This is my favorite find of the day. You know those production company logos that appear at the end of most TV shows? It seems that some people find them scary, because they consist of short bursts of attention-grabbing music and some sort of logo flying at you.
Well, one of them, from Paramount in 1969, has a nickname: the Closet Killer. Because it sounds like what you hear when a serial killer is waiting in your closet.
I associate this with the first season of The Brady Bunch.
(More Paramount logos here.)
Even better than that, a short film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last month called The S From Hell, which spoofily explores children’s fears of the 1960s Screen Gems logo. The entire nine-minute film is currently online, and after watching it, I’m a little unnerved by the S From Hell, too.
Finally, here’s a good explanation of why these things can be frightening to a kid.
I…don’t get it. It doesn’t seem all that terrifying to me.
I’ll admit though that the Mark VII hammer strikes spooked me a little, usually because the shows it came after (Dragnet for example) were on Nick at Nite about the time I’d be going to sleep and the sound would be kind of unnerving in that late night period of liminal consciousness.
We’ve been watching Michael Apted’s 7 Up series of documentaries (following a group of kids in the 1960s from childhood into adulthood), and this sort of reminds me of its almost comically over-dramatic music. At the end of each installment, it shows the children playing, the voiceover says something like “this is the future of Britain.” Music: dun dun DUN! Haha. Still I love how they’ve kept it all these years.