Childhood Trauma Rediscovered Through Spooky Retro Youtube
I’ve spent nearly all of my life haunted by something I saw on TV when I was extremely young. I’ve never been able to remember what it was, and I’ve spent decades searching the internet trying to figure it out.
The way I remember it, it’s a story about someone who washes a spider down their kitchen sink. At the end, they get into a dark elevator where the spider, having grown massive, exacts it’s revenge. The elevator rising up into the dark shaft and blood drips down.
As recently as a few months ago, I was pouring over lists of spider movies trying to find it.
Every act of arachnid murder I’ve committed throughout my life has been accompanied by the irrational fear that it would not die, but rather lurk in the shadows, growing large and bulbous with hate, until it would one day descend upon me to tear me apart.
This was further exacerbated by a haunted barn attraction I went to in the town of Kiel, Wisconsin in the early 90s. As you walked into the silo and were distracted by the plexiglass beneath your feet dimly illuminated to show human remains buried beneath, a giant hairy spider prop that filled the circumference of the silo dropped on you from above.
Years of trauma, and yet I couldn’t find the source.
Until this morning, when my girlfriend randomly put a Youtube video on the TV containing 9 hours of creepy late night horror TV and retro commercials. She started fast forwarding, scanning through it to see what was of interest, and stopped at an elevator scene.
I recognized it immediately, despite not seeing it since the 80s.
She went back to the beginning to see what it was.
I had been searching spider movies all these years, but it turns out it was an episode of the 1980s Twilight Zone reboot that aired in January, 1986. The segment was called “The Elevator,” and it was written by Ray Bradbury. The story is about two brother (one of them is “Evil Ed” from Fright Night, a childhood favorite of mine) searching for their missing scientist father in an old warehouse where he keeps his experiments.
Dad invented a growth serum. The brothers find unnaturally enlarged rats, cats, and dogs, as they search the warehouse.
They call the elevator to take it the upper levels, thinking Dad might be up there.
But the elevator isn’t empty when it opens.
The monstrosity inside grabs the brothers, the doors close, and the elevators ascends into the dark shaft. Their flashlights falls to the floor below, followed by droplets of blood, and the abrupt end of the story.
Mostly how I remembered it. Except now I need to figure out where I’m remembering the sink scene from, because that didn’t happen in this story.
Watch the 2-minute abridged version of “The Elevator” here:
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