As a kid with an over-active imagination, the thing that scared me most was a poster for a SAW film (probably). You could just see the outlines of something that looked like a rotten green head under a huge "censored" sticker. The bus drove past our school everyday while we were having lunch, leaving me pretty terrified and unable to eat. Am I the only one wimpy enough to be scared by a poster?
xx, Flo
I'm super busy this weekend and I don't have time for squat but I'm only human; I had to dash to the theater to see SILENT HOUSE. It's not like I'm compelled to see everything, this one just looked particularly up my dark, lantern-lit alley. Don't worry, I'm not going to ruin or give away a thing. I just wanted to pass along the harmless info that ELIZABETH OLSEN is exceptional — and deserves any and all hype — and that directors CHRIS KENTIS & LAURA LAU (of OPEN WATER fame) implement the (pretend) continuous real-time one-take element to mostly decent effect and that most importantly, this movie got me good on a couple occasions. More telling than any rusty inadequate word I could come up with is the fact that upon leaving the theater, I let out an involuntary and lamentably audible sigh of relief. Seems my lungs prefer it when I make with the breathing. I don't mean to oversell and instigate disappointment and honestly, I had a dozen quibbles invade my head toward the end but all in all, this flick agitated my hopefully imaginary heart condition just fine.
The guy who stood up behind me felt differently. I gleaned that when he proudly exclaimed, "That's the worst movie I ever saw!" before leaving. He's not here to defend himself so allow me to defend him; clods can't help being clods. It's true, it's a waste of time to try to change them. You're better off trying to teach a snake to use a hula-hoop. Now everybody is of course entitled to his or her opinion but that dude wasn't offering an opinion, he was spouting a bold-faced lie wrapped in a histrionic cliché and c'mon, what a grandstanding drama queen. I guarantee that guy has seen way worse and regularly. Anyway, the bullhorn made me realize something I hadn't before. To get properly scared in a movie requires a certain amount of empathy. Sure we get scared because we think, "What if this happened to me?" But another, equally important part is the instinctual human reaction of concern for another person's safety and well-being. I'm not saying "Worst movie!" guy has no feelings but I'm feeling secure in suggesting that he has limited access to them. I don't have the resources to study or back up that theory, so let's assume I'm right based on my hatred of loud unsolicited opinions alone.
I need to change the subject before I turn into MAX VON SYDOW in HANNAH AND HER SISTERS. That's a side of my personality I like to keep hidden away in a drawer with my extensive CYNDI LAUPER tape collection. Once upon a time, in my old apartment building, I was on the phone with a friend of mine. I don't remember the conversation but I'm sure it was depressing. Suddenly there was a black out and the phone went dead. I could see nothing. All of the sudden there were stomping footsteps running up and down the stairs outside my apartment. It sounded like a mob. Somebody banged on my door. Well it turned out it was nothing, just a normal explainable electrical glitch but for at least three minutes or so I was seriously freaked out. "They're finally coming to get me!" I thought. I didn't have time to imagine concretely who was coming for me but I vaguely assumed it was the floating guys from DARK CITY or those grimacing gentlemen from BUFFY. What got to me the most though was knowing that my entire realm of safety could be blown out like a match. SILENT HOUSE made me remember that.
This movie luxuriates and cavorts in the dark, climbing under dining room tables and grabbing at your heels. It captures that bat wing paranoia that shadows your shoulder when you're putting your key in the front door at night expecting to be tackled by every mugger ever born. From a distance it looks like a simple structure but up close, you can see certain bricks placed in a way to throw you off balance. Way before any sledge hammer busts through any wall, there's a scourge of psychological termites (memory lapses, nervous alibis, double edged words) making the wood soft. More swaying than anything though is ELIZABETH OLSEN's persuasive, performance, which sweeps you into the ring of panic with its realness alone. Sadly the final act of SILENT doesn't deliver the power punch that the build-up deserves but by that time I was fine, having already received exactly what I came for. I guess I should give loud mouth guy a break. For some people horror movies are more about the slot machine payoff. In my opinion there's too much going on in in the darkness here to throw it all away just because you don't like what the lights being turned on reveals. Hey, now that I think about it, loud guy was the perfect audience member right until his own final act- maybe he and the movie SILENT HOUSE are perfect together.
