Courage The Cowardly Dog is one of the greatest shows of all time. And for many of us, it was our introduction to surrealist horror.
I return to this show periodically to think about the hidden themes that my child brain couldn’t fully grasp back in the day.
The fourth episode of the show is called The Demon In The Mattress. And, oh boy, it brought back some weird memories, and sparked some cool connections.
A quick synopsis to start us off…
*Abandoned as a pup, Courage was found by Muriel, who lives in the middle of nowhere with her husband, Eustace Bagge. But creepy stuff happens in Nowhere. It's up to Courage to save his new home*
Muriel gets a second-hand mattress by calling a number on a shady newspaper ad. The mattress turns out to be haunted by a demon, which possesses Muriel (the entire episode is a clear homage to The Exorcist).
Courage traces the salesman who sold them the mattress, and finds out that it has a history of possessing people when they’re asleep.
Courage finds an exorcism chant online ("Hullabaloo and howdy doo, musty prawns and Timbuktu…!”)
After a couple of tries, the incantation works. The demon leaves Muriel… but it jumps into Eustace. Muriel has a quick fix: she knocks him out with her rolling pin. She and Courage roll him up in the mattress, and hand it back to the deliverymen. They cart away Eustace and the mattress into the night.
The End
I gotta say, parts of this episode were still pretty spooky on the rewatch. Also it was only about 11 minutes long (why did time feel so slow when you were a kid? Well, I think I know why, but that’s a topic for another time.)
What I wasn’t expecting is that it would strike me as one of the best representations of the dangers of shadow repression.
I write extensively about the shadow across several essays, especially this one.
So I won’t bore regular readers with a long introduction to the idea, but in short:
The Shadow is everything in us that contradicts our self-image. It comprises all the elements we shun, repress or deny within ourselves. It acts as a counter-balance to our consciously held perception of ourselves. It is not just “our dark side”, its the repressed side of our nature, that was banished or neglected because it was unacceptable to our conscious personality.
Let’s zoom out and consider Muriel. What we find is pretty disturbing…
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