Gooder Than Hell!

Back in the 1960s, the Screen Gems studio updated its closing credits sequence, changing it from an innocuous lady holding a torch to an artsy little scene in which two parallelograms dance around one another and a tiny red dot. This six-second sequence was accompanied by the then-new sound of a Moog synthesizer.

Well, evidently, this sequence freaked out a whole bunch of kids at the time, according to a new short documentary called “The S From Hell,” which recently debuted at Sundance. Here ’tis, in its entirety:

Fascinating topic, which I found a little bit more background on here. Consider this:

Maybe it was the movement that was shown on the screen that seemed scary. The scene began with two parallelograms, one near the top center of the screen and one rising from the bottom of the screen. The top parallelogram was at a distance and moved in closer while the lower one was closer and moved away. They began to move together, growing in legnth. When they got close to each other the two sections wrapped around a dot, which simultaneously appeared in the center of the screen, forming the S. The dot may be meant to represent a hub of a film reel. While this was happening, the words “SCREEN GEMS” came forward between the S and the bottom of the screen. Maybe all this action at once was too much for a young mind to comprehend. It was shown on a yellow background with the S being red sometimes, black other times. I think it looked more eerie on a black & white set, when the background showed up as white and looked much colder.

Perhaps we felt sorry for the dot seeming to be captured and trapped by the two parallelograms. Some of the more neurotic viewers maybe felt the parallelograms would sneak up and capture them, maybe while they slept (hence the nightmares). Maybe the whole thing was planned to be a way to get us kids to watch less TV.

And now we head down the rabbit hole that is logophobia! I also stumbled upon the Closing Logos Group, which keeps a massive index of every closing sequence you can think of. Although the Screen Gems sequence was particularly noteworthy for being scary, it certainly wasn’t the only one. Check out this great MetaFilter discussion on other unintentionally (?) scary moments in television.