During the first half of the 1990s, which I remember as a generally underwhelming time for Kindertrauma TV, late night HBO blissfully bludgeoned my unsuspecting young mind with everything from Suspiria to Scissors to Sorority House Massacre 2. All of those movies made a lasting impression. But none of them traumatized me like Fabrizio Laurenti's Witchery, starring David Hasselhoff and Linda Blair.
In 1991, I was eight years old. At this point, I was already obsessed with horror movies. I often tracked them down by watching The Prevue Guide Channel, an oddly hypnotic station on which T.V. listings would rise in an endless scroll across the bottom half of the screen, while previews of coming attractions for movies like Rent A Cop played on top.
One night, I became fascinated by the Prevue Guide trailer for Witchery. So far as I recall, the trailer included four scenes: a girl in a wheelchair saying "Your dad shouldn't buy that house! My mom told me, a witch lives there!," a woman standing in a black cloak on a beach, Linda Blair decked out in a nightgown and huge hair laughing maniacally in a voice that was not her own, and the word Witchery, the letter "T" replaced by an inverted crucifix.
At that age I was already enthusiastic about ominous children, excessive women, spooky houses, and the defilement of religious imagery. I did not know the meaning of this word "witchery," which sounded like witchcraft only somehow more sinister. In my head I imagined that the movie was about a brothel or women's boarding house full of witches. I had to see it. Unfortunately, Witchery was airing on Showtime, and my family didn't get the channel. So I waited…waited…waited… Finally, months later, it appeared on HBO in the middle of the night, and I taped it.
I watched in awe as a group of sinners ended up at a mysterious, deserted hotel on an island in "Massachusetts." One by one, they were transported to some kind of alternate dimension where they were brutally raped, tortured, and/or murdered by the deformed minions of a glamorous old woman in a black cloak. The woman might have been the vengeful ghost of a pregnant witch who (in flashback) jumped from a window to her death to escape murderous pilgrims, or she might have been a has-been Hollywood actress. Or both. The movie leaves it artfully ambiguous.
To me, this was one of those movies that, pre-Internet, seemed so weird that they could only have been documentaries transmitted directly from other worlds. There was so much I didn't know when I watched Witchery: I didn't know that it was (or would one day be) considered to be notoriously awful by many horror geeks. I didn't know that Hildegard Knef, the evil old woman, was a totally chic and fabulous German movie star and chanteuse. Sometime later, when I first saw Baywatch (which had mysteriously escaped my un-monitored eyes up to that point), I thought "Oh! That's the guy from Witchery!" when The Hoff appeared on screen.
I also didn't realize, while I was watching Witchery, that it was traumatizing me. While watching the movie, I didn't notice feeling scared. But something about Witchery got to me and, like most traumas, the effects didn't occur until later. In the coming days and weeks, I couldn't stop thinking about Witchery's weird atmosphere. When I looked in the mirror, I'd be petrified of seeing Hildgard Knef's scary diva face looking back at me (a recurring warning in the film). I was haunted by a horror movie convention that always gets to me: a film projector that mysteriously ran on its own without being plugged in, showing the visitors avant-garde witchy cinema. For the first time, I found myself having an existential crisis, pondering questions like "Can one really feel good that some of the characters escaped the island at the end of the movie, when they first had to watch their loved ones be brutally murdered?"
Witchery haunted me so much that I launched a personal boycott against anything that had to do with the horror genre for what seems, in my memory, like years (in reality, it might have been months). I taped over Witchery with "Paul Simon at Central Park." When that wasn't enough to destroy its evil powers, I hid the tape in the back of my closet in my old bedroom (where it probably still resides!). Not since the Flowers in the Attic crisis of 1989 had my world been so up-ended by media, and nothing has had such an effect on me since.
Like so many kinder-traumatized, I watched the object of terror again over a decade later and thought that much about it was kind of inept and funny. And yet sometimes, when I go to bed anxious, I still dream that Hildegard Knef is coming to get me. And sometimes, when I wake up in the middle of the night and half-consciously wander to the bathroom, I start to worry that maybe, just maybe, I'll see her staring back at me from the mirror…
— Ben S.
