Category: Name That Trauma!

I have to say that your blog is both horrible and really neat. Hopefully someone can help me figure out what these movies were so I can see them completely and stop being weird about it.

I was watching a T.V. show about horror movies, and it showed little clips of the scarier parts. I don't remember the date but I think it came out at the same time that CAT'S EYE did, because I keep thinking this was part of that movie (it's not). There is a horrible flesh-colored monster with no hair and generally human shaped, only it had the scariest mouth ever (lots of long sharp teeth) and it SMILED. For some reason I have it in my head that her name was Lucy (or Lucie) but I don't ever find pics when I Google. Maybe that was the creator's name for the puppet? Either way that thing was scary as hell.

The other movie memory was about a girl who may have been hallucinating. She was walking along in an alley or a dark park or something and hears a kitten crying. She followed the sounds to a trash can and lifted it up and something horrible was inside (it may have been just a rat but I think I was about 6 and they were scary) and she lost her mind screaming and acting nuts and then somehow (I don't know if she stopped hallucinating or I remembered it wrong) she ended up being comforted by some guy. I think it ended up that her sister was setting her up to seem crazy so she (the non-crazy sister) could get the guy. That kitten in the trash can scene made me forever nervous of sounds inside things I can't see into.

I will be amazed, but SO GRATEFUL, if anyone knows what in the world I'm talking about!

Thanks so much.

— Kim K.

UNK SEZ: I think I know the first one Kim! We've gotten a "Name That Trauma!" on it before (HERE)! It sounds like you are talking about "Lizzie" from the TOM SAVINI directed episode of TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE entitled "Inside the Closet". You can read our review of it HERE. As for the second, hopefully one of our readers will know the answer to that!

Oh my dearest Kindertrauma, I have JUST discovered you, and I'm in love! I'm hoping you can help me figure out who was behind the biggest trauma of my young life. It was, of course, a PSA, and it sent me and my brother running out of the room in tears back in the '70s. I'm pretty sure it was made by the Latter Day Saints. It was about hate, and it featured a little red cartoon guy with smoke coming out of his ears and, as I recall, wild swirly eyes. He started far off in the distance and stomped toward the screen as a creepy song about hate played. The last line of the song, as I recall, was, "Hate…the one it hurts the most…is YOU!" And when it said, "you," the little guy EXPLODED!

I've searched for this thing in vain for years. The closest reference I've found is HERE.

Oh, and I did a gallery installation about THE WALTONS' episode "The Changeling" at GalleryThe here in NYC. I slept in the gallery window wearing a red wig, surrounded by Raggedy Ann dolls, as a TV played the scene.

I hope someone else remembers this PSA!

— Stacy Pershall

UNK SEZ: Thanks Stacy! I don't remember your commercial but I've always been haunted by another one that I'm pretty sure was from the Latter Day Saint's too. In it, a little girl is shown crying, looking out of a rain soaked window and then her mom comes up behind her and the girl says, "Mom, why am I so dumb?" and that's it. They used to show it all the time and I know it existed because it inspired a popular catchphrase in my home. I'm not a fan of religion myself but I must give credit where it's due and say that the Amish make great pickles and the Mormons make great TV commercials. I could watch LDS spots all day! They run the gamut from noose inspiring to nitrous oxide sweet and every so often they're narrated by TOM BOSLEY! I looked for both of our PSAs in the YouTube pile up below and came up empty handed but maybe if we keep our fingers crossed and pray to the Internet, both of our ads will reemerge soon!

ALSO: Thank you Stacy for alerting the Kindertrauma offices to both HEDDA GET BEDDA and the board game SEANCE! Kids, you can buy Stacy's book LOUD IN THE HOUSE OF MYSELF over HERE!

Is there anyone else here who has a recollection of seeing an After School/Scared Straight type T.V. program from around 1980-ish that ends with a boy being stabbed in the guts and bleeding to death in the street?

When I was about 10 or so (around 1980-ish) my grandmother made certain that I was home from school so that I could watch a late afternoon television movie about the down side of falling in with the "wrong crowd" (you know what road "good intentions" paved.) The kid in the story was playing baseball/softball/stickball with some friends and hits a homerun that smashes through the window of some gang members' hangout ruining their pizza. The gang kids then track down the ball player and stab him to death in retaliation for nailing them with the homerun ball. My recollection is that at the end of the movie, the kid who has been narrating the whole thing is lying in the vacant lot holding his bleeding stomach (I also remember the gore being very explicit–his guts might have been hanging out) while repeating, "I don't want to die."

