Category: Name That Trauma!

I have a question maybe someone can help me with. In the early eighties I remember watching a slasher film where a man lived in a boarding house with his domineering mother. She would tell him that he needed to find himself a girl just like mother. He was killing the girls that would move into the boarding house. Using their body parts, he created a woman that looked like his mom. Then he locked his mother up with the body and told her to teach it to love him just like she did. Does it ring a bell? I can't seem to remember the title of the movie.

Unk Sez: How about it kids, anybody know this one? Leave your thoughts in the comments or email us kindertrauma@gmail.com if you do!

I remember being a kid and walking into the living room while my mother was watching a movie on television.  I watched the remainder of the movie and found it very scary.  It was about some kids (teenagers?) who were playing in/around a water tower, and I think one of them fell inside or got pushed inside.  If I remember right, the kid ended up dying.  I could be way off, but I was hoping someone would be able to tell me what movie I'm recalling.

UNK SEZ: Yikes, another day, another "Name That Trauma" stumper! I feel like I've seen this before. It kind of reminds me of THE OTHER but I think those kids where messing around in piles of hay. Wasn't there another movie where a kid fell into a silo of corn and suffocated in it? Falling into a water tower reminds me of something that might happen at the beginning of C.H.I.P.S. Gee, LeeAnn I'm not quite sure what this may be. If anyone has any ideas please dump them in to the comments section…but be very careful around the comment section edge, it's very slippery and several readers have been known to fall in, never to be heard from again!

Reading the article with AMANDA BY NIGHT gave me chills since, for a long time, I have been searching for something that was VERY similar to the Prisoner's ROVER…

When I was a kid (in the 80s) I rented a VHS tape that at the beginning had these previews and one was like this:

In the middle of the desert a man in a suit, laying on the sand, desperately drags himself at a slow pace, like something was about to attack him (but there is nothing around!). Then a quick cut shows us a big city downtown and a horrible noise. Suddenly, in the best HARRYHAUSEN stop-animation fashion we see flying a HUGE giant mechanical bug (shaped like a fly) that gets on top of one of the skyscrapers and yanks the whole thing out with debris falling all over. Cut back to the guy in the desert, cut to the giant fly with the building hanging between her legs, cut the guy, horrible sound getting more intense, cut to the point of view of the bug flying over dunes, cut to the guy hearing the noise, the bug gets on top of him and drops the building…on him.

It was horrific. I remember rewinding it and watching it over and over again. To this day it haunts me to know what that was about.

AUNTIE SEZ: Marcel, you have us stumped! If any of you dear readers know the name of this freaky fly flick, please leave it in the comments or email it to us at kindertrauma@gmail.com.

I don't think this is technically considered a trauma 'cause I kinda liked it, but here goes…

When I was 10-ish and growing up in lovely upstate NY, I used to wake up before everyone else and sneak downstairs to watch a very, very early morning T.V. show. It was probably around 1982 or 1983, and it featured (I think) a Dracula, a werewolf, and a Frankenstein in strangely comedic situations. Every once in a while there would be a musical montage of these goofy monsters dancing to stuff like The Archies "Sugar Sugar" or The Stones "Jumping Jack Flash."

I have often wondered if this show actually existed, or if it was just a psychedelic fever dream.

Either way, please help!

UNK SEZ: Melissa you are talking about THE GROOVIE GOOLIES. I loved that show as a kid. In fact I still love it. It premiered in 1970 and it was a spinoff of THE ARCHIES cartoon. Sabrina the Teenage Witch (who I also love) being the connecting factor!!!! Find out more HERE!

This was a movie about a young girl looking for her missing father seduced by a female vampire, chased and treed by werewolves who were fought off by the vampires as she watched from up in the tree.  This is all I can remember, please let me know if you have any idea what this might be.

UNK SEZ: Claudine, I know just what movie you are seeking! It is one of my personal favorites and it's called LEMORA: A CHILD'S TALE OF THE SUPERNATUAL. I've written about that haunting film on these very pages! Read my gushing ramblings about that gem HERE. Thanks for being traumatized by something I know. I was beginning to develop a complex! You cannot see me doing a Snoopy-flavored happy dance in your honor, but that is just what I am doing!

I'm so grateful to have come across this site.

