I wish I could offer you the classic ‘This happened to a friend of a friend of mine.’ That way, I could be like you: doubting everything I saw and heard – I don’t really talk about it anymore. Most don’t believe me, or think I exaggerate. I really, really wish I could be like you. Sometimes, I’m not quite sure I believe it myself until I wake up to the wails of my now four-year-old daughter in the middle of the night. The cruelty of humans far outweighs the monsters’, and I don’t know when she will be able to sleep soundly again.

Katie had just turned three when the incident happened. On Saturday mornings I would take her to the old school, local theater to watch old favorites screened for children: movies ranged from Snow White to Pixar movies. At the time, Katie was obsessed with anything related to Toy Story. We had all the DVDs, dolls, posters, name it; her bedroom was themed after Toy Story down to her pillows. So of course, when it was announced Toy Story 3 would be shown that weekend, I knew she would be ecstatic to see it on the big screen.

The showing usually started at eight in the morning, but we lost an hour waiting until nine. Thankfully, the kids were mostly all playing together before the showing, but some parents left frustrated, much to their children’s dismay. We and a dozen parents stayed and were rewarded with an apology and free candy.

Let me begin with a cliché: the movie started normally – it did. The intro was Katie’s favorite part, where Woody and Jessie chase the train and Buzz saves them at the last minute. In fact, the movie was exactly as it was at home.

The ending is where things became strange. Near the end, Woody and his friends are carried onto a conveyor belt – as they fell screaming, the screen flickered and the sound jammed on the constant loop. The awful, jarring screaming kept going long before the screen went dark. It was like watching helplessly something suffer, come apart but clinging to what remnants of life there is until you put it out of its misery. I remember stiffening in my seat until the father of a kid near me groaned loudly and said: “Seriously.” We’d only paid five dollars for this viewing, but I had to agree, we could have done without this interruption. A child began crying – his mother took him outside. I should have followed them.

It was a glitch, a bug, nothing serious, not uncommon with new technology, I reckoned, and decided to wait for Katie’s sake. She wasn’t yet upset, moreso annoyed and asking if the movie would continue soon. I used to have a friend, John, who worked at this old theater: he was replaced by the current computer in the projecting booth and I remember how angry he had been about it – in fact, I’d not seen him since, though I recall him spitting that computers can never be relied on like a human. I suppose that, thinking back on it today, he was right.

The screen turned white as light from the projector resumed – when I looked back, I saw a silhouette in the booth: a man from the looks of it – so they still use people in the booths, I wondered curiously. How odd, I continued my train of thought, because John had been fired since he wasn’t needed… maybe he’d not told me all the reasons. The thought quickly left my mind when the movie resumed with a couple of minutes to spare, quieting Katie’s whining.

She wanted to see the next scene, the one where the toys get rescued from the incinerator by the aliens – the screen flickered back to life but something didn’t feel right. The sound quality had dimmed considerably, like a pillow was pushed over the speakers to muffle them. There was something else too, something I only noticed when Lotso betrayed the toys by not pressing the ‘stop’ button of the belt and the toys fell into the incinerator.

Their voices.

Their voices were wrong. Not by a whole lot: maybe the kids didn’t quite notice but I did, and I know the father next to me did too because we exchanged a confused glance. They were similar, yet as though someone was imitating the voices instead: this wasn’t Tom Hanks anymore but an odd, rheumy version of what may or may not have been his voice. Around that time, I felt like something was about to happen, something bad, but I couldn’t fathom what, or if I should leave or not. I couldn’t explain the differences: no respectable theater would air a pirated version of the movie – so what was this?

Then the differences began spreading past the sound into the visuals. I’ve seen this movie too many times to count and if you have seen it too, you know the toys eventually give up as they slide toward the fire, hold hands, waiting for their deaths until a giant claw hauls them out of the incinerator at the last minute. Sure enough, the scene as they carried down the incinerator was the same, but the animation was too fluid – think of these old 1930’s cartoons like Betty Boop where everything moves constantly and never stops? It was subtle at first, but after a short while, obvious. You see, animation became far less strange when animators realized that we stop every few motions: grab a cup of coffee, stop. Bring it to your lips, stop. Take a sip, stop. Put it back down, stop. It makes the animation look natural – this here? It was akin to watching warm clay move on the constant. It was unnerving… no stops at all between motions, always in movement. And let me tell you something: if it looked psychedelic in the 1930’s, imagine with 3D computer animation. Clearly, this wasn’t the movie I owned at home.

I noticed the father was looking at me again, so I shrugged, still as lost as he was. Neither of us knew what to make of this. A kid began crying and his father took him out of the theater – I wish I’d done the same. I suppose I remained seated out of gross curiosity the way we can’t look away when seeing a horrible accident. I realized the music was entirely gone bar the effects of the fire from the incinerators as the toys held hands, their arms wobbly, liquid.