Greetings fellow Traumatized Tots!
I'm going to start this off in pretty much the same way others have, by gushing over this amazing, informative, and truely entertaining site. It really helps to know that I'm not the only one who suffered through childhood (misery loves company and all that Jazz). While browsing through the numerous Name That Trauma!s I was reminded of a particularly nasty memory of what I'm pretty sure was some kind of freaky short film on TV. It was the 80's. Of this I am positive.
The plot involved a guy who intended on creating a girlfriend for himself with some kind of weird chemical (I think it was pink colored, but that's not important). Anyway, he was flipping through some swimsuit magazines and picked a girl he liked and then dropped the weird goo on the girl's image. Poof! She comes to life! Only there was one problem… her lower half was still stuck in the magazine. I could actually feel the color drain from my face as this creepy half-girl started reaching for the guy and begging him to kiss her. Then she melted or something. The guy made a second attempt and poured the girlfriend formula over another sexy chick and Poof! Another horrible disaster. This second girlfriend was GIGANTIC and took up the entire room! Once again she begged him to kiss her and in my little child brain I just knew that if he tried she would suck him into her jumbo lips like a piece of gum and start chewing. Then she melted too.
Thank God! But this guy clearly didn't learn his lesson and tries a third time. Poof! Experimental Girlfriend #3 arrives. She was beautiful with a perfect body and long, lucious hair. I wanted to look like her when I grew up… until she moved the hair out of face… which looked like chewed up roadkill. I was rooted to the chair with terror! This reject from a Tales From the Crypt comic didn't beg to be kissed like the others but demanded it and even started choking the poor guy! But mercifully she melts away, too. I just knew that this would be his last attempt to make a girlfriend. I was wrong. A fourth attempt was made. This one… turned out just fine. The only problem was she kissed a different guy and left the building with him instead of the poor mad (stupid) scientist. Oh well. At least he didn't get eaten.
What happened toward the end is kinda fuzzy but I seem to remember the girl-making goo falling on a picture of some weird… cartoon vegetable creature… I have no idea. By that time I started to wander off to check under the beds for giants, mutilated half-torsos, and hideous faced monsters that would kill you if you didn't kiss their slimy, dripping lips.
Please help me find this weird little TV nightmare so that I can finally face my demons!
– The Youngest Hewitt
Hello!
LOVE your site. I've got a NTT I'm hoping someone can help me with…
I remember seeing this on television when I was just a little kid. I was born in 1972, so this would probably have been in the late seventies, early eighties. If memory serves (no guarantee!) this felt more like a TV show than a film. Possibly even something from the U.K., since my parents watched a lot of PBS – particularly Masterpiece Theatre…
The setting, I think, is Victorian England. The bit I remember took place at night and I'm pretty sure I remember fog and gas lighting. There's this young man wearing a black cloak. He's going to visit someone.
Young man in the black cloak enters a house. He addresses an old man lying in bed (his father?) Clearly, the old man is in the last stages of sickness. He barely moves and his voice is weak… There may or may not be a third man in the room..
Suddenly, for some reason, the young man becomes alarmed. He reaches out and grabs the blanket covering the old man. Young man yanks off the blanket-
– and reveals that the old man's body has already decayed, leaving nothing but a skeleton covered in cobwebs!
Horrified, the young man bolts out of the house and into the night – pursued only by maniacal laughter…
Not too surprisingly, this memory scarred me for life. If anyone can offer me any clues as to what the hell this was, I'll be forever grateful.
Thanks!
— Kieran W.
Browsing over RedBox's offerings, I noticed that they had the original Batman movie on offer. This is the campy 1966 Batman movie with Adam West and Burt Ward (Baaaaaaaby on booooooard…something…something…Burt Wards…this song writes itself!) I innocently rented it to relive the fun, campy atmosphere of that crazy, tilted, pastel world Batman inhabited at one time. Little did I know that a KinderTrauma was around the bend.
Not having seen this movie since I was a kid when it was shown on ABC's 4:30 Movie (anyone else remember the 4:30 movie? I completely forgot about a scene that totally freaked me out as a kid. The kicker is that upon seeing it, my mind allowed me to peer inside and see why it was so traumatic. I'm sure, since we're all here, that we're equally fascinated with the mysteries of what scares us as children, so to have my mind reveal itself in regards to a trauma was a wild experience.
