Happy Birthday and Nightmare Fuel

If my grandmother were still alive, today would be her 100th birthday (or possibly her 101st; she was 95 when she died, but she insisted that she was 96, so who can say for sure). When I was a boy, I would spend most of my summers with my grandparents, and it was very much that idyllic period that you see portrayed in films: no Internet, no cell phones, no helicoptering caregivers. We kids would head out in the morning after our bowls of sugary cereal and vanish into the world until dusk, and nobody worried about us. We had no idea how good we had it back then. The only drawback to where they lived on the outskirts of town was that everything in town (toy shops, bookstores, movie theaters) was too far to get to unless someone drove you. I was a kid who loved movies, and so my grandmother would frequently take me into town for the first showing of something I wanted to see, and I would just stay all day and watch the movie multiple times, or theater hop and see what else was playing…