the ominous “H”

Sorry, so busy that I’m reduced to offering blog snacks rather than meals.

Here’s a childhood TV skit that has haunted the back of my mind for the 35 or so years since I saw it last. I consciously remembered it tonight for some reason, then of course was immediately able to find it on YouTube.

This would be worth an essay in some pop culture journal on the aesthetics of horror and ominousness. What makes the H so horrifying, exactly? The voice? The soundtrack? The ominous repetition without purpose of a single letter of the alphabet? The strange appearance of the television set itself? Some combination of all of these, of course, but I believe it would be possible to be more precise. The method would be the “eidetic variation” of replacing some of these elements with more harmless parameters and seeing what happened.

All I know is that if I were to turn on a television set alone at 3 A.M. and see what Bert saw, it would probably lead to some sort of nervous breakdown. This really was pretty close to the edge of what little kids can endure (as some of the commenters noted– and I do recall being horrified by this particular skit, which sent chills down my spine even at age 5 or 6 or whatever it was).

Make sure not to bail out before the surprise ending.