Category: Special Guest Stars

AUNT JOHN SEZ: I love me some horror movies and I love me some musicians, but you know what I really love? That's right, horror-movie loving rock stars! They really hold a special place in my heart, so I am pretty stoked to say that not only did we receive some pretty super traumafessions from Melissa Rodenbeek and Hiram Lucke of the super group THE HARVEY GIRLS, but they were also kind enough to let us debut the new video for "Caerse Muerto" from their latest album "I've Been Watching a Lot of Horror Movies Lately." So let's take a trip down bad memory lane with Hiram & Melissa and then we'll peep their video which pays tribute to EVIL DEAD and CEMETARY MAN. Take it away Hiram…

POLTERGEIST (1982)

I have an uncle who is a very religious man. He's the kind of guy who keeps Chick Tracts around the house in large bags to give away (he's a preacher, after all.) I used to read them as a kid when visiting his family, mainly because they were spread out on the coffee table. Later, I figured out this was probably on purpose — although he was very nice, he would occasionally say things to my parents like, "God watches over his flock, even those that stray," say after they related a story about narrowly avoiding a car wreck. Because I was the kind of kid who regularly checked out ghost stories and gothic tales from our town's very small public library, I was drawn to Jack Chick's crude depictions of good and evil.

One day I read a tract in which a man looks in the mirror only to see his face melting because of his sins. This was during an HBO summer* when I watched Poltergeist about 357 times. The scene where one of the paranormal investigators looks in the mirror and watches his face disintegrate into maggot-filled goo and blood running into the sink… remember that? Well, I couldn't get it out of my mind, and with this new image firmly nestled against it, I didn't look in a mirror for years. In fact, I would purposefully run past a large mirror we had in our hallway while turning my head the other direction. Luckily, I was still a few years from puberty so I didn't have to worry too much about my appearance.

I also never went to church again.

*This is Melissa's phrase for summers in the Midwest — Kansas to be exact. It's when you're young and have no money to do anything and it's 100 degrees for three months, if not longer, so all you do is sit around watching cable with a fan blowing on you (or, if you're lucky, in the air conditioning — which my parents didn't decide to get until I'd left the house). You end up watching a lot of movies over and over again. I would do things like count the number of stunt people… I believe PREDATOR had the most, with around 150 listed in the credits. So, that's an HBO summer.

—Hiram

THE OTHER (1972)

So for some damn reason, this movie aired regularly on CBS in the late 1970s, when I was a credulous and easily startled child. The setting is a wholesome 30s-era farm, where young twins Niles and Holland Perry (CHRIS and MARTIN UDVARNOKY) run around saying "cripes" a lot. UTA HAGEN plays a mystical Russian grandma reminiscent of all the Bensonhurst babushka ladies whose mustaches I both feared and esteemed. UTA teaches Niles "the game," which permits him to psychically link to another's mind. It's a satisfyingly dramatic process, entailing hoarse whispering, profuse sweating, and folding like a T.V. tray at the end from the sheer mental effort of it all.

Niles spends most of his time connecting to and freaking out about Holland, a remorseless junior psychopath. I cried when Holland flung a cat into a dry well. I cried when Holland sunk a baby into a water barrel so that just a bit of dark hair floated at the top. But what scared me too much to cry was the finger — cut off a corpse with a pair of garden shears, carefully wrapped in tissue paper, and hidden away until it was green and fat as a corrupt sausage.

It's just not fair that the little girls in THE SHINING get all the creepy twin glory.

(The movie features an outstanding lyrical soundtrack by JERRY GOLDSMITH, who also scored POLTERGEIST. Suggested drinking game: Every time Niles portentously whispers "Holland," chug a lemonade.)

—Melissa

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Thanks Hiram & Melissa! Be sure to check out their Top 10 Horror Movie Music Moments, and get a copy of "I've Been Watching a Lot of Horror Movies Lately" from Circle Into Square.

And now, let's watch the world premiere of "Caerse Muerto":

I envy you, I really do.

That is, if you're like one of the many Kindertrauma regulars who were nearly scared clean out of childhood itself by media such as public service announcements, doll commercials, Claymation cartoons, and DISNEY/SESAME fare. Sure, I was occasionally creeped out by those things, too, but on the whole probably viewed such incidents as welcome moments of quiet dread. After all, I was too being traumatized by the blood ‘n guts of cinematic material aimed at adults…

A child of divorce, I can't recall a time when my father didn't take me to the movies every Sunday. The problem is, he took me to the movies he wanted to see as I guess this was his set-aside time each week to catch up on both current releases and classics at the revival houses… or just to check out the latest grindhouse offerings on 42nd Street. This was New York City in the 1970's, a wonderland of high-, middle- and lowbrow film culture rubbing shoulders with each other and confusing impressionable little kids like me.

