Why Are Nursery Rhymes So F***ing Creepy?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 ต.ค. 2022
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To be fair, it's pretty hard to do any construction work in London without uncovering a medieval mass grave or two
It probably were workers that died during construction
That sounds more annoying than creepy. Start digging and boom, mass grave. Goddammit, not another one. Couldn’t find a better place to dump the dead? Lazy fuckers
typical day in Ohio right there
Popular rhyme from 100 years ago:
I had a little birdie whose name was Enza.
I opened up the window and influenza.
Jolly good sir, I do hope you are not tugging my tail
Hmmmmmmmmmm... Wonder what pandemic it was from.
Ah yes, a rhyme about the bubonic plague, and the reason, which are cat killings. Also about the life of Liz from the seven deadly sins.
I'd want to add the caveat that just because death of children was more common - and because the idea of childhood was not what it is now - doesn't mean that people didn't mourn their kids when they died. There's lots of historical evidence of grief over children, regardless of circumstances.
Thank you for saying this, came to post something similar
I came here to say this, too. Just because it was more common to lose a child early, it doesn't mean that it didn't hurt as much or that they didn't value children less than we do today. That was a pretty tone-deaf thing to say in the video.
So, SO many legendary ghosts and goblins are said to be the spirits of undead children. The grief for infant mortality deeply influenced folklore…
To give some perspective from outside the English-speaking world, I come from Denmark, which has a lot of cultural influence from Germany, and I must say that in both our fairy tales and nursery rhymes there is absolutely a pretty profound running theme of death. One thing to note is that the brothers Grimm didn't invent the stories they wrote down; they were common fairy tales collected throughout Germany, which was the entire point: They wanted to conduct an ethnic study of their new nation. In other words, those stories weren't just gruesome because the Grimm's were weirdos. -They even included warnings for the parents that maybe they shouldn't read the goriest ones to the children.
One extreme Danish example called "Bro, bro, brille" - 'Bridge, bridge, glasses' is a musical game that reads like an absolute fever dream involving the Kaiser in his castle and bridges and one of the kids' dads, a soldier, who "must ultimately suffer death" and ends with the slowest child in the group being boiled alive in a big black kettle. Most songs involving animals also involve one of those animals dying; A frog that gets eaten by a stork, a crow being needlessly killed by a hunter, etc.
I've heard a hypothesis that the reason these songs developed as they did was a way of teaching children that sudden and random death was a natural part of life in order to make it less traumatising and also to warn them about making the mistakes that would lead to such events. For example, Hansel and Gretel is pretty much just Stranger Danger Squared.
I find that to ring quite true. In my childhood, none of us really were that bothered about death, and we often included it in our made-up games.
I don't know for certain whether this a uniquely Germanic thing, but I have heard that the German werewolf myth had something to do with the plague leaving a lot of farmland vacant to be swallowed up by the deep, dark forest, which would have villages be isolated from each other and brought the nightly soundscape of the forest with it as a daily reminder of the wild animals living there. Combine this with the increased chance of waking up to a mangled corpse of your livestock and people going missing, either because they simply got lost in the forest or because of highwaymen, it's not hard to see how that myth could have gotten started. Maybe that could also explain why children were taught to find death natural? If they were squeamish around dead chickens, they probably wouldn't grow up to become good farmers.
thank you so much for this explanation!
As an American adult, having been raised with games that also included death as a natural part of it, I can agree with your hypothesis and shed a little light into the fact that we have so much more in common than we may realize. Things have definitely changed and it's sometimes very strange to see the fluctuations of societal norms.
@@TheDamianvain17 I completely agree with you there. In just the last 10-15 years, I have seen some pretty substantially changed trends in how children are raised here (mainly being influenced by American media). Some changes I have noticed:
1. A much less relaxed attitude towards sexuality/nakedness. I remember basically being unashamed about my naked body right up until puberty. Today, children seem much more self-aware of how their bodies come across to others.
2. Much more focus on the well-being of the individual child rather than the group.
Problem-solving now involves listening to each party and letting them know that they have been heard. Back in the day, we would just get collective punishment. I remember quite distinctly how we would get free history lessons about Japan during the lunch break because our teacher had lived there, but when two or three kids wouldn't shut up, those free history lessons ended for all of us. No if's or but's.
