My Most Terrifying Cinematic Experience? Why, The Polar Express Of Course!

Here's another exciting entry in this Holiday themed column, 25 Days Of Christmas Pop Culture! From now until Christmas Eve, I'll be tackling one piece of Christmas pop culture! It could be a book, movie, TV special, song....so long as it's festive for this time of the year, it'll be checked out in this daily column!

We all have that one movie we watched as kids that terrified the living hell out of us. When you're 6, it's terrifying, but when you're older it's not only good material for a compelling yarn but a testament to the kind of power film can have over a person. Some have The Goonies, my brother has Gremlins, but me? I've got the scariest movie of them all: The Polar Express.

Now, here's what makes the whole scenario tragic; I was excited for The Polar Express. I'm a month away from being 9 years old, I'm excited as hell for this movie. The year long marketing campaign had me excited for a new form of animation, motion-capture, and to see what Tom Hanks and Robert Zemeckis had cooked up. Ah, I was so naive. I had no idea what was in store for me in that Studio Movie Grill auditorium.

Just a mere few minutes into the movie, I was terrified out of my skull. The human characters were haunting, especially those lifeless eyes that I distinctly remember haunting my nightmares for days afterwards. After exiting the theater briefly, I managed to survive the rest of the movie, and as you might imagine, I despised it. Not only was the animation creepy, but I found it to be too long and boring. That months fellow family animated feature, The Spongebob Squarepants Movie, just reinforced how much The Polar Express failed, as it utilized much less cutting edge animation to instill zero nightmares and plenty of fun.

I guess I can appreciate that The Polar Express was so memorable in the regard of being so damn terrifying that I still can't manage to watch the thing. The fact that the movie has managed to become a classic among holiday movies really is befuddling, especially when Robert Zemeckis infinitely better motion-capture Christmas movie A Christmas Carol exists. I guess others were able to look past the creepy animation, and more power to 'em. Meanwhile, I'll try to get through another Christmas without having a nightmare about that damn hobo showing up in my room with a butcher knife. I don't care if he was voiced by Tom Hanks, that character, like The Polar Express as a whole, was creepy as hell.