The first grownup movies I recall seeing "officially"—meaning, my mother was aware of these outings, unlike earlier ones—were screened as part of a PLANET OF THE APES mini-fest. One of the titles was 1971's ESCAPE, the topic of a recent excellent Traumafession by FilmFather who sums up my feelings pretty well. By "mini-fest" I mean that in this pre-home-video age, it was common practice to re-release older films in a cycle to play on the same bill as the new installment. So I remember seeing several of the APES movies back-to-back, a nonstop parade of grim violence and sympathetic characters being killed off.

Speaking of sympathetic characters getting the axe, the only movie I was so terrified of that I just couldn't cope at all was THEATRE OF BLOOD (1973). By all accounts this is a worthwhile movie, but to this day, nearly forty years later, I still haven't been able to bring myself to watch it. Fairly early on the dramatic structure/tension of the film is made clear—VINCENT PRICE is killing off, one by one, those whom he feels have slighted him. Since I was either seven or eight when I sat there in the darkness watching this, I'm not sure that I grasped that the victims were cruel theater (oops, "theatre") critics, and certainly the film's campier aspects were lost on me. All I understood was that that people were being murdered… horribly, graphically, inexorably.

This itself probably wouldn't have been an issue for me. I would have just gripped my armrests harder and gutted my way through. But one of the upcoming victims was played by ROBERT MORLEY, whom I already knew as a pitchman from the British Airways TV ads of the time. His persona in these commercials? The charmingly harmless chubby man who just wants to be your friend. And VINCENT PRICE was about to ensure that he wasn't going to be anyone's friend, ever.

"No, Daddy," I remember pleading, "I don't want him to kill the nice fat man and I know he's going to kill the nice fat man."

After attempts at shushing me didn't work—in fact, I was getting louder and whinier and more desperate by the minute—my Dad grabbed my hand and led me up the aisle and out in the sunlight. I had already been crying for some time.

My Dad's anger/annoyance at me was palpable, undeniable. Which is partly how I know I must have been terrified out of my gourd: it would have taken a lot of conviction on my part to defy him to the point where we had to leave the theater (not: "theatre"). And of course I understood his anger and did not find it unreasonable. After all, I had ruined his Sunday-at-the-movies plans with my juvenile anxieties over a bit of gruesome bloodshed.

But even now I don't blame him for his response—I'd been subjected to plenty of other screen-trauma by this point in life, so why was I over-reacting in this one particular case? In truth, though, I was probably so terrified during earlier movies that I couldn't find my vocal cords to protest. One horror flick that left lasting marks on my tender brain was TALES FROM THE CRYPT (1972). The anthology set-up meant a new type of terror was introduced every ten or fifteen minutes, so in effect the movie attacked my childhood from multiple angles. In particular, the famous JOAN COLLINS segment with the murderous Santa Claus was taboo-bashing to a seven-year-old's fragile psyche. In a way it's a proto-slasher sequence, and so helped fuel maniac-at-large fears for me for years to come (e.g., around campfires). Also, another reason I think this segment impacted me for life is that as an adult I perversely find the most compelling theme to be when two evils square off against each other, and that's what we have here since COLLINS is a murderer herself.

But this entire segment is just a warm-up act in TALES FROM THE CRYPT. Poor PETER CUSHING's being picked upon—itself a resonant theme for kids, or at least for me—and then returning from the dead with that hand thrusting upwards from the wormy grave! That moment is still thudding away somewhere deep inside me. And then the topper, somehow beyond that: the red, raw heart as the end punctuation both to the story and to a disturbingly rhymed Valentine's Day verse. Wow, that's like something that's made intentionally to flow into the deeper, darker currents of a kid's imagination…

In fact, this movie had it all, now that I think about, every type of grisly nastiness including revenge-gore: I also suffered a soul-concussion thanks to the segment that ends with the bad guy being chased down a narrow, razor-lined corridor by an attacking dog. Being sliced to ribbons has never been more visceral for me, even in movies when, unlike here, they actually show such the slicing on-camera. In any case, TALES FROM THE CRYPT, aside from ruining me forever in terms innocently enjoying the movies, not to mention my social/moral development, also seemed to speak to me—indeed, it was as if the unspeakable had been uttered aloud. The things you imagine at night when the lights are off, the supreme scariness of dogs, knives, cemeteries—all of this was now reality to me. It was a strange form of validation, knowing now that things this evil and tragic existed in the real world—for of course that's what the movies were to me: they were real because they existed outside of my head. Forget about their being "fictional"—that distinction carried little weight at the time and probably still doesn't.