3. Less freedom of movement and more freedom of self-expression. Back in the day, we would literally just run around with our friends after school until dinner time when he had to be home. But then we would only speak if we were asked, or else ask if we could tell something. I wasn't that we were weren't allowed to speak, but it was sort of a cultural silent agreement that parents were the ones who took the initiative.
4. A much more PC culture.
I think many of these changes are probably alright. Especially the ones that have lead to a lot less bullying and a much more supportive environment around learning. I am continually amazed and touched at how well kids treat each other these days, but I sometimes miss the days I fondly remember as my 'wild' childhood: Bullies to run away from lest you get a nosebleed, throwing stones at each other knowing the exact right speed to make it hurt but not make the other one cry and not to hit in the head, running naked across a beach, getting lost for hours only to find your way home and be very proud of yourself but also afraid of your parents, being sad at a funeral but ok the next day because death was normal and just meant that great grandpa wasn't there anymore and that wouldn't erase the time he had already been there.
@@rasmusn.e.m1064 Very well articulated. The quality of life improvements are great, but just like anything, there's a cost. You've mentioned those in detail and I'm amazed how things have changed for both of us and for folks like us - even though we're from different countries and cultures. Then again, I suppose the Anglo-Saxon heritage spanning the globe has something to do with it.
Another thing could be the creation and wide distribution of personal computers, the internet, and the strong desire to connect, sometimes with anyone, because we may have no one where we live. Globalization was always inevitable, but computers sped up the process of old, wooden boats, but far more multiplied, and therefore, much faster.
That's actually quite an amazing explaination
As a Brit, I always associated ‘London Bridge is falling down’ with the Fire of London in 1666, which destroyed the old London Bridge, including all the sprawling houses which lined its sides.
Same, I thought that was where it was from.
I think you're right and that it's not what the guy is trying to claim the song is about in this video.
There are several theories, including settings the words of a Viking saga (story) of the Viking attack on London to Music.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Bridge_Is_Falling_Down
This made me think about lullabies my mom sang to me, and her mom sang to her, and so on, and so on. They are mostly about men going to war and never coming back, sang in a sorrow and melodic, rhytmic tone. One of them, roughly translated, goes like this:
"When I left for the war
I left my sister in the cradle.
When I returned
I found a great weaver/(not exactly weaver but dont know the word)
I asked my mother:
Who is that great weaver?
That, my son, is your sister
The one you left in the cradle.
Weave, sister, weave
weave me a war flag
Weave it green, weave it red
You will never see me again"
Lullabies also are given this treatment. With them however, it is mostly parents (especially mothers) who sing these songs to lull the child into sleep, so while the rithm and melody are meant for the young babe, the text might be the singers outlet for their own strife. You see this especially in italian lullabies, where the singer sometimes even threatens the child with a violent death if it doesn’t shut up.
"Rock-a-bye, baby, on the treetop,/ When the wind blows, the cradle will rock. / When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall, / And down will come baby, cradle, and all." But I imagine the songs are mainly sung to preverbal babies, or ones whose vocabularies don't reach much beyond mama and dada. Perhaps your example is a way for a frustrated mother to work out her anger while not actually harming her baby, safely tucked into the cradle.
Exactly I m indian and a lot of horror movies here showcase women/witches etc singing lullabies
For some reason people find children harmonizing eerie. I think it comes from the fear of beings you expect to be pure and innocent being anything but
@Nomadic Dragon probably lol
Kids for most part are innocent and pure until they see how the world works
3:37 Tom Scott did a fascinating study on the many variations of "Jingle Bells, Batman Smells" found throughout the world. It's amazing to see how children (who often lack the means to publish or distribute written songs) have continued this oral tradition long after the age of recording largely erased it from adult music circles.
The most interesting part was the effect that "publishing" the song via The Simpsons had. After that episode came out, it had a far-reaching effect to in a sense make it the standard version. The Simpsons version is similar to one I grew up with (except I think we tended to say "broke its wheel" instead of "lost its wheel"). I don't know how much of this was due to the actual show.
Don't know that one. But in my childhood in England in the 1940s we sang irreverent versions of some Christmas carols. i remember "When shepherds washed their socks by night / All seated round the tub, / A bar of Sunlight soap came down / And they began to scrub."
In Brazil we had a sort of foul version where someone announce the toilet paper is over, then someone else suggests using a newspaper to wipe, then the first responds by saying newspapers are really expensive and wondering how will they do to clean their 👌. The song uses our word for AH, really, not anything like "butt".
