I don't know why. I can't put my finger on it, but like "The 7 Faces of Dr.Lao" and "Something Wicked this way Comes" and "The Borrowers"....for some reason this movie creeps me out!
shareIt must be the incredibly realistic violence in it. It makes "Texas Chain Saw Massacre"seem like a picnic!
Truth is stranger than fiction, but fiction must make sense.
I know...the toys that Tom plays with creeped me out. Reminds me of this Christmas video, I bet the same company did the puppeteering....Santa gives you nightmares!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKGonDIq8gw&feature=related
When I was a little kid, I loved every minute of this movie, and didn't notice any of the creepiness. Not one bit of it.
As an adult seeing it again in the 70s or 80s, I sure did. If you have even a passing acquaintance with Freudian psychology, you probably will. It's almost like a world-class paean to young male narcissism.
But... should any of that even matter to a little kid? And isn't it okay to still remember fondly the sublime beauty of the moment when the old man says "the only thing sadder than a boy without a toy... is a toy without a boy"?
"I don't deduce, I observe."
Those stop-motion characters certainly are creepy.
However, the late 50s and the 60s were rife with creepy-looking stop-motion dolls, especially the 50s.
There were commercials for Brylcream and Alka-Seltzer that regularly featured stop-motion dolls ("Speedy" for Alka-Seltzer who was kinda cute in a creepy sort of way).
I don't think stop-motion dolls lost their "creepiness" until the Rankin-Bass studio started producing their own brand of stop-motion characters like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Santa Claus, Pinocchio and all the rest. Their style pretty much predominated starting in the 1970s.
"Don't call me 'honey', mac."
"Don't call me 'mac'... HONEY!"