Killer Clown

It occurs to me that there are a dwindling number of people in the world who know exactly what I mean when I say that color photographic negatives are slightly terrifying.  My first camera as a kid was a little blue Fisher Price number that took 110 mm film.  All family photos were 35 mm film photos and the negatives often got loose from the little envelopes and you'd have to hold them up to the light to figure out which set they went with.  The colors were all reversed, making usually normal-looking people all green and yellow and blue and generally alien and, yes, terrifying.

This nightmare is another one from the way back machine of my early childhood, probably age 5 or so.  Again, not much happens, but it's vivid and fills me with dread:

I'm supposed to take a vitamin but I know that the vitamin bottle is actually a kind of horrific genie's bottle.

The cap flies off and a photo-negative ghost of Ronald McDonald flies out.

I hide under the coffee table, as he seems unable to penetrate that fortress, but he continues to taunt and menace me and I start to wonder if I'll ever be able to come out.  He assures me that my mom has no idea he's there and she's going to make me come out and he'll be waiting.

For the record, I am not generally phobic about clowns and though I'm vegan now and was never really gung ho about fast food, neither did I have any particular aversion.  This feels like it has the potential to be the kind of thing where some little guy (me) uses a proprietary image (Ronnie McD) in a really silly, non-commercial way and then lawyers with too much time on their hands get all cease and desist-y.  I hope not. I like this one.  No live link for the golden arches just in case.