The Monster Under the Bed Was Never the Problem

When I was a kid, the most dangerous place in the house was the six inches between my mattress and the floor. I couldn’t tell you what lived under there, exactly, but I knew it was waiting for an opportunity to grab my ankle. Naturally, I developed an elaborate system for getting into bed without allowing any part of my body to linger within reach of whatever horrible bastard occupied that space. The procedure involved hitting the light switch at the doorway and making an Olympic leap to the mattress before the darkness overcame my room. Everyone knows the safest place to be is under the covers.

The funny thing is, I never actually saw anything under my bed. There were probably a few lost toys, some monster dust bunnies, and whatever food I’d hidden from my parents. None of those things possessed claws, teeth, or any particular interest in eating children. None of that mattered to me. I was convinced something was there, and the absence of evidence wasn’t going to change my mind.

Childhood is a strange arrangement. Adults spend an extraordinary amount of time teaching children to use their imaginations, then act surprised when those imaginations start producing things that want to murder them. We’re encouraged to invent imaginary friends, populate our bedrooms with fantastic creatures, and believe in magical visitors who enter our homes while we’re sleeping.

Then somebody turns out the lights, and suddenly we’re expected to be reasonable.

The Trouble with Darkness

Darkness doesn’t actually change anything about a room, a reassurance I’ve offered my younglings with remarkably little success. The furniture stays where we left it, and the pile of laundry on the chair remains an embarrassing monument to procrastination. Unfortunately, knowing that nothing has changed doesn’t make it any easier to recognize whatever seems to be lurking in the corner once the lights go out.

When we can’t see something clearly, our imaginations tend to make up the difference. Unfortunately, they aren’t particularly interested in reassuring us. A coat hanging on a door might be perfectly harmless, but that doesn’t stop it from looking like somebody standing in the dark. The tree outside the window becomes a collection of grasping fingers, and a perfectly ordinary house settling on its foundation suddenly sounds suspiciously like footsteps.

For a child whose understanding of the world remains under construction, those possibilities can become remarkably convincing. Adults aren’t immune, either. We’ve simply developed better explanations for the noises that frighten us, along with a greater appreciation for electricity bills.

The Education of a Frightened Child

My parents were conservative in their politics but remarkably liberal when it came to scaring the shit out of their children. Their philosophy was essentially, “You wanna watch this? Fine. You live with the consequences.”

I was born in 1979, which means I had absolutely no business watching Poltergeist or A Nightmare on Elm Street when I did. But there they were, and I watched them. Apparently, the possibility of traumatizing a child wasn’t sufficient reason to change the channel.

My mother and her boyfriend even threatened to call Freddy Krueger when I misbehaved. Back in the late eighties, Freddy had a 1-900 number that allowed fans to call in and listen to a pre-recorded “deadtime story” or a monologue voiced by actor Robert Englund. My mother and her boyfriend held the possibility of calling it over my head. Because threatening to sic a homicidal supernatural pedophile on your kid is apparently an acceptable disciplinary strategy.

That’s my bar for parenthood, and I like to think I’m crushing it.

I can understand why some kids develop coulrophobia, an intense fear of clowns. The makeup conceals familiar human features, the exaggerated expressions make emotions difficult to read, and the whole performance can feel profoundly unnatural. I had a little additional encouragement.

Between Poltergeist and Stephen King’s It, clowns already occupied a particularly unpleasant corner of my imagination. Then my stepmother’s best friend decided to chase me around the house with a stuffed clown wielding a steak knife.

An actual steak knife.

I don’t remember anyone explaining what valuable life lesson I was supposed to take away from that experience, although I certainly learned to maintain a healthy distance from clowns. And that’s the peculiar thing about childhood fear. The monsters on the screen might be fictional, but the people introducing us to them are very real. Sometimes they’re the same people who are supposed to reassure us that there’s nothing to worry about.

Why the Monster Needed a Hiding Place

Childhood monsters have excellent taste in hiding places. Closets and the spaces beneath beds are difficult to inspect without getting close enough for something to grab you, which is a considerable disadvantage when you’re already convinced something is waiting.

A monster standing in the middle of a brightly illuminated bedroom presents a straightforward problem. You can identify it, assess the danger, and begin screaming for somebody with greater authority. A monster hiding behind a closed closet door presents an entirely different situation. You don’t know whether it’s there, what it looks like, or what might happen if you open the door. To a child, that uncertainty can be more frightening than the creature itself.

Horror movies have been exploiting that uncertainty for decades. A camera can linger on a dark doorway long enough for the audience to start expecting something terrible, even when nothing appears. By the time a noise comes from somewhere beyond the frame, we’ve already imagined what might be responsible. The filmmaker doesn’t necessarily have to show us anything.

And because each of us supplies our own possibilities, the resulting fear becomes intensely personal. What terrifies one person might barely register with another.

The monster under my bed didn’t require a physical description. Whatever I imagined waiting there was already perfectly suited to frightening me.

When Ordinary Things Turn Against Us

Even perfectly ordinary things can become frightening under the right circumstances. A doll becomes unsettling because its face resembles a human being without behaving like one. A hallway seems threatening because we can’t see what’s waiting at the other end. Even a familiar bedroom can become uncomfortable when shadows distort the arrangement of furniture. Horror filmmakers understand this exceptionally well.

In Poltergeist, the television becomes a gateway for supernatural forces. In Child’s Play, a seemingly harmless toy conceals a murderous personality. A Nightmare on Elm Street turns the simple act of falling asleep into a potentially fatal mistake.

What makes these stories effective is how easily they turn ordinary comforts against us. A child’s favorite toy becomes something to avoid, and even going to bed can seem like a terrible idea. The movie eventually ends, but the associations have a way of following us home. You can know perfectly well that nothing supernatural lives in your bedroom and still find yourself looking at the furniture a little differently.

What Was Really Under the Bed?

Eventually, most of us stop worrying about creatures hiding beneath our mattresses. We grow older, learn more about the world, and discover that the things worth fearing rarely announce themselves with glowing eyes and enormous teeth. But the underlying mechanism never disappears.

Even as adults, we’re perfectly capable of imagining something terrible when we don’t have enough information. An unfamiliar noise in the middle of the night can still make us wonder whether we’re alone, regardless of how many perfectly reasonable explanations we can think of. The monsters change as we age, but our imaginations remain remarkably cooperative.

Looking back, I don’t think I was ever particularly frightened of whatever might have lived beneath my childhood bed. I was frightened because I couldn’t know for certain that nothing lived there. And given that some of the adults in my life seemed perfectly happy to encourage those suspicions, I wasn’t exactly receiving much help in sorting out what was real.

Although, for the record, I still think keeping your feet beneath the blankets is a perfectly reasonable precaution. Thank you, Paranormal Activity.

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Photo by New Africa: Little girl with flashlight looking for monster under bed at night. Find images on Magnific.

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