Donuts? Doughnuts? Whatever. If they have powdered sugar on them, I find them deeply frightening.
“Frightening” might be a slight exaggeration.
I definitely find them deeply unsettling.
I definitely don’t eat them.
But I don’t break out in a cold sweat when I see them. Not anymore.
It all began when I was a very small child. I went over to a neighbor’s house and all the Big Kids were watching Dr. Paul Bearer’s Saturday afternoon Creature Feature double-feature on WTOG (Channel 44, St.Petersburg, FL) because that’s what you did on a Saturday afternoon if you lived in Southwest Florida in the 1970s.
I didn’t know what the movie was, I only knew that it was very scary and the one scene I saw was enough. It’s a shame I didn’t stick around because I’m sure I wouldn’t have been nearly as traumatized if I’d seen the whole movie.
Or any other scene in the movie.
Any scene at all.
The scene I saw involved scary alien women feeding a pair of boys poisoned powdered donuts and then eating their brains. At least I thought the women ate their brains. I saw the scary alien women preparing to cut the boy’s heads open and I took off running for home.
Later in life, I would recount this story to people but no one was able to figure out what the movie was. Media librarians. The MST3K gang. Film historians. Everyone thought it was vaguely familiar but no one could put their finger on it.
If only I remembered more details. Like it being Japanese, or involving a guy in a giant rubber turtle costume, because I’m pretty sure those details would have been very helpful. The kaiju tend to be the memorable parts of these movies for most people.
The movie that gave me a lifelong phobia about powdered donuts was none other than Gamera Vs Guiran.
The nice folks at Mystery Science Theater did, in fact, solve the mystery (and they aired the movie on their show in 1991, although that’s coincidental to my quest).
Thanks to the internet, I can pinpoint the day my powdered donut phobia began: April 17, 1976. That’s the date Gamera Vs. Guiran aired on Creature Feature, according to The Crazed Fanboy’s database.
I understand that powdered donuts are not, inherently, dangerous. Except when they are.