Steven King said the whole reason he wrote Dream Catcher was for the bathroom scene because bathrooms are so scary in real life. Along with what you said about suicides, slip and falls and the others, he noted that the bathroom is where you usually make the discovery that your body is failing in some way, such as noticing a new dark spot on your skin or blood in the stool.
I'm way late but on the topic of Stephen King and her use of IT clips in the video,,, like, a lot of shit happens in bathrooms in that novel and its film adaptations, damn. Like, as you mentioned, a suicide.
This is a great point. Also, if you've ever cared for elderly people, the bathroom is the most challenging part of giving them care. Whether it's helping them onto the toilet or helping them into the bathtub, it can be hard to the caregiver to see watch a loved one decay to the point where basic necessary tasks are now very difficult and know that this will be their own future one day.
All animals are hyper alert while defecating. You're exposed and immobile and it makes you easy prey for predators. Humans aren't immune to this instinct and many cultures around the world associate toileting with fear, even some of the more isolated cultures. It's also a rather surreal place. It's wet, possibly mouldy and smelly and tiles make everything echo.
Lot's of cultures have developed tales about monsters thag prey on people when taking care of their business. Like that ghost in japan (that the hand from Majora's mask is a clear reference to) that asks you to choose between a red and blue roll of toilet paper, and both are correlated to how it will kill you, and choosing a color not listed has it drag you to the underworld.
I was a maid at a hotel for a summer. A closed shower curtain or bathroom door was pure anxiety inducing. It always felt like the opening scene of Law & Order where the dead body is found.
I live in Australia. My life literally is that scene from "Arachnophobia". No joke. We've had spiders under the toilet seat, in the shower, on the lights, behind the mirrors. I had one straight up drop on me from the roof while I was showering as a kid. I didn't need movies or games to make me scared of the bathroom.
Indeed, sorry, I should have made it more obvious I was agreeing with that point in the video. Though, that being said, movies and games have certainly helped reinforce that fear :) And that thing about checking the toilet bowl? That's pretty much necessary life skills here. You do not want to know the creepy crawly things I've found living in the toilet bowl.
I moved from the US to Australia a few years ago, and holy shit! I hate huntsman spiders and golden orb weavers. I once came across a golden orb weaver with an abdomen bigger than my thumb and legs wider than my spread open hand while working in an orchard. Thinking about it still gives me the shivers.
Heavy Metal Collector hahahahaha oh man, look, you honestly do kinda get used to it. Especially the little ones. But huntsman spiders definitely still creep me out. At least they're not super venomous. We get a lot of orb weavers, too. There's a big bastard made his web outside our kitchen window. But at least he keeps the flies out
we had a detached laundry/dunny and I remember as a kid I peed my pants because I refused to use it while the inside one was taken there was always more than a 50% chance it would be covered in redbacks
As someone with intense anxiety, bathrooms are like a second home to me. Seeing them in horror movies, games, etc. is extremely effective because when I see bad stuff happening in them, I see a place that I consider a safe spot be tainted. I usually find horror hilarious but bathroom horror terrifies me. Thanks for making this video, it's fun to be scared every once in a while!
This is honestly one of your best videos. I've always loved your retrospective vids but this is maybe one of the most exhaustive ones you've done! And it really got my brain a-buzzing about why bathrooms/toilets are so scary. For me, it's because they usually only have one exit. Usually no windows either so if the light goes out it's pitch black. That's nightmare material! I'm from Finland and we have a sauna in almost every house, attached to the bathroom. The times I've seen saunas used as a bad place or scary place is exactly once: in a Finnish horror movie. I'm kind of surprised it's not more of a trope: saunas are small and cramped and have low visibility, the heat can make one anxious (especially if it becomes too hot), the hot stones are basically begging for someone to fall over on them and be burned badly. In our culture saunas are deeply deeply symbolic and seen as a place of truly becoming clean (and it's true - the feeling of cleanliness after a sauna is completely different than after a shower or a bath). Saunas are almost like churches, there's a holiness to them. In the past women gave birth in saunas and the dead were washed there. Maybe that's why they haven't been disturbed or tainted with horror imagery.
I love the original content. I was hoping to hear something about Candyman. A lot of bathroom scenes in that one.. especially the urban legend about the boy who gets his penis cut off my candyman and it's found floating in the toilet.
I can't help thinking that walking backwards up dimly lit stairs holding a candle and a mirror runs a pretty good chance of falling and breaking your neck. Like it's a rather vicious prank maybe?
I had a similar thought. Only for me, it was tripping and lighting yourself on fire. There's also dropping the mirror and cutting yourself. Perhaps the odds of physical harm/death are what the grim reaper truly represents there.
Can confirm, Ghostbusters Tub had terrified me from proper hygene. Im not gonna lie, i'm 29 now and get regular showers but it took me over 12 years to get over my fear of showers and baths from the grudge and ghostbusters. I honestly was terrified and had to be forced to take a shower, thanks for the analizing, this helped even more! I'm happier to take showers now~
The hand in the toilet thing from Majora's Mask is actually a reference to a Japanese myth. There is a ghost called Aka Manto and he will ask "red or blue paper" if you say red he will cut you to ribbons, if you say blue he will strangle you, and if you pick another color he will drag you to the afterlife. The only way to escape is to say "no paper".
As a kid I also remember going to slumber parties and being told to do the "Bloody Mary" thing. I flat out refused because I fully believed in demons and wanted no part in inviting one around. To this day I still completely avoid looking in mirrors at night for fear of what I may see lurking there (even if it's just a figment of my own tired imagination.)
In some prisons, inmates will take one leg out of their trousers while on the toilet. This is so if they are jumped they will not trip themselves if they have to react.
I got bored one day and started reading about prison stuff XD Some dude made a crossbow in solitary confinement... Shit that can happen there is insane.
I've never been afraid of bathrooms really. I don't look behind the shower curtain, I don't close the door when I walk by; I just always find solace in a bathroom. Growing up in my grandparents' really old farmhouse, I experienced abuse from a family member. The house had dimly lit... well, everything. Everywhere that wasn't a main living space was dark, creepy, and smelled. I would generally hide in the bathroom or in the closets because I found comfort in being able to lock doors (yeah, closets with locks... on the inside?) Seeing scary bathrooms in film or video games always made me wonder why. I assume now that seeing as my childhood was different than what media portrays, I get why I never developed that fear.
I actually had a somewhat similar thing. I was bullied a lot at school, and my high-school had small rooms as toilets intead of stalls. I spent many breaks there hiding from the world. The black-coloured walls mumbled the voices of people, and I felt like I could be myself there. To this day I prefer small dark rooms when I'm feeling anxious, and might go to the bathroom just to have a moment of peace and quiet.
Reminds me of how occasionally I would hide in the changing rooms at my elementary school for comfort, under the benches. I'm claustrophobic, but since it's open enough not to feel trapped there, I found something very comforting about that small, tucked-away space. Also, I do close the bathroom door when I walk by, but only because I know one of my roommates prefers it to be left closed.
1. My friend told me that the mirror thing with vampires was because mirrors were backed with silver, which was seen as a pure and good metal, which conflicted with the vampire's tortured and different nature. 2. The bathrooms suck because you can't be armed while taking a shower. Unless you stuck a crowbar to the panels using one of those suction cups.
You make a good point about the bathroom being a terrifying place in real life, too - I used to self-harm fairly frequently in the bathroom (although I live alone, it was purely easy clean up) and, although I still have my struggles with pills, I haven't marked my skin in almost a year now. But when I was dyeing my hair red the other day, and I was rinsing it out, and it was all over the bath, and my hands, and my wrists, and my arms (I'm not exactly neat and tidy when it comes to any chore!) I found myself panicking and flashing back just a bit to that time in my life, and it really shocked me what a hold it had over me. Not as bad as certain things that make me remember things I'd rather forget, but one that certainly came out of no-where and one that not everyone can understand, even if I do think we all have (ir)rational fears of the smallest room.
