Category: Name That Trauma!

I just love your site, and am getting lots of good tips on movies to see. Also, it helped me to revisit a horror that terrified me for years after watching it at the tender age of 14, it was PIECES. It truly made me feel sick for a very long time. I hired it again when I was about 23, but just couldn't bring myself to watch it; the memories of the horror were too strong. I am happy to say that after discovering your site and seeing a clip on your youtube page, that at the more mature age of 39 I was able to sit through the whole movie, and even giggle a little. Yay!!! The power has been taken away from that particular nastie.

My find-that-film has been bugging me for at least 15 even 20 years. I watched it when I was very young, maybe 8 years old. I was born in 1970 and the movie was probably from the ‘60s or ‘70s. A HAMMER horror type (don't think it is though) with a male actor, PETER CUSHING type (probably not him though). The only scene I remember which I think was near end of movie…. a woman tied up and possibly gagged lying on an alter/bed type thing, in a church(?), under a white sheet. Next to her a man with a knife, looking all possessed about to plunge knife into the woman for a sacrifice; woman squirming away from position of knife raised above her, then suddenly another man bursts in and shoots the knife wielding man in the back. The woman was a real woman (not a child), naked but covered by a white sheet. She is on the bed/alter and fully aware of the pending sacrifice, but not willing, there is fear in her eyes and you can see her move her body under the sheet trying to get away from the knife, which the man is holding above her. You can see she wants to escape and thinking by moving her body she will avoid the plunge of the knife, this is why I think she is tied and gagged, not a mesmerized victim as you often find in these types of movies. Anyway, someone bursts into the room/church and shoots the villain in the back. End of movie.

Hope you can help. Glad to get the nightmare of PIECES out of my system, now just to figure out this little bugger….

Hello!

A friend turned me on to your site…it's FABULOUS. So I wondered if you can help me. I have a fear of spiders, which I believe goes back to a scene in a movie I saw as a kid. It went something like this:

A woman is in her house, I think asleep or something, when she kind of becomes under the power of this voice. The voice tells her to go out to the barn, which she does. It tells her to lay up on this table, which she does. It tells her to open her mouth "wider." "WIDER", and when it's wide enough, a tarantula drops into her mouth and we see the lump kind of go down into her throat. I have very little recollection of what occurred before or after that, but that one scene has, apparently, scarred me for life.

Any ideas on what this movie could've been?? I grew up in the '70s and '80s, and I'm thinking this was definitely a '70s era movie.

If you can help, that would be great, although I don't know if I'll have the guts to watch the movie, even if I do find out what it is. I thought if I watched BURNT OFFERINGS again as an adult, I'd get the image of the smiling undertaker out of my head, but NOPE, he's JUST as scary now as he was then…

Thanks for listening!

UNK SEZ: Angela, you are speaking of one of my favorites, WES CRAVEN's DEADLY BLESSING! This might not be one of Mr. CRAVEN's most successful outings, but with a cast that includes MAREN JENSEN, SHARON STONE, LISA HARTMAN, ERNEST BORGNINE, MICHAEL BERRYMAN and DOUGLAS BARR, as JOY BEHAR would say, "Who cares?" My older brother somehow snuck me into the theater to see this one way back in 1981 and it scared the hell out of me too! I'll never forget the film's crazy climax, which, as it turns out, was forced on CRAVEN by a studio who demanded a surprise ending no matter how little sense it made! DEADLY BLESSING is not currently available on DVD, but for now you can watch the whole thing on YouTube starting HERE!

I wanted to let you know that I really enjoy your site! It brings back memories to many classic films that I had completely forgotten about. I have a "Name That Trauma!" inquiry that I was hoping you all could help me with. Here goes: It is definitely a short, not a full length film. It Involves a woman in her apartment alone and a doll (I think maybe it was a ventriloquist dummy, but may be wrong) coming to life and attacking her. I also think the film contained no dialogue, but again i could be wrong. Very creepy stuff. Hope you can help and keep up the great work!

