THAT SCARY FRENCH SERIES I LOVED TO WATCH AS A KID

This was in my childhood, and it scared me as much as Renly Baratheon's death... (The night is dark and full of terrors...)
This was for me the series that, next to Sailor Moon, scared me the most. Yet I felt attracted to it.
The second season of Papyrus. It really knocked me off the sofa.
The premise, long story short: The whole realm is at stake because some dark god wants to conquer it with spiritual possession of humans, animals, and even objects.
I mean, this series was scary 'cause minor characters kept on being possessed by an evil god time after time (it's set in a legendary past when gods coexisted with mortals, like Game of Thrones if you believe the Lord of Light to be real. Plus, Set is a red god worshipped with fire like R'hllor...). Some people get glowing red mind-control eyes as a result of possession, while others fall fatally ill. Though nearly no one dies, anyone can get possessed...
Most of these episodes are in Russian, in which I only know a few words, but I have been fortunate to find some of them in French, the series's original language.



40: THE SEVEN KNOTS (IN FRENCH)
This is by far my favourite episode of this series. The Fantastic Voyage episode. Long story short: The smart guy of the leading cast discovers a dark secret. The priest of doom decides to silence him by throwing a scorpion figurine into the flames. Which makes an eerie red arachnid sting the clever lad in one of his heels, as he comes down with a fever and searing pain.
The titular seven knots are placed as a rosary-like necklace on his chest and serve as a life-preserving charm, yet they are burned down one by one... for there is a red glowing scorpion inside his lungs, tearing at the fragile tissue. Now, when all hope seems lost, the crown princess takes her chances and undergoes some dangerous potion-induced astral projection to enter her companion's body and fight off the... evil spirit? that is threatening his life.
This episode made me know what it looks like inside a person's lungs, in really gorgeous detail, which filled me with fantasies about possession, daydreams, stories like The Usurpers of Inner Realms (which had some characters enter the lungs of others to make them fall ill, torture them, or even control them from within):





28 MIKA
This episode is in Russian and features, in the titular victim of the week, a medium of sorts, a sorceress who wants to keep herself forever young. Yes, she is possessed.


29 THE THIRTIETH SPACE
This is the Jumanji episode: the crown princess gets trapped in a board game. While being an outright Alice story (a lone girl trapped in another world rife with surrealism and/or symbolism, trying to make her way back home), it had lots of Seventh Seal vibes since the villain was playing with her as a piece from outside the game. E-E-R-I-E.
The episode kept me fantasizing lots of times about entering my old Oca board (Oca, or Goose, is a traditional game quite popular here in Spain):


30 FALSELY ACCUSED
A warrior king's only daughter and heiress overhears some army officers trying to kill her father. The traitors want, for a good reason, to silence her. Luckily, a goddess comes to the rescue, turning Princess Anitti into a kawaii baby hippo while her father's life, and peace between both realms, hangs in the balance. Yes, the warmonging evil chancellor is possessed:


31: THE SACRED FLUTE
In this one, a priest is possessed. And, in the climax, the princess is blinded. She gets these scary white cataracted eyes, without any pupils or twinkles: just white irises...


32 THE JUDGMENT OF THE GODS
The hero himself is offered a glowing red sceptre by the priest of evil and gets frigging possessed. The way it sounds: the leader of the five-kid band is the victim du jour. The lesson to be learned: anything red in this world bodes no good at all.



33 THE SERPENT OF DARKNESS
The Crown Princess is in a coma after the priest of evil throws a statuette of her into the flames:


34 THE FOUR CHAMBERS
The smart guy of the leading cast gets possessed by simply holding a pen. Holding a freaking pen. (This is not the only time that he's targeted throghout the series!) And, while possessed, he screws the whole realm up:



35 THE DIVINE CERAMIST
OK, the episodes seem to escalate in scariness, so...
The premise is that all the humans have got a counterpart in life-sized statues made by a ram-headed god. That's frigging right, he makes a new statue for every human born and destroys one for every one deceased.
So this is another Find the Cure episode (I have to say that one third of the series consists of undertaking quests to heal ailing characters), and yet the one with the most surreal premise. Lovecraftian, in fact. We have the comatose king's little brother (obviously, a usurper in training) being as sweet as he can, for no good reason... a statue of the ruler missing its heart... and said heart reappearing in a casket owned by said spare to the throne.
The gods' realm here is underwater, and of a lovely blue, glowing with light.
The darkest point is when the spare to the throne consecrates the heart to Set and it glows red... there is a death here, though it is reversed with a resurrection.


36. THE LOCUST QUEEN or WHEN LOCUSTS ATTACK
A statuette of a locust becomes the real thing. The real freaking thing. A queen locust that glows red (steer clear!). And that then turns a bunch of stones into a swarm of killer locusts. Run!


37 THE TALISMAN
A scarab charm is thrown by the priest of evil into the flames... and, suddenly, the royals are gradually turned to stone, also suffering from amnesia:


41: THE RED WATERS
There's this spring of glowing red water that makes everyone fall ill (but why isn't that it makes them possessed, instead?):


42: THE SACRED CROWN
En route to a ceremony on which the whole realm literally depends, a glowing red bug (uh-uh) enters the body of the sleeping princess through one of her shoulders. While possessed, she burns the titular sacred red crown, which is the keystone of this ritual. The story centers on the quest for the spare red crown, which by no means will be easy to reach. In the meantime, since the ceremony can't be carried out, a big-nosed usurper claims the throne...


