Mister Rogers' Horror Connections
A Halloween special edition
Mister Rogers is my best friend as a mother. Before we let our daughter watch shows, we listened to his music and read his poetry, and then Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was the first TV show she was allowed to watch. The secret sauce here is that Fred’s calming, steady voice has been a throughline, so when I put on episodes or songs now, it immediately lowers the temperature in our home. If I’m about to lose my shit, Fred calms me down, too. That crayon factory visit—magic.
One of the areas where Mister Rogers excelled was in approaching experiences that children might find scary or confusing and breaking them down to child-sized bites, answering questions that might not occur to adults. For example, during his ER visit, he asked if an x-ray machine can read your thoughts. One of his guiding principles was that “anything that is mentionable is manageable.” We can also use stories from the neighborhood to talk through a problem our daughter might be having. Bossy with friends? Remember when X the Owl made Henrietta mad acting that way (episode 1508)?
Twice a month, The Fred Rogers Company releases a week of episodes from the archive, which you can watch here for free. We enjoy episodes on DVD, but it is nice to see how the storyline in The Neighborhood develops over the full week.
Neighborhood-Horror Crossovers
Recently, I looked to see if Mister Rogers ever discussed going to the hospital or having one’s tonsils taken out. Would you believe that Mister Rogers had a segment for the show made when he had his own tonsillectomy? And the director of that segment was George A. Romero of Night of the Living Dead fame. At the time, he was 31 years old and had just made his iconic film. Of course, I thought, Romero lived and worked in Pittsburgh, where he attended Carnegie Mellon. My friend Emily used to live in Pittsburgh and went to a whole Night of the Living Dead festival out there. Romero said that filming Fred Rogers’ tonsillectomy was much scarier than making zombies: “What I really mean is that I was scared shitless while I was trying to pull it off." (Read more about it at Collider.)
Julio and I were also reminded of the actors from The Neighborhood who also appeared in The Silence of the Lambs, another classic horror film made in Pittsburgh that employed local actors. David Early, who appeared as himself—a first-grade teacher—in Episode 1462, plays a police officer. Don Brockett, who appears across the series as the beloved character, Chef Brockett (as well as other characters in the operas) plays a really creepy inmate in the same facility as Hannibal Lecter. He’s also a zombie in Romero’s Day of the Dead. Chuck Aber, a.k.a. Neighbor Aber plays Agent Terry toward the end of The Silence of the Lambs. (See images at The Neighborhood Archive.) Not long ago, we rewatched The Silence of the Lambs and made a game of spotting the “neighbors.” Chuck Aber is hard to miss, but the other two go by quickly!
It’s Just Make Believe
In terms of horror in The Nighborhood itself, Mister Rogers had Margaret Hamilton on to explain to children that her scary character, The Wicked Witch of the West, is just pretend. It became a classic moment, one of many in which Fred emphasizes for children the difference between real life and make-believe.
Finally, plenty of people found Lady Elaine Fairchilde terrifying when they were children. As a grown person, I think she’s hilarious. Iconic. Not putting up with anyone’s shit, just giving it out. No notes.