My Dad also took me to museums and arthouse theaters for horror when it screened as part of festivals or repertory programming. At one museum (NYC's MOMA?) I recall sitting through numerous European silent films, and looking back, I realize that some of these were probably German Expressionist classics (CALIGARI, NOSFERATU) since they seemed quite familiar when I saw them in my late teens a dozen years later. At the time, they were captivating but for the most part didn't hit me in the gut.

One hugely notable exception on the Euro-front was a film that so traumatized me that I didn't know its title (or even if I imagined the film itself) until decades later. That's how strong my repression of it was. Anyway, SPIRITS OF THE DEAD was another anthology film, with three famous directors each trying their hand at a POE adaptation. Released in the late ‘60s, I must have seen it in revival four or five years later. There are three stories in this film, but LOUIS MALLE's "William Wilson" segment so horrified me that I later blocked out all memory of the others. The erotic S&M undertone (overtone?) was, I'm guessing, inappropriate for an under-ten child, with one key scene showing ALAIN DELON whipping a too-sexy BRIGITTE BARDOT. But the scene that lifted the top of my skull and then proceeded to stir my brains with a sharp spoon featured a dissection by DELON on a still-living young woman. I believe he's interrupted, but that's beside the point, which was… YOU MEAN YOU CAN CUT UP SOMEONE LIKE YOU CUT UP YOUR DINNER? YOU MEAN SUCH STUFF CAN BE SHOWN IN MOVIES? YOU MEAN YOUR OWN PARENTS CAN TAKE YOU THESE MOVIES?!?

Okay, enough shouting. The bottom line is that these movies, and a lot more in addition, messed me up irrevocably… but in a good way. After all, I've earned my living over the years in large part from horror. So what—and whom—do I have to thank for that? In short, maybe it wasn't a "problem," as I described it earlier, that my father took me to the films he wanted to see, but rather a blessing…

Thanks, Dad!

UNK SEZ: Thanks Peter for the super deluxe traumafession! I envy your seventies era 42nd street memories. I think I was eating Wonder Bread in Alison Park, PA at the time, terrified by car headlights beaming light on my bedroom ceiling and a poorly placed clown painting. For all you folks out there who don't know our friend and early (meaning essential) supporter PETER GUTIERREZ, he is an author, journalist and now with NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD: REANIMATED, a DVD producer!

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD: REANIMATED is a fresh new look at your favorite ROMERO classic created by a collaboration of a multitude of artists and fans of the original film. If you haven't already seen it, check out the trailer below to get an idea of what's in store for you! You can snag a copy HERE and why don'tcha check out the official website for more info HERE!

""If your bed starts shaking, just come and get me as quickly as you can," those were the words my mother spoke after watching THE EXORCIST for the first time. Needless to say, I shared a bed with my sister that night so I wouldn't have to be alone. It was after that when the images started to come. Night after night I would try and fall asleep and I would see the images of Regan's face coming at me in a continual loop. My parents thought about taking me in to a psychologist for it but I figured I could fight through it by continually watching the film and facing the horror which is, THE EXORCIST, the single greatest horror film ever made.

As much as I tried I couldn't get the film out of my head as a youngster…I even went so far as to tear out the picture of Regan's head which was on the inside of early Fangoria covers and put it on my wall…but I think it only made things worse. What really got to me was the randomness of the event and the fact that there really didn't seem to be any logical explanation. Watching the mother go through the torment of trying to figure out what's wrong with her daughter was terrifying enough (especially watching her be put into the machine for catscans), but the things which happen to her in her room and the way it slowly builds is filmmaking at its best, in fact, I didn't learn to sleep with the lights off until I went to college and had a freshman roommate, I was 19. My dad would always come to the top of the stairs and tell me to turn my light off before going to be because of the electric bill but I would only turn it off for a moment and just as quickly get the lights back on, it was too much lying in the dark, in the basement, thinking about being possessed and trying to justify to God why I was a good kid and shouldn't be possessed by the Devil or whatever evil spirit it was.

The last few years of high-school saw the release of 'THE EXORCIST 3 and I bought the poster and hung it above my bed…maybe I was trying to torture myself, I'm not sure, but again, I think it just added to the tension which went along with sleeping each night. As I got older and would revisit the film, I started to notice what truly separated THE EXORCIST from almost all other horror movies…the drama. No other horror film before or since, in my opinion, has done such a remarkable job at exploring the depth of each character and their own personal demons. Once the '80s hit horror movies became a consistent barrage of chase scenes where paper-thin characters run around screaming and it means nothing to me. Granted, there might be some good moments but a great horror film should stick in the audiences brain and make them think and wonder and put them in a place which isn't safe…not just a series of "look, a monster, run" and then some arbitrary moment where they figure out how to kill the creature, it's ridiculous. The simple fact that horror films place characters in a situation where, more often than not the audience wants them to die, just leaves empty movie-goers and feeds into a society which already lacks compassion.

