My Top Scary Movie of All-Time

I don't like scary movies, and I don't like heights. Basically, I don't like anything that makes my body go into fight-or-flight unnecessarily.

When I was little, my parents would let me and my sister stay up every Friday night and watch anything we wanted. We basically only had two channels so nothing could be really bad. Could it? I remember watching one horribly scarring TV movie called The Dark Night of the Scarecrow. Like most movies of the 20th century, Charles Durning was in it.

The plot was simple: A group of hateful men wrongly blame a mentally disabled man for an attack on a young girl. They track him down to his hiding place – inside a scarecrow outfit in the middle of a corn field.

As we look into his quivering eyes, the three men blow him away. Then, over the next two hours, we watch the scarecrow kill the men.

If my traumatized 7-year-old brain remembers correctly, one bad guy was killed by suffocating in a grain silo, one was fed through a wood shredder and Charles Durning got a bellyful of pitchfork.

For years, I saw that scarecrow at the foot of my bed at night and behind my eyelids on sunny days. I even remember his name – Bubba Ritter.

That movie, my friends, was a child's mental apocalypse in 1981.