@@ariadneleal8256 in Portugal we also have that version "jingle bells, jingle bells já não há papel não faz mal, não faz mal, limpa-se ao jornal, o jornal é caro, o papel também, limpa-se às cuecas que está tudo bem"
@@mariazeredo6657, way more polite than BR version... 😁
Late Victorians: Maybe these children shouldn't be working in steel mills.
Also Late Victorians: God now they're too innocent, make them creepy
There was a British Nursery Rhymes VHS tape from 1982 which I used to watch growing up. It had a very whimsical and yet macabre feel to it at the same time, especially with the Humpty Dumpty and Crooked Man segments edging dangerously close to Uncanny Valley territory
Crooked man is my favorite, The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix created an old man ghost for it, love it!
crooked man is openly creepy
“I’m brining you in.” - Bigby Wolf
Iron Maiden? EXCELLENT!! (Metal Guitar riff)
I'm surprised he didn't mention "Rockabye Baby."
~When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,
And down will come Baby, cradle and all"
That always wigged me out as a little kid..
Who would put a baby up in a tree? And why was my mother singing this to me ??
one thing about oral folklore in general... is that it's meant to be scary, for example in my country the oldest ones tell the story of "Mãe D'água" (Mother of Water), a spirit who lives in rivers and wells and kidnaps children...
This story makes a lot more sense when you consider that it is easier to make a child believe that is a monster that eats children, than to make him consider the risk of drowning if he plays in rivers alone
Brazilian nursery rhymes are interesting. Some of them have creepy tones, while some others carry a few (but meaningful) instances of violent actions, even institutional violence allusions. But a whole lot of them are all about really melancholic verses of romantic love and longing and/or loss. Also not that suitable for children, you'd think, but very revealing about Brazilian history, concerning violence, and pretty much still carrying Portuguese medieval poetry style and themes.
That’s not Scott Derrickson - that’s Oscar-nominated actor Tom Wilkinson.
Derrickson is such a great horror director.
Wilkinson played in the movie...
I always thought it's because little children don't have a lot of vocal range or control yet so the melodies can't move in big intervals, so you have slow chromatic movement and minor thirds as the biggest jump. Things like "If You're Happy and You Know It" rely on vocal timbre more than big major key melodic signals.
The simple answer is that children do be pretty scary without doing much at all
I think that at 6:27, you put a photo of actor Tom Wilkinson, and not Scott Derrickson. Just a small detail
I cut my reading "teeth," so to speak, on the old classic children's stories. The brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, etc. They were very dark stories. One of the reasons for that is that they were written as "children's" stories but they were actually veiled commentaries on politics, social attitudes, and public figures/rulers at the time.
I live in a hilly area. I was in low gear on my pushbike going uphill at dusk when I passed a paling fence behind which there were 2 or 3 girls with single digit ages who were singing Ring Around A Rosy while dancing in a circle. They were all wearing gauzy princess dress up clothes and their dance was disturbingly slow motion, making the fabric float around them. I deduced they were on a trampoline but for a moment there the effect was right out of a 70s Christopher Lee movie. They weren't singing very loudly either which enhanced the effect.
“Jingle Smells, Batman’s Bells, Robin scrambled his eggs! Oh what fun it is to punch some criminals tonight!” …or, um, something. 😉
I don't know that it has any connection to London Bridge, but several of the other Germanic-influenced cultures had a concept called a Church Grim (or some variant of that) where an animal would be killed and buried under Church foundations so that it's ghost could haunt the church yard and protect it from evil. Likewise there is another Germanic Story called Hinzelmann that kind of sort of implies that, prior to Christianization, similar practices may have been done involving people.
There was a character named Hinzelmann in American Gods who tied into that theme too.
I had never heard of people being buried under structures to protect it until a few years ago when I read a story by a British author, Robert Westall. His story was about a medieval church that every few years, children were lured to the church and sacrificed to it. Turned out that each part of the church had the buried body of a child in it, and the person who built the church was also buried in it, feeding on the bodies of the children hundreds of years later!
I remember one going around as a child:
Whistle while you work/ Hitler is a jerk/ Eisenhower has no power/ Whistle while you work.
We would have been too young to know who the names belonged to.