There is really nothing "safe" about THE EXORCIST – even when we know that it's a demon of some sort and she's possessed it still feels as if we're involved in a helpless situation where not only is there something "evil" happening, there is also a deterioration within the characters themselves and that hasn't really been done since. Hell, the film was nominated for Best Picture alongside a Bergman film, that's incredible to me and at the time, it was one of the biggest box-office successes of all-time…now it's just a big marketing gimmick to get people into the theater for the first weekend and after that it doesn't matter. I have a problem with that and THE EXORCIST is where I look for inspiration as a filmmaker, especially when it came to making DAWNING. Imagine if horror films could've kept developing after the 1970's instead of being sucked into the world of Reaganomics and the need for more and more wealth…a time in which horror and action films merged…we might have more horror films up for major awards and crossing the line between horror and drama. Horror movies are so safe now-a-days that I've actually been out of the horror loop for almost a decade if not more.

To me it comes down to one thing: "Horror can be dramatic and drama can be horrific" and THE EXORCIST is a shining example of this."

UNK SEZ: Thanks Gregg for the powerful traumafession! Folks, Gregg's film DAWNING has quite the buzz surrounding it, it's won multiple awards and you can check out the official website HERE. Those who've caught it are happy to sing its praises; check out these smitten reviews from our blogging brethren:

• PLANET OF TERROR
• CHUCK NORRIS ATE MY BABY
• ALL THINGS HORROR
• SCARE SARAH
• ZOMBIES DON'T RUN
• JADED VIEWER
• FROM MIDNIGHT
• DOLLAR BIN HORROR

It's so hard for me pick just one movie that traumatized me as a kid! I was sooooo frightened of horror movies. One of the earliest ones that changed me was THE BIRDS. I never even saw the whole movie, but the eyeball-pecking scene was enough when I was six to make me so afraid of crows that I would no longer walk to my best friend's house alone. She lived only four houses away, but crows used to gather on the electric poles between us. So not only did I have nightmares and fears about Mr. HITCHCOCK's masterpiece, but I actually changed my life schedule around those fears…my parents would have to watch me walk me past the birds so I could play with my friend!

UNK SEZ: Thanks ELISABETH for the great traumafession! All of you horror fans out there are sure to be interested in ELISABETH's award winning film THE COMMUNE, it's been dubbed "true horror" by PRETTY SCARY. You can read much more about it on the official website HERE, and watch its snappy trailer below. (Notice that the peacock in the trailer is safely behind bars!)

Awhile back we reviewed a movie called BABY BLUES, an above par indie flick that not only impressed both A.J. and I with its effectiveness in the suspense department, but also with its strong performances. One of those strong performances belonged to JOEL BRYANT. I'm only exaggerating a little when I say that shortly thereafter JOEL BRYANT headshots were hung in our lockers at school and we began spending an inordinate amount of time at the local malt shop discussing his dreaminess. I can admit now that perhaps one of us should have given more thought to the JOEL BRYANT FOREVER tattoo but this was all the way back in May when we were young and impressionable. Can you really blame us though? Check out the peepers on this guy…

Further stalking… I mean research resulted in us finding out that JOEL is happily married. Now normally that would have cooled our jets some (pretend) but as it turns out he's married to DEVEN GREEN the notorious Youtube superstar responsible for the "WELOME TO MY HOME" parody videos you've doubtlessly seen. (She also turns out to be the hilarious BETTY BOWERS.) Suddenly we had two people to idolize! Where would we find the time? Luckily the two are known for collaborating as a comedy duo so that their fans may worship both in one quick swoop!

Unrequited appreciation is the name of the game at Kindertrauma Castle (no matter how much cash and free time we donate to the community the locals still dump their trash in our front lawn and pelt us with cantaloupes when we retrieve our mail). So you can imagine our unbridled joy when we received a (unsolicited, I swear!) communiqué from JOEL thanking us for the review and saying he was a fan of the site. How awesome is this guy?

Wouldn't you know it that a week later the four of us Me, Aunt John, JOEL and DEVEN are spending a glamorous weekend in Las Vegas. Aunt John and JOEL may have ended up getting arrested and spending the night in the drunk tank but DEVEN won forty grand playing poker and I fulfilled my life long dream of performing SCRITTI POLITTI's "Perfect