Category: Name That Trauma!

Howdy,

Two friends recently challenged me to identify two different horror movies that they saw ages ago as kids and God damn, I was completely stumped. Any chance you fine folks can crack these mysteries? All I've got to work with is some scraps of information:

* The first horror movie would have been an eighties flick available as a VHS rental. The story featured a crazed mental patient who built lots of killer dolls. The dolls were made of flesh-colored clay or plastic (like Barbie and Ken) and one of them was armed with a scalpel. The dolls were done through stop-motion animation.

* The second horror movie would have been a late eighties/early nineties VHS title. The plot featured a serial killer who could either turn himself into electricity or possess machines (or both). The movie featured a scene in which the killer hides inside of a light bulb.

Thanks!

Enzo S.

UNK SEZ: Thank you for writing in, Enzo! I hope I have your answers!

The first film you mentioned is probably the Amicus anthology ASYLUM. It's from 1972 but had a theatrical rerelease in the states in the early eighties as HOUSE OF CRAZIES. There were at least two VHS editions, one used the original poster art and the "ASYLUM" title and the other had a more modern look and went by ASYLUM: "The House of Crazies".

ASYLUM's tales are all based on stories by ROBERT BLOCK. The one your friend should be interested in is called "Mannikins of Horror," it very much fits your pal's description. Here it is on YouTube…

This very same story though was used for an episode of the horror series MONSTERS so that could very well be what they are thinking of too. Luckily that also is on YouTube…

The second film you mentioned, I would think is WES CRAVEN's SHOCKER from 1989. That definitely involves a killer who has electric-centric powers. I don't remember him hiding inside a light bulb but I wouldn't put it past the guy. That one seems almost too easy to be correct so if any of our readers know of any other titles that fit the description, please let us know! Hmmmm, wait a minute, I suppose 1993's GHOST IN THE MACHINE might fit just as well… Here are both trailers just in case…

Hello Kindertrauma! I was inspired by Pete G's recent Backseat Psycho post to reach out to you with my own hazy, '70s memory of a movie I saw when I was a kid. Here's all I remember:

A teenage girl is taunted (and possibly killed?) by three older teenage/college boys. To get back at them her mother (who happens to be a witch) goes to a pit in the woods and curses each one of the men to die by way of a natural element (air, fire,and ?). I only remember one of the deaths–one of the men dies when he jumps out of an airplane and his parachute doesn't open (death by air?!?).

Does this ring any bells Kindertrauma?

Thanks so much!

— Steve Q.

This has stuck with me for so long that it's almost impossible to believe it ever existed! A short film I saw as part of a double feature in Scotland at the local cinema (maybe with When a Stranger Calls?) -late '70s/early '80s. The parts that stick most is that it is British, short and it's about a woman who repeatedly "sees" or remembers a murder being committed, no one believes her and she is hospitalized. In the very end of the film it turns out to be a premonition of the murder of her own family by a psycho hiding in the back of the car. The film ends with her seeing a hand with a knife come up from the back seat as she stands horrified… Help me remember what this film was!

Thanks!

My sister and I have been searching for info on this for years. In the early '80s we saw a horror short on HBO (may have been USA?) where a lady had some type of monstrous hand in a jar. One night, I think she was in the shower, and the creature came back for the hand. I believe the short ended with someone else displaying the jar, but it had the woman's hand in it. Any info you have on this would be so great. Thanks, and keep up the good work!

Hey you guys!

I was just visiting with my cousin and he was telling me about a movie he saw in the '70s that scared the crap out of him and it sounds really cool – but I have no idea what it is.

There's a woman running through a house being chased by someone – or a group of people – and she keeps seeing herself either on a TV – or multiple TVs throughout the house – being killed. Or it might be in a painting. But it seems like the TV thing was more what his memory was. And she is either being burned or hung – or maybe both – in what she is seeing. And what she is seeing is making her run from the people chasing her. He said it was color and seemed like it was made in the '70s.

Thanks!!!

This was one of those movies that we were shown in elementary school to scare the shit out of us to straighten up and fly right. It was made in the ‘70s. These kids are annoyed that their parents are constantly telling them what to do, what to wear, making them go to school, etc., the standard stuff that kids bitch about. And then one day, when they are rooting around the attic of their house, they find some kind of magic dollhouse, which contains a slip of paper that says that if you make a wish to this house, the wish will come true. Naturally, the kids wish that their parents let them do whatever they want to do.

