I’ve been busier than usual lately so I haven’t posted much, short of some Instagram moments here and there but I was listening to a podcast this morning and one of the panelists mentioned the theme to Unsolved Mysteries and it reminded me that, while I loved the show, the song itself terrified me! Something about the tinkling of those bells along with the throbbing beat sent shivers down my spine before every episode.
It got me to thinking about the other theme songs that frightened me as a child. Here’s a quick rundown of the most spine-tingling television intros I remember.
It is entirely likely that this “music with which to scare your children” started for me at the tender age of not-even-one when my parents took me with them to my first movie ever… JAWS. I was born a little over two weeks after the movie premiered and I’m not sure why they took me and I’m fairly sure I couldn’t absorb what was going on in the film anyway and yet… the theme music haunted me forever. This fear was so ingrained that as a little boy I clearly remember begging my mother to sit outside the bathroom just in case a shark came up through the drain and tried to eat me.
Not kidding. It didn’t help that when I was twelve my family was spending the day at Folly Beach when what I’m told was a nurse shark (yes, I know, not dangerous to humans… usually) swam up, bumped into my leg and caused a full on beach-wide panic attack as I screamed and ran, nearly over the waves, back to the shore.
Scarred… for life.
Tommy Karr 