Almost every nursery rhyme and fairy tale is a warning to children about predators.
Those creepy twins from The Shining terrified the hell out of nine year old me.
That Rosemary's Baby opening song immediately comes to mind
Well, just because Ring Around the Rosy came out hundreds of years after the bubonic, doesn't quite mean that it isn't a song about past horrific events.
Know what else is creepy as hell ? A toy piano . Alice Cooper and Ozzy both used one and that is just off the top of my head . Love the videos ! ....
Why do you think toy pianos are creepy?
If i knew that then they wouldn't be that creepy to me just like nursery rhymes .
Nah, that's just how Alice and Ozzy used them--same dark trope. Seals and Crofts used a toy piano in Summer Breeze, and there's nothing creepy about that song. Somebody also did an album of classical music played on toy instruments, and while it's kind of weird, it's not creepy. There was also a rock band called Pianosaurus, who made heavy use of toy instruments in their music.
You know what's creepier than children singing nursery rhymes? American children reciting the pledge of allegiance. Real culty vibes
And yet my fellow americans deny the creepiness. Idk what's creepier, the act, or the dismissal of the act's undertones.
Not sure if this is a jab at us citizens or legit felt creepiness.
Definitely cultish cause it's part of the CULTure,
If you directly translated the Pledge of Allegiance into German, changed the associated flag and hand symbol, filmed a bunch of children doing it, and showed it to Americans, a bunch of em would go “wow, looks like the Nazi party is making a comeback”
@@sulturwood3226 It's probably not "denial" so much as just it being harder to see something from the inside. This is a whole thing called "State Civil Religion" and it sort of saturates every part of American life. The youtuber Religion for Breakfast has a pretty good video about it. th-cam.com/video/x49n90lWi0s/w-d-xo.html
I have always found it had the whiff of communism about it, which immediately qualifies it as cult-like. It also symbolically encourages idolatry.
If you want to find out how free you really are, just say no to regurgitating that contrived crap...
The newest one to me is from The Witch. The black phillip rhymes. Not sure if they are based on historical songs. I know there was an effort to make the film period correct, but yah.
how about a video about c418 and his music specially the ones he made for minecraft, this game soundtrack turns out to be extremely immersive and adds so much diversity to the randomness of minecraft its incredibly artistic and special for a cube game and it would be cool to see a video going deep in the subject of c418 and his music
Man, the lyrics from Frances The Mute by the Mars Volta are so incredibly poetic! You should make a video on that album!
Your voice pared with the background music gives me some deep nostalgia :D
Ring Around The Rosy is about the black death. In 1918 children sang: I had a little bird, its name is Enza. We opened up the window and in flew Enza!
Nursery rhymes are creepy in the right context, because we've been trained that it's the calm before the storm, and we're about to find out the kid's really a demon, or some killer is stalking them, or whatever. It's not just recently, either. You know, the fairies in some of the old stories from the British Isles... they're not exactly like the Disney fairies. I have a book of stories compiled by someone called Katty Briggs (I just checked - it's called "Encyclopedia of Fairies", and it's been out of print for a long time, it seems)... and the stories were very old stories when SHE ran across them. Many of the characters weren't "nice". They were ostensibly kids' stories, and some of these folks would sing-song talk in rhyme, at least in the language or dialect they spoke. I think that's where we got the idea that spell-casting should sound like nursery rhymes! It seems to be a widespread and old idea... probably travelers and traders traded stories and songs too.
"Rock-A-Bye Baby" is about the cradle falling from the top of a tree and the baby falling (obviously to its death).
Hello - It is based on Gothic Horror (cf Frankenstein, Nosferatu, vampire culture, etc) which appeals to children since they love anything grotesque like monsters, dinosaurs, and so on which thrills them and keeps them captivated while telling them the story. They all have lessons in them, which is important, as it teaches them something each time. Blessings - DrD
Great song about nursery rhymes and creepiness….”Korn - Shoots and Ladders”
I always heard London Bridge is falling down was about the vikings led by Olaf pulling down the original bridge in 1014. Whether that actually happened isn't certain by any means but I've heard that's the origin for the rhyme from many places.
Happy early Halloween, Polyphonic!
This is officially my favorite YT chanel right now.
I know that a few torsos have been found in the Thames, one by Tower Bridge in 2001. Strangely it was a young boy the police called 'Adam', and according to the coroners report he was murdered on the 11th September...the same day as the Trade Centers.
