Childhood traumas

Hey, and welcome to my final post on this blog. This post is dedicated for my final task for the course and my theme for the task was childhood traumas and more so the characters that caused those traumas. This idea came to me when I started to think all of the character that I was scared when I was a child and I really wanted to know what experiences other people had. It didn’t come to me as a surprise that pretty much all of the people here in Finland had pretty similar experiences, although there were some unexpected characters and new info I found out while doing my research for this project. For my practical part of the task I wanted to create short illustration book of these characters.

Alright, I think that’s enough exposition, and without further ado, let’s delve into the nightmares.   

My own experiences

For me all of my childhood nightmares lead to one specific anime called Silver Fang, and more so on very specific character from that anime, Akakabuto. I must have been around 8-9 when I saw couple episodes of this series and it traumatized me for years. I had constant nightmares of Akakabuto and some sort of bear phobia until I was 14. I was also scared of forests and I’m still kinda unease when I’m in a cabin which is located in a middle of a forest. Finally at the age 14 I kinda realized that bears are chill and just eat berries and stuff like that and that helped me to get over my fear of bears.

 Akakabuto from Silver Fang

Second most horrifying thing that I can remember for me as a child was Michael Jackson's Thrillers opening scene where Michael turns into a werewolf. This scene has been burnt into my brain forever. Why I was scared of werewolf Michael was also due to my uncle telling me that this creature lived in his basement at the sauna, and you can bet your bottom dollar I still don’t know what his basement looks like.

Michael Jackson turning into a werewolf

 Those were just the two of the most prominent examples I could think of, but I had many characters I was scared of, most of them were bears though…

Research and discoveries

For my actual final task I started to ask what characters scared people the most when they were a child. I asked my friends, family and I also posted the same question (although in finnish) on twitter and got over 70 answers, so I had a lot of characters and data to go through. Lots of people had the same characters from Muumin; The Groke, Lady of the cold and the transformation scene involving The Hobgoblins magic hat. Also Morso and Pelle Hermanni were on top of their game when it came to giving nightmares to children.

There were a lot of random characters from obscure series and some really random fears, like being afraid of the ominous...lottery balls. From these random fears came one interesting trivia fact though! Apparently even the very first children's program in 1960, Raninis Family, here Finland, manage to give nightmares to the children with their character Kasper the doll!...And I can see why....

 Kasper the doll

What made these characters so scary was the sound design and the music associated with these characters. Sound can easily influence our mood and feelings and you combine that power with disturbing/creepy character design and you got yourself a doomsday device that can scar thousand of children for life! How great is that!  

The final task

And so with all of the characters and data I manage to make a short illustration book called Nightmares behind the glass. As I’m writing this post the book has four characters in it, but I am thinking about adding more in the future.

I wanted to illustrate these characters as if they were mythical creatures and the book was a collection of information about them. My only regret with this task is that I didn’t have time to draw more of these characters but I will draw more of these pages in the future for sure. This project was a lot of fun to do and I loved this course, it’s sad that it’s over now. I hope you all weird people reading my blog had fun.

Here is my final task, try to sleep at night.