Author: aunt john

One might ask himself or herself how a simple song could be traumatizing. Well picture this, you are eleven-years-old just beginning your 6th grade year of junior high, intimidated being in a new environment, and the next thing you know your "old battle ax" of a gym teacher queues up "Sexual Healing" by MARVIN GAYE as you exercise. At this time the gym class was segregated girls and boys did not mix (The only exception was when they taught square dancing. Yes, you read that correctly, square dancing). However, we were all in the same building. I was embarrassed beyond belief to be doing the daily calisthenics with lyrics such as "Baby I'm hot just like an oven. I need some loving" playing in the background. I could just feel the eyes of creepy 8th grade guys watching me. You know the guys that have flunked so many times they are old enough to drive to junior high. This was not an isolated incident. This song was played during our calisthenics many times that year. To this very day, if I hear the beginning lyrics, "Get up get up get up get up. Wake up wake up wake up wake up," I scream and change the station if I am in the car. If I happen to be in a store when the song starts playing, I stifle my scream and leave immediately.  I suppose it is irrational after all these years to fear listening to this song, but I can't help myself.

P.S.: That year was tough music wise for me because "Mickey" by TONI BASIL was a hit, and that was a whole other can of worms. People to this day think it is funny to refer to that song when I tell them my name.

UNK SEZ: Oh, Mickster you're so fine, you're so fine you blow my mind…sorry I could not resist. Seriously, Mickster you opened the trauma gates with the mere mention of gym class alone. Obviously physical torture is not enough for some gym teachers. There are many who feel the the need to utilize Abu Ghraib-style psychological break down methods as well. As Mr. Gaye himself sang "What's going on?" Honestly, I can't blame you for grudging on that nearly X-rated musical demand for immediate gratification. It's like, simmer down, Mr. Gaye, wear green on Thursday much? Sheez. To be fair, poor Marvin's tragic fate of being shot and killed by his brain tumur suffering father meant he never lived long enough to be introduced to the Divinyl's take charge, DIY solution "I touch myself" Very sad, very sad indeed.

I was about 14 years old.  I used to babysit the kids who lived across the creek from me. The creek was large enough that I had to canoe across it, maybe 40 feet wide and about 6 to 7 feet deep.  I babysat these kids regularly, sometimes as late at 2:00 a.m.  I'd paddle over in the daylight, and I'd paddle back in the darkness.

I then made the poor choice of riding my bike to the neighborhood theater with my friend and watching FRIDAY THE 13TH.  Yes, we were underage, but it was the neighborhood theater and we knew all the ins and outs of sneaking in to R-rated movies.

The movie horrified me. But it didn't really connect with me until that final scene where Jason comes out of the lake and pulls the lone survivor in.  That was it.  I was traumatized for life.

The next weekend I had to paddle over to watch those children.  The trip over was fine, in a sense.  It was daylight, but I still had Jason in the back of my mind.  I somehow convinced myself I would be able to paddle back without any issues.

1:30 a.m. approached and the parents came home.  It was time for me to go back to my home… in the canoe.

I walked to the canoe that was tied to the bank.  I looked to the black water.  I didn't want to go out there.  I was terrified.  My senses were at full alert.  I could see the silhouette of my house.  The window to my parents bedroom was dimly lit as my parents always fell asleep with the T.V. on.  I hoped they would randomly look out the window to watch me, as if that could help.

I slowly crawled into the canoe.  I untied the rope and grabbed my paddle.  I stuck it in the water very slowly, and gently pulled myself through the water trying not to attract any attention.  I was half way to the dock.  Ripples of water projected from the paddle due to my hands shaking.  I was almost there.

I then heard a thud and felt something hit the canoe.  I was in tears. I looked into the water and saw a round black mass floating next to me. It was somebody's head.  I was almost sure it was somebody's head.

I poked it with the paddle and it just bobbed in the water.  I jabbed the paddle into the water and began to paddle home as fast as my arms could move.  I was frantic.  I pulled the canoe close enough to the dock for me to jump from the canoe.  I ran for the back door.  I didn't even tie the canoe up as it floated back out to water.

I made it into my house.  I was still alive.  I went straight to my bedroom and sat on my bed, wiping my eyes, trying to regain control of my breathing.

The next day I used the rowboat to search for the canoe that had floated away.  I found it resting under some trees about one hundred yards away. After that I had my parents drive me to my babysitting jobs, or rode my bike until I was old enough to drive.  I never got back in that water after dark.  My nights of camping out on the dock with my fishing pole were over.  FRIDAY THE 13TH had ruined me.

Oh, and that head… it was a large piece of firewood that had slipped off of a neighbor's dock.

