Category: Name That Trauma!

Hello All, it's been entirely too long! Follower for – I can barely believe it – SEVEN years now, and I still wear my fantabulous white-with-green-trim Kindertrauma clown t-shirt proudly.

Three quick hits for you today, that have surfaced to haunt me here and there over the years:

1) Episode of what I've always thought was Macgyver, but now I'm doubting that, where I think there is an ongoing search for a missing girl, and there's a painting of the girl and/or multiple photos of the girl that have the face cut out, and the perpetrator has all the missing faces or something.

2) Episode of, I think, the reboot of Outer Limits where there's a TV that's off but a set of female eyes and possibly lips that materialize in the dead TV screen.

Hmm… interesting that both of those have a female face or face-parts theme…

And now to completely veer away from that theme…

3) Gangster movie I saw my granddad watching one afternoon in the late eighties or early nineties (he'd sometimes watch a lot of Chuck Bronson and other vintage violent action stuff without enough regard for a little girl hanging around) and I think a drug boss or something was mad at his lackey and forced him to eat like a whole bag of cocaine (more gritty realistic suffering than horror, but still chilled tiny me).

Thanks! I love y'all!!

OnlyChild1213

HI!

I'm told you may be able to help me…

Do you know the name of this movie? I think it's a one-word title beginning with "D". 50's, 60's or 70's b/w. About radioactive waste off the coast somewhere in the British Isles. Possibly sunken in barrels. The people in the village get overgrown brows, and their fingers possibly begin to fuse. Babies born with defects. Some outside agency tries to convince them it's radiation but they're too superstitious to believe it? I think? I saw this at age eleven and it's haunted me since. It's not "The Giant Behemoth". Does it sound familiar at all? I developed a habit of brushing my fingers across my brow, just to check that it hadn't "grown over". Thirty-six years later, and I still do this.

THANK YOU

UNK SEZ: Hey, I think I know this one! We had it at the video store I worked at and it happened to have a very unusual VHS box with its poster art image going sideways. I do believe you are looking for DOOMWATCH (1972). Check out its wikipedia page HERE and the trailer below and let us know if we got it right. Thanks for writing in (and the great description), DX!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hi at Kindertrauma-

I watched these movies when I was little but turned off the TV and walked away immediately after these scenes. I watched these on basic cable in the early 90s…

-two teenagers making out in the hospital and their tongues become attached

-possessed girl gets needle from under bed and pushes in little brothers belly button while sleeping

-haunted painting of graveyard changes as the story unfolds old man comes out of grave and later on is buried again? Paintings are on a wall along a staircase. Might be from the 50s… or 70s…?

Thank you! : )

Maggie

UNK SEZ: Thanks for writing in, Maggie! I may be able to help you with that last one! A haunted painting of a a graveyard that changes sounds a lot like the pilot episode of NIGHT GALLERY entitled "Cemetery" starring RODDY McDOWALL. You can read a classic traumafession of that very episode HERE and watch the episode itself right around HERE. As for your other two NTT's, I'm hoping one of our knowledgeable readers can help!

Hello!

Some time back (HERE) I asked for help remembering the name of a creepy live action movie where a St. Bernard dreams of being chased by a man dressed as a terrifying skiing cat. Turns out it was called Fantasy on Skis, a 1962 film that later showed up on Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color TV show. After a little research, I think I saw it in the theaters in 1975, when they rereleased Snow White. It served as a short subject before the main film. Watching the rest of the film provides PLENTY of other nightmare fuel…on skis! A scarecrow chases a pair of crows, cowboys (skiers wearing horse costumes around their waists) have a gunfight, Captain Hook chases Peter Pan…it's amazing. The cat part though IS especially terrifying, and starts at about the 24:50 mark (HERE).

Thanks to Dan S.—who had similar childhood memories of the film and managed to find the above link—for tipping me off!

Hi there,

Terrific site. I was wondering if you could help me with a half-remembered TV-based trauma from my childhood.

My brain's telling me it was a scene from an American TV series, like Columbo, although it could have been a made for TV movie, and it would have been shown during the day on UK TV around the end of the 1970s (possibly beginning of the 1980s)

I remember a woman at home, alone, trying to track down the source of the sound of a baby crying. She kept looking around the house trying to trace where the noise was coming from and eventually narrowed it down to the cupboard under the stairs. She slowly opens the cupboard door and inside finds a Victorian doll, slumped motionless on a chair. Cut to the next scene and cue me running from the room, unable to tell my mum what I'd seen.

My brain's probably filling in the blanks, but it may have involved a tape recorder/dictaphone next to the doll which was producing the crying sound (maybe to send the woman mad/chase her from the house.)

It wasn't Spielberg's 'Something Evil' (which also features a following-the-sound-of-a-crying-baby moment) as this wouldn't have been shown during the day.

I'd be grateful for anyone's help on laying this to rest and can only apologise that there isn't much to go on.

