Abaculus

Last night, spaced out on the sofa dad started chanting, "I will crack thy bones for thee, I will crack thy skull for thee" then bursting into some hysterical laughter. Of course I wondered if my parental figure had suddenly been possessed by the devil. Either that, or lost the plot completely.

Dad grew up on a coastal village, which basically consists of one long street, and not a lot else. It turns out the village hall used to screen a series called "Scorpion". Whilst a series, apparently it was never shown in order because that was the way things were done. Be grateful you can see anything at all. On leaving the cinema his uncles (Caradog and Lewis) sometimes used to hide in shadows chanting the above; Caradog wearing some disused policeman's coat wrapped around his face. Since there was only two street gas lamps along a couple of miles of road, thus pitch darkness coupled with an overactive imagination spurned on by the cinema; it left the kids running up the street. Process repeated every week. All these screwed up genes were obviously handed down, so next time I'm being purely sadistic, you'll know why.

The above tale made me glee. At a similar age - I'm talking about 6 or 7 here - we watched a film about the Egyptians. Through a woman's greed for the treasures the Pharaoh was going to take into his next life, she made a decision to stay in the pyramid and in doing so became locked in. Cue: huge concrete doors slam down, woman panics. Of course the treasures or she does not physically go anywhere to some afterlife. She's stuck. So I ask what was going to happen, and got the details that she was going to suffocate. She won't be able to breathe? Questions go on, and we get to the dying a slow and painful death description. I then burst out crying, and my family ribbed me for it, "Its only a film, look at you". My sister - who is younger than me - never lets me forget it (yes, ammunition that will slink out of the depths of memory). Since then, let it be known I've never cried at a single film. The whole room can be crying buckets, it can even be a translation of reality and I'm totally NOT GOING TO CRY is etched a bit too well in my neurons. I will leave spelling out my relationship with horror films for another day.

I've attempted to locate Scorpion online, with the view of possibly buying a dvd for dad's birthday (I've got a few months, but skipping ahead a bit here, dad is the most difficult person to give presents for - he hates materialism with a passion), and running into a dead end already.

Dad thinks he was aged 6 - 8 at the time, which makes it 1946-1948 or thereabout. Given there would have been little or no film production in the first half of the 1940s and mid Wales was hardly the cutting edge, its very possible this could have been produced pre-war days. A simple search for "scorpion" on IMBd leads to these results, but it doesn't help. I'm looking for a series, I'm looking for something scary in the eyes of a kid that was around 1940s or before (1950s at a push, if dad is bluffing his age). Film buffs out there, got any ideas?