(As an aside, it seems KinderTraumas are part of the human experience through all cultures and ages. The Indians of South America developed a whole religion around KinderTraumas wherein they believe that traumas from childhood burden us with negative energy and emotions. To free people from such traumas, they developed cleansing ceremonies called "limpias" to first detect traumas and then cleanse them. You can see such a limpia HERE.
Nevertheless, when I was watching the Batman movie there was one part where the Penguin (Burgess Meredith) uses a dehydrator to turn his minions into powder. The minions line up and are turned into powder one by one without flinching. The utter lack of emotion or fear in the minions as they're powderized (mixed with the weird, detached feeling the special effect added) completely freaked me out when I was a kid and that angst came roaring back when viewing it as an adult.You can see the scene HERE.
I started to wonder what creeped me out so much concerning that scene and it was like a trap door opened in my mind and the Architect said, "Step inside so we can talk awhile." So I sat down with Mr. Subconscious, sipped some tea and chatted for a while. He told me that what creeped me out was the fact that these men so willingly let themselves be turned into powder (killed is what I thought as kid) without fighting back or protesting or resisting, happily standing there waiting to be disintegrated. Nor did they flinch when they saw the others around them atomized. What made it completely traumatizing was that they were giving their lives up for evil, happily marching to their own destruction. And then Mr. Subconscious held up flash cards of suicide bombers, Nazi SS officers, kamikazes, and others who were so intoxicated with evil that they would happily sacrifice their life for their mad overlords. Talk about epiphany.
It was a cathartic experience if nothing else. And it was one KinderTrauma I could put to sleep in a warm, comfy bed where it wouldn't slowly tug at the back of my mind anymore. But in the end, seeing Lee Meriwether in the Catwoman suit again made it all better.
— bdwilcox
I have two traumas to confess, both of which I suppose speak to the sheer volume of time I spent as a child with my head in a book to the exclusion of any and all other activities. When I was in the first or second grade a classmate whom I can no longer remember brought a picture book (The Secret Knowledge of Grown-Ups) to school that left me quaking in terror for days. It purported to be a book of secrets that are kept from children by a secret cabal of adults, to be revealed only to those that have turned thirteen. Being a child with the rare gift of being completely unable to understand humor, I saw no indication that this was anything but one hundred percent factual.
Among the claims in that book that I found particularly disturbing were: vegetables evolved from giant man-eating monsters and we must eat them in order to prevent them from reverting back to that state, we must drink milk in order to keep atomic cows from exploding, and worst of all, that if you blow bubbles in a glass of milk your face can get sucked into the glass and left permanently deformed. I remember that after I returned home from school that day utterly traumatized, my mother decided it was a good time to show me the classic movie "E.T." and was baffled when I did not enjoy it because I was preoccupied with horrific thoughts of suck-face. My memories of that book are so bizarre that after many years I began to wonder if I hadn't just imagined it all. But last summer, while volunteering at my local library, I stumbled across it in the humor section.
A couple years after this incident, when I was 8, I was at my grandmother's house, where there is a very strange little room created by an odd angle in the roof, known as the Book Nook. In this Book Nook I found a book called "Strange Creatures From Time and Space", which had apparently belonged to my dad or one of his brothers when they were children. (My dad said he had no memory of it.) It was all about Bigfoot, giants, sea monsters, and other unexplained phenomena. Later I found out that it was written by JOHN A. KEEL of Mothman Prophecies fame, and the cover illustration was by Frank Frazetta, but at that young age I hadn't heard of either of them yet.
In any case I could not put the book down, even though it soon terrified me. The more frightened I became, the more I wanted to read it. I read it nonstop on the way back, which involved a drive across most of Texas as well as a plane flight. The whole way I imagined Bigfoot keeping pace with our car from behind the treeline. In the airport I saw a very tall man whom I became convinced was a giant from Patagonia like I had read about in the book. The whole thing came to a head about a week later, when I came home from a piano lesson in tears and begged my dad to take the book away and never let me see it again. He agreed, but thankfully he didn't actually throw it away, for I found it again almost ten years later and still have it today!
Lewis
