kindertrauma

Month: February 2009

Traumafessions :: Reader Mike on Scary Stories 3

Posted on By aunt john

I remember reading the SCARY STORIES series when I was a kid. The stories would fascinate me while the imagery was…imaginative is the best word that comes to mind. There was one picture above all others that disturbed me and that could be found in SCARY STORIES 3: MORE TALES TO CHILL YOUR BONES. I am not certain but I believe the story is titled "The Room." All I have based on it was that it came right after the story about the girl that had been raised by wolves.

I remember that I was reading it in third grade (I had to be eight) and I refused to let my friend have it because the stories themselves were captivating. When I turned to the next page though and the slanted eyes and crooked smile of the woman caught my attention my heart began pounding and I quickly closed it; passing the book over to my friend with a shaky voice.

It took me years to be able to face my fear and look back at the illustration and even now I have a troubling time staring at it for too long. Believe me though that it's a memory that's never faded.

UNK SEZ: Crooked smile? Are you thinking of this story from SCARY STORIES 3 entitled "The Dream"?….

Name That Trauma :: Reader Barry B. on an Unknown Halloween Special

Posted on By unkle lancifer

I remember a Halloween cartoon where this creepy old guy sends a group of children around the world to learn the history of Halloween, and in the mean time, one of them dies or was already dead… something… but each of the kids agrees to die a year early to bring their friend back. I remember evaluating all of my friends, and still base their worth on how many years of life I would give up to save them.

Any clue on this one?

UNK: Barry, add this to the long list of "Name That Trauma"s that I have absolutely no clue about. Let's just put this one up the flag pole and see if any of our readers salute! If anyone out there remembers this Halloween special, help poor Barry out and leave a comment or send us an email!

UPDATE: Name That Trauma SOLVED! Barry confirmed that commenter ElderMarsh is correct with THE HALLOWEEN TREE (featuring the voice-over talents of Mr. LEONARD NIMOY).

Here's PART 1:

Watch: PART 2 | PART 3.

Thanks again to ElderMarsh!

Traumafessions :: Kinderpal Mickster on BBC's Count Dracula (1977)

Posted on By unkle lancifer

This particular trauma I suppressed from my memory until I was a teenager. I decided to read Dracula during my junior year of high school because of my love for vampire lore. While reading I came to the part where Dracula gives the three vampire women, a baby to feed on. Suddenly, I had a flashback of witnessing this scene being played out in a movie. For years, I tried to figure out what version I viewed. I knew it had aired on PBS, and I suspect that is the reason why my parents thought that it would be okay for me to watch. Anyway, I started thinking about the origin of this trauma last year and finally pinpointed the source. It is COUNT DRACULA made by the BBC in 1977 and starring LOUIS JOURDAN. Through further investigation, I determined that I must have seen the first broadcast on PBS Great Performances (I believe in 1978) because subsequent broadcasts cut the scene with the three vampire women feeding on the baby. When I received the DVD from Netflix, my memory was confirmed. I have watched many versions of Dracula over the years, but this one is by far the closest adaptation on film. If you are a fan of Dracula, I highly recommend checking it out. However, I do not recommend allowing a seven-year-old child to watch. This scene so shocked and disturbed my young mind that it was blocked from my memory for ten years.

Please enjoy viewing the horrifying scene…

Traumafessions :: Reader NiNi on "They Thirst" Book Cover

Posted on By aunt john

Hey, this is cheaper than therapy! While I'm thinking about traumas from the ‘80s, here's another horror that shaped my youthful psyche: the first-edition cover of ROBERT R. McCAMMON's THEY THIRST. Horror novels were even more common than horror movies in our household, and this book lay on the coffee table for quite some time to scar my kindergarten-era mind.

The book itself? Not especially scary. But the cover was the stuff of ‘80s airbrushed nightmares! The dead black pits of the eyes in the skull-like face… the tiny LATOYA JACKSON nose… and worst of all, the bloody red lips and needle teeth of that over-sized mouth. Every time I saw that damned book, I would discreetly flip it over so I wouldn't have to see it.

Nowadays, the illustration kind of reminds me of an anglerfish in drag, or the misbegotten lovechild of JAWS and THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW. But the 5-year-old inside me remembers the fear of stumbling across this image in the darkened living room on my way to that nighttime glass of water…

Name That Trauma :: Reader Molly T. on NOT Salem's Lot & Maybe NOT Mr. Boogedy

Posted on By unkle lancifer

Great site! I grew up being fascinated by horror flicks – when my parents would take me to the movie rental store, rather than heading for the "kiddie" movies, I'd head right for the STEPHEN KING and gore. With all those years of scaring myself to tears, it's a wonder I cannot figure out where this particular scene came from:

There is a vampire of some sort, floating in a cloud-like mist, next to a boy's bedroom. Now before you say this is SALEM'S LOT, I can assure you that this boy did NOT open the window to let the vampire in. Rather, he broke a cross off of a (Lego) set that was near the window and used it to try to ward off the vampire.

