Tintin Forums

Tintin and the Black Island.

That ape monster always gets to me. I know it's kinda funny and the situation is full of gags, but that ape just has a really creepy quality to it that is hard to describe.

The whole affair with Haddock's nose, the rose, the invisible bee, and the Castafiore's nails. For some reason I find it all extremely creepy. Really makes me ill at ease.

Oh, and strangely enough, also the Snowy tail thing, in Congo, after he gets bitten by the parrot. The fact we see him with a swollen tail, and then hear him scream, and then see him happy with a bandaged thin tail... Given the carpenter joke that happens right before, I could never completely shake off my mind that they actually just sawed off the excessive bits of his tail.

Ramon and Alonso going to Hell in The Broken Ear. That, I'm sure we'll all agree, is a bit excessive, especially considering that Tintin was (and always has) been read by younger children.

Agree AND disagree. Those hell/paradise things (with horned red devils, and big white bearded saints on clouds) are pretty naive, and quite childish. They are frequent in Quick & Flupke comics, where they're never too shocking, mostly because Quick & Flupke is quite silly and surreal in the first place : it's gags, not meant to be taken seriously. The first Tintin adventures were not too serious either (diving suit in prison cell, trumpet communication with elephants, etc), and the Ear is a bit in this phase of transition between silliness and realism.

What I'm getting at is that, yes, that scene is freaky. But not because it doesn't fit a "children book". On the contrary, the same scene, in a lighter book, would not shock as much. What makes it disturbing, is that it happens in an already semi-realistic, semi-adult world. It makes it feel both more "alien" and more "real".

To take a tangent : "Doom" was a videogame about a gate to hell being opened on Mars, and it has been turned into a movie about mutants outbreak and DNA modifications. Now, I'm not a fan of either the games or the movie, but it made me think. It made me realise that we're a bit jaded when it comes to these mutant DNA giger-based monsters, now so typical of sci-fi thrillers, and the "Doom" game's strength was coming from the old-school medieval iconography's irruption in a sci-fi environment. I do believe there is some unexploited power in classic 'naive' demonic imagery, precisely because it doesn't fit in our modern world - there would be some horror in the irruption of devils looking as we used to "rightly" depict them in medieval times, "after all !". It would tap simultaneously in childhood fears, and in the credibility of the unexpected. In fact, the unexpected "too expectable" is a genre I love (and has been, so far, mostly exploited in comedy : like Tim Burton's "Mars Attacks" or Fredric Brown's "Martians go home"), and I think its impact has some nightmarish horror potential.

To come back to Tintin, I think that's what happens in that panel. Devils come to claim souls "after all", in a setting that make us believe in the reality -or credibility- what we read. Not any kind of devils, but the traditional ones, which implies that "all the rest" is real as well (eternal punishment in big cauldrons, etc). The "it's real after all" impact is what makes the scene so traumatic. In a real children book, we'd be expecting it as part of the "stories told to children", and it wouldn't have the same impact.

Anyway, that's the angle through which that scene hits me, I think.

Hmm, there are several that i find disturbing. For one, the visual images from when Tintin is hallucinating in Cigars of the Pharaoh, in conjunction with the music (In the TV series), is extremely disturbing.

Another would have to be Rascar Capac, for obvious reasons of coarse :P

-Levi-

Yeah. I can't believe I forgot Rascar! Eeek! That little crispy critter freaks me out!

The one scene that has scared everyone!

Oddly enough, it was the hallucinatory and dream sequences that so captivated me when I first read Crab With the Golden Claws (I think I was 8 or 9). Those were always my favourite scenes throughout the series. And many of the books are just downright Surreal in and of themselves. I'm not sure I was ever truly shocked by the cartoon violence, having grown up with Tom and Jerry and Bugs bunny etc.

I always thought the devils in "Broken Ear" were the creepiest thing in Tintin books. Another is the thought of Mitsuhirato in "The Blue Lotus" committing hara-kiri.

There is an atmosphere of mystery and suspense throughout The Blue Lotus, mainly in the scenes set at night (page 10, 12-13), that used to speed up my heart. Specially because I first read those pages, in the Tintin magazine, where they were loose. Actually, it was my first contact with Tintin and it was that creepy atmosphere that made me ask my parents to buy The Blue Lotus, my first Tintin book.

The live mummy of Rascar Capac also used to scare me a lot, so much that I didn't reread The Seven Crystal Balls until many years later!

But none of these can be considered 'hardcore', I think. At least not as much as Barnabé (I forgot his English name, sorry) being shot at Tintin's doorstep.

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Wolff committing suicide in Explorers on the Moon as one of the most 'hardcore' moments. His death was certainly horrific - at least I hear that death by vacuum contact is pretty disturbing.