The program was followed by a documentary on the making of the show detailing how at least a portion of the script was written by gang kids who had been invited to help develop the cautionary tale. It didn't make me afraid of gangs or baseball, but it started a lifelong interest/obsession/recurring nightmare with belly cutting.

Got a title? Any ideas?

Thanks,

— Bracken

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Bracken, your Name That Trauma induced some serious déjà vu as I think it is the same After School Special reader Shane wrote in about a little whiles back. Readers, please help us kill two birds with one stone and sound off in the comments!

Hi Kindertrauma,

I have a Name That Trauma from the early 2000s. I asked about it on Yahoo but got no (helpful) answers.

Around 2002-3, I caught about 10 minutes of a movie on T.V. The movie looked pretty grainy so I'm guessing it wasn't a new release. I have no idea what channel it was on.

The gist of it was that there were a group of harpies, or bird-human hybrids, I don't know, that lived on a mountain near a coastal village. I've since realized that this was probably not an American film, as the scenery looked very European or possibly even Russian, with the big snow-capped mountains and tiny little quaint seaside cottages.

Maybe it was being played during a foreign (crappy) cinema marathon or something, but now I'm just guessing.

I remember the bird people, whose costumes pretty much consisted of cheap fake wings, talons and tails, flying down and terrorizing the residents of one of the cottages. A girl came out of the cottage and the bird people flew down and grabbed her with their feet and dragged her along the ground into the forest. That's when I turned it off.

Do you guys have any idea?

— Tasha P.

OK, this didn't totally scar, or scare me… but I NEED to watch it again. I'm usually pretty good with finding old movies I used to watch as a kid on T.V. in the middle of the night… I own copies of MONSTER IN THE CLOSET, UNINVITED (cat demon on a boat version) and GHOULIES 2…(GHOULIES 1 sucked)… BUT I specifically remember one thing that I can't find.

It was a nerdy guy who was attempting to summon a demon. Somehow or other he ends up summoning a nerdy demon. Like a lesser demon or something like that. I want to say the demon was yellow, and there may have been a point that he wore glasses. The demon was trapped in a pentagram force field or something like that, and couldn't move, but I think the movie had a lot of talking. IF I remember correctly, the yellow demon made a deal with the human to help him summon a more powerful demon and there was a huge thing about passing something (summoning scroll maybe) through the force field.

PLEASE help. I want to say it was on USA UP ALL NIGHT… MAYBE HBO… It also could have been a short film, because I think it all happened in one room.

Hi,

Love your website, especially the trauma confessions.

The Trauma I need identified is actually my brother's. He saw a short film, where a brother and sister find a very deep dark hole in the ground and could hear movement at the bottom. At first they send down a flashlight in a bucket, they get back gold coins and a note asking for, "Eats."

They keep sending things down until the whatever is down in the hole does not send gold coins back in return. The brother gets angry and decides to go down the hole via a rope to complain. From the perspective of the sister we see the brother reach the bottom, but then his flashlight goes out.

The sister pulls the rope up and there is a note attached to it. The note states, "Thanks for the eats."

Regards,

— Robert

UPDATE: NAME THAT TRAUMA SOLVED! Let's all give a round of thanks to reader Rabs for knowing it is the episode "Thanksgiving" from the T.V. series AMAZING STORIES!

So when I was staying over at my grandma's when I was about 8 or so, I stayed in their spare room, which had a TV (a luxury I didn't have at home).

When everyone went to bed, I decided to take advantage of the opportunity… only for it to turn into a massive FML.

I switched onto a movie and the scene was as follows:

A teenage girl is hiding from a man/thing under a table in a diner. She's with a companion (for the life of me I can't remember if her companion was a human or a dog, that wasn't the part that scarred me.)

The guy she was hiding from comes in and grabs her from under the table and takes her into his truck. So far, just your ordinary chase/kidnapping.

Then the guy who took her (who's in the driver's seat), grows a massive lizard tongue and licks her… and then I switched that shit off before I could see what happened next.

I need to know what movie this was from, so I can watch it, and find out what sort of lizard freak would do that to a girl…

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

— Beau K.

UPDATE: NAME THAT TRAUMA SOLVED! Kudos to reader jaakko for knowing this one comes from, of all places, HOWARD THE DUCK!

