If seven-year-old me could have played The Lord of the Rings: Gollum back in 2001 the fear I felt of its title character might have dissipated. When I was a kid, there was nothing I was more afraid of than Gollum. Later on in adolescence, I would develop more rational fears, like ‘heights’ and ‘the meaninglessness of life,' but from the first moment I saw the lantern-eyed leech in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies, I was fascinated and terrified in equal measure.
He didn’t take long to traumatize me, either. Gollum as we know him, the fully motion captured creation iconically performed by Andy Serkis, didn’t appear until The Two Towers. But, even the brief glimpses you see of the character in The Fellowship of the Ring — crouched on a rock, screaming that “the Precious is lost,” skittering along stones near the sleeping Fellowship in Moria, peering at Frodo and Gandalf with big, pale eyes — were enough to imprint him on my psyche.
When I saw The Two Towers a year later, the fear deepened. Now I could picture him slowly descending a cliff face to attack the unaware Hobbits, or tearing into a fish with his knife-like teeth, or wrapping his anemic fingers around a vulnerable neck. Later, after Return of the King came out, I refused to watch it if I was home alone because I was too freaked out by the opening montage showing Sméagol’s transformation from Hobbit to ghoulish cave creature.
Most of my scariest childhood memories are tied to this character. A frenemy told me that Gollum lived in his basement, and I almost jumped out of my skin when, during a sleepover, I heard movement in the middle of the night, only to feel my pulse plummet when his cat walked into view.
I remember having a nonsensical dream where I fell into the hall closet in my childhood home and was seized by a wash cloth that I (for some reason) understood to be possessed by Gollum’s spirit. In my waking hours, when I ran up the stairs in the dark, it was his lithe body I pictured bounding after me. And when I imagined something under my bed, it was Gollum’s gremlin smile.
I dealt with this fear, primarily, by developing a pretty good Gollum impression. I even, once or twice, made ‘Gollum juice,’ the tea concoction with honey and lemon that Andy Serkis used to lubricate his throat throughout his performance. It also helped when I realized later on that Gollum was the size of a hobbit, and probably wouldn’t be able to hurt me all that much.
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum would have been an even better solution to my fears. Out this week, the third-person stealth adventure game from Daedalic Entertainment casts you as everyone’s favorite Ring fiend. One thing that games have taught me over the years is that it's impossible to be afraid of a character that you're playing as. The monster from Carrion would be terrifying to encounter in real life, but when you're controlling it, you identify with it, and there isn't any room for fear.
Playing The Lord of the Rings: Gollum would have defanged the character for me. How can you be afraid of someone when you’re pressing O to make him slide down a ladder? Or when your mistakes are getting him caught by orcs repeatedly? Or when he has a goofy ass haircut?
The way the character is presented throughout the game undercuts any fear I could have felt. In the now-infamous image of Gollum crouching by an orc with the words Beg, Threaten, and Give Bread in little black clouds, you can see all you need to know. Jackson portrayed Gollum as a mix of genuinely menacing and whimperingly pathetic. In what I've played of the game, you mostly just get the pathetic part.
Dwarfed by the orc in that image, easily defeated by his enemies, scrounging for whatever food you find on the ground. I wouldn't have been afraid of him anymore than I could have been afraid of Conker or Gex. He's part of the proud video game tradition of weird little dudes. My eight-year-old self was still afraid of Gollum when I imagined him transformed into a washcloth. But, I doubt that fear could have survived his transformation into polygons.