AmyD joins the Monster Mash!

AmyD is new to our Signal Corps, and I am delighted she's decided to participate, and I think you'll be glad, too


Least Favorite: Chucky

Why nobody ever just drop kicked this monster, I could never understand

As a fourth-grader, I had an irrational fear of Charles Lee “Chucky” Ray of the Child’s Play movie series fame. I couldn’t look at him, think about him, see him in a commercial, or hear other people talking about him without sensing indescribable dread and crying. Since he actually frightened me (and still does a little to this day), he is my least favorite monster. I have no idea where this fear came from because I have never even seen a single “Chucky” movie, and I had nothing but positive doll experiences growing up. It made no sense to anyone at the time. I couldn’t even go to the cheesy video store in my neighborhood, “Movies Galore” (yes, that really was the name), without dramatically avoiding the “Horror” movie section. If I even caught a glimpse of the demonic red-headed doll on the movie box by accident, my heart would race and I would start sweating profusely.

Unsurprisingly, my family had no idea how to deal with my strange behavior, but that fact has never stopped them from trying before. While my sister delighted in exploiting my fear, my parents decided to employ two different approaches to try to calm me down. My psychiatrist dad decided some sort of “thought experiment”/mental exercise was in order. He instructed me to lie down, close my eyes, visualize putting Chucky in a jar, twisting the lid on tightly, and putting the jar on a shelf somewhere in the recesses of my elementary school mind. I am not making this up. So, as I stretched out on the couch trying to put Chucky in a mental memory jar, all I could think was, "what if he gets out?" Cue panic.

My mother, the more practical of the two, took it upon herself to “tease” the fear out of my body. She was convinced that I was far too old and smart to be afraid of Chucky. Clearly, she did not understand that age and a high Brain Quest score were totally irrelevant to the matter. So, (again, I am not making any of this up) she would follow me into a room at night, turn off all the lights, and then whisper "Chucky, Chucky, Chucky" to me in the dark. Immediately the tears would well up in me and the guilt would set in in her. The tagline to all of these experiences as I would run out of the room was always the same, “Amy, I don’t even know what a ‘Chucky’ is. It’s just some pretend creature!”

I think these experiences only proved that my folks were well-meaning but ill-equipped to battle a little doll in overalls. Eventually, I outgrew my fear, was able to sleep again, and could rent as many Sega videogames from “Movies Galore” without any panic attacks. However, no one in my family has seen a “Chucky” film since he was banned from our household for so long. I doubt the ban and his “least favorite monster” moniker will ever be lifted.

Favorite: Rhoda Penmark from The Bad Seed (1956)

Wow.  Just..  I need to see this movie.

Rhoda Penmark is the greatest mean girl there ever was. As both a child and a monster, this makes her all the more compelling. Children naturally don’t understand complex morality, and Rhoda flaunts this in the most grotesque manner. You really can’t help but empathize with her poor mother when she discovers her little brat killed grandma. My parents were big fans of “The Bad Seed,” so anything my sister and I ever did was dwarfed by Rhoda's growing body count. In fact, her evil nature worked to reaffirm our (mine, especially) own angelic goodness.