I remember watching a faux TV news broadcast that was live reporting the WAR OF THE WORLDS story — alien invasion, etc. This would have been in the late '80s, maybe early '90s. I remember that coming back from every commercial break, there was a disclaimer notifying the viewing audience that the news report wasn't real. They kept "losing signal" or "losing contact" with their reporters in the field as things got more and more intense — I believe it ended with color bars or snow or something that made it look like the station feed was lost.

I was little — maybe 7 or 8 at the most — when I caught this, so it would have been '88, '89 maybe. Scared the bejesus out of me… even though there were the disclaimers, it was SUPER realistic and I was completely freaked out. I know there was a TV series around the same time, but I don't think this was part of it, unless it was a special episode or maybe some kind of promotion for it.

Can't find anything on this out there but would love it if you could help me identify it. My boyfriend has followed your site for years, and he suggested I reach out to you — I'm a librarian and I'm kind of embarrassed that my awesome research skills can't dig anything up on this, so I defer to your considerable expertise.

Thanks!

—Erin M.

UPDATE: NAME THAT TRAUMA SOLVED! Special thanks to reader chopmeup for knowing it was WITHOUT WARNING!

First of all, thank you for your wonderful site! It's like catnip for me.

I've been reluctant to submit this "Name That Trauma!," because my memories of it are so bare bones and fragmented, and I'm not sure if I've made up parts of them (just like any good trauma!) But I figure that if anybody can help me find this movie, it's somebody on your site.

I'm pretty sure that it was on HBO in the late '80s or very early '90s. It was in the afternoon, so it probably wasn't rated R. I remember imagery of a mother and her baby in a house, a large diamond or other clear magic jewel (very SUPERGIRL-y), and a monster. In particular I remember a shot of a big, monstrous arm/hand with claws. The monster might have been after the baby or the diamond, or both?

Also, I think that there were shots taken from the monster's point of view, and in these shots everything was bathed in greenish-yellowish-brownish hues. I remember looking it up in TV Guide and seeing that its genre was listed as "fantasy," but I somehow forgot to retain (repressed?!) the title! Kindertrauma, can you help me?

All my best,

— Ben S.

UPDATE: NAME THAT TRAUMA SOLVED! By Reader Ben S. no less! Turns out this trauma comes from 1982's TIME WALKER!

Hey, Kindertrauma!

Hope you guys are doing OK. Just wanted you to name this movie that traumatized me as a child, to the point it made me feel amazingly disgusted by the sight of slugs.

I can't for the life of me remember what was the name of this movie, all I remember is that there was some night scene where some janitor (a woman) was paralyzed, laying on the floor, and something forced her mouth wide open… and from the corners of the hall she was lying, a HUGE amount of slugs started to crawl over her…

slower and slower…

to the point they start crawling on her body…

with her jaw, WIDE OPEN…

And THOSE FUCKING SLUGS, BY THE HUNDREDS, STARTED SLIDING DOWN HER THROAT, CHOKING HER TO DEATH.

I was probably around 8-9 at the time… I cannot unsee that scene ever since.

Could you guys name that movie? I'd really appreciate it!

Keep up the great work!

Regards,

—D

UNK SEZ:: All I can think of is SLUGS (1988) but does it fit? I know snails chomp on a chick in FULCI's AENIGMA (1987) and I know that slug like creatures attack in NIGHT OF THE CREEPS (and SLITHER) but all I can think of is SLUGS which seems way too easy. Anybody have any other guesses?

NOTE: Top slug image is from the SHAUN HUTSON novel SLUGS and comes courtesy of the ever excellent TOO MUCH HORROR FICTION!

UPDATE: NAME THAT TRAUMA SOLVED! Thanks to reader visitedbyvoices for naming it with AENIGMA! Per a follow-up email from Reader D.:

Hey Aunt John!

First of all, I wanna thank you for posting my Name That Trauma! 😀

As for the leads, "Squirm" looked pretty damn close, but I'm gonna go with visitedbyvoices's one, "Aenigma"… I've watched that scene over and over again, while trying to remember what I've seen like, 20 years ago, and I have to say it has to be that movie!

Although those are snails and not slugs, and the woman doesn't look like a janitor at all (don't ask me why I remember the scene like that, I've no clue lol), it's a night scene, she's paralyzed and those fuckers pretty much covered her entire face, killing her!

Thank you so much for solving my childhood greatest mystery! I really, really appreciate it!!

Keep up the excellent work! 😀

Kind regards,

— D