Thanks in advance

UNK SEZ: Thanks, Alex! I have a vague suspicion that what you may be looking for is 1978's NIGHT CRIES? It's a made for TV movie that is all about a mother (SUSAN SAINT JAMES) whose baby died in childbirth and is haunted nightly by the sound an infant crying. It fits the time period and it also stars WILLIAM CONRAD (CANNON) which might explain the "Colombo" vibe. NIGHT CRIES is available on YouTube (first part below) so you can check it out to verify. On the other hand, I may very well be wrong so if anybody has any other guesses or suggestions feel free to share your ideas!

I'm about 23 now and I have a VERY vague memory of something I saw that scared the crap out of me when I was 7 or 8 years old. I don't know where it was, I want to say Sesame Street since I watched it so often, but I also watched Cartoon Network back then and it might have been from there.

It was this red (possibly orange) demonic looking thing animated in CGI. It may have appeared on a screen or monitor. It had these creepy yellow eyes and I recall a mouth that looked like a vent… I remember it had a deep evil voice, and that at one point it said "Who am I?" and laughed evilly. That's the ONLY thing I remember about it.

I saw it for a short time and every time it appeared I'd run out of the room. If this was SS, I think they took it off because it was scary. This thing gave me nightmares and I wanna know what it was!

Here are ten images from ten movies directed by the ever prolific David DeCoteau! How many can you identify?

One fine Saturday morning back in the early '80s I jumped out of bed, bolted for the living room and promptly switched on the TV, thinking I would get in a couple of cartoons before everyone else woke up – the usual weekend routine. This morning, however, I was met with a jolt.

The (color) image that faced me showed a man, then cut to a woman, both looking somewhat surprised. I cannot recall who the actor and actress were, but they were middle-aged and the setting looked to be a nicely-appointed house sometime in the '30s or '40s. There was a knock on the door, and one of the individuals turned and answered it.

Standing on the threshold was a ghost, but, instead of seeing a semi-transparent actor, the phantom looked like it was made of blue glass and had very vague features (there were no eyes, for instance). And man did it freak me out. I jumped up, ran to my parents' bedroom and began yelling about what I had seen.

I can't recall a good deal about the details, other than that the movie seemed to have been made several decades before. It was also probably playing on our old local South Florida channel, WCIX 6. Was anyone else startled by this scene?

-Jackball74

Dear fine folks at Kindertrauma,

I'm hoping you can help me with a memory that has plagued me most of my adult life. Before I started elementary school in the very early eighties (had to be 1981 or 82) and became a slasher freak at far too young of an age (thanks to the advent of cable and my hesher older brother), one memory of freakiness remains lodged in noggin.

My beautiful Mom, like most homemakers, was a total die-hard soaps freak and because there was nothing else for me to do at the time, so was I. I remember being vaguely caught up in the various plots of Days of Our Lives, Another World and the Young and the Restless. On one of these or possibly another I am forgetting, there seemed to be some sort of inheritance scheme involving a young woman with questionable mental stability. Someone somewhere was trying to drive her crazy and it seemed to be to get at her fortune (or possibly her man…I was about 4 yrs old, after all). The way they were doing this was by dressing up in a giant Raggedy Ann costume and tormenting her when she was alone. I seem to remember creepy music box-type music and that the camera would get this sort of hazy/psychedelic/fish-eye lens effect to symbolize her broken mental state. It seemed to stem from some kind of childhood trauma having to do with Raggedy Ann which scared the lady (and me too!).

In any case, this always stuck out to me as a brief moment of horror creeping into Mom's soaps and I, for the life of me, have never been able to figure out what I saw or met anyone else that knows what I am talking about. Does this ring a bell with any of your readers? If so, do they know what soap or what the hell was going on? Or should I doubt my own mental state? In any case, if I start to see any giant Raggedy Ann dolls showing up around the house, I'll let you know…

UNK SEZ: Yikes, I think I found your trauma, David! Apparently the soap in question was ANOTHER WORLD circa 1982. If you check out the video below (around the 4:40 mark), you'll get a glimpse of the tormenting doll costume! From what I could gather, a character named Alma Rudder donned the garb to drive a lady named Blaine insane (At the beginning of THIS episode, Blaine discusses the nightmarish encounter with her shrink). Thanks for sharing this David, I can see why this freaked you out as a kid!

Hey! First of all – love your blog! It's so comprehensive, plus funny – it's amazing 😀

Down to brass tacks – I vaguely remember watching a movie on TV maybe 7 or 8 years ago which still nags at me sometimes. I believe it was a horror movie – here are the details I remember:

* Youngish guy working at a burger joint late at night.

*A burger he's making is sitting on the counter when lighting strikes the building and happens to be directed to the burger.

*It proceeds to come to life and psychologically manipulate the young man into taking over the world, used either CG or claymation that was very eerie.

Thanks for your work!

UNK SEZ: Thanks for your kind words, Kelly! Aunt John, our resident BETTER OFF DEAD-fanatic, is emphatically certain that you are talking about SAVAGE STEVE HOLLAND's kooky off-kilter classic BETTER OFF DEAD (1985) and I'm inclined to agree. As much as I wish we lived in a world with many a possessed hamburger movie to choose from, I'm sad to say we probably don't. Check out the scene below and let us know!