N Is For Nightmare

There are three things I intend to touch on here. Not too sure how I am going to tie them together, but let's begin.

When I was a little girl (or more accurately, a teenager), I was terrified of a game called Nightmare. It was a video board game that came out in 1991 and it was set in a place simply known as 'the Other Side'. In it, there were six harbingers, each who governed a Province. Playing the game, meant that you had to take on the persona of one of the harbingers, which were a werewolf, poltergeist  mummy, zombie, witch and vampire. There was one other character in the game, the Gatekeeper. His job was to ensure you don't escape from the Other Side.

Well, maybe it doesn't sound scary, but the Gatekeeper terrified me. I don't even remember playing the game, just watching the video that game with it. In the movie, the Gatekeeper often interups the game to punish or reward players willy-nilly. There was no rhyme or reason to it. And you couldn't even win the game, the Gatekeeper just arrives and declares himself the winner. How unfair is that?

Honestly, I don't even know what terrified me so much about the silly game. But I did find the commercial on YouTube and decided you all need to watch it. You can thank me with kisses and cake.



I suppose it is kind of embarrassing admitting I was scared of this game. Oh well.

When I hear the word 'nightmare' there are two movies that come to mind. Nightmare Before Christmas and Nightmare On Elm Street. On one hand, you have Tim Burton's wonderful stop motion musical about Jack Skellington, a resident of Halloween Town, who finds a portal to Christmas Town and decides to celebrate the holiday. Things don't exactly go as planned. The other is a slasher film directed by Wes Craven that revolves around teenagers who are being stalked and killed by a man with knives for fingers, Freddy Krueger, not Edward Scissorhands.

Other than the word Nightmare in their titles, these movies have nothing in common. Unless you play the six degrees of separation game and discover that Johnny Depp is in the 1984 version of Nightmare On Elm Street and he later developed an unusually close relationship to Nightmare Before Christmas' writer Tim Burton. Maybe that's reaching though. Still, both are classic films that can be watched at either Halloween or Christmas. Okay, okay, that's a bit of a joke. Freddy Krueger isn't exactly a festive fellow.

Now I am going to leave you with a song by Fresh Prince and Jazzy Jeff. Just because it fits the whole theme.