The First Movie/TV Show That Really Scared Me

I cannot prove this film or TV show actually exists.  I have scoured the Internet since the late 90s for any other mention of this existing.  Every now and again I'll get a "that sounds familiar" or a "I think I remember something like that" but nothing ever comes of it.

It's the first time I ever screamed in fright at something on television (also possibly one of the only times I've ever screamed in fright at the television).  It was a goofy, dumb program with an obviously rubber mask.  I was watching it with one of my best friends, a girl who lived three doors down from my house at the end of a cul de sac.

There are no pictures for this post, because again I can't prove this program ever existed, but I have recently enlisted the help of I Remember This Movie... to help me figure it out.

Because seriously, if they have someone who remembers episodes of Bone Chillers, they should be able to help me with this.



So here's the set-up.  My friend (who I'll just call "K") and I were at my house, and we realized a program was going to come on that I honestly believe was called Monster In My Closet.  No, it wasn't the children's story about the kid who befriends the thing in his closet, that was There's A Nightmare In My Closet.  That was a video narrated by Billy Crystal.

It also wasn't the horrible B-movie Monster In The Closet, which was just a thinly-veiled anti-homosexual propaganda film starring a child Paul Walker and Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas.  As children, before you get your hopes up.  It was 1986, a time of rampant anti-gay paranoia in American horror films.

Seriously, the monster dies while "marching on San Francisco."  It couldn't have been more obvious if they cast Paul Lynde.

Anyway, we realized this program was going to come on, and we decided to make a game of it.  We would each use our crayons to draw what we thought a closet monster looked like, and whoever came closest to what the television showed us was the winner.

But here's what I remember:

A small child has a room with a closet to the right hand side of the bed if you're standing facing it.  He keeps oversized toy blocks in front of the door, much to the chagrin of his parents, because he's convinced there's a monster in there.  Any time the blocks are moved away, he gets extremely upset and puts them back.

One day, his mother (I think it was his mother?  Maybe it was a maid?) knocks the blocks over and starts picking up his toys from the floor.  The door opens up behind her.  She looks back.  The television shows the monster.

And honestly, it's about here that my memory ends.  Now, this was about fifteen minutes into the production, we had been getting more and more worked up over what this thing was going to look like as each second ticked by.  There were lots of little teases, such as the door opening a crack when the blocks were in front of it, and we'd see from the creature's point of view as it lamented being unable to push aside three pounds of plastic to get to soft chewable flesh.

Both "K" and I screamed when the monster came on the screen, and I remember it dragged the mother/maid into the closet and the door slammed shut behind her feet, at which point we turned off the television and ran outside into the daylight.

That's right, we were scared silly at around 2 in the afternoon.  Either it was a weekend, or it was summer vacation, either way not something I'm really proud of.

Anyway, if anybody has any recollection of this based on my poorly described synopsis of part of it, please let me know.  I want to find this somewhere, hunt down K, and get the two of us to finish what's probably a really terribly-made production (again, the 80s) that shouldn't have scared anybody, much less us.