UNK SEZ: Stutz, thank you so much for this beautifully written TRAUMAFESSION! I gotta say it kinda gives me the creeps. It reminds me of all the times I thought I heard a noise in the house or thought somebody was following me in the street, all the times my brain wickedly decided to erase the line between real life and all the movies I've seen and the books that I've read. Just remember, decapitated heads that turn into driftwood are fine, it's driftwood that turns into decapitated heads that you have to watch out for!

UPDATE: Check out Stutz's blog THE MONDAY REPORT!

My parents were generous enough to buy records for me and my two older brothers. I don't know why we got this record, but I can imagine it was for Halloween purposes: "Disney's Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House."

The cover alone is enough to scare any kid. Side One is a bunch of scary stories with effects which were OK but not traumatizing. It's Side Two that terrorized me – it's a collection of really fucking scary effects made by the top Foley artists and effects people at Disney – OF COURSE it's going to be scary! There were human voice, animal sounds, wood creaks, wind, water drips, crashes – and they all seemed EVIL. ORSON WELLES would have been jealous. The fact that there's no narration or anything made it even worse. Your imagination could fill in ANYTHING and in my case, it always did. The back cover has a warning that reads "Not intended for young, impressionable children from three to eight" – that was exactly my age range, and my brothers quickly learned that playing track one on side two ("Screams and Groans") was the quickest way to send me running screaming to my room to hide under the covers with my fingers in my ears. My parents, of course, did nothing to stop this.

The trauma followed me to high school, when a friend of mine produced the same album from her collection. I couldn't hide my reaction and she insisted on playing it, just to freak me out. I went outside where I couldn't hear it and wouldn't come back in till she turned it off. Later in life I needed to use the sounds on side two track ten ("Things in Space", less scary Forbidden Planet-type noises) for a radio show but had to make everyone promise not to "accidentally" play any of the other tracks.

In Googling the album, I found a SITE where someone has uploaded the tracks. I turned the sound off on my computer before I clicked on the link in Google, just in case they'd set a track to play automatically. Will I click on any of the links, just to see if they still scare me? HELL NO.

By the way, I still have the original album in my collection, safely tucked in the back. I hope it doesn't crawl up the stairs one night to terrorize me again. It just might, y'know.

I'd be interested to know if any other readers were traumatized by those bastards at Disney.

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Thanks Lene for the great audio TRAUMAFESSION! To hear more from Lene, literally, be sure to check out the podcasts that abound on her site I Read Comics.

Kids in this high-tech age don't know how coddled they are when severe weather is forecast!  Today, you've got all these electronic graphics with little maps in the corner, crawls across the screen, and now and then a weatherbabe (or weatherguy) may come on to give logical, reasoned updates.

Not so when I was a kid in the '70s.

Even for a Severe Thunderstorm Watch, the programming would stop, the TV screen would fill with some ominous-looking graphic (still, of course, no movement back in those days) screaming whatever watch/warning it was in all caps, vivid colors…and worst of all, that infernal, screaming, shrill Emergency Broadcasting Service tone!  Then usually an announcer with The Voice Of Doom would come on and provide the "public service" of warning us all of impending tornadoes, damaging winds and large hail that were SURELY going to target the house you lived in and make Dorothy's tornado in THE WIZARD OF OZ about as scary as a silent fart.

Almost as bad were the "ALL CLEAR" statements that would come on-screen when the danger was supposedly past…except that the graphics were usually in more soothing shades of green and white.

The fake warnings created on YouTube are laughable compared to the horrifying simplicity of the bulletins back in the 1970s that made me want to scream running for the cellar – and, worse, my parents made me watch them because it was "educational"!

I fearlessly watched every Creature Feature run on Detroit's WKBD Channel 50 from the late sixties through the seventies, but one managed to sear its way directly onto my retinas. The 1966 ROGER CORMAN/SAMUEL Z. ARKOFF film QUEEN OF BLOOD was patched together from a bunch of eerie footage from a 1960 Russian sci-fi film called NEBO ZOVYOT. In QUEEN OF BLOOD an American spaceship crew (which includes JOHN SAXON and a young DENNIS HOPPER) intercepts a space capsule containing an inhabitant of Mars–a green-skinned, green-haired and incredibly creepy mute alien female. She turns out to be a blood-sucking space vampire who starts knocking off the crew one by one. Given that she's just an over-the-hill glamour model in green makeup and a beehive wig that might not have been so scary except for the way she does it–by hypnotizing her victims with her TERRIFYING GLOWING EYES.

The sequence that drove me over the edge was when a sleepy crewman observes her walking from the lava-lamp-equipped engine room on the other side of the ship and slowly stalking toward her victim (me in this case), then unveiling her blazing eyes (accompanied by a maddening buzzing sound) in child-scarring close-up. Later she takes out DENNIS HOPPER in the engine room in a scene that anticipates HARRY DEAN STANTON's death scene in ALIEN. We later see her licking blood off one of the crewman's wrists but in a wicked death by irony she turns out to be a hemophiliac who bleeds to death when she's scratched by the spaceship's lone female crew member.