Where in the world did this come from?

I have another scene in my head, which I thought was from the movie MR. BOOGEDY, but maybe it's not. I thought it was from that movie because I seem to remember a sort of "Boogie man" (who maybe had a hole in the side of his head?), standing in a family's living room, shooting some sort of powers out of his hands and making things go berserk – one thing in particular was, he made a vacuum cleaner "blow up" like a balloon and float to the ceiling, with the little boy holding onto it, not being able to get down.

Any ideas on this one?

UNK SEZ: A Lego crucifix you say? I don't recall seeing that in a movie, but it's a great tip none the less. Maybe one of readers can recall such a thing. As for the second film you mentioned, I think you actually ARE thinking of MR. BOOGEDY, there is a vacuum present in that movie's last scene (MR. B. ends up sucked inside it) and a kid does float to the ceiling at one point and has to be yanked down. It doesn't look to me that it is the vacuum cleaner that begins to levitate, but check out the climax of MR. BOOGEDY below and see if it looks at all familiar:

If anyone knows the answer to the first one, please leave a comment or shoot us an e-mail.

Official Traumatizer :: Jason Voorhees

Posted on By unkle lancifer

Hey look at the date, it's Friday the 13th!!! What a great day to make Jason Voorhees, Camp Crystal Lake's resident bad boy an Official Traumatizer! There is not much I can say about Jason that hasn't been said elsewhere, but what I can do is tell you about my own first experience with the film FRIDAY THE 13TH and my original introduction to the little mongoloid boy named Jason Voorhees.

Little Unkle Lancifer was too young to go see the first FRIDAY THE 13th in the movie theater, but thanks to FAMOUS MONSTERS magazine I was well aware of its existence. (Although to be accurate, I was at least partially confusing it with another film, 1979's THE ORPHAN). My eldest brother, who I imagined at the time had the most fulfilling existence imaginable, WAS old enough to check out this intriguing and mysterious movie which he did as far as I recall, as soon humanly possible.

Now, unlike myself, my older brother is not a light touch when it comes to horror. In fact, it was a badge of honor for him to return from a film and declare himself unfazed and unimpressed by what he had seen on the screen. His attraction to the genre appeared to me to be more as if he were accepting some unsaid dare. He was out to prove that he could withstand anything presented to him and I was sure at the end of the day he would much rather be watching BRUCE LEE.

My usually too cool for school older brother returned from FRIDAY THE 13th in a state in which I had never seen him. He was flushed, he was amped and he was absolutely beside himself. It was if he had just witnessed a train crash and was still working through the adrenaline that was coursing through his body. He was literally stunned and therefore I was too, stunned that there was something so scary that it could leave my roughneck, ninja-star throwing sibling in such a state.

Eventually I grew up to be the kind of film spaz that will go ballistic if a movie is ruined for me even slightly. I'm the jerk that won't enter a theater if I think I've missed 30 seconds of the opening and I am known to drive normal people insane with my excessive use of "pause" and "rewind" at home. At this young age though, for all I knew, my only chance to experience FRIDAY THE 13th would be vicariously through my brother so I demanded he tell me everything he could remember of what he had witnessed.

Uncharacteristically, my brother fulfilled my request and regaled every detail from the opening jeep murder to the closing credits. I was mesmerized from start to finish as images both titillating and horrifying passed through my young head. Some might describe FRIDAY's plot as slight or even non-existent but, due to my own verbal introduction to the happenings of Crystal Lake, to me it will always skew closer to one of the greatest campfire stories/legends ever told. At this point in my life (and maybe it's due to the fact that I was ruefully born with only one foot in reality) I took the events told to me as gospel. When he eventually described little Jason's final exodus from the murky bottom of the lake my jaw hit the shag carpet.

Not very much later a VCR appeared in our living room. Our family was one of the first in our neighborhood to be graced with one (don't feel too bad for those other kids on the block, they all had that amazing invention called "cable" which we could only dream of). Wow. The idea of watching a WHOLE movie in your home whenever you wanted… what a luxury! Not surprisingly, one of the first tapes I had to get my grubby hands on was FRIDAY THE 13TH; now I could finally see what all of the hubbub was about and watch the vaporous story in my head transform into something permanent and concrete on the television screen.