OH my giddy aunt. I just literally finished watching the last video I had lined up for the day, and thought forlornly, Gee. I really hope PUR uploads that toilet video soon.. 12 minutes later... I'm in youtube pleasure town
Thanks for adding the creepy toilet from 'Look who's talking'. That thing definitely was a major reason for me to be scared to go to the bathroom at night. (And we did have those plushy covers back then as well! The 80s/90s were wild!) In horror movies you expect something creepy lurking in the bathroom, but that toilet abomination in a kids movie totally came out of left field for me. My dad always obsessed over potential rats coming out of the toilet and so he really made sure that we learned to always close the toilet lid down! So those dudes who claim it's too hard to put down the SEAT after peeing really get no sympathy from me! Appreciate the short clip from Van Helsing, it's so campy, colourful and fun. (And I really love Drac in this!) Maybe a film to cover in the future, or do some general break down/ranking of vampire content as a Halloween special?
I'm here late, but let me tell you my toilet fear as a child. After I saw that arachnophobia toilet scene as a teeny tiny child, I had to check my toilet for spiders for YEARS. I always had to lift the seat and check to make sure it did not have any dang venomous spiders hanging around! And I really did do this for a couple of years. The funny part is that I live in an area that does not have a SINGLE venomous spider species around. Kids are dumb. Well, at least I was dumb.
The thing that always scared me as a kid was the sound of the toilet flushing. It's so loud, like a monster. Or so loud it will get the attention of the monsters. I can still remember the feeling of my heart racing as I would flush the toilet and run back to my room and under the covers as quickly as possible
i was bulimic from age 9 to 20 or 21, and that was the main thing i had in my mind this whole video. thank you for mentioning your experience with it! i know it's silly but it was nice to have that association validated!!!!!
You knew I was gonna come here. You know. IN THE BATHROOM 1:447:158:3710:1211:1412:5314:14 P.S. Scariest bathroom scene is definitely What Lies Beneath!
I remember Silent Hill 3 had a few scary moments in some of the public toilets, as well as a scary mirror in the hospital level. Still to this day, that mirror room is one of the scariest rooms I've ever been in.
I remember one time when I was extremely sick, and after long sitting and shitting in the bathroom - my stomach hurt so much that I was genuinely afraid to find an internal organ float in the toilet!
As a wee bairn, toilets at night became a thing of terror thanks to that demonic toilet from "Look Who's Talking, Too". That level of horror had no business being in an otherwise fairly wholesome family film about talking tots.
I'm really glad you made this video because I've always been scared of bathrooms, especially bathroom mirror and for a long time, years even, I used to have really bad anxiety when I was in the bathroom and I couldn't take long showers or just be in a bathroom for too long without panicking, especially at night. I never had a way to explain it, except for kids in elementary school doing Bloody Mary stuff (which I'm still scared of today!!). I've gotten over it mostly since most of my paranoia occurred when i was a kid, but when I play games with bathroom mirrors, even stuff like Gary's Mod, I get super anxious that something creepy is going to happen. Thank you for making this video, as its something i can show people when I don't know how to explain why I'm scared of bathrooms!
Paltheas I’ve pretty much always had a cat in the house, so I tend to leave doors cracked open a bit to allow feline exploration, but I might occasionally seize up in the bathroom if I take a shower at an atypical time, that is not first thing in the morning. I’m not sure why exactly it has to be later in the day to freak me out by being mostly prone and naked and in an inescapable water closet, but that’s my life. Maybe ,y imagination has time to wake up and suggest things that aren’t there through the shifty glass of the shower door?
Usually I prefer the doors not to be closed. Probably some very slight claustrophobia. The door to my bedroom is always closed, otherwise my dog would poo and pee on the landing in the middle of the night. She never makes a mess in the bedroom. Proving that she can wait until morning, and that she is just an opportunist, I love her so much :D
When I first started watching this, I instantly thought of the scene in the 1990 version of It, where Beverly sees all the blood in her bathroom sink, but her father can't see any of it. Spooked me out like crazy. Great video!
Not afraid of bathrooms. Then again I wasn't really exposed to any frightening stories or situations featuring bathrooms. Growing up as a kid, though I did develop a fear of death and dead things. Especially birds. One experience I remember is when I rode my bike down to the park. While riding around near the trees, I saw a bird that had its chest ripped open. Just thinking about it now 19 years later freaks me out.
All my childhood fears of bathrooms stemmed from that trailer I lived in for the first 13 years of my life. A trailer where there was, quite often, the possibility of finding a two-inch long cockroach behind the toilet, crawling on the wall, jumping out from the medicine cabinet, crawling by the tub, coming out of the shower drain, et cetera. I was petrified of roaches as a kid. Also, the weaksauce toilets which inevitably clogged instilled me with a gruesome fear of the toilet overflowing and flooding the entire place. I'd often have brown-out nightmares involving the toilet overflowing while my legs stuck to the ground, unable to escape the oncoming flood, only able to move in slow motion. ...Also, there was this clip on AFV I saw once around the same age where someone stuck some prank creature in the toilet which would pop up when the prank victim opened the lid. Thanks to that, I was scared of creatures coming up from the pot for waaaaay longer than I wanna admit, lol. I have no current bathroom-associated fears. ...I still have weird filthy bathroom dreams though. I've always wondered what sort of wack "bathroom dreams" people had before the invention of the modern toilet. Or "brownout dreams" before the invention of the common lightbulb. Anyway... off topic. :P -Cy
I was actually expecting her to bring up clock tower when talking about mirrors, since if you inspect the mirror in the bedroom, a hand reaches out and chokes you to death. But I guess that's a less prominent scene than entering the bathroom, so I understand.
As a kid who loved baths Ghostbusters 2 was horrifying, especially when I reached the age where my parents no longer monitored my baths. But while I would always check my bathtub and linen closet for monsters while growing up, I was really terrified of the hallway at about 8 in the morning when no one in the house was awake. I would dart between my room and the bathroom and not feel truly safe until I was back in my room with the door locked. I was always afraid that a Gremlin would be in my house, watching me.
Candyman absolutely wrecked me as a kid, as I was probably way too young when I first saw it 😵 I still can't do dark bathrooms, not necessarily because of that movie, but I'm sure it didn't help.
I had nightmares for years about being walked in on in bathrooms/changerooms. In one nightmare it would be my bathroom, in another it would be the family bathroom, in another it would be the change room at the middle school, etc. Most of them have ceased, but occasionally I still get one. For me, that fear from the nightmares comes back any time I see a bathroom in a video game or even a film. Like even in something like Fallout 3, many of them are jumpscares, and I would just see the bathroom and go "NOPE!" and keep going. Despite yes, this being a game with zombies and mutants and other body-horror things in it, it's seeing a poorly lit bathroom that gets me to skip it. The least scary bathrooms in video games were the ones in Leisure Suit Larry. Yes you can die in it, but it comes from a place of absurd comedy (eg the toilet overflowing and filling up a sealed bathroom.) Both Gone Home and Phantasmagoria had the same effect when walking into the bathroom, despite the former pretty much being an anxiety of something bad happening, while the latter was marketed as being horror, and you know it's something bad is coming because it's in the opening video.
Man, this reminds me of a book I read a while back before I left school, I don't remember what the book was called, but I can remember what it was about. People accidentally discovered an endangered animal species in Mexico; extremely viscous and would attack on sight, the creatures hid in drainage pipes and attacked by lunging out of sinks, toilets, etc. The scene I remember clearest involved a young woman and her mother, who had blocked the toilet with her sewing machine and taped it shut, saying something was trying to emerge and attack. After the daughter went out (before she left, she heard water splashes and wrote it off as nothing, she'd also taken off the tape and the sewing machine), the mother blocked the toilet up again, and the scene ended with the mother being in bed again and seeing something in a corner. Once the daughter returns, she goes back upstairs to find her mother's neck torn out, and then is also attacked by this mystery creature. One of the very few horror novels that actually gave me chills, I'd love to read it again.
Thankfully I don't think I ever succumbed to fear of toilets, not even from seeing ghostbusters 2 as a child (though I was raised right and saw the original on a regular basis, so it wasn't a scary thing to me). I do agree that the fear likely stems from the bathroom/toilet feeling like such a safe place, but at the same time it's one of the places you're most vulnerable.