I went to bed that night with the image of that creepy face and those electrifying glowing eyes (director CURTIS HARRINGTON achieved the effect by beaming pencil-thin points of light directly onto her eyeballs) jolting me awake every time I tried to drift off to sleep. The movie showed up on T.V. on MGM Hi-Def so I can now preserve it forever–it's ridiculously cheap and cheesy, yet when I showed my wife the corridor-stalking scene even she admitted it was creepy as hell.

UNK LANCIFER SEZ: Thanks Jeffrey for the great traumafession and thanks for turning me on to QUEEN OF BLOOD. I had no idea it was such an extraordinary looking film. (Those who'd like to get a peek of QUEEN OF BLOOD's exceptional visuals can get a gander HERE and HERE. ) While we're at it, I should also thank you for naming a magazine after folks like me and Aunt John; here's to GEEK MONTHLY inheriting the earth!

If there are any advantages to having alcoholic father, one is the utter lack of parental guidance on what movies a kid is allowed to watch. My father took my older sister and I to see a double feature of FRIDAY THE 13TH and SCREAMERS. It was 1980, so that would have made me seven years old and my sister nine. I remember wanting to see SCREAMERS because people were supposed to be turned inside out! My father took us to the theater and gave me a handful of quarters so I could go to the lobby and play video games if the movie got too scary for me. Needless to say, I spent most of FRIDAY THE 13TH in the lobby.  I could tell that the movie was coming to an end by the peaceful music that was coming from the theater, so I decided to take a seat next to my sister and Dad. The image of a woman in a small boat floating along a still lake was being projected on the screen. It seemed like the worst was over. The next thing I know is that my eyes were being assaulted by the disfigured Jason popping up out of the water and pulling the hapless woman down into the lake. My sister began screaming uncontrollably and I was practically crawling under the seat out of fear and embarrassment of my sister. My Dad picked us both up, one in each arm, and carried two screaming kids out of the theater. We laugh about it now, but we were scared half to death! I never did get to see SCREAMERS!

UNK L SEZ: Erczilla, as traumatic as that final scene may have been you should be thankful that good old Jason spared you the misery of sitting through SCREAMERS! That movie's "Man Turned Inside-Out" ad campaign was all a disguise to hide an Italian film about an island of fishmen! For a better view of that film's super fishy history, check out this great blog, JOHNNY LARUE'S CRANE SHOT and for a very thorough review of the film (which actually has developed a bit of a cult following), I suggest BADMOVIES.ORG!

I suffered mightily at the hands of PUNKY BREWSTER when I was still biting ankles. You see, my sister was a DEAD RINGER for SOLEIL MOON FRYE, and I am not exaggerating when I say that we couldn't leave the house from '87-88 without being mobbed by unruly children looking to get close to their idol, "Punky."  I can even recall my Mom arguing with other mothers at the grocery store: "If she's Punky, what the hell are we doing in this dump?"

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Kitty, I feel your pain. My second cousin bore an uncanny resemblance to CAPTAIN LOU ALBANO, sans the facial hair, and it made shopping at the local K-Mart a nightmare. Cousin Pam was what my mother called a "handsome girl," but I digress. Everyone needs to check out Kitty's blog KILLER KITTENS FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE. Be warned though, this kitten definitely has claws!

As a child, I didn't have too many experiences with horror or violence on T.V. and movies.  I watched a lot of fluffy stuff.  But you never can tell just what can traumatize a little kid, and thus begins the story of how I could not stand the thought of watching AIRPLANE! well through adulthood.  Since it wasn't a movie that would raise the suspicions of my parents, I found myself watching it in my Dad's living room with the family on T.V. in 1984. The eminent plane crash idea wasn't bothering me too much and everything was going just peachy until that ridiculous inflatable autopilot showed up.

The horror that seeped into me at that moment was insidious and tricked me into thinking everything was fine, until I went to sleep. You see, I was only five and I had just started being ferried between Texas and Florida as a "child traveling alone" the year before; and obviously, I hadn't gotten over the whole plane ride thing. The fact that I had nightmares about the inflating autopilot gag is kind of embarrassing and yet I couldn't shake my acquired revulsion to the thought of ever giving the movie another chance.

I did finally see AIRPLANE! all the way through for the second time in college.  I am proud to say that I experienced no fear when watching the autopilot inflate, but I have to confess I still hold a bit of a grudge against them.

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Thanks LeEtta for the great TRAUMAFESSION! Surely, y'all must check out LeEtta's super crafty site The LeEMSmachine. Just don't call her Shirley.

UNKLE LANCIFER SEZ: AIRPLANE!'s inflatable Otto Pilot as an icon of fright? I can see it…