44
The secret of the missing queen is revealed, setting a series of events in motion: She tried to kill her husband and their child while possessed by a glowing red mask, but her love stopped her and she was killed by a glowing red boomerang out of nowhere to the solar plexus...


46 PRINCESS FOR A DAY
The Freaky Friday episode. A magic hand-mirror, which obviously glows red, causes a sudden Freaky Friday Flip between the princess and the tomboy:

THE POWERS THAT BE

As a child, I was a true fraidy-cat (or a cowardly lion cub, if you prefer).
Here is a list of things that gave me serious cases of the willies:

1. Aliens from Mars Attacks: AKA heads of lettuce with bloodshot scarlet eyes. I was terrified of both lettuce and the local video club (as long as it was decorated with the Mars Attacks poster). My lovely divorced mother, aware of this fact, used these aliens as the boogie-man.
   
2. Animatronic chimp at a local shoe shop: he had a dark baritone voice, that I found rather threatening. Guess how I felt when he finally was gone!
3. Lovebirds: or "scarybirds" to me as a child, for having white eyerings that made their eyes look uncanny. I wouldn't frequent a café or shop where lovebirds were kept as pets, even if bribed with a regiment of Kelly dolls and/or a truckload of marshmallows!
   
4.  Hyacinth Macaw at Gothenburg Zoo: despite sporting Sweden's national colours, this chap had some nice yellow eyerings around black eyes, on a Prussian blue face. Think of a huge blue lovebird and you get the idea.
   
5.  Romanesque art in Catholic school canteen: Jesus and his disciples looked like humanoid Mars Attacks aliens to me (lightbulb heads, huge sclerae, blank, expressionless irises). I never ate there.
6.  Nuns in picture, Catholic school chapel: Another thing shown at the "Little Catholic School of Horrors". The nuns, seen at work in a nineteenth-century hospital, had narrow black clefts for eyes and tiny Mona Lisa smiles. To cut a long story short, they didn't look human.
7. Androgynous figure in charity poster: a wrinkled face without any facial hair, and a white robe. This character gave me the willies because his/her gender was unclear. Blame the Catholic Church for a great deal of my childhood scares!
8. Mutua General de Seguros old (1990s-early 2000s) logo: A half-faced sprectral figure, gender unknown and ambiguous (bobbed hair, and, on the chest, pectorals or breasts?)... Then the half-light and half-dark face, whose dark half seemed not to exist. And that eerily soaring shawl... My favourite bookshop Argot was beyond the local MGS office, but getting there was like venturing into the lair of a live dragon to get to its treasure. When the insurance company reached its hundredth year in 2007, it changed to a more stylized logo, similar to a flame or a lily. Praise R'hllor!

Disney films deserve to be mentioned apart, because they're literary adaptations, and for being more familiar to readers:

1. Wicked Queen Dowager (AKA Snow White's Stepmother), Fruit-Seller Mode: after drinking a self-distilled potion, Disney's first villainous stunner (to be followed by Maleficent, Lady Tremain, Gothel, and the Snow Queen) transforms into a remarkably hideous crone, with a hooked nose and the type of eyes that I saw in both lovebirds and Mars Attacks aliens.
   
    Scary-to-Sandra eyes, with huge sclerae, tiny irises and not a glimpse of a twinkle.
2. Pinocchio: when I received this film on VHS for Christmas, I quickly defenestrated it from a fifth floor (luckily, there were no casualties). Why? For the puppetmaster Stromboli, but especially for the whale incident. As a kid, the sole thought made me shiver.
   
3. The Brave Little Tailor: specifically, the scene where Willie accidentally drinks Mickey.
   
   Along with  the whale scene in Pinocchio, it impressed me a lot, for having got to view what a living thing looks like from within. I took this fear of being devoured up to ten. I even had my mother "bowdlerise" "The Three Little Pigs", "Little Red Riding Hood", "The Seven Little Kids", and "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", by deleting or altering the parts where characters were swallowed alive by predators.
4. Mr. Dawes Senior (the banker from Mary Poppins): the last item on the list is a live-action character. I gave him the boot for being a bearded bastard who, aside for looking like a corrupted Santa Claus (a lanky and cold-eyed Santa with a longer and pointier beard), caring more about business and money than about the quality of life of poor street sellers (he states that they should let the old pigeon-feed lady eat cake).
   
    Raised in an all-female household, I was skeptical towards males in general. And, not knowing Cromwell or Hitler back then, I found in Mr. Dawes Sr. the epitome of masculine coldness and inhumanity. To add more fuel to the fire, the portrayal of God the Father in both a local church and Baroque art, a gent with a bushy white beard, resembled either Santa Claus or Mr. D. Sr. with the recommended BMI. And so, I got to find even the Lord himself scary (Soon, I would realize that the Creator cares as little for humankind as Mr. Dawes Senior for pigeons and street sellers!).