I know this video is 4 years old at this point, but snakes can also find their way up their pipes. I used to work in a barn where we had some type of very very large grass snake they got into the walls and plumbing of our building. We couldn't catch him and, quite frankly, we liked that he was hanging around because grass needs eat mice and rats which are a big problem for barbara. But that does not make it any better, even when you like snakes, to go to sit on the toilet, look in, and see it is ocupado in the weirdest way.
Man PUR’s vidjas r soo good! My scary bathroom memories come from silent hill 2&3 (those really creeped me out) and the naked lady scene in the shining. (Thanks for the reminder btw XD)
When I was a kid my mom rented arachnophobia. There's a scene with a spider in the toilet bowl and the shower. It made me check before I used either for along time. However Candyman made me scared of the bathroom for years. That bathroom scene is wild.
And now that I'm done watching the video, and done eating my snack, I need to go use the bathroom... At 3 AM. In the basement bathroom that only has one dim light.
Ghoulies had a picture of that green baby looking thing hanging out in a toilet on the cover, with the tagline: “they’ll get you in the end” Hahahahaha
I actually find comfort in bathrooms and in my own room because I know the only entry and exit point so if someone shows up or something happens I know how to handle it
When I was a little kid I was afarid of getting sucked down the drain of the bathtub because of an episode of rugrats where one of the characters had vision of getting sucked down the drain. Good news is that my fear only lasted a year.
I only developed a fear of the bath *tub*, and this was due to having a huge crack in it and having to stand on the back end, until we could finally afford to have someone come in and repair it. It took a while to get where I didn't feel the fear of it, even though I knew it was now safe. Still, occasionally, just the white walls can be disconcerting for a brief moment.
The scene that sticks out to me didn't happen in a bathroom, but did involve a sink. When The Blob sucked that dude down the drain, I was scarred for life. Great video as always, Roses!
I often think of the scene in A Nightmare on Elm Street where the girl is falling asleep in the bathtub until claws start coming up through the water. That image creeped me out.
When i watched E.T. for the first time, there was a scene, where the boy shows E.T. around the house, and when he get's to the bathtub, he opends the faucet and says something like "Water comes from there. and sometimes bugs" and I never forgot. and it still freaks me out even though I know it won't happen. Not scary. Just gross
When I was very young I happen to see a scene in Highway to Heaven where no one believed this old lady that there was a snake in her toilet. The angel convinces his buddy to look anyway and holy cow there it is. Even after almost 30 years I still sometimes double check before sitting down.
I think media made the bathroom creepy. As you said the bathroom is something really private, most people feel very comfy in their bathrooms but defiling that place making into something scary is super contrasting to the comfy private zone/safe space feel most people associate with their bathrooms and thats why its a good setup for horror. Its the same concept that makes the monster under your bed scary. Edit: I love my bathroom, broke multiple Tetris records while sitting on the pot :D
I still say one of the scariest bits in Eternal Darkness was the bathtub hallucination. It's one of the few times I've actually found a jumpscare kind of respectable. I'd argue that the grossness of bathrooms is a major part of why they're used so often for scary scenes. The vulnerability aspect is important too (probably more so), but the thought of how unsanitary they often are can really enhance a scary scene. The thought of someone getting cut up or whatever is made even more unnerving by seeing it happen in some moldy, shit-encrusted, fly-infested room. The fact that so many bathrooms are so cramped adds even more since it makes the dirtiness feel even more all-encompassing and inescapable. Plus, let's be honest, a bathroom is just one of the least dignified places to die.
When I was a teenage I often saw an eye looking at me from the crack made on the hinge side of the door when it is slightly open. It was a towel hanging behind the door and my mind was playing tricks on me. But no matter how many times I saw it and realized what it was it still scared me the next time.
I've never actually been afraid of bathrooms. Even when I was little and there was scary wallpaper in the room, it was only in one place so it was that and not the room. Although that one time on Friday the 13th, I found a decent size frog in my tub, probably could give me pause for thought.
It doesn't bother me. I lift the lid, I look and then I sit down. Rather simple interaction. If something is in there you close it and flush, weather it's a rat or much MUCH worse, someone else's feculence.
1. Let me just say how much I love your videos. 2. We throw an epic and over the top Halloween party every year, it takes weeks to set up and takes over the entire property. Cops have been called, pretty sure we are the reason our neighbors moved, ect. A big part of the decor is the bathroom! We have actually had to dial it back because people were too uncomfortable using the bathroom or using it with the door shut. The last really epic design is what drew the line with our friends. Even our large burly friends were unsettled. We have an old house with high ceilings so we suspended mutilated barbies from the ceiling at a high that you didn't see them unless you looked up, which you don't really do until you have already sat down. We also had blood everywhere, a dead body in the tub that looked like a spooky sacrifice, and bloody writings on the wall. Frankly it spooked me and I'm the one who set it up. The isolation of being alone in a small space makes the bathroom a great place for scares. 3. As a young person i went to a party that had when you walked in a "spooky" bathroom. Very basic, hand prints on the curtain ect. I thought to myself "how cute." But as I sat there doing my business the light started to flicker and they had their mirror rigged to show a spooky face and honestly my pants weren't even allnthe way up before I was out of that room!
Nah bathrooms don't scare me. What scares me I blame jurassic park and this park I went to that had dinosaurs noises and realistic sculptures when I was little. So my greatest fear comes in two forms both similar in feeling. It starts off in a jungle or a forest the sky gets dark, thunder rumbles and lighting is the only light source you got you start hearing the low growls and calls of raptors, Dilophosaurus, Carnotaurus, and pterodactyls around you and in the air then sudden a flash of lighting shows a T-rex feet in front of you. It gives out its roar foot steps coming your way... now the other has the same weather but it's in the middle of the ocean on a raft and seeing glimpses of a mosasaur, plesiosaur, or a Megalodon swimming around the raft
Not exactly a bathroom fear, but I have always been creeped out by pipes making noises in the walls. Creakes, knocks, burbling or screeches always sent my mind into places it shouldn't be. Great video.
Cool video, though i do feel i should point out a missed opportunity to use a scene from Final Destination were a character dies an unseen force/freak accident ends up strangling him in the tub. Basically looking like a suicide.
Ok wow, this video brought back some memories. When I was a kid there was a period in 5th grade where the story of Bloody Mary had taken over the school and the older kids liked to scare the younger kids with it. I remember being in the bathroom with two of my friends talking about Bloody Mary when two older girls turned off the lights as they left the bathroom, so of course we panicked and ran out screaming. I also remember a day when my friend was at my house and we tried to summon Bloody Mary in my parents' bathroom, counting on our fingers all the times we had to repeat her name. As we got closer to the end we gave each other this look like, "oh shit, what have we done?" When I was maybe 5 or 6 I was afraid of the bathrooms at Target because the toilet flushing was so loud. And at that age, I was afraid of anything that was loud. My house has three bathrooms, the one attached to my parents' room, the one in the upstairs hall, and the one in the basement. I've claimed the basement bathroom as mine and that's where I shower. It's a very small bathroom complete with a medicine cabinet, dim lights, and a shower the size of a broom closet. To get to this bathroom I have to walk down a dark narrow staircase, through a long dark hallway, in a very old house that creaks a lot. A few years ago I heard the story of Kashima Reiko for the first time. And if the story of a vengeful ghost who's missing the lower half of her body isn't scary enough. The story basically ends with telling you that Kashima will appear to you after you hear the story and you have to answer her questions correctly or else she will kill you. And of course, she's said to appear in bathrooms. One night I was taking a shower with the thought of that story in the back of my mind. I can't really hear anything above the sound of the water and the bathroom fan but I heard a voice in the hallway and a knock at the door and immediately froze. I don't quite remember what happened except hearing the door being forced open and noises in the room while I stood frozen in the shower thinking I was going to die. A few minutes after the noises stopped I felt brave enough to open the shower curtain and I saw the medicine cabinet and the door were both open. I guess this was all a horrible coincidence as one of my family members needed something from the medicine cabinet at the same time I was thinking about bathroom ghosts.
