The Big Red Room (3 of 4)

Fear is innate. We’re born crying our lungs out and from that point forward it’s all about navigating minefields of potential terrors. Some become better at it than others, and the rest of us pretend.

When I was a little kid I was predictably wide-eyed, it took a while for genuine fear to take shape, to materialize as a recognizable, definable thing in my world. At that point the only thing I was truly afraid of was that my sister might steal from my stash of lemon drops. Again. 

Unease, trepidation - these things I understood. The night my family went to see Jaws they dumped me at Grandma’s house beforehand ‘cos they thought I was too young to handle it. I was extremely jealous. I wanted to see it. But they were probably right to do so, since simply looking at the poster for that movie - the shark’s black emotionless eyes, hundreds of sharp teeth headed straight for that lady swimmer - gave me a weird feeling in my stomach. Here’s the thing, though: that was a pretty intriguing feeling. 

One night I woke up in the middle of the night and found my parents awake in the living room, on the couch watching television. They allowed me to watch with them, probably because getting me to go back to sleep was too much of a hassle. What they were watching was an episode of Twilight Zone, “Five Characters in Search of an Exit”. It’s the one where five figures - clown, ballerina, hobo, soldier, and bagpipe player - find themselves in the middle of a blank, colorless nowhere with no memory of who they are or how they got there. After much speculation and hand-wringing about the nature of their existence, they work up a plan to get out. Able to see a rim just above, at the top of the circular white wall surrounding them, they build a human ladder. The soldier is able to reach the edge, and get over, whereupon he plummets to the snow-covered ground below, only to be picked up by a small child several times his size. Turns out the five figures were dolls the whole time, being gathered for charity Christmas gifts.   

That episode has a nice, weird atmosphere, perfect for viewing while half-awake. There amid the shadows against the red wall in our living room, the tv screen seemed like a brightly lit portal into some other plane of existence. Those characters each had a kind of primal appeal; clown, soldier, ballerina, each with its own specific mode of dress and behavior, very basic, very vivid. The mood was one of claustrophobia, accentuated by the black and white, so sharp, so stark. I was sucked in. 

The ending, with the revelation that the figures were dolls, was both puzzling and unnerving. I had a lot of questions. Do dolls really come to life? Could it be that I am actually a doll? Would I ever get out of this red room? And if I did get out, could I get back in? This is where I keep my lemon drops!  

The episode wasn’t particularly scary. A mild disappointment, because for whatever reason, my young mind was very infatuated with the idea of being scared. I would like to claim I had a preternatural understanding that on a psychological level experiencing vicarious fear works as an inoculation against genuine fear, but I suspect I was merely out for cheap thrills.

In classic be-careful-what-you-wish-for fashion, that Twilight Zone episode would come to seem like a warm and fuzzy enterprise compared to another doll-related TV event from 1975. The movie that would irreversibly sully my heretofore pure and unwrinkled childhood consciousness was Trilogy of Terror, a TV movie that starred Karen Black in three separate segments, each written by Richard Matheson, who himself had written several classic episodes of Twilight Zone.

I was one among many thousands of Gen X’ers scarred as a young person specifically by the third segment of Trilogy of Terror, in which Karen Black buys a voodoo doll as a gift for her boyfriend, only to have the thing come to life and terrorize her in her own apartment for half an excruciating hour. 

Based on Matheson’s fantasy classic “Prey”, the sequence is a small masterpiece of horror, with a downright brilliant performance from Black as an upwardly mobile suburbanite with troublesome mother issues. She carries the whole segment, vacillating in turns from weary nervousness to full-blown hysteria. The performance is not particularly subtle, but it is believably grueling.

Her performance is more impressive given how easy it might have been to be overshadowed by her little scene-stealing sparring partner. All sharp cheekbones, tiny crazed eyes, unkempt black hair, that damn voodoo doll is scary even when it's inanimate, so imagine the effect when it’s scuttling across the floor, shrieking. Early on Black ponders aloud, “Aren’t you an ugly thing?”. Pretty rude. No wonder it attacks her.  

The reign of terror this voodoo doll inflicts on Black amounts to an extended and harrowing cat and mouse game, including plenty of eerie shuffling sounds, broken lamps, kitchen knives, and not a little bloodshed. The editing and sound design are each unusually effective. Once it has sprung to monstrous life the doll is shown only in glimpses, usually in a blur of motion and shadows, so the viewer can never quite get a fix on it. The sound it makes, sort of an obnoxious, hostile gargle, would haunt my dreams from that point forward. 

I don’t think I dreamed the night I saw the movie because of course I couldn’t sleep. And that awful, raspy screech kept ringing in my brain. This despite the relatively happy ending of the story, in which (spoiler alert) both Black and the doll come out of the whole ordeal with claim to a kind of victory, the doll having survived Black’s attempt to bake it in the oven by taking possession of her body, and Black in turn now fully prepared to properly face up to her overbearing mother; with a giant knife at the ready and a big, grotesque smile spreading across her face.

I think this movie had such an effect on me because we had a small statue in our red living room that I was pretty wary of even before that voodoo doll raged across my psyche. Afterwards, forget it.

It was an odd statue, a human figure, faceless, limbs posed at awkward angles. My father had a bizarre predilection for that kind of thing. There were always statues of weird heads or misshapen torsos around. But this statue had an aura about it. That thing was not my friend. 

I’d walk by it cautiously, pretty sure it was turning its head to follow my steps. Sometimes I’d see it move. Taking a couple steps forward, jutting its arms out in a weird parody of human movement. I’d be caught there breathless and it would catch my eyes with its no-face and I could feel it giggling. A vacant, barely-there sound, muffled but unmistakably malevolent. 

I’d try to move and it would mock me. Standing in the doorway, still twisting its arms and legs in a senseless jerking motion. Once I even saw it kneel and curtsy. 

Maybe it was only making an attempt to communicate. To be my friend, in its strange, stop-motion way.  

Nah. I didn’t have time for that shit. Go find friends somewhere else, maybe in whatever creepy statue netherworld you materialized out of. 

I had to find some means of avoidance, some way to blot out this bizarre spectacle that the red room had birthed. I needed a way out. A song or a movie or some drawing or some companionship. Something with noise and smoke.

I needed a parade or an airshow. Something with light and color, where the laughter is gentle and open and amiable.

I needed to find something to get me through. 

Don’t we all, at some point?

to be continued