If you can get hold of a copy of Bart Simpson's Treehouse of Horror Issue 1 (originally published in September 1995) you'll find an intriguing Bongo Beat article written by Simpsons creator Matt Groening entitled "49 Things That Frightened and Disturbed Me When I was a Kid" (note: in the UK this article was published in Issue 33 of The Simpsons Comic in November 1999). Here, Matt takes us on a journey down the deep dark well of childhood fear and the various brushes with terror which kept him lying awake in a cold sweat for many a night throughout his youth. Irrational childhood fear can play a major role in shaping one's adult affinities and preoccupations, so this glimpse into the younger Matt's psyche is fascinating in terms of how we plainly see a few themes that would be prevalent in his later work taking form here - for example, Matt brings up his morbid childhood phobia of robots, a few remnants of which were manifestly transferred over into Bender's character in Futurama. What makes it such an entertaining read, however, is the sheer banality of it all, or rather the manner in which Matt's young, impressionable eyes were able to transform the dull suburban world of mid-century America into the stuff of nightmares. Matt's fears were informed by everything from science fiction B pictures to mundane black and white television, from a kid's eye understanding of the politics of the age (Matt feared commies, but for slightly different reasons to the rest of the US) to the freakier happenings (ostensibly, anyway) within his own neighbourhood and his early encounters with the grislier side of nature, among them his first youthful awakenings to the prevalence of mortality and decay. Nowhere is that expressed more succinctly in Matt's list than in item 24, where he supplies an anecdote about opening up a candy bar to find that a bunch of maggots had gotten there first.
Where this list struck a particularly strong a chord with me on a personal level, however, was at item 26:
"26. Uproarious canned laughter on old TV sitcoms."
MY SOULMATE!
Actually, Matt and I have more in common besides our mutual irrational fear of disembodied laughter. Reading through Matt's list, I notice a very clear pattern, whereby growing up Matt was regularly tormented by an older brother named Mark who evidently enjoyed playing on his anxieties.* Well, snap.
I'm such a great fan of Matt's list that I got to thinking that there was perhaps an entire blog series to be mined from going in search of a selection of these objects of terror and giving my own thoughts and impressions on them and their lingering ability to frighten and disturb. There are of course limits to how many of the items on the list I can revisit for myself. The ones relating to Matt's personal first-hand childhood experiences are obviously impractical - I cannot, for example, check out the rotting beaver carcass Matt stumbled on out in the woods one day when he was nine, and nor would I wish to. But the items relating to popular culture (which make up about half the list) are things that I can certainly take a stab at.
As an endnote, the final item on Matt's list acts the punchline to the entire article, namely, "The realization that most of these memories still haunt me." Which is another thing that makes Matt a man after my own heart. I didn't get over a huge chunk of my own irrational childhood fears so much as log them away quietly at the back of my psyche, enabling them to intermittently surface and give my adult brain a good rattling. Which accounts for a significant proportion of the material that I write within these pages.
* Actually, Matt's older brother Mark comes up three times in the list and there's only one instance where he appears to have been deliberately stoking his younger sibling's fears. I'm pretty certain that there's also a Futurama commentary where Matt talks about his brother Mark looking to terrify him by dressing up as a robot, however.
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