So this video is fantastic and I'm so glad you feature the IT miniseries as an example here. I was no older than 5 when I first saw that tv movie and it scared the living daylights out of me. Along with a healthy distrust of clowns, drains in tubs, sinks and on curbs terrified me for YEARS. I just knew Pennywise was gonna come out of a drain and eat me.
26 years ago when I was six, I would be terrified of Bloody Mary and the bathroom mirror. Bloody Mary is very famous here in Brazil. I also saw a movie I can't remember what it was, where the shower sink would have a creature pull a guy in and blood splatted everywhere. I would never close the door while in the bathroom, and when it started I would ask my mother or my father to be in the bathroom door waiting for me to finish my shower.
I remember when I was a kid (maybe 5, 6 years old) I was absolutely terrified of being sucked down the bathtub drain because of an episode of Rugrats where Angelica tells Tommy and Chuckie that it was indeed possible to get sucked down the bathtub drain.
Part of fear is being vulnerable. When you're in a bathroom you are either naked or with your pants down almost every time. You are at your most physically vulnerable.
Genuinely great analysis. This is something I've been thinking about off and on for years ever since not just seeing "Psycho" but also listening to the Mitsfits song "Psycho '78" and the Samhain song "Mother of Mercy". And, of course, I very vividly recall the Bloody Mary legend from childhood. Despite all that, bathrooms are mostly comforting for me as places of escape in public places, refuges at noisy parties, etc.
I wasn't wearing my glasses, and when that Roses-Sim popped up sitting on the toilet, I thought it was actually you!!!! Not a very pleasant shock!! Another great video, these really help when I am feeling stressed out, which is all day every day.
Great video, and I feel 100% the same way about the Ghostbusters 2 and Arachnophobia scenes. We must be around the same age, because this touched the exact same things from my childhood. For some reason, I can't wrap my head around you actually being afraid.
The fire drills during college while in the shower is a real thing, it happened to me two years in a row! I had to book it outside, into the freezing cold winter night! Unique &well put together video as always, Roses!
I am honestly afraid of going to the toliet at night when all the lights are out and everyone is asleep. When I found out two years ago that _CREATURES_ can crawl up the toliet I became even more terrified of it
The part of the video when you mentioned. I grown to see bathrooms, especially mirrors and tubs. In movies and some games actually, there are scenes where the character commits suicide or self-harms in the tub, and the mirror for me are the drawings of someone looking in a mirror, happy outside the mirror, but their reflection is depressed/crying/etc.
Oh, man, it's great to see a nod to Killer Klowns from Outer Space. :) And Clock Tower? Nice! Eternal Darkness on the Gamecube also has probably one of the best bathroom jump scares I've ever experienced. Regarding bathrooms, I'm not generally afraid of the real thing (though I can get a bit apprehensive when walking past one in the dark to go to bed - it's a little pocket of darkness that has its own little pocket in the form of a curtained bathtub), but video game bathrooms are awful. I think I can only think of maybe two games where bathrooms aren't actively out to get you (Penumbra and White Day), and even in White Day, if you're being chased, then the bathroom may not necessarily be a safe place to hide. This is a fantastic video. Bathrooms really are scary in almost every movie or game they're in, and it's cool to see not only why, but also a comprehensive set of examples. Great job!
Well in the recent remake of White Day there is a scare where you hear something slowly but surely check all of the bathroom stalls, banging each door open, until it comes to you, which is a bloody girl with a wide grin who practically falls to the floor when she finds you. Scared the crap out of me!
I had that exact same experience as a little kid with Ghostbusters II! That said, I think that the genuinely scariest bathroom moment in... basically ANYTHING is *that* bath in the game Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. You'll know it if you've played it far enough. That shit will not be forgotten. I swear, that is such a perfect moment of horror- even after all these years, after replaying the game multiple times and actively *KNOWING* that it's going to happen, it's still somehow done so perfectly that it still gets me EVERY. SINGLE. DAMN. TIME!
I remember the first time I heard about Bloody Mary, at a Christian kids camp when I was about 11. I was terrified! Also I would look at the patterns in the wood by my bunk and manage to see scary faces in them. Creepy times
Yeah, my first experience with bathroom horror was when I saw, "A Nightmare on Elm Street" when I was around 8 years old. Also, funny that your hair color is the same as the pink slime from Ghostbusters 2. Haha!
The movie Dark Water terrified me around my shower when I was a kid. I am so glad I don’t get my water from an easily accessible tower on the roof. I will also say it’s funny that the bathroom, like you mentioned, is often a place of escape and safety. As a child, it was my only place to escape family troubles and anxiety. I would turn off the lights so only the inspection lit the white tiles, and sit in the tub fully clothed. I felt soothed and safe. Public bathrooms are 50/50 horror and escape for me though 😅
I was around 8 years old at a rest stop when a woman and her two daughters open my restroom stall started at me for a good second then closed it. I already had anxiety about doors either locking me in or not keeping people out. So yeah that was fun.
Great video, and interesting observation about movie characters feeling safe in the bathroom. When I have dreams about some kind of danger in my house, I always run to the bathroom and escape through the window. Although, the bathrooms are the only rooms in my house with door locks, so that makes sense, haha.
I'm honestly super surprised you didn't end up including the toilet scene from Silent Hill 2, that one is one of my definitive bathroom scenes in a video game for sure. Also there has been a lot of discussion about that game starting out in a public bathroom and what it means for a horror game.
I saw It when I was 6-5, and I’ve never been afraid of clowns but I vividly remember the scene of children’s voices coming from the sink drain and now bathrooms are always scary to me after watching a horror movie (even with movies that don’t feature a bathroom scene).
This was a great analysis. Bathroom horror has always been fascinating to me, too. For what it's worth, in dream analysis bathrooms are commonly interpreted as the need to release emotions you've been holding inside for too long. Subconsciously bathrooms could be seen as places of trauma.
If you look in the bathroom mirror at midnight and chant Bloody Mary three times, your Mom will yell at you to go to bed. ;)
The true horror.
Brian Webber it's true, I barely escaped with my life.
Stop, you're gonna make me have nightmares!
And yell at you for wasting her good flashlight batteries.
(You know better than to use her candles!)
That would be scary. I've been tempted to put a restraining order in mine.
Steven King said the whole reason he wrote Dream Catcher was for the bathroom scene because bathrooms are so scary in real life. Along with what you said about suicides, slip and falls and the others, he noted that the bathroom is where you usually make the discovery that your body is failing in some way, such as noticing a new dark spot on your skin or blood in the stool.
I'm way late but on the topic of Stephen King and her use of IT clips in the video,,, like, a lot of shit happens in bathrooms in that novel and its film adaptations, damn. Like, as you mentioned, a suicide.
I had to check to make sure before I said this same thing. Good on you dude, I'm surprised she didn't mention this in the video.
This is a great point. Also, if you've ever cared for elderly people, the bathroom is the most challenging part of giving them care. Whether it's helping them onto the toilet or helping them into the bathtub, it can be hard to the caregiver to see watch a loved one decay to the point where basic necessary tasks are now very difficult and know that this will be their own future one day.
In short: Great idea, bad execution
All animals are hyper alert while defecating. You're exposed and immobile and it makes you easy prey for predators. Humans aren't immune to this instinct and many cultures around the world associate toileting with fear, even some of the more isolated cultures.
It's also a rather surreal place. It's wet, possibly mouldy and smelly and tiles make everything echo.
Also, if you're going to die, better if you don't while taking a shit.
Thats why your dog stares at you awkwardly when you take them out to shit
Lot's of cultures have developed tales about monsters thag prey on people when taking care of their business. Like that ghost in japan (that the hand from Majora's mask is a clear reference to) that asks you to choose between a red and blue roll of toilet paper, and both are correlated to how it will kill you, and choosing a color not listed has it drag you to the underworld.
@@satireknight I think you got like a time limit. You gotta say something
I was a maid at a hotel for a summer. A closed shower curtain or bathroom door was pure anxiety inducing. It always felt like the opening scene of Law & Order where the dead body is found.
I live in Australia. My life literally is that scene from "Arachnophobia". No joke. We've had spiders under the toilet seat, in the shower, on the lights, behind the mirrors. I had one straight up drop on me from the roof while I was showering as a kid. I didn't need movies or games to make me scared of the bathroom.