Then the scene took a different turn.

The claw saving the toys never came down. There was no rescue.

The toys screamed and screamed and screamed an ear shattering screech that would ring in my head for days and nights to come. Their’ ringed hands shrank as the plastic melted into a thick, flesh colored goo. I recall Woody’s face the most because the camera mainly focused on him as they advanced toward the fiery pit. Black bubbles popped on his cheeks like sores and then his shrieking mouth opened wide, wider and wider. His lips stretched to retched lengths until his entire jaw melted off its hinges like hot cheese, leaving liquid strings of burning plastic behind.

The banshee-like yowl of the toys escalated until I could scarcely hear the wailing children around me. My stomach clenched and I felt revulsion stir in my throat. Woody’s eyes rolled down his cheeks, not painted, but globes of gelatinous, viscous substance which burst like egg yolks – what remained behind were two dark pits already reshaping themselves from the heat. The toys’ eyes, all their eyes, burst, disintegrated, splattered on their liquid plastic cheeks. It was like I was watching people come apart as the aftershocks of an atom bomb hit them.

Woody’s hat melted over his head, now shaped unnaturally, and with it, the fabric of his clothes burst into flames in one sudden burst. Woody convulsed as though he felt every lick of the blaze, his hands now fused to Buzz’s and Slinky’s.

“Reach for the sky”, the box inside Woody came to life for a few seconds: “Somebody’s poisoned the waterhole! Somebody’s poisoned the waterhole! Somebody’s poisoned the waterhole! Somebody’s poisoned the waterhole!”

I felt a sharp cramp in both my hands and realized I’d been clutching the arms of the chair hard. The action kept me grounded because a part of me wondered if the pit wasn’t coming for me too. While the footage mostly focused on Woody – “Somebody’s poisoned the waterhole!” – you still caught a glimpse of the other toys too. Toys like Buzz and Rex, all made exclusively of plastic, melted rapidly in a colorful but uneven liquid goo. There was no blood, just plastic molding itself to the approaching fire, yet horrible and terribly graphic. Perhaps because you get attached to the characters you feel they are alive, but I swallowed back the intense urge to vomit.

“Somebody’s poisoned the waterhole! Somebody’s poisoned the waterhole!”

I should have left sooner; take Katie with me and spare her, but I’ll admit I had forgotten about her in that moment, too focused on this violent display.

“Somebody poisoooooned theeeeeeeeeeeeeee waaaaterrrrrhooooooo……….”

Soon, I realized the crying and shrieking I was hearing was no more from the speakers but the people around me who’d also witnessed – what? What had happened?! By now Woody had gone silent as well as his companions, leaving nothing but the crackling of the fire. The toys were dead. Suddenly, I grabbed Katie in my arms and exited the theater room. She wailed in my ear, clung to me with nails digging into my shoulders.

The father had followed me out with his son. In my trance, I watched, detached, as he yelled at the employee who’d sold us the ticket. Later, when quietly sitting at home, I remembered the puzzlement on the kid’s features – he had no idea what had happened, why, or how. I wondered if I should join the building mob of angry parents. Instead, I left before things might turn violent. I was stunned – shocked, and was convinced I could smell burning plastic. Before I got to my car, a man shouted to me to wait. I it was the father. His name was Jeremy – after he promised he’d get to the bottom of what transpired, we exchanged numbers. The rest of the day was hellish: Katie fell asleep crying, and me? Me, I was left with nothing but questions. Every time I closed my eyes, Woody’s eyes slipped down his cheeks and split, his jaw hanging loose until it crashed on his lap.

My head hurt. My eyes burned. I felt like they too, would pop out of their sockets. I couldn’t sleep. Katie would awaken screaming, and I had to take down anything Toy Story related from her room and hide it all in a box that, a year later, remains hidden beneath the stairs.

Days later I received a call from Jeremy. I slumped in my chair as he explained how he returned to the theater and pushed them to let him investigate the projection computer. Sure enough, he found something: a hack, possibly, or someone in the booth changed the movie for the version we got to see. The original was gone, replaced with that horrible version. Either way, while he was excellent with computers, following a lead back to the perpetrator wasn’t possible. Reluctantly, we had to let it go, but the story leaked, which caused irreparable harm to the old theater. A few months later, it closed permanently due to bankruptcy. I think one of the parents sued the theater.

To this day, I can’t shake off the nightmares in which, while Woody’s features leak down his cheeks and onto his chest, I can still hear the string box: Somebody’s poisoned the waterhole!

I guess they did.

I guess they did….