I was about 2-3 years old when I saw this scene. It is of a woman screaming and running up a staircase with a wall on one side and the railing on the other. Hands come out of the wall trying to grab her as she runs up.

That's all I remember.

Everyone tells me I'm crazy, but how can a toddler make that up?

L.O.L.

Anyway it was in 1987 or 1988, and I was in Jacksonville Florida, if that helps. I can't find it anywhere, but I'm inclined to believe it's an old school haunted mansion type movie.

UNK SEZ: Sanabellia, I wonder what movie this is! It certainly sounds familiar, an old house, a chase up the stairs, creepy hands reaching out from the banister. I can't put my finger on it though. Any Kindertrauma readers out there with any ideas? You gotta help Sanabellia!!! Leave your best guesses in the comments section or email us at Kindertrauma@gmail.com. Somebody must know this one!!!

Hi, I am so glad I found out about your site!

When I was little I saw this terrifying movie that gave me nightmares for years, and I have been trying to figure it out for 10 years. My friends think I'm crazy. It was probably either late ‘80' or early ‘90s. The only part I can really remember is a little girl being chased by a big brown monster with horns or something, and she is in her room and the monster is in the mirror.

The mirror is one of those old long oval mirrors that stands on its own. I know it's vague. I think the little girl had dark brown hair. At first, I thought it was the trippy version of ALICE IN WONDERLAND that came out in '85, but I have watched it and that's not it.

The girl and the mirror are totally different.

I think I may have seen this other movie around the same time. If you can help me, I will not know how to thank you. It's killing me that I can't figure out what movie I saw.

Please help!!

UNK SEZ: Emilee, I'm not sure about this one. At first I thought it was MIRROR MIRROR (1990) based on your description of the mirror, but I think the beast in that movie is more of the scraggily hag variety. Then I thought of RIDLEY SCOTT'S LEGEND where the beast in question does have horns and the girl (MIA SARAH), though not a little girl, has dark hair. The beast indeed enters through a mirror at one point in that movie, but from what you've said I get the idea that the action takes place in a more traditional bedroom rather than the fantasy world depicted in LEGEND. You can watch that scene HERE. Let me know if that could possibly be the one you're looking for, otherwise I have to throw it out to our readers to assist! In the meanwhile, through my research, I did discover that a very similar occurrence as the one you mentioned once befell upon SESAME STREET's Grover who took his own monstrous mirror confrontation in absolute stride…

I came in on my father watching a movie and sat down with him.  I was coming in mid-movie so I don't know the whole plot but there was a guy and his girlfriend and a psycho bad guy that was after them.  The bad guy kidnaps the girlfriend and the hero goes after her, he catches up to them in some kind of parking lot at night.  The girl is now chained to the back of a huge semi truck by her legs – her arms are chained to some kind of fence or pipe coming out of the ground.  Bad guy watches it all from his side mirror and keeps laughing, smiling and revving the engine of the truck.  Good guy is pleading with him and finally tries to get closer to free his girlfriend, bad guy stomps on the gas and the truck screeches away amidst the girl's screams.  Now they didn't show the scene of her getting yanked apart, they just cut to the bad guy and the good guy but I was so bothered by the whole thing.

I kept asking my dad, "Is she okay, what happened to her, he didn't pull her arms off right?"

My dad finally told me to go and play in my room so I never saw the end of that movie but I had dreams later of that same scene and it has haunted me all this time.

UNK SEZ: This grizzly act can only be the work of RUTGER HAUER! Absinthe, your pop must have been watching 1986's THE HITCHER. What a crazy scene huh? I'm still kind of shocked. That was JENNIFER JASON LEIGH getting yanked apart and C.THOMAS HOWELL was the guy who had to stand by and watch it happen. It seemed good ol' J.J.L.'s acceptance into the final girl club was as good as written in stone, but maybe her application got lost in the mail or something. As disturbing and as counter intuitive to horror tropes as this scene is, you can be thankful that your young mind missed out on the way THE HITCHER serves up french fries…talk about finger licking good!

Last week a coworker glanced over my shoulder and asked what in the hell I was looking at. I explained the awesomeness that is Kindertrauma and he seemed appropriately impressed. Then he hit me up with his own "Name That Trauma" that left me totally stumped. So, I'm turning it over to you boys and the faithful readers of Kindertrauma….