Indeed. That is why I say there are already pre-existing things outside of fiction that can cause apprehension.
Indeed, sorry, I should have made it more obvious I was agreeing with that point in the video. Though, that being said, movies and games have certainly helped reinforce that fear :) And that thing about checking the toilet bowl? That's pretty much necessary life skills here. You do not want to know the creepy crawly things I've found living in the toilet bowl.
I moved from the US to Australia a few years ago, and holy shit! I hate huntsman spiders and golden orb weavers. I once came across a golden orb weaver with an abdomen bigger than my thumb and legs wider than my spread open hand while working in an orchard. Thinking about it still gives me the shivers.
Heavy Metal Collector hahahahaha oh man, look, you honestly do kinda get used to it. Especially the little ones. But huntsman spiders definitely still creep me out. At least they're not super venomous. We get a lot of orb weavers, too. There's a big bastard made his web outside our kitchen window. But at least he keeps the flies out
we had a detached laundry/dunny and I remember as a kid I peed my pants because I refused to use it while the inside one was taken there was always more than a 50% chance it would be covered in redbacks
YOU: "Are you afraid of bathrooms?"
ME: "I WASN'T, THANK YOU SO MUCH."
As someone with intense anxiety, bathrooms are like a second home to me. Seeing them in horror movies, games, etc. is extremely effective because when I see bad stuff happening in them, I see a place that I consider a safe spot be tainted. I usually find horror hilarious but bathroom horror terrifies me. Thanks for making this video, it's fun to be scared every once in a while!
This is honestly one of your best videos. I've always loved your retrospective vids but this is maybe one of the most exhaustive ones you've done! And it really got my brain a-buzzing about why bathrooms/toilets are so scary. For me, it's because they usually only have one exit. Usually no windows either so if the light goes out it's pitch black. That's nightmare material!
I'm from Finland and we have a sauna in almost every house, attached to the bathroom. The times I've seen saunas used as a bad place or scary place is exactly once: in a Finnish horror movie. I'm kind of surprised it's not more of a trope: saunas are small and cramped and have low visibility, the heat can make one anxious (especially if it becomes too hot), the hot stones are basically begging for someone to fall over on them and be burned badly.
In our culture saunas are deeply deeply symbolic and seen as a place of truly becoming clean (and it's true - the feeling of cleanliness after a sauna is completely different than after a shower or a bath). Saunas are almost like churches, there's a holiness to them. In the past women gave birth in saunas and the dead were washed there. Maybe that's why they haven't been disturbed or tainted with horror imagery.
Thank you for the kind words and the extra insight! :)
Exhaustive, yes. So many bathrooms! I really loved this video and how everything is linked.
That's so interesting. I love to learn something new about other places!
I love the original content. I was hoping to hear something about Candyman. A lot of bathroom scenes in that one.. especially the urban legend about the boy who gets his penis cut off my candyman and it's found floating in the toilet.
Hi, thanks for the interesting and unique cultural insight :)
I can't help thinking that walking backwards up dimly lit stairs holding a candle and a mirror runs a pretty good chance of falling and breaking your neck. Like it's a rather vicious prank maybe?
I had a similar thought. Only for me, it was tripping and lighting yourself on fire. There's also dropping the mirror and cutting yourself. Perhaps the odds of physical harm/death are what the grim reaper truly represents there.
Can confirm, Ghostbusters Tub had terrified me from proper hygene. Im not gonna lie, i'm 29 now and get regular showers but it took me over 12 years to get over my fear of showers and baths from the grudge and ghostbusters. I honestly was terrified and had to be forced to take a shower, thanks for the analizing, this helped even more! I'm happier to take showers now~
The hand in the toilet thing from Majora's Mask is actually a reference to a Japanese myth. There is a ghost called Aka Manto and he will ask "red or blue paper" if you say red he will cut you to ribbons, if you say blue he will strangle you, and if you pick another color he will drag you to the afterlife. The only way to escape is to say "no paper".
O- O yikes
Thanks for the protip!
As a kid I also remember going to slumber parties and being told to do the "Bloody Mary" thing. I flat out refused because I fully believed in demons and wanted no part in inviting one around. To this day I still completely avoid looking in mirrors at night for fear of what I may see lurking there (even if it's just a figment of my own tired imagination.)
In some prisons, inmates will take one leg out of their trousers while on the toilet. This is so if they are jumped they will not trip themselves if they have to react.
Flaression not sure why you know that but as a paranoid person myself I will remember this trick.
I got bored one day and started reading about prison stuff XD Some dude made a crossbow in solitary confinement... Shit that can happen there is insane.
I do this too in case of zombie atack.
(actually just to spread the legs futher)
I read it on reddit a few months ago, it's an interesting trick
That is a damn good idea. I shall take that into my mind bank. You never know when you might need it.
I've never been afraid of bathrooms really. I don't look behind the shower curtain, I don't close the door when I walk by; I just always find solace in a bathroom. Growing up in my grandparents' really old farmhouse, I experienced abuse from a family member. The house had dimly lit... well, everything. Everywhere that wasn't a main living space was dark, creepy, and smelled. I would generally hide in the bathroom or in the closets because I found comfort in being able to lock doors (yeah, closets with locks... on the inside?) Seeing scary bathrooms in film or video games always made me wonder why. I assume now that seeing as my childhood was different than what media portrays, I get why I never developed that fear.
I actually had a somewhat similar thing. I was bullied a lot at school, and my high-school had small rooms as toilets intead of stalls. I spent many breaks there hiding from the world. The black-coloured walls mumbled the voices of people, and I felt like I could be myself there. To this day I prefer small dark rooms when I'm feeling anxious, and might go to the bathroom just to have a moment of peace and quiet.
Reminds me of how occasionally I would hide in the changing rooms at my elementary school for comfort, under the benches. I'm claustrophobic, but since it's open enough not to feel trapped there, I found something very comforting about that small, tucked-away space.
Also, I do close the bathroom door when I walk by, but only because I know one of my roommates prefers it to be left closed.
1. My friend told me that the mirror thing with vampires was because mirrors were backed with silver, which was seen as a pure and good metal, which conflicted with the vampire's tortured and different nature.
2. The bathrooms suck because you can't be armed while taking a shower. Unless you stuck a crowbar to the panels using one of those suction cups.
2 or you have a glock, I remember someone saying that can shoot underwater.
"Loads AK-27"
You sure about that?
You make a good point about the bathroom being a terrifying place in real life, too - I used to self-harm fairly frequently in the bathroom (although I live alone, it was purely easy clean up) and, although I still have my struggles with pills, I haven't marked my skin in almost a year now. But when I was dyeing my hair red the other day, and I was rinsing it out, and it was all over the bath, and my hands, and my wrists, and my arms (I'm not exactly neat and tidy when it comes to any chore!) I found myself panicking and flashing back just a bit to that time in my life, and it really shocked me what a hold it had over me. Not as bad as certain things that make me remember things I'd rather forget, but one that certainly came out of no-where and one that not everyone can understand, even if I do think we all have (ir)rational fears of the smallest room.
OH my giddy aunt. I just literally finished watching the last video I had lined up for the day, and thought forlornly, Gee. I really hope PUR uploads that toilet video soon..
12 minutes later...
I'm in youtube pleasure town
Thanks for adding the creepy toilet from 'Look who's talking'. That thing definitely was a major reason for me to be scared to go to the bathroom at night. (And we did have those plushy covers back then as well! The 80s/90s were wild!) In horror movies you expect something creepy lurking in the bathroom, but that toilet abomination in a kids movie totally came out of left field for me.
My dad always obsessed over potential rats coming out of the toilet and so he really made sure that we learned to always close the toilet lid down! So those dudes who claim it's too hard to put down the SEAT after peeing really get no sympathy from me!
Appreciate the short clip from Van Helsing, it's so campy, colourful and fun. (And I really love Drac in this!) Maybe a film to cover in the future, or do some general break down/ranking of vampire content as a Halloween special?
I'm here late, but let me tell you my toilet fear as a child.
