Author: aunt john

I have a Traumafession that may not be a first, but is surely a rarity: a second-generation Traumafession.

It comes from The Giving Tree, the beloved children's book by Shel Silverstein (who also wrote Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue," strangely enough). While the book is a heart-tugging classic, it's the back jacket photo of Silverstein that traumatized me as a child, and now my 5-year-old son Dash.

To put it in perspective, this photo is from a brand-new reissue of The Giving Tree. In other words, they've been using it for at least three decades.

I mean, is this the best head shot they had of this man? The gritty black and white photo, his thick eyebrows, even thicker beard, and an expression that looks more like he's going to chase you through the woods than tell you a children's story.

Even if this was the best photo of Silverstein at the time, that was at least 30 years ago. Horribly scary photo aside, how about a different or updated photo just 'cause? A simple image search on Google easily produces several better options.

So, not only did this photo of Silverstein scare me as a child, it's disturbed my son enough that he actually asked me to take the book jacket with me after bedtime stories one night — he too thought "the man on the back was scary."

NOTE: Be sure to check out FilmFather's excellent blog HERE!

Thank you so much for the gift that is Kindertrauma – every day brings new delights!

I am surprised that no one has yet mentioned a classic P.S.A. from the late ‘60s, and I must confess I'm grateful that they haven't, as I am simply terrified that someone may excavate this childhood horror in video form and post it. Every few months or so I do a web search to see if it has ever resurfaced…to date, nothing.

It was an anti-heroin P.S.A., I believe 15 seconds in length. The camera panned around a wind-up toy monkey playing a drum as a little girl's voice is heard: "They say that people who are addicted to heroin have a monkey on their back – isn't that cute!" Then the kicker – the camera zooms in FAST on the monkey's face. It bares its fangs, and the hellish thing screams. (It may have cut to a shot of an actual simian at this point, but my memory is unclear.)

The speed of that zoom was breathtaking – the child had scarcely finished her last word before the camera moved and the shriek was heard. It was unquestionably the most frightening thing I ever witnessed in my childhood, and despite a steady diet of filmed and written Horror from my youngest days, nothing had prepared my little six-year old psyche for this. Whenever the ad played again, I ran screaming from the room…and since it was only 15 seconds long, I didn't have much time to get away!

A number of years ago, I posted this recollection on a web discussion group dedicated to all things horrific. Days later there was a very angry reply from a respected attorney in Texas, who said he had successfully repressed the trauma of this ad over the years…and my posting had brought the evil thing back into his consciousness and was giving him nightmares. Trust me; this cautionary spot had a profound effect on those of us of a certain age. I've long suspected this might have been an inspiration for Stephen King's short story "The Monkey."

My arms have been covered in gooseflesh typing every word of this. Please – don't find this P.S.A.!

UNK SEZ: Steven S., this is your lucky day because no matter how hard we tried, we could NOT find your P.S.A.!

I heard that Bob Dylan song 'Lay Lady Lay' last night and my brain suddenly flashed an image of Lady Elaine from MISTER ROGER'S NEIGHBORHOOD. A traumatic thing, no doubt. I didn't realized I harbored that association. Needless to say I just had to Google her and that's when I came upon Kindertrauma for the first time.

I quickly posted the URL to Facebook to share with my peeps. Since last night we have all been trolling your web site, revisiting our nightmares. It has been a moving experience.

One thing I looked for but didn't find is THE LOST SAUCER a series included in the SATURDAY MORNING WITH SID & MARTY KROFTT show.

JIM NABORS is a Mr. Creepy (like most biology teachers) and RUTH BUZZI is simply not someone I would want to spend any time alone with. In this show they are in robot suits ('Actually, we're androids.') and piloting a space ship (saucer) that lands on earth. Here they befriend two kids – a white girl who is babysitting a little black boy. White girl is all responsible and wants to go home while little man is all hip and cool and digs the 'flying pinball' machine and is in no hurry to get back home (he knows it will be bed time soon). Before they can turn the saucer around (ha!) and head back to Earth, in comes the scariest fucking thing in TV in the '70.s DORSE! The biogenically engineered half dog-half horse monster!

Dorse was supposed to be this cute lovable robots-best-friend thing but was in fact a very scary beast with rag-mop fur and a velvet covered hobbyhorse head. Yeah, I knew it was a full-grown man in a suit, but that just made it even worse. Somehow I knew that adults who dressed up in costumes to make kids feel 'comfortable' was sinister, I knew there must be an ulterior motive for wanting to make kids feel 'comfortable' (re: distracted, easy to manipulate). This show – that DORSE – scared the crap out of me. Two adults dressed like robots ('Actually, we're androids.') with another guy in a dog/horse suit who KIDNAP two kids on a 'saucer'? C'mon! And wasn't JIM NABORS a Mormon??????

Thanks for the great site!

I can remember it like it was yesterday. I was sitting on my neighbor's couch, watching MTV with her and her older brother (I was about six, she was about nine, and her brother was 19). We'd gathered around to watch the BRITTANY SPEARS video for "Lucky" (our favorite song), and were about to go off and play Barbies and leave her brother to his teenaged business when we heard a song that we both liked. It was the Gorillaz's "Clint Eastwood." We were both far too young to understand the drug induced lyrics, but liked the beat/tune and had been dancing to it in her room a few minutes beforehand.