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Upon receiving this one, my mind instantly went to the KAREN BLACK classic TRILOGY OF TERROR. There is not too much dialogue, as it is just BLACK versus the killer doll; it is a vignette, so it is pretty short, and most people usually just remember this part of the movie. I asked Matthew if this was the case, and he responded:

All of this sound good except that the imagery that really stuck with me was the doll… sort of how calm and polite he looked. Not tribal or scary at all. Any chance we could run this by your readers?

There you have it kids… we are looking for a non-Zuni, well-composed killer doll. The calm nature also rules out CHUCKY from CHILD'S PLAY, and the old school BLACK DEVIL DOLL FROM HELL. If anyone knows the answer, be a doll and sound off in the comments or send us an email.

UPDATE: Name That Trauma! SOLVED. Let's all raise our juice boxes to reader incognitovixen for cracking the case!

O.K., in grade two, our teacher was a mild sadist. She showed us depressing films and picture books, and apparently got some sick kick out of it. Most I've forgotten, but one I haven't been able to forget. I saw it in 2001, but it was probably from the '70s/'80s

It was a cartoon about these inner city kids. They were all African American. One of the boys was a comedian (I clearly remember one of his jokes being, "Today, I told a man that my shoes were hurting me. He told me that I had them on the wrong feet, and I said, 'These are the only feet that I have'"). The comedian boy had an older brother who was in a gang. There was apparently going to be some sort of big gang fight, and so the comedian boy went to stop it. In the end, he gets shot (possibly by his brother). It ends with all of the characters sad at the boy's funeral.

Something makes me think that it was either a FAT ALBERT cartoon, or that it was animated by the same artists.

This one has been bothering me for years. No one I've ever talked to has ever heard of this movie, which traumatized me as a kid.

I remember seeing this when I was kindergarten, so we're talking the 1970/1971 school year. I think it was in black and white, and I think it was narrated rather than having the actors actually talk.

Anyway, the story involves three kids, an older boy and girl, and a young boy, possibly their brother. The two older kids get separated from the brother, who is then grabbed by two older boys dressed as Indians. They take him to the beach and tie him to a pole and run off. The tide starts to come in and the water rises higher and higher. The boy looks to be in danger of drowning, but finally the older kids and their grandfather (I think) rescue him.

Like I said, it's been nearly 40 years since I've seen this, but it still sticks with me. I have no idea who thought it would be appropriate to show this to a bunch of 5-year-olds. Anyone can back me up on this, and confirm this is not some hallucination on my part would have my gratitude.

AUNT JOHN SEZ: It's time to put on your thinking caps dear readers. Does anyone know what Bill is talking about? Sound off in the comments or shoot us an email.

I believe this might be a TV movie, probably from the very early '90s ('90-'92). I don't quite remember what it was about, but I do remember it took place in the sewers and there some kind of sewage sludge that, when touched, would turn said person or animal into a monster. There may have been a large group of people, but what I do remember is that there was a PHYLLIS DILLER lookalike that got turned into a 10-foot pillar of terror. I think it was a stop-motion effect. The image of that monster has been burned into my mind since the day I saw it, but to this day (over 10 years) I have not for the life of me been able to figure out what I saw.

Please, please, please!! If you have any ideas as to what this might be I would be eternally grateful.

UNK SEZ: Zoe, when I hear "sewer" I think C.H.U.D. but I don't recall the old lady monster that you mentioned in that one. 1991's THE BONEYARD does indeed feature PHYLLIS DILLER and she does grow into a giant monster at one point in that film. Check out the trailer HERE and for an extensive review just pop on over to the great ZOMBOS CLOSET OF HORROR. Let us know if thats the one you've been looking for!

Hello. Love your blog, and I had a couple of traumas I thought maybe you could help me with. Both come from television in the early 1980s, and I wish I had clearer memories of them, but here's what I can recall:

The first is an animated P.S.A. shown during Saturday morning cartoons in the early ‘80s, done in a style that, to the best of my recollection, was similar to the comic strip ZIGGY. It was about controlling or expressing your anger, and featured an animated ZIGGY-type character against a white background, getting angrier and angrier. It absolutely terrified me as a child; I couldn't have been more than 5 at the time. I think my dad might have even called the T.V. station to complain because I was so disturbed by the ad!

