Heinz-Friedel Heddenhausen – The Singing Ringing Tree

This next film, I’ve always had, lurking deep somewhere in my early memory an image of something that I saw when I was a kid that had a really dark, man/ bear in it that was really frightening. This is it, isn’t it?

Yeah it is. That’s why I chose it, I’ve got this really weird, buried memory of watching it as a kid and being quite spooked by it. It was this celestial tree, and that’s all I remembered. I couldn’t fully remember much about it, apart from the intro and this weird celestial tree. I looked it up and saw it was a feature film from 1957. And I’m thought, 'I saw that as part of these European films I used to watch as a little kid at home when I was really young.' What happened was the BBC bought the film in the 60s and instead of showing it as a film, they broke it into parts and put it on as a children’s show. It was terrifying. I only saw it in black and white, and when I looked it up to see who wrote the soundtrack, I saw that it’s in colour and it’s even spookier in colour. Have a look on YouTube, the entire film is on YouTube in high-definition. It’s even trippier now, it’s really weird. The soundtrack’s probably pretty bog-standard, apart from that little tree bit. But it’s one of the spookiest things I’ve ever seen in my life.