when i was little, i was frightened of a lot of things. that my parents would die or that i'd get kidnapped or that the dresser in my room would come to life and eat me... you know, standard childhood things.

i still remember conquering one of my great fears: my closet door was rattling one night and my father, who was reading a bedtime story to my brother, refused to come find out what it was and so i was forced to open the door myself (can you imagine what this was like to a child with an imagination??). it turned out to be the cat (bitter from several hours stuck in the closet) and not the boogie man, but still.

even as i age, though, i find that there are still things that give me the creeps:
- all the heads screaming "dorothy gale!!!!" in return to oz.
- the beginning of amadeus when they open the door and he's covered in blood.
- cockroaches

all of this came back to mind because i recently bought a copy of chitty chitty bang bang, one of my favorite childhood films. i had forgotten how fun some parts are (me old bamboo! me old bamboo!) and how disturbing some of the other scenes are. i was sort of expecting to have moved on from the things that scared me as a child. perhaps, i thought, that my new status in life would cause me to be horrified by the song that the king sings to his wife; it's all about how much he loves her and yet throughout the song he's trying to kill her (strangling her, impaling her, that sort of lovely thing).

but no, i still find that song sort of funny. it appears that what will always get to me will be the child snatcher. i guess we never move on from our childhood kidnapping fears.

or at least i don't.