Author: aunt john

O.K., this one is weird but there was this one scene from THE WALTONS where the young girl is playing on a tall triangle shaped woodpile. She is told that it is dangerous, but keeps playing. The next thing you know she falls, and she gets hurt. I don't know why I obsessed about this but I would re-enact it with my paper dolls, Barbies… whatever I could get my hands on!

I couldn't find this in your archives, so I decided to send it in. If you have it, well, I gotta get this out anyway.

PUNKY BREWSTER was my all time favorite show as a tyke. I developed my first unrequited crush on SOLEIL MOON FRYE, wrote her a fan letter, the whole nine yards. There was something so perfect about that show to elementary school-aged me. Perfect.

Until Season Two.

Season Two featured a very strange two-part episode called "The Perils of Punky." In it, Punky, Cheri, Alan, the dog Brandon and Margeaux end up lost in a cave during a camping trip. They get told by an old Indian about a lost princess who was captured by an evil spirit and trapped in the cave. One by one as they explore the cave, they disappear. Only Punky is left. As she sits down on a rock, all hell breaks loose:

I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I was terrified. What had been up to that point a relatively benign episode of a beloved sitcom, turned into a whole bucket of nightmare fuel for weeks to come. I stopped trusting the television, especially my formerly favorite show.

At the end of the episode, Punky fights a demon (!) and rescues her friends, but I didn't see that until the season was released on DVD. Years later.

Punky. I'll never trust you again.

I'm scared by all sorts of stuff. But the biggest scare-fest for me is Thriller, starring MICHAEL JACKSON. From the werewolf-type-thingy to the zombie that peeps into the camera right at the very end, it scares the holy crap out of me! Thanks for 16 years of trauma, Mr. JACKSON and Mr. LANDIS!

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Luckily for you Ally, the Gloved-One and/or his production company has forbidden the embedding of his seminal zombie video, so we can't display the full visuals.

Unfortunately for you, we do have the power to embed the below LEGO and BOLLYWOOD versions. Ummm… enjoy?

In THE MOD SQUAD episode "Twinkle Twinkle Little Starlet," pretty little Julie Barnes is used as bait to catch someone who uses silk scarves to strangle blond girls who get to close to a talk show host. When Julie finds herself alone in the woods with the strangler she reaches into his vest pocket thinking it's a hankie, instead she pulls out a scarf and sees it's like the ones that the strangler used on the other girls. She is frozen in fear, and my heart was pounding feeling her fear too. I was between 8 and 11.

UNK SEZ: Thanks Ian for turning me on to this creepy and obviously very groovy episode of THE MOD SQUAD. I tracked down a very informative post on just this episode at a great site called MOON IN THE GUTTER,
you can check that out HERE!

I'm amazed that you don't have RALPH BAKSHI's classic trauma WIZARDS on your site.

Cree-py.

Oh, where to begin with WIZARDS? Someplace between a sweet faerie (dressed in a baby blue onesie, no less) named Sean getting blasted through the heart with a sniper rifle and the bad guy's machine projecting one of Hitler's speeches into the sky during a horrible bloody battle, this cartoon is supposed to have a message of non-violence.

It's an all-out battle between technology and magic, with technology being the ultimate baddie. It takes place in Earth's own future, after nuclear war has split society into good faeries and mutants. There are many up-close shots of creatures good and bad getting blown up complete with cartoon blood and guts. Loud gunshots, yelling and crying all set with Hitler bloviating in the background: it's enough to give an adult nightmares and they showed it to us in grade school.

With BAKSHI's unique drawing style, the images of their war are burned into my memory. Ultimately, with the twist ending, it's hard to say which side actually won the war.

Reading all the previous entries, I'm REALLY glad my folks were always so careful about what I could and couldn't watch as a child.

That said, there was one show I stubbornly insisted on watching, because I loved it so much and 'oh it's not scary at all!!'–

GHOSTWRITER.

It aired, as I recall, some time in the ‘90s, so I guess I was about six or seven. For those who have never seen it, it's about a group of kids that are sometimes contacted by a ghost–a spirit of some kid who died in the 1800's, I think this was revealed at some point–who writes messages to them that only they can see. How does he do this? Why, by altering text on anything they happen to be looking at, of course! So if they happen to be reading the back of the cereal box at breakfast, suddenly the cheery cartoon is glowing and the letters rearrange themselves to spell anything from 'Gabby's in trouble! Find her!' to 'Party at Jamal's!' With his help and guidance the gang solves mysteries. Cool premise, to a kid's way of thinking, and I loved it.

