black and white countertop tv and watch Perry Mason do his thing late at night. It was rare for us kids to share any activities at night with her. We would be exhausted from the day’s explorations, but if we did get up, we knew where we would find her.
Idyllic as this all sounds, things took a dramatic turn over a two-night period.
Every parent, grandparent or babysitter has made the fateful mistake of inducing nightmares by permitting kids to watch something they were unprepared to see. Grandma scored a twofer: scaring the crap out of both my brother and me, on sequential nights, because she decided to watch a movie on the big tv.
This was the week of the Canadian television debut of Airport ’77. Disaster movies in the seventies were like superhero movies today. You could not escape them (pun intended). Four movies were created in the Airport series, the first based on the bestselling Arthur Hailey novel. The rest of the movies, Airport ’75, Airport ’77 and Airport ’79 The Concorde, simply found new ways to terrorize a group of passengers and crew.
And young children.
Movie poster for Airport ‘77
The film was aired on tv over two nights. Night one ended with the 747 crashing into the ocean after striking the top of an oil rig. In the movie, not much has happened yet as the structure of the plane is still intact, though sinking. As the younger of us kids, I wasn’t affected simply because I probably did not realize what was going on. My brother, older and grasping the seriousness of the situation, had nightmares that evening.
Despite the fact that one of her grandkids had nightmares, she still thought it was a good idea to sit us down to watch the conclusion the following night.
The second half is where the disaster part of the movie kicks in. The plane breaks apart, people struggle to stay alive in the middle of the ocean – I may not have seen Jaws yet, but like everyone, I knew about Jaws, so I knew there was more to fear than drowning). Needless to say, I didn’t make it through the second half of the film before freaking out.
Before we all get too judgy, remember that there was no cable, and VHS wasn’t a thing yet either. If something decent was airing on tv, you tuned in. Could be a long, dry spell before anything exciting comes on again. And, let’s also face up to the fact that my grandmother had not dealt with young kids having nightmares for many, many years - so the twofer must have been equally challenging for her.
Seven years passed before I sat down with my grandmother to watch a movie again. I chose Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy.
No nightmares.
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Keep this topic going: listen to the accompanying podcast episodes Those Movie Moments We Were Far Too Young to See and Animated Nightmare Fuel (for Kids!)