My co-worker is very guarded about his age, but I know he's older than I am (36). His memory involves a movie or show he saw on television as a child. It could have been in black and white or in color. All he recalls of the plot is that there were some scientists performing super secret experiments on chimpanzees somewhere in the Arctic (or some other cold as a witch's tit kind of place). And get this; the scientists are being murdered off one by one by someone or something.

It's the last scene that has haunted him for years. The lone surviving scientist gets locked out of the lab and is stranded outside is below freezing temperatures. He furiously bangs on the reinforced door begging to be let back in and who appears in the small window of the door? One of the chimps, looking all smart and malevolent! You see, it was the chimps committing the murders all along! Needless to say, my future coworker was freaked the hell out of his short pants…

He's scoured the Internet looking for any clue about what movie or anthology series this could have been and has come up empty handed for years. Anyone have a clue? I'm guessing it's pre-PLANET OF THE APES and probably from some show like THE OUTER LIMITS.

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Mr. Canacorn, as a member of the same age-bracket as your guarded co-worker, I would like to believe he is referring to the seldom-aired, season three B.J. & THE BEAR Halloween special. Readers of a certain age will recall that season three of the GREG EVIGAN-helmed, big-rig situation comedy marked the departure of pesky Sherriff Elroy P. Lobo (CLAUDE AKINS) and heralded the introduction of the "Seven Lady Truckers."

Led by the immensely talented JUDY LANDERS as the appropriately named "Stacks," (her character had an insatiable appetite for pancakes from what I can recall), the "Seven Lady Truckers" aroused great friction and drove a wedge between the titular B.J. McKay and his best friend Bear.

Feeling spurned and dejected, the usually easy-going Bear reached his boiling point on the Halloween special, when he methodically hunted, brutally tortured, and savagely killed the "Seven Lady Truckers." B.J. of course had no idea who was behind the murders until the final, gory decapitation death of LANDERS.

Advertisers were mortified by the monkey violence, and the episode only aired in Eastern Europe and parts of Southern New Jersey. In the U.K. it was released theatrically as B.J. AND THE BEAR: AN EXPERIMENT IN FEAR, and was considered a major bomb.

Of course none of this actually occurred in what polite society refers to as "reality," so I am going to ask our astute readers for help. Does anyone have any idea as to what killer monkey show Mr. Canacorn's co-worker is talking about? Leave your guesses in the comments, or e-mail 'em to us at kindertrauma@gmail.com.

BONUS: Click the Bear button below to hear one of the best theme songs in the history of modern television!

UPDATE: Reader Ivan just sent in the following tip:

A COLD NIGHT'S DEATH: An awesome movie–I caught this on the old NYC ABC late movie–at first I thought it was a (good) ripoff of CARPENTER's THE THING, but the TV Guide set me straight. And it IS good. I'll never forget that damn monkey staring through the door at poor ELI WALLACH…

UPDATE: Big ups to reader Ivan for nailing this one! Another Name That Trauma! solved.

I remember watching a movie with my mother when I was young – about 6 – 8.  The movie was about a small town, which had a chemical (maybe nuclear?) company that employed them all.  Of course this is mid -1980's and they were trying to make a statement so the place is run very shoddy and we have a meltdown or a leak and everyone has to run for cover.  The part that got me was the ending, the one worker had a family with a few kids and his kids were playing hide and seek when the melt down occurred.  His youngest daughter hid in the trashcan and the mother couldn't find her in time.  I remember the ending of the father coming home and going to the trash can because he knew that was were she always hid and pulling her out now dead!  That last scene has stayed with me all these years and haunted me.

UNK SEZ: Absinthe, this does sound traumatic! I did a bit of research into the nuclear disaster movies of the eighties and I could not find any mention of this girl in a trash can. If the movie you're thinking of is anything like THE DAY AFTER, THREADS or TESTAMENT, you can be sure that you were not the only person left highly disturbed. I have a feeling somebody knows this one so you know the drill kids, any ideas go into the comments section or if need be, email us directly at kindertrauma@gmail.com!

UPDATE: Solved… the source of this trauma is the 1986 made for T.V. movie ACCEPTABLE RISKS (see the comments for more information). Special thanks to reader Grokenstein for saving the day!