**slowly sings** "a tiiiisket, a taaaaasket, a green and yellow baaaasket"
Bruno Bettelheim argues in The Uses of Enchantment (1976) that "fairy tales help children solve certain existential problems such as separation anxiety, oedipal conflict, and sibling rivalries. The extreme violence and ugly emotions of many fairy tales serve to deflect what may well be going on in the child's mind anyway." (Wikipedia The Uses of Enchantment) And that "the emotional and symbolic importance of fairy tales for children, including traditional tales once considered too dark, such as those collected and published by the Brothers Grimm. Bettelheim suggested that traditional fairy tales, with the darkness of abandonment, death, witches, and injuries, allowed children to grapple with their fears in remote, symbolic terms. If they could read and interpret these fairy tales in their own way, he believed, they would get a greater sense of meaning and purpose. Bettelheim thought that by engaging with these socially evolved stories, children would go through emotional growth that would better prepare them for their own futures." (Wikipedia Bruno Bettelheim) It seems to me that nursery rhymes may play a similar role as fairy tales, but expressed in collective spontaneous performance that creates a bonding of sorts between children in group settings.
Perhaps kind of like in Harry where in order to defeat a (I believe) bloggart which appears as your worst fear you have to say a word similar to hilarious and imagine your worst fear in a comical manner.
Have you ever heard the Russian nursery rhyme “Tilli tilli bom” spooky stuff
I feel it should be noted that recent research shows that many nursery rhymes and lullabies may have origins going back 8,000 years.
I still shiver at the humming of 'Rosemary's baby' to this day
Simpson s first season Xmas episode Bart sings the Batman smells version of jingle bells.. that was 90.. so I was a ten .. my sons watch the Simpson’s so they down too. Love it !💯👽
I don't now why. But i find "Row, Row your boat" so mysterious. Especially the "Life is but a dream" line.
My favorite creepy movie song is Nightmare on Elm Street!
I saw it in the theaters when I was a teen and can still sing it!
Did the kids sing these songs while working in the sweatshop to print books?
Because it's usually sung by children and they are scary as it is
It's true. Children are creepy AF
Cause little Cynthia detached Henry's head with a croquet mallet. No, wait this is nursery crimes
Great album for this time of year!
Exactly what i was thinking of
EPIC. One of my favourite albums.
Interesting in 2021 the London bridge built in London that now stands in Lake Havasu had 80 bodies in it . 😮
This channel is way to high quality and has a great upload schedule for the sub count.
There's a nursery rhyme about the thumb cutter that comes to cut the thumbs off children that suck their thumbs.
The person who made “Ring-Around-The Rosy” could have still learned about the Black Plague and wrote a song about it as a cautionary tale. It would be another thing if it was years BEFORE the plague happened.
I've come to add +4 to your journey to 1mil subs 👏🎉 excellent channel!! Already forwarded it to my bestie who is into pretty much all the music you've been covering. Keep up the good work! 👌 Hug 🤗
all things meant to amuse children are creepy when used by adults. Dolls, nursery rhymes, clothing, baby talk, santa clause, clowns, etc
"Happy birthday to you" is also a nursery rhyme. But is NEVER creepy. The creepy ones are those taken from the middle ages. The ones with lyrics "ring around the rosy" and such. They were composed with death in mind because in the middle ages children under 4 years old have a 50% chance of dying from bacteria and disease. Not to mention childrens stories from the middle ages like hansel and grettel contain cannibalism, kidnapping, etc..
Well. . . "Happy Birthday to You" doesn't really qualify as a nursery rhyme. It wasn't even created until the early 20th century. But, basically, ALL the old stories (and quite a few of the not-so-old) were created as propaganda that parents would use to keep their kids in line. "Stay out of the forest!" was a big one (cannibalism was just added for emphasis or local "flavor," if you will) because forests WERE both inviting and dangerous. Aimed at girls: "Be patient, be virtuous, do NOT try to move above your station, some man will come eventually and 'save' you. . ." For boys (because if no wars conveniently relieved you of your excess sons, passing on your position on the land you either didn't own or couldn't divide among them was problematic): "Be brave and bold! Go seek your fortune! Be clever and smart and even a bit sneaky! Above all, LEAVE!" One of the oldest stories still known to us is that of Odysseus (and Penelope). Three thousand years. . . same damned message.