There was one specific episode, however, that to this day remains the only thing I can ever recall giving me a nightmare. It dealt with a gang coming into town, taking over some turf the protagonists used as a hangout. This gang was no ordinary gang, however–they wore masks. Big green rubber masks, with horridly-bulging eyes. Shudder. Worse yet, each member wore TWO masks, one on his/her face and the other on the back of their head! At one point Alex, one of the protagonists, decided to join up with the gang to infiltrate them and take them down from within. Part of his joining entailed signing an oath of some sort, and a member offered her back to him as a writing surface, her mask leering down at him all the while. I woke up screaming bloody murder that night, convinced that a dual-headed green-faced monster with bulgy eyes was lurking the closet.

Just thought I'd share. Thanks!

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Well Matthew, thank you for sharing that with us. The episode that terrified you was first show of its first season, and it's called GHOST STORY. Below are the clips for your viewing pleasure.

Could it possibly be that no one has mentioned the Sleestak from LAND OF THE LOST as a leading cause of childhood night terrors? Surely I must have missed that post.

The way they would creep silently around their labyrinthine cave passages stalking their prey was simply chilling. The Sleestak would slowly emerge from the blackness not unlike Michael Myers in HALLOWEEN to claim their prey. Nocturnal hunters, they prowled the darkened forests in packs; large, reptilian, and totally without mercy. They were known to sacrifice their human victims to their God who dwelt deep within a pit in the bowels of the subterranean city (a creature Holly would confront face to face). And don't get me started on their Library of Skulls. Amazingly, these terrifying denizens of darkness were creatures from a Saturday morning T.V. show for kids!

Fast forward to the present, and most folks remember LAND OF THE LOST as just a silly little children's show from the '70s. They've forgotten the dark underside of LAND OF THE LOST: the sinister Mist Marsh, the mysterious Zarn, and, most of all, the brooding horror of the Sleestak.

AUNT JOHN SEZ: What child of the '70s could really forget about those nasty Sleestaks? Kindertrauma surely hasn't, and Unkle Lancifer personally inducted them into the Official Traumatizer Hall of Fame this past year. Speaking of the '70s, be sure to check out Kinderpal Gilligan's super-cool Retrospace!

Growing up I watched a lot of horror movies; guess you could say I grew up with them. My cousins are not the bravest of folk and when they rented horror movies I was "forced" to watch them as well. This started when I was about 4 years old. I've watched everything from ‘80s slashers, to old classics, to horrid B-movies even MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 wouldn't touch. I was not afraid, the only thing that remotely frightened me was CHILD'S PLAY, but that wasn't even bad. I was quite confident I could watch anything or see anything and not be scared.

I was wrong.

My horrors came not from movies… but from a book. SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK. I believe this has already been covered, but only a particular picture was discussed and it wasn't the one that made me sleepless for months.

I was about 10 when I discovered this book in my school library; the cover was rather eerie so I was drawn to it. Without looking inside, confident I would be entertained judging by the cover alone, I checked out the book and was on my way back to class.

It wasn't until I got home that I started to read the book. The stories were rather cruddy but the pictures were what struck me. They were so otherworldly in the way they were drawn it sent shivers down my spine in a good way. That all ended when I saw 'the picture.'

The story I believe was called "The Haunted House" or something close and the image that accompanied it was that of a woman's face; if it could be called a face. Decay had taken most of her visage away leaving a wraith like being with scraggly hair and empty sockets with piercing pinpoints of light visible in the back of the skull. Her mouth was agape, lips nearly rotting off her and her teeth were few and far between. I was literally frozen with fear, staring at this being in the pages of a book.

Once I regained my composure, I slammed the book shut and threw it from me, never to finish it. My mother had apparently heard me yelp, I didn't recall making any noise, and came in to see what had happened. I explained what I saw and she had to see for herself and was shocked to see such a graphic image in a kids' book. She promptly did the mother thing and told me it was just a picture and couldn't hurt me, but what kid really believes that? I was convinced this thing would come and kill me in my sleep.

The face haunted my dreams for the next few days, that simple image and my explosive imagination had done what no horror movie had ever done to me. I was afraid to sleep in the dark; I couldn't sleep without waking up from a nightmare in a cold sweat. After a month or two the initial scare wore off and only trauma remained. To this day I cannot look at that image without shuddering, so imagine my despair when they released a new edition of the same book with that face adorning the cover.

I am writing to you about the weirdest musical ever…and the only movie written by Dr. Seuss himself! THE 5,000 FINGERS OF DR. T.! This is a classic Kindertrauma film. Imagine a live action version of Dr. Seuss's drawings but way before RON HOWARD's HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS and MIKE MYERS' CAT IN THE HAT.

Dr. Seuss wrote the script and the lyrics and designed the sets (of course). This is an amazingly weird, wonderful film that will creep the crap out of you. There's a dungeon for all non-piano players who then perform an extend dance sequence. There are doors in floors and stairs that lead to nowhere and hands coming out of the wall. There are Siamese twin guards, connected by their beard, on roller skates. Oh yeah, the main kid Bart and all the other boys forced to play piano, wear a hat with a hand coming out of the top!

The best part is that the adults in the film learn to, "Always listen to kids, even when they lie."