Installment Three of Tyler's Tot Terrors:

When I first saw this movie, I teetered on the precipice of abject terror, barely daring to breathe lest each breath become a scream. I give you . . .



The Secret of Nimh. I know. It's rated G. I saw it during the Fall Party at Bethany Fellowship in Bloomington, MN. This was the same Fall Party in which I got my neck zipped into my Wrangler jean jacket by my Auntie Carrie. I think I was four.
The culmination of the evening, after all of the kids were nearing maximum sugar saturation, was the movie in the community dining room. They set up a screen and a projector in the corner of the room. I was so excited to watch a cartoon that would last longer than a Bugs Bunny short - I imagined how much fun it would be - but then the movie began. Eerie, creepy . . . a gnarled hand, claws clutching a quill, moves slowly toward an inkwell - an inkwell that produces sparkling gold ink! A breathy, ethereal voice narrates as, not beautiful gold ink, but mysterious ink drifts from the well. Ink is black or blue. Not swirling and golden. And it CERTAINLY doesn't make the page you are writing on flash like fire! What kind of movie is this?!
The mysterious clawed hand then produces a strange medallion with a red gem in the middle. How odd.
That's when the title comes up. "The Secret of Nimh."

In this movie, there are many vicious and frightening characters, and all of them seem bent on some sort of mad destruction of something. Even the good guys are scary. Especially that Owl. If you've seen the movie, you know what I mean. Downright diabolical. I have sense memory of clenching my jaw shut in a grimace and averting my eyes to find something . . . anything! . . in the dark on which to devote my attention. Good luck when the only light source is the very thing that I'm trying NOT to look at.

Not too long after I was traumatized by that movie, I discovered my own little secret. In my mom's jewelry box, I found a gold medallion with a red gem in the middle. To my young eyes, that was the very same necklace as the one in the movie. I used to sneak into my parent's bedroom and pull the necklace out to look at it. It would give me a terrific thrill, and I would place it back into its spot, my heart fluttering wildly. As I grew older and the memory of the movie faded, I stopped looking at the necklace. It no longer made sense. The second I realized that it wasn't from the movie, it became uninteresting, even a little bit embarrassing, to think that the jewelry box held any secrets at all. It was just jewelry, not magic.