@Ava Black What you are doing is trying to apply modern, and stupidly sensationalistic, values to very old stories circulated among people whose thought processes you (especially) couldn't even begin to understand. Cultural anthropologists and archeological linguists know better. Let's take your utterly absurd notion that The Pied Piper of Hamelin is a reference to "selling" children, perhaps into cannibalism. Unlike most folk tales, we have a surprising amount of HISTORICAL evidence for this one because a place name is provided. It dates back to the late 13th or early 14th century. Records tell us that something or someone was responsible for the disappearance of many of the town's children. And that's ALL we know! No "piper," although a stained-glass window commissioned a century later apparently depicted one. But such was the culture of the time that we don't know whether he was pure whimsy or a metaphorical device or just the artist's imagination. The rats weren't introduced until a 16th century version of the story but might have been an addition due to the fact that by then people knew that Bubonic Plague was carried by rats. Again, is it suggesting that the children didn't "disappear" but died from plague? We don't know. And you certainly don't.
No one is denying that Europe during the Middle Ages saw its share of all kinds of ugliness. But details like the forest come up with such regularity among these small enclaves of people isolated within deep forested areas, that it's obvious the FOREST, and not some girl-snatching man, is what was frightening. Or maybe Hansel and Gretel's witch was in drag?
You are perfectly entitled to apply whatever moral or message to these old stories that you'd like. That's what stories are for. But stop trying to claim that your obsessions are what the people who created these stories were concerned with. The long and short of it is, we don't know. But enough archetypal patterns emerge over hundreds of years of them to make some EDUCATED guesses. Gee, like the two I offered above. And when YOU, "dear," have spent 50 years studying language and oral tradition, get back to me. Or just go watch another video that tells you whatever shit you want to believe.
Rock a bye baby is a well known one.
All The Love From Morelia Michoacán México💙
This was very interesting. Thank you.
Just bought a new copy of The Grimms Bros Fairy Tales last month. Pretty talented for the time.
The Grimm brothers didn't WRITE a single one of them. They were a couple of German scholars interested in linguistics who figured that, in a time with no recording and very little literacy, a good place to study the historical development of language patterns would be in the old stories of the less affluent people (most of whom were rural peasants). In other words, the folk tales passed down throughout the generations. So they listened to and COMPILED a bunch of old stories that had circulated through oral tradition for hundreds of years. Phrases like "Once upon a time," "seek his fortune," "happily ever after" are all identifiable as "fairy tale language" from the Middle Ages retained because that's how we do with songs and stories.
Pied piper is one luring children away due to their parents mistakes.
I fucking love the brother's Grimm n used to read it as a little kid hiding under my blanket. :) happiest time/ages of my life
Love the video, especially the cool iconography on the opening. Here for the quality content and to help the algorithm. Happy Halloween weekend, everyone!
And the American intro to French language songs in the first grade. We were never taught on the spot what the lyrics meant but many years later uncovered the establishment's fiendish plot to subvert our collective psyche.
Although it's not a nursery rhyme, "Alice in Wonderland" might be considered in this genre; it's Victorian and certainly creepy.
Without watching the video I'm gonna go with the cynical condescension of hypnotocally tinkled lilting coupled with bizarrely macbre lyrics.
So I was born in 2006 in the countryside where I was born and lived till I moved out to attend highchool in the city. Phones were very uncommon back then, so what we did at school was play games. The London Bridge game was one of them.....😶
Thank for mentioning the Opies. Fi fi fo fum, by the pricking of my thumb, hubble hubble toil and trouble . Their cadence is a spell.
I thought London Bridge was due to the Tower of London prison, when did that change or is this a Mandela effect?
The link between ring-around-the-rosie and the Black Death has long been debunked. "Iron Maidens" were never a medieval torture instrument, but were actually an 18th century hoax. But many anglo-saxon nursery rhymes do have a surrealistic twist.
"Three, six, nine, the goose drank wine.
The monkey chewed tobacco on the street car line.
The line broke
The monkey got choked
And they all went to heaven in a little row boat!"
I mean, what is that about? 😀
"Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star", "Baa Baa Black Sheep" AND don't forget "The Alphabet Song" (all are the same song).