I am happy to say that I was not even remotely disappointed. I could not believe I was getting a chance to eavesdrop and spy on this incredible universe full of denim cut-offs, strip Monopoly and bloody decapitations. If this was what being older was going to be like, sign me up I thought. I'm sure actually being systematically butchered by an unseen presence probably bites the big one in real life, but to me, at the time, it seemed like a great way to spend a Friday night. As LYNN REDGRAVE used to say, "This is Living!"

Having already heard the entire story from my brother you would think that I would be completely prepared for the film's shocker ending, but poor dense me was still taken off guard. I knew Jason was at some point going to rise from the lake, but I had foolishly thought that there would be some kind of build up to such a thing. As Alice (ADRIENNE KING) put her hand into the reflecting water of Crystal Lake, I was pretty sure young Jason was a few scenes away and I instinctively assumed that a JAWS like score would warn me of that danger approaching. No such luck, as Jason jumped out of the lake I jumped out off the couch. I simply had no defense in regards to FRIDAY THE 13TH and I loved the freefall feeling it injected me with, like being on a sled and knowing the ride wasn't over until the sled said it was over.

No matter how securely the original FRIDAY embeds itself within our culture (Let's face it folks, it's here to stay), for some reason, it has always been able to squirm its way out of receiving all the respect that it rightfully deserves. The critical among us can fault the direction, but the reality is that FRIDAY accomplishes everything it sets out to do and then some. One could fault it for being derivative or slap-shot, but dozens of films have tried to duplicate its sense of place and atmosphere and failed miserably. You can even gripe that there is little in the way of characterization, but personally I don't need to know that much about a person to assume that they don't deserve (or appreciate) an axe splitting their skull in two. You can pile up all the knee jerk dismissals you like, but there is a reason why so many return to this movie again and again throughout their lives.

Jason works and Jason has always worked. Those of us who were introduced to him in our youth eventually do master some control over our fear of him, but we're still his bitches all the same. Like many slasher films, FRIDAY is, at its heart, a campfire story and campfire stories not only do not require the fundamental elements that create great literature to work, but actually are hobbled by such useless chaff. It is meant to scare you, to leave you feeling unsafe, to make you think twice about that twig that just snapped. It's meant to cast a spell over you that alters your perception to the point that the world around you suddenly seems unfamiliar and fraught with potential danger. It's meant to be fun, a giddy first dance with death; a way to take the anxieties associated with the approaching seductive freedoms of adulthood and milk them for all they are worth. I'm glad that my first FRIDAY THE 13TH movie actually took place in my own head thanks to my older brother's surprisingly good storytelling skills, but let's face it, my brother had some excellent material to work with; Jason Voorhees is a potent legend and a born Traumatizer.


WANT MORE JASON?

Traumafessions :: Reader Mickelodeon on Fembots, Sleestaks, Sesame Street And Doctor Who

Posted on By unkle lancifer

Even today, I can barely bring myself to utter more than the names of these things that terrified me as a child, lest I begin screaming and crying for my teddy bear:

There's no way I can quantify these and put them in order of terrifying-ness, because they all scared the shit out of me.

But one -another one from SESAME STREET, no less- needs explanation: it was an animated bit, where a rock-like "IF" fell to the earth, with some truly terrifying music playing in the background. I think the music is from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, but I'm not 100% sure of that. I've looked for this on youtube and have had no luck tracking it down to see if it still scares me the way it did. Talk about terrifying; I'm still not a huge fan of the musical piece.

And thank God I didn't know about JON PERTWEE's DOCTOR WHO and his autons back when I was but a wee girl, or they would have won hands down as most terrifying…Christ almighty.

UNK SEZ: Mickelodeon, that 2001 animated bit freaked the hell out of me too! In fact, after a traumafession from our pal AMANDA BY NIGHT on that crazy bouncing "Rover" ball from THE PRISONER, yours truly left this comment:

Rover does freak me out. It's so otherworldly and surreal. They used to have an ongoing bit on THE ELECTRIC COMPANY that gave me the same feeling. It was a take off on 2001 but having not seen that film at the time I had no idea. It was just a cartoon of a monolith that broke apart revealing different words. The one that haunted me was "ALL". It hurt my little brain to think of "ALL"

I can't find that one but here is the one for "ME" which is equally unsettling and hurts my slightly larger brain…

I don't know why a shape would give me the willies, but it's so out of place and unusual (Rover is the same way) that it just feels like there is some larger force at work that you can't get your head around. Sort of like a house pet's response to a vacuum cleaner.

As it turns out these animated monolith bits were shown on both SESAME STREET and THE ELECTRIC COMPANY! SESAME STREET aired two different shorts and THE ELECTRIC COMPANY had nine. All that means is that as a kid back in the seventies, there was virtually no escape from Monolith horror!

To read more by Mickelodeon, be sure to check out her site Strange Cousin Susan.