The second would come from probably around the same time, some sort of docudrama show on daytime T.V. during the week. All I remember is that the show ended with the main character being executed in the electric chair. At the time, I was convinced that it was a real execution. I'm not sure if it was a movie or TV show or some kind of daytime special. But I remember it being particularly bleak and grim in a gritty, late-‘70s/early-‘80s kind of way.

I grew up in Washington, D.C., if that helps at all.

I certainly appreciate any help you might be able to give in helping piece together these disturbing childhood viewing experiences.

Thanks!

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Sorry Harris, since I was not raised in D.C. nor I have ever been big on ZIGGY or daytime programming for that matter, save for game shows (NO WHAMMIES!), I really haven't a clue. Readers, help a brother out with a comment or an e-mail.

So, this might be a little bit out of your purview, as it involves a picture book rather than a movie.

When I was in 2nd grade or so, I attended a very conservative Christian school. Once a year they would have a book give-away in the library, where they got rid of books that were too battered or moldy or whatever to have in the library anymore, and make room for new books. I saw a brightly colored picture book on dogs, and snagged it. I think the cover might have been yellow, or had a golden retriever on it or something. It had that sort of hard, cloth covered binding, and the illustrations seemed ‘60s-ish.

Anyways, for the first three quarters of the book, it was standard fare, with general dog facts, and dog breeds from around the world, that sort of thing. Then I got to the last section, dog lore.

Also known as ALL ABOUT WEREWOLVES. Seriously, it was about werewolves, nothing else. This section was written in the same didactic style as the rest of the book, (absolutely no indication that this wasn't fact) and had such lovely topics as "how to tell a werewolf" (I remember a picture of a guy with scratches all over his face, from running through the underbrush), and finally, a section on how to practice lycanthropy, and turn your self into a werewolf.

I swear I am not making this up. As a little girl from a sheltered background who had to cover her eyes during some of the more intense scenes in SNOW WHITE, you can guess how much this traumatized me. I think I ended up performing an "exorcism" on it, and throwing the book over my back fence. I refused to go behind our house for like a year after that, certain that the "demonic" book had haunted the area.

So, I'm really curious if it's as bad as I remember it, or if my overactive imagination has been playing tricks on me.

Thank you for any help you can offer!

Here's what I remember:

There's a bunch of little kids in a clearing and they have some kind of living thing in a bag hanging above them. One of the kids gives another a wooden stick and the kid, who is obviously trying to not look like a wuss in front of his friends, starts beating on the bag with the stick. A big blood-stain forms on the bag and when it falls, it's revealed that inside the bag is the kid's own pet rabbit! (or maybe it was his dog, but I seem to remember it being a rabbit).

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Dear readers, anyone out there care to take a swing at this one? No need for a blindfold, just leave your guesses in the comments or shoot us an email.

EARLIER: When piñatas attack!

I saw this site and have spent the past few days reading various traumas; most of them I can understand what makes them so frightening. There are a few traumas that I would love to ask about but above all others there's one that sticks in my memory more than any other. I believe I was four or five (‘89-‘90) when I was shown a children's book. The details are very vague, but if memory serves me correctly it was a fairytale about monsters that stole a woman's baby and replaced it with a monster (I want to say ogre but don't quote me on that).

I can barely remember anything else, but I would also venture to say that someone goes to fight the monsters and reclaim the baby. Sadly that's it. The picture of the "baby" that had been put as a replacement to the child was very frightening and I refused to ever read it again. Unfortunately I can neither remember who had shown it to me nor what ever happened. If anyone could help me I would be greatly obliged.

UNK SEZ: Anybody out there remember this baby swapped with monster tale?!

UPDATE: Name That Trauma Solved! It's "Outside Over There" by Maurice Sendak. Mad props to the Mickster for solving this one so quickly!