The next morning the kids wake up and go downstairs and see that their parents are still in bed. They ask if they have to go to school. The groggy parents say, "Whatever you want to do, honey." So they stay home and have a good time. Meanwhile, the father doesn't go to work and the mother just sits around doing nothing and days go by, the kids don't go to school, the dad doesn't go to work. At one point, the kid's friend's come by and ask them why they're not going to school, they say that they just don't want to. The daughter asks the mother if maybe they should go back to school and she says "whatever you want to do, honey." Things start to become desperate. The parents just walk around in robes, no one is going grocery shopping, the heat and electricity in the house is turned off, the daughter is shown scraping the last remnants of peanut butter out of a jar because she is so hungry.

In the last scene, the father builds a fire in a fireplace so they can warm up and the kids put the magic house in the fire and then there is a freeze-frame. This movie totally fucked me up. I had nightmares about it and so did my friends. What the hell was this movie and why was this shown to kids?

Hi, I have a trauma I have been thinking about for a couple years and I decided to finally submit my memory to you in hopes someone can figure it out.

It seemed to be set in a desert area of the U.S. A teenage girl (maybe a little older) dressed in potato sacks, took care of her old father out in the middle of nowhere. But her dad dies and she is alone.

One day a city guy's car breaks down near her desert shack, and somehow she takes him hostage, like a pet or something. That's all I can remember except that at one point I can remember he gets cold, so she crawls in next to him to warm him. This isn't some kind of a hostage love story. The guy is really terrorized and tries to escape. I can't remember the outcome at all. I don't think it was good because my feeling about my memory of this movie is that it upset me.

To the best of my recollection, it was a movie from the '70s. I would guess early seventies, but I'm not sure.

The girl was a sort of a homely thin blond. The man she took hostage was slim and dark haired.

Can anybody remember this movie?

Thanks so much,

Naja

PS, I have been really enjoying your website since I found it a couple years ago.

One fine afternoon in the early '80s, I zipped my cable box channel indicator to the left, locked on to HBO and caught part of one of the most depressing and bizarre bits of animation I've ever been witness to.

It was done up in a very minimalist style, simple colorless line drawings against a blank white background. There were no character voices, only a narrator with a British accent. I don't know how long it had been on, but here's the part I caught:

A plane was zipping around the sky, out of control. It was apparently being flown by an outdoorsman who had his team of sled dogs on board. The plane crashed and everyone on board perished.

The next bit involved a child who needed an operation. You saw him standing alone in the middle of the screen and then an arm snatched him off-screen. It was then revealed that due to complications he died during surgery.

There was then a scene featuring a family huddled together. The scene switched to a shed and the narrator revealed that the family sought shelter inside but had no food. It was some sort of storage shed filled with containers of chemicals, and all the family members ended up drinking them and dying. This was represented by several bubbles rising above the roof that then turned into question marks.

At this point I had decided to forgo the ending of this ever-so-joyous offering and quickly zipped right, desperately hoping to catch an episode of "You Can't Do That On Television" or possibly "Danger Mouse" and forget what I had seen. But it's stayed with me ever since, and despite searching for clues online, I have never found out what it was.

Given the tone and the times, I figure it had something to do with the after effects of a nuclear war. There wasn't much more to the narration than descriptions of what was happening with the various characters. And given the narrator's accent, I assume it was made in the UK. Perhaps the BBC or some film company didn't want kids to miss out on all of the fun adults were having when watching "Threads" or "The War Game." So did anyone else out there happen to see this?

I was watching "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" one night recently, and it reminded me of a TV-movie trauma I saw in the late 1970s or early 1980s.

As best as I can remember, it involved a girl (possibly Eve Plumb, but I can't find this in her filmography) whose new stepmother was committing her in a psychiatric hospital, under the guise of taking her to a summer camp for near-sighted girls. I do recall the girl said, "Great, we'll all be bumping into each other."

At the asylum, the girl didn't "play ball", so the staff tried various methods of breaking her, one of which was putting her into the same cell as a violent inmate, hoping she'd get beaten up – but the two girls became friends instead, playing patty-cake when their cell was opened later.

I didn't get to see the end, as it was past my bedtime, but I was told the nurses there wanted to sterilize her – but she was rescued in the nick of time, possibly by her father.

The concept of being institutionalized frightened and fascinated me at the same time, and I have always enjoyed movies involving psychiatric hospitals. Does anyone else remember this TV movie? I am guessing it aired sometime between 1979 and 1983.

Thanks!

Dustin in Minnesota