The video started off with the band's name being written across the screen, as some creepy laugh played in the background. It then went on to show cartoon people (avatars of the band members) singing. Innocent enough. All of a sudden, this creepy fat blue lightning Rastafarian man starts rapping. That got our attention right away. As the song goes on, the white background turns into a graveyard. Then, mid-song, this monkey arm shoots up from the ground, and the screen becomes filled with thousands of zombie apes, all marching to the beat of the song. I'm not sure if I remember correctly, but I think that the video ends with one of the adorable cartoon people kicking a zombie ape into outer space.

I didn't sleep a wink that night, afraid that the zombie apes would take out my bedroom wall and squash me, and I refused to watch MTV until I turned thirteen.

MTV betrayed me AGAIN at age 14. A few of you may remember my traumafession about Happy Tree Friends. Well, the incident had terrified me so much that, all through puberty, I had a constant fear of coming across Happy Tree Friends on T.V./in a movie's coming attractions. If I had even the faintest clue that there WAS an actual T.V. show right around that time, I don't think I would have turned on the TV at all.

I was watching the morning wakeup countdown before going off to school, and the screen announced that the next video would be "The Carpal Tunnel of Love" by Fall Out Boy. This was during my Fall Out Boy phase that I refuse to speak of.

(AUNT JOHN SEZ: Umm, too late, you just told everyone.)

Well, you can imagine my joy when I found out that my television was about to deliver a song from their not yet released CD. That joy ended as soon as the video started. It was as if God was bitchslapping me through my TV, because staring back at me was a familiar yellow bunny, flirting with the little pink rodent that had haunted me for so long. Totally forgetting the fact that it was 5:30 am on a Monday morning, I screamed at the top of my lungs and hurled my cup of o.j. across the kitchen, fleeing to my bedroom and hiding under my covers. I didn't stick around long enough to actually watch the video, but, needless to say, I didn't watch MTV until I was SURE that nobody liked that song anymore.

Ah, memories. Let me start by saying that I love scary movies, and always have, which makes my own kindertraumas even more amusing.

One of my earliest traumatic memories was watching a black and white movie about giant invading spiders (I think it was 'Invasion of the Giant Spiders', but I've never been able to verify). In one scene, there's a toddler in a playpen in the front yard of a house while the spiders invade. People are running and shrieking, the town's on fire, the toddler is *screaming*, and NOBODY IS COMING to save it. I think I was about 4 years old, and that scared the beejezus out of me.

AUNT JOHN SEZ: I believe the movie you are thinking of is the 1958 chestnut EARTH VS. THE SPIDER, or THE SPIDER as it is also known. THE SPIDER trailer is kind of dull, so let's take a gander at the greatness of the trailer for 1975's THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION:

Sorry for the interruption, please continue Harmonyfb:

At six, I used to hide behind the couch any time ads for "Sir Cecil Creep" (our local scary movie host) came on TV.

When I was 8 or 9, I developed a love of TWILIGHT ZONE repeats and NIGHT GALLERY first-runs. One NIGHT GALLERY episode scared me so badly that I still occasionally have nightmares about it. It was about a painter who winds up with his face permanently morphed into the 'op art' painting he's been working on. Notice I have no idea what the actual plot was – it was the image that was burned into my tender psyche. Someday I'm going to have to find a copy of this episode.

AUNT JOHN SEZ: I just combed through the exhaustive NIGHT GALLERY guide, and didn't see anything about an op-ed artist with a Cubist face. Could have it been a TWILIGHT ZONE episode?

O.K., growing up as a kid in the early ‘70s the local T.V. stations in Jersey showed reruns of the original STAR TREK. Like many other elementary-school-aged kids at that time, I became hooked. I even got that cool toy bridge set with the action figures-including Uhura, but in time I broke the spinning transporter that made the figure placed inside "vanish." So I wound up getting rid of the whole set and then, decades later, I was told that it was worth a lot of money. That's an adult trauma! However, seeing this show did give some childhood scares. There was that "Empath" episode where Kirk, Bones & Spock were taken by aliens and left in a room with a mute female who was an empath. She could absorb the injuries of those she touched healing the victim while temporally getting the ailment till she healed herself. When Bones is tortured and brought back, she absorbs his injuries and winds up getting his facial wounds. She gets a pained expression on her face which was a bit hard to look at:

Then there was "The Lights of Zetar" where Scotty's new love interest Mira, becomes possessed by the life forms of an alien race that look like flashing lights. The flashing lights were not the scare, it was when they entered a person. The crew found what was left of a planetary settlement and a near death woman who had the Zetars in her. Her possession was shown by having her face "solarized" and when the aliens first try to speak through the person, it's all slow and garbled.

The same would happen to Mira plus when she was taken over she was slumped against a wall. She had her head bent at a funny angle while the Zetars spoke through her.

Pretty scary for an under ten year old! Get this: Kirk decided to put the possessed Mira in a pressurized "hyperbolic chamber" to kill the Zetars. Decades later Michael Jackson and the 1993-94 Vancouver Canucks would make headlines with such a device! Oh, the authors for this episode: JEREMY TARCHER and his wife SHARI LEWIS.

Yep, THAT SHARI LEWIS!!