After I saw that arachnophobia toilet scene as a teeny tiny child, I had to check my toilet for spiders for YEARS. I always had to lift the seat and check to make sure it did not have any dang venomous spiders hanging around! And I really did do this for a couple of years. The funny part is that I live in an area that does not have a SINGLE venomous spider species around. Kids are dumb. Well, at least I was dumb.
I made food JUST to eat while watching, let's do this!
Me here three years later started this with a cup noods, extra veggies.🤣🤣
The thing that always scared me as a kid was the sound of the toilet flushing. It's so loud, like a monster. Or so loud it will get the attention of the monsters. I can still remember the feeling of my heart racing as I would flush the toilet and run back to my room and under the covers as quickly as possible
I can't believe you bit Dave Grohl as a vampire. But I also can.
+ProJared Plays! You know it.
i was bulimic from age 9 to 20 or 21, and that was the main thing i had in my mind this whole video. thank you for mentioning your experience with it! i know it's silly but it was nice to have that association validated!!!!!
You knew I was gonna come here.
You know. IN THE BATHROOM
1:44 7:15 8:37 10:12 11:14 12:53 14:14
P.S. Scariest bathroom scene is definitely What Lies Beneath!
I remember Silent Hill 3 had a few scary moments in some of the public toilets, as well as a scary mirror in the hospital level. Still to this day, that mirror room is one of the scariest rooms I've ever been in.
"Are you afraid of the Bathrooms?" The sequel to "Are you afraid of the dark?" that nobody expected.
I remember one time when I was extremely sick, and after long sitting and shitting in the bathroom - my stomach hurt so much that I was genuinely afraid to find an internal organ float in the toilet!
Of course this happens to be the newest vid during my morning shower. Thanks roses ;)
No sweat.
You watch TH-cam in the shower?
+PushingUpRoses There *will* be sweat, if you scare him away from cleaning himself. Too much sweat!
As a wee bairn, toilets at night became a thing of terror thanks to that demonic toilet from "Look Who's Talking, Too". That level of horror had no business being in an otherwise fairly wholesome family film about talking tots.
So who else ran from their room to the bathroom, did their business, and ran back as fast as they could as a child when it was night?
I'm really glad you made this video because I've always been scared of bathrooms, especially bathroom mirror and for a long time, years even, I used to have really bad anxiety when I was in the bathroom and I couldn't take long showers or just be in a bathroom for too long without panicking, especially at night. I never had a way to explain it, except for kids in elementary school doing Bloody Mary stuff (which I'm still scared of today!!). I've gotten over it mostly since most of my paranoia occurred when i was a kid, but when I play games with bathroom mirrors, even stuff like Gary's Mod, I get super anxious that something creepy is going to happen. Thank you for making this video, as its something i can show people when I don't know how to explain why I'm scared of bathrooms!
whenever i'm walking through my home in the middle of the night i close the bathroom door. it just feels safer!
Same, and for some reason I am also in the habit of closing the door to my room.
Paltheas Hmm, but then you are locking yourself in. Maybe if you check the shower first?
I also close all the doors at night. I don't want to look into a dark room and see something.
Paltheas I’ve pretty much always had a cat in the house, so I tend to leave doors cracked open a bit to allow feline exploration, but I might occasionally seize up in the bathroom if I take a shower at an atypical time, that is not first thing in the morning. I’m not sure why exactly it has to be later in the day to freak me out by being mostly prone and naked and in an inescapable water closet, but that’s my life. Maybe ,y imagination has time to wake up and suggest things that aren’t there through the shifty glass of the shower door?
Usually I prefer the doors not to be closed. Probably some very slight claustrophobia. The door to my bedroom is always closed, otherwise my dog would poo and pee on the landing in the middle of the night. She never makes a mess in the bedroom. Proving that she can wait until morning, and that she is just an opportunist, I love her so much :D
When I first started watching this, I instantly thought of the scene in the 1990 version of It, where Beverly sees all the blood in her bathroom sink, but her father can't see any of it. Spooked me out like crazy. Great video!
I remember my mom always insisted on getting semi see-through shower curtains because of Psycho.
That scene from Dreamcatcher scared me enough to have a fear of going to the bathroom at night for several years
Not afraid of bathrooms. Then again I wasn't really exposed to any frightening stories or situations featuring bathrooms. Growing up as a kid, though I did develop a fear of death and dead things. Especially birds. One experience I remember is when I rode my bike down to the park. While riding around near the trees, I saw a bird that had its chest ripped open. Just thinking about it now 19 years later freaks me out.
All my childhood fears of bathrooms stemmed from that trailer I lived in for the first 13 years of my life. A trailer where there was, quite often, the possibility of finding a two-inch long cockroach behind the toilet, crawling on the wall, jumping out from the medicine cabinet, crawling by the tub, coming out of the shower drain, et cetera. I was petrified of roaches as a kid. Also, the weaksauce toilets which inevitably clogged instilled me with a gruesome fear of the toilet overflowing and flooding the entire place. I'd often have brown-out nightmares involving the toilet overflowing while my legs stuck to the ground, unable to escape the oncoming flood, only able to move in slow motion.
...Also, there was this clip on AFV I saw once around the same age where someone stuck some prank creature in the toilet which would pop up when the prank victim opened the lid. Thanks to that, I was scared of creatures coming up from the pot for waaaaay longer than I wanna admit, lol. I have no current bathroom-associated fears.
...I still have weird filthy bathroom dreams though. I've always wondered what sort of wack "bathroom dreams" people had before the invention of the modern toilet. Or "brownout dreams" before the invention of the common lightbulb. Anyway... off topic. :P
-Cy
YUP
THERE'S CLOCKTOWER
D:
I was SO happy when she brought that one up! My personal favorite!
I was actually expecting her to bring up clock tower when talking about mirrors, since if you inspect the mirror in the bedroom, a hand reaches out and chokes you to death. But I guess that's a less prominent scene than entering the bathroom, so I understand.
As a kid who loved baths Ghostbusters 2 was horrifying, especially when I reached the age where my parents no longer monitored my baths.
But while I would always check my bathtub and linen closet for monsters while growing up, I was really terrified of the hallway at about 8 in the morning when no one in the house was awake. I would dart between my room and the bathroom and not feel truly safe until I was back in my room with the door locked.
I was always afraid that a Gremlin would be in my house, watching me.
Just realized after watching this vid I have to go to the bathroom.
*Cocks gun* Wish me luck. I'm goin' in!
Candyman absolutely wrecked me as a kid, as I was probably way too young when I first saw it 😵 I still can't do dark bathrooms, not necessarily because of that movie, but I'm sure it didn't help.
In Australia, it’s possible for a redback spider to be found under the toilet seat. Those are among the nastiest spiders out there.
I had nightmares for years about being walked in on in bathrooms/changerooms. In one nightmare it would be my bathroom, in another it would be the family bathroom, in another it would be the change room at the middle school, etc. Most of them have ceased, but occasionally I still get one.
For me, that fear from the nightmares comes back any time I see a bathroom in a video game or even a film. Like even in something like Fallout 3, many of them are jumpscares, and I would just see the bathroom and go "NOPE!" and keep going. Despite yes, this being a game with zombies and mutants and other body-horror things in it, it's seeing a poorly lit bathroom that gets me to skip it.
The least scary bathrooms in video games were the ones in Leisure Suit Larry. Yes you can die in it, but it comes from a place of absurd comedy (eg the toilet overflowing and filling up a sealed bathroom.)
Both Gone Home and Phantasmagoria had the same effect when walking into the bathroom, despite the former pretty much being an anxiety of something bad happening, while the latter was marketed as being horror, and you know it's something bad is coming because it's in the opening video.
Man, this reminds me of a book I read a while back before I left school, I don't remember what the book was called, but I can remember what it was about.
People accidentally discovered an endangered animal species in Mexico; extremely viscous and would attack on sight, the creatures hid in drainage pipes and attacked by lunging out of sinks, toilets, etc.
The scene I remember clearest involved a young woman and her mother, who had blocked the toilet with her sewing machine and taped it shut, saying something was trying to emerge and attack.
After the daughter went out (before she left, she heard water splashes and wrote it off as nothing, she'd also taken off the tape and the sewing machine), the mother blocked the toilet up again, and the scene ended with the mother being in bed again and seeing something in a corner. Once the daughter returns, she goes back upstairs to find her mother's neck torn out, and then is also attacked by this mystery creature.
One of the very few horror novels that actually gave me chills, I'd love to read it again.
Might this be, *_The Blob_* that you speak of?
Thankfully I don't think I ever succumbed to fear of toilets, not even from seeing ghostbusters 2 as a child (though I was raised right and saw the original on a regular basis, so it wasn't a scary thing to me). I do agree that the fear likely stems from the bathroom/toilet feeling like such a safe place, but at the same time it's one of the places you're most vulnerable.
Great job! Love this
I checked my toilet just now lol
I know this video is 4 years old at this point, but snakes can also find their way up their pipes. I used to work in a barn where we had some type of very very large grass snake they got into the walls and plumbing of our building. We couldn't catch him and, quite frankly, we liked that he was hanging around because grass needs eat mice and rats which are a big problem for barbara. But that does not make it any better, even when you like snakes, to go to sit on the toilet, look in, and see it is ocupado in the weirdest way.
Man PUR’s vidjas r soo good! My scary bathroom memories come from silent hill 2&3 (those really creeped me out) and the naked lady scene in the shining. (Thanks for the reminder btw XD)
When I was a kid my mom rented arachnophobia. There's a scene with a spider in the toilet bowl and the shower. It made me check before I used either for along time. However Candyman made me scared of the bathroom for years. That bathroom scene is wild.
"...so if you were thinking about having a snack..." I hear just as I'm opening a package of Nutty Bars...
And now that I'm done watching the video, and done eating my snack, I need to go use the bathroom... At 3 AM. In the basement bathroom that only has one dim light.
I know, I was awkwardly eating a Crunch chocolate bar right as she said that and I was like....ruh roh!
At least it wasn't a Mounds bar
Ghoulies had a picture of that green baby looking thing hanging out in a toilet on the cover, with the tagline: “they’ll get you in the end”
Hahahahaha
The Eternal Darkness bathtub jump scare is what made me weary of bathrooms in every game after.
I actually find comfort in bathrooms and in my own room because I know the only entry and exit point so if someone shows up or something happens I know how to handle it
When I was a little kid I was afarid of getting sucked down the drain of the bathtub because of an episode of rugrats where one of the characters had vision of getting sucked down the drain. Good news is that my fear only lasted a year.
I only developed a fear of the bath *tub*, and this was due to having a huge crack in it and having to stand on the back end, until we could finally afford to have someone come in and repair it. It took a while to get where I didn't feel the fear of it, even though I knew it was now safe.
Still, occasionally, just the white walls can be disconcerting for a brief moment.
The scene that sticks out to me didn't happen in a bathroom, but did involve a sink. When The Blob sucked that dude down the drain, I was scarred for life.
Great video as always, Roses!
Damn that was a good scene
I often think of the scene in A Nightmare on Elm Street where the girl is falling asleep in the bathtub until claws start coming up through the water. That image creeped me out.
When i watched E.T. for the first time, there was a scene, where the boy shows E.T. around the house, and when he get's to the bathtub, he opends the faucet and says something like "Water comes from there. and sometimes bugs"
and I never forgot. and it still freaks me out even though I know it won't happen.
Not scary. Just gross
When I was very young I happen to see a scene in Highway to Heaven where no one believed this old lady that there was a snake in her toilet. The angel convinces his buddy to look anyway and holy cow there it is. Even after almost 30 years I still sometimes double check before sitting down.
I think media made the bathroom creepy. As you said the bathroom is something really private, most people feel very comfy in their bathrooms but defiling that place making into something scary is super contrasting to the comfy private zone/safe space feel most people associate with their bathrooms and thats why its a good setup for horror. Its the same concept that makes the monster under your bed scary. Edit: I love my bathroom, broke multiple Tetris records while sitting on the pot :D
I still say one of the scariest bits in Eternal Darkness was the bathtub hallucination. It's one of the few times I've actually found a jumpscare kind of respectable.
I'd argue that the grossness of bathrooms is a major part of why they're used so often for scary scenes. The vulnerability aspect is important too (probably more so), but the thought of how unsanitary they often are can really enhance a scary scene. The thought of someone getting cut up or whatever is made even more unnerving by seeing it happen in some moldy, shit-encrusted, fly-infested room. The fact that so many bathrooms are so cramped adds even more since it makes the dirtiness feel even more all-encompassing and inescapable. Plus, let's be honest, a bathroom is just one of the least dignified places to die.
"Disturbing imagery, viewer discretion advised"
I'll be fine
*Mouse swims up a toilet pipe*
I WILL NEVER BE FINE AGAIN
When I was a teenage I often saw an eye looking at me from the crack made on the hinge side of the door when it is slightly open. It was a towel hanging behind the door and my mind was playing tricks on me. But no matter how many times I saw it and realized what it was it still scared me the next time.
Don't grab a snack?
I'm grabbing ALL the snacks!
You rebel!
I've never actually been afraid of bathrooms. Even when I was little and there was scary wallpaper in the room, it was only in one place so it was that and not the room. Although that one time on Friday the 13th, I found a decent size frog in my tub, probably could give me pause for thought.
It doesn't bother me. I lift the lid, I look and then I sit down. Rather simple interaction. If something is in there you close it and flush, weather it's a rat or much MUCH worse, someone else's feculence.
1. Let me just say how much I love your videos. 2. We throw an epic and over the top Halloween party every year, it takes weeks to set up and takes over the entire property. Cops have been called, pretty sure we are the reason our neighbors moved, ect. A big part of the decor is the bathroom! We have actually had to dial it back because people were too uncomfortable using the bathroom or using it with the door shut. The last really epic design is what drew the line with our friends. Even our large burly friends were unsettled. We have an old house with high ceilings so we suspended mutilated barbies from the ceiling at a high that you didn't see them unless you looked up, which you don't really do until you have already sat down. We also had blood everywhere, a dead body in the tub that looked like a spooky sacrifice, and bloody writings on the wall. Frankly it spooked me and I'm the one who set it up. The isolation of being alone in a small space makes the bathroom a great place for scares.
3. As a young person i went to a party that had when you walked in a "spooky" bathroom. Very basic, hand prints on the curtain ect. I thought to myself "how cute." But as I sat there doing my business the light started to flicker and they had their mirror rigged to show a spooky face and honestly my pants weren't even allnthe way up before I was out of that room!
Nah bathrooms don't scare me. What scares me I blame jurassic park and this park I went to that had dinosaurs noises and realistic sculptures when I was little. So my greatest fear comes in two forms both similar in feeling. It starts off in a jungle or a forest the sky gets dark, thunder rumbles and lighting is the only light source you got you start hearing the low growls and calls of raptors, Dilophosaurus, Carnotaurus, and pterodactyls around you and in the air then sudden a flash of lighting shows a T-rex feet in front of you. It gives out its roar foot steps coming your way... now the other has the same weather but it's in the middle of the ocean on a raft and seeing glimpses of a mosasaur, plesiosaur, or a Megalodon swimming around the raft
Heavy Metal Collector I do lol I do a lot of vampire rpgs lol and larping
Funny that you mention Jurassic Park, there was a rather vicious death scene involving a bathroom in that movie.
The scariest thing in the bathroom is when you flush it and the water STARTS RISING. Now that is real terror.
Like if you can't use a bathroom without checking behind the shower curtain first, 'cause neither can I
dude I always gotta check -what if theirs some demon in the shower
Not exactly a bathroom fear, but I have always been creeped out by pipes making noises in the walls. Creakes, knocks, burbling or screeches always sent my mind into places it shouldn't be. Great video.
Cool video, though i do feel i should point out a missed opportunity to use a scene from Final Destination were a character dies an unseen force/freak accident ends up strangling him in the tub. Basically looking like a suicide.