Happy Halloween he says
Pretty sure London bridges one was about Vikings raiding
The rhyme by the witches in Terranigma
Ooooh, a different kind of content! *Digs in*
Go look up the Lizzy Borden nursery rhyme and tell me that it isn't really messed up for kids to be jumping rope to a song about brutal axe murders. Its based on a true story, that is very famous locally, considering it happened right near me, but I don't know exactly how well-known the story is across the country and around the world.
I'm pretty sure I only know about it from the song with the chorus, "No you can't chop your pappa up in Massachusetts."
"Lizzie Borden had an axe, gave her father forty whacks"
Except that isn't a nursery rhyme. I'm an old woman, and though we never used it as a skip-rope rhyme, I guess it could have been, but that wasn't its original intention. It was probably made up and circulated by older folks, like dirty limericks are: "There was a young gal from Nantucket" -type of thing. I first heard it as a teenager from my dad.
I thought Maybe it was because whit things like the plague or the insecurity, people would try to explain children whit those songs to keep them "safe" (? Idk
Yeah I don't think that's the right picture for Scott Derrickson... :O
But good idea man, the silence was chilling
Philippines has the same myth like the london bridge sacrifice... I remembered hearing it all around the news before 😂
Here's one thing that might add to this. All over the world, no matter where you are, children tease each other with that same three note phrase. Na na na na naaa na.
Juxtaposition is always creepy. Lately film makers have taken to playing unusually happy or out of place music to scenes of chaos. Or when children act in a manner contrary to the way we all expect them to act is creepy. I guess that's what creepy is. It's unsettling. It's out of place. It's contrary to the way your brain knows a thing is.
3:47 look at that thing in the bottom left corner
M is not a horror film. It's a thriller.
I have, in fact, watched it in it's original language, and it is not very scary, but tense.
My son is turning 5. When I started thinking of English nursery rhymes and song , I find many of them to be violent or dark. So decided to look it up. Violent.
I want to see a horror film using Dua Lipa's songs as its horror theme songs
Now why are church organs creepy?
Check out Shockheaded Peter by The Tiger Lillies.
Nursery Cryme.
It's the juxtaposition.
It's that kids aren't supposed to be creepy they are innocent kids. Yet the harmonic rhythm paired with ritualistic lyrics
6:29 That's... not Scott Derrickson. That's actor Tom Wilkinson.
I looove Ring a round the Rosie. Always wondered why it's scary to others. None of my friends know that rhyme.
In Chinese and Asian culture, in ancient time they do really sacrifice children to build bridges.... In fact I think you can still see the memorial stone in a few Japanese bridges
The Brother's Grimm only reiterated what they had collected from the villages they visited throughout Europe.. I assume stories like Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel were used to frighten children from going off with strange men... the mortality rates of those times were very high and death was often a daily reality for most children. It's not surprising that the horrors of the world were often ingrained within children's stories and nursery rhymes
They are cautionary tales...
Also, some of these had political undertones, which could be denied by claiming “that’s just a nonsense children’s song; it doesn’t mean anything”.
As our elementary school in England we sang "The Grand Old Duke of York," one of those traditional songs considered "safe" for children. It originally satirized The Duke of York who was son to George III and head of the army. There were others probably based on political events.
Mexican children rhyme:
Doña Blance (Lady White)
Circle Game
Lady White is covered
With pillars of gold and silver.
We'll break a pillar
To see Lady White.
Lady White is covered
With pillars of gold and silver.
We'll break a pillar
To see Lady White.
Who is this little hornet
In pursuit of Lady White?
I am this little hornet
In pursuit of Lady White.
----Break in into a mausoleum?
I think part of the reason they've become so creepy is two fold. First, there are a lot of nursery rhymes that have kind of gotten written down in a certain form, and have gotten kind of stuck that way for many years. I think folklore is meant to evolve over time and through standardization, they've become sort of stuck in time. It's not a bad thing, as new stuff is always being made, so there are always new versions evolving over time, but now the newer versions are still around along with older versions which can be unfamiliar and kind of gives the effect that you're looking in a mirror, but the reflections don't quite line up correctly. The second thing is regarding instinct. We have a lot of that surrounding children, and it can be an unsettling experience to suddenly realize you have thoughts and urges that are not as rational as we'd like them to be, or come without prompting. I don't get as creeped out by children that were born that way, but I tend to get more unsettled by children who are creepy due to their association with tragedy.