Has a movie ever permeated your psyche so deeply that it has woven its way into your amygdala, establishing the very rules and cautions through which you live? A movie lost to time, forcing you alone to carry the burden of its memory? I, who was raised six feet away from the static TV screen, am no stranger to being haunted by lost ghosts, but one movie resides above all the late-night fever dreams—The Adventures of Pinnochico (1996).

I first encountered this movie on YTV’s Big Fun Movie Night sometime around 2007, though there seem to be no records of this particular broadcast. Lying on my green leather couch, stagnant in time before all of its rips and tears, I witnessed my box TV perform a function I’d never seen before: broadcasting a satellite channel. Until that point, the glowing box had housed furry puppets, singing Australians, and big comfy couches on VHS, but never programming that could be interrupted midway with a commercial for Swiffer WetJet. YTV was strange and intense, and there was no way of knowing what I was watching. My father held the remote, and though I had known my way around it since I was in diapers, I wrongly trusted him with the task of putting on something enjoyable.

In that dark room, I was thus drawn to the moving image of a walking, talking, moving thing. It was a real puppet, but it didn’t look like a Fraggle or a Muppet. It was wooden and disjointed and flapping around—I had thought that television wasn’t real, but it looked as if it were interacting with the world I belonged to. Through adult eyes, I recognise that wooden freak of nature as New Line’s attempt at a live-action Pinocchio, but as a human, I can’t help but sense that someone had to summon that puppet and haunt it with a sacrificed soul. 

Common Sense Media describes the film simply: “Scary live-action version has violence, guns, and monsters.” I insist on adding to this list. Pinocchio gets kidnapped by Rob Schneider at the beginning of the film. I ask my dad to change the channel, but he’s already intrigued, and it’s a kids’ movie, ideally age-appropriate. I begin to notice that my fireplace doesn’t produce as much light as I need. My mom’s already gone to sleep. I’m praying, in the only words I know, for a commercial break. Then, to prevent Geppetto from being imprisoned for debt, Pinocchio is sold. He’s brought to an island of runaway and orphan boys. The boys shoot Pinocchio four times with a gun. Brrap brrap. Like a couple of dudes, the boys drink some beer and go on a rollercoaster.

What follows is a two-minute sequence of shifting close-ups, showing the boys horrifically transforming into donkeys on the rollercoaster—the beer was donkey transformation juice? They cry bloody murder for their parents until their screams twist into HEE-HAWs, and from the coaster carts, they’re shipped off to carry cargo in the salt mines. Maybe my dad should’ve changed the channel at this point. Maybe he couldn’t hear me crying over the donkey yelps, or maybe he just wanted me to toughen up. After a decade of chronic nightmares, I am shamelessly weaker.

I hold my eyes closed, I cherish the commercials, and I dread the scary Big Fun Movie Night bumper indicating the nightmare will resume. Pinocchio, now half-donkey, half-puppet, is swallowed by a whale and must climb out of its fleshy blowhole, then is turned into a real boy through the magic of his own tears. These details meant nothing to me as my brain began to program implications out of pure fear. When I yell for help in a time of need, will my words become unintelligible? Could animals be former humans, punished for their actions, now nonautonomous and slaughtered without sympathy? Could I be transformed against my will into a form that disgraces the habitation of my spirit? Can these awful feelings lingering in my mind ever be shaken off?

I slept sandwiched between my parents that night. And on-and-off for the following decade. Slappy the Dummy, Chucky, Annabelle—each sent me spiralling into sleepless benders for months after encountering them. I still believe, in the back of my mind, that some abysmal thing may come to life if I think about it too hard. And even now, I’m too scared to change the channel sometimes, too scared to disturb what’s alive inside the screen.