Ok wow, this video brought back some memories. When I was a kid there was a period in 5th grade where the story of Bloody Mary had taken over the school and the older kids liked to scare the younger kids with it. I remember being in the bathroom with two of my friends talking about Bloody Mary when two older girls turned off the lights as they left the bathroom, so of course we panicked and ran out screaming. I also remember a day when my friend was at my house and we tried to summon Bloody Mary in my parents' bathroom, counting on our fingers all the times we had to repeat her name. As we got closer to the end we gave each other this look like, "oh shit, what have we done?"
When I was maybe 5 or 6 I was afraid of the bathrooms at Target because the toilet flushing was so loud. And at that age, I was afraid of anything that was loud.
My house has three bathrooms, the one attached to my parents' room, the one in the upstairs hall, and the one in the basement. I've claimed the basement bathroom as mine and that's where I shower. It's a very small bathroom complete with a medicine cabinet, dim lights, and a shower the size of a broom closet. To get to this bathroom I have to walk down a dark narrow staircase, through a long dark hallway, in a very old house that creaks a lot. A few years ago I heard the story of Kashima Reiko for the first time. And if the story of a vengeful ghost who's missing the lower half of her body isn't scary enough. The story basically ends with telling you that Kashima will appear to you after you hear the story and you have to answer her questions correctly or else she will kill you. And of course, she's said to appear in bathrooms. One night I was taking a shower with the thought of that story in the back of my mind. I can't really hear anything above the sound of the water and the bathroom fan but I heard a voice in the hallway and a knock at the door and immediately froze. I don't quite remember what happened except hearing the door being forced open and noises in the room while I stood frozen in the shower thinking I was going to die. A few minutes after the noises stopped I felt brave enough to open the shower curtain and I saw the medicine cabinet and the door were both open. I guess this was all a horrible coincidence as one of my family members needed something from the medicine cabinet at the same time I was thinking about bathroom ghosts.
So this video is fantastic and I'm so glad you feature the IT miniseries as an example here. I was no older than 5 when I first saw that tv movie and it scared the living daylights out of me. Along with a healthy distrust of clowns, drains in tubs, sinks and on curbs terrified me for YEARS. I just knew Pennywise was gonna come out of a drain and eat me.
26 years ago when I was six, I would be terrified of Bloody Mary and the bathroom mirror. Bloody Mary is very famous here in Brazil. I also saw a movie I can't remember what it was, where the shower sink would have a creature pull a guy in and blood splatted everywhere. I would never close the door while in the bathroom, and when it started I would ask my mother or my father to be in the bathroom door waiting for me to finish my shower.
Thank you for not showing that other bathroom scene from The Shining. THAT's the reason I keep the shower curtain pulled back...
I remember when I was a kid (maybe 5, 6 years old) I was absolutely terrified of being sucked down the bathtub drain because of an episode of Rugrats where Angelica tells Tommy and Chuckie that it was indeed possible to get sucked down the bathtub drain.
Part of fear is being vulnerable. When you're in a bathroom you are either naked or with your pants down almost every time. You are at your most physically vulnerable.
Its always very clear how much work you put into your videos. Great content.
Genuinely great analysis. This is something I've been thinking about off and on for years ever since not just seeing "Psycho" but also listening to the Mitsfits song "Psycho '78" and the Samhain song "Mother of Mercy". And, of course, I very vividly recall the Bloody Mary legend from childhood. Despite all that, bathrooms are mostly comforting for me as places of escape in public places, refuges at noisy parties, etc.
I wasn't wearing my glasses, and when that Roses-Sim popped up sitting on the toilet, I thought it was actually you!!!! Not a very pleasant shock!!
Another great video, these really help when I am feeling stressed out, which is all day every day.
Great video, and I feel 100% the same way about the Ghostbusters 2 and Arachnophobia scenes. We must be around the same age, because this touched the exact same things from my childhood. For some reason, I can't wrap my head around you actually being afraid.
The fire drills during college while in the shower is a real thing, it happened to me two years in a row! I had to book it outside, into the freezing cold winter night!
Unique &well put together video as always, Roses!
Goddammit now I want to watch Dreamcatcher for the 4th time, and still be confused as fuck!
I am honestly afraid of going to the toliet at night when all the lights are out and everyone is asleep. When I found out two years ago that _CREATURES_ can crawl up the toliet I became even more terrified of it
The part of the video when you mentioned. I grown to see bathrooms, especially mirrors and tubs. In movies and some games actually, there are scenes where the character commits suicide or self-harms in the tub, and the mirror for me are the drawings of someone looking in a mirror, happy outside the mirror, but their reflection is depressed/crying/etc.
Oh, man, it's great to see a nod to Killer Klowns from Outer Space. :) And Clock Tower? Nice! Eternal Darkness on the Gamecube also has probably one of the best bathroom jump scares I've ever experienced.
Regarding bathrooms, I'm not generally afraid of the real thing (though I can get a bit apprehensive when walking past one in the dark to go to bed - it's a little pocket of darkness that has its own little pocket in the form of a curtained bathtub), but video game bathrooms are awful. I think I can only think of maybe two games where bathrooms aren't actively out to get you (Penumbra and White Day), and even in White Day, if you're being chased, then the bathroom may not necessarily be a safe place to hide.
This is a fantastic video. Bathrooms really are scary in almost every movie or game they're in, and it's cool to see not only why, but also a comprehensive set of examples. Great job!
Well in the recent remake of White Day there is a scare where you hear something slowly but surely check all of the bathroom stalls, banging each door open, until it comes to you, which is a bloody girl with a wide grin who practically falls to the floor when she finds you. Scared the crap out of me!
I had that exact same experience as a little kid with Ghostbusters II!
That said, I think that the genuinely scariest bathroom moment in... basically ANYTHING is *that* bath in the game Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. You'll know it if you've played it far enough. That shit will not be forgotten. I swear, that is such a perfect moment of horror- even after all these years, after replaying the game multiple times and actively *KNOWING* that it's going to happen, it's still somehow done so perfectly that it still gets me EVERY. SINGLE. DAMN. TIME!
I love how unique and thought provoking your content is.
I remember the first time I heard about Bloody Mary, at a Christian kids camp when I was about 11. I was terrified!
Also I would look at the patterns in the wood by my bunk and manage to see scary faces in them. Creepy times
There's a small window in my shower and in the morning when it's dark I'm worried I'll look outside and see a spooky ghost.
Very inconvenient.
Yeah, my first experience with bathroom horror was when I saw, "A Nightmare on Elm Street" when I was around 8 years old. Also, funny that your hair color is the same as the pink slime from Ghostbusters 2. Haha!
The movie Dark Water terrified me around my shower when I was a kid. I am so glad I don’t get my water from an easily accessible tower on the roof.
I will also say it’s funny that the bathroom, like you mentioned, is often a place of escape and safety. As a child, it was my only place to escape family troubles and anxiety. I would turn off the lights so only the inspection lit the white tiles, and sit in the tub fully clothed. I felt soothed and safe. Public bathrooms are 50/50 horror and escape for me though 😅
The most kudos for using a clip from Head! I haven't thought about that movie in ages.
I was around 8 years old at a rest stop when a woman and her two daughters open my restroom stall started at me for a good second then closed it. I already had anxiety about doors either locking me in or not keeping people out. So yeah that was fun.
The bathroom was always "place-to-read-away-from-my-bratty-little-brother" for me!
Also, love the new icon for you! Tres chic!
Great video, and interesting observation about movie characters feeling safe in the bathroom. When I have dreams about some kind of danger in my house, I always run to the bathroom and escape through the window. Although, the bathrooms are the only rooms in my house with door locks, so that makes sense, haha.
I'm honestly super surprised you didn't end up including the toilet scene from Silent Hill 2, that one is one of my definitive bathroom scenes in a video game for sure. Also there has been a lot of discussion about that game starting out in a public bathroom and what it means for a horror game.
I saw It when I was 6-5, and I’ve never been afraid of clowns but I vividly remember the scene of children’s voices coming from the sink drain and now bathrooms are always scary to me after watching a horror movie (even with movies that don’t feature a bathroom scene).
This was a great analysis. Bathroom horror has always been fascinating to me, too. For what it's worth, in dream analysis bathrooms are commonly interpreted as the need to release emotions you've been holding inside for too long. Subconsciously bathrooms could be seen as places of trauma.