The Moment I Feared: Part 3

Alligator (The Pool Scene)

Lewis Teague, 1980

 

Children in peril scenes are a dime a dozen in film, but kids getting killed? That's very much seen as taboo and ignites controversy even to this day. Disturbing scenes of child fatalities cropped up in mainstream cinema more often in the past, based on my recollections. Call it a symptom of the nihilistic seventies, New Hollywood out to shock, or to put it more bluntly, the film industry just not caring, but it seems like this was a decade where children were just as much fair game of a gruesome death as to their grown-up counterparts.

Steven Speilberg's blockbuster Jaws (1975) left a trail of knock-off creature features in its wake, one of my favourites being Lewis Teague's snappy B-movie gem, Alligator (1980). 

Seeing a couple of kids in pirate costumes by a back yard pool, and dragging a blindfolded youngster to his doom by making him walk the plank into the gaping jaws of a giant alligator, was enough to shock me as a kid: that poor child's terror before being pushed into the pool; the shot of the alligator when the lights are turned on; the blood. All of these elements lead to an unforgettably terrifying viewing experience. Over forty years later and that scene is instantly triggered whenever I hear about 'gators making their way into people's pools. 

Ironically, the film spawned a kids board game released by Ideal Toys in 1980, which my parents copped for me from Argos when I was a kid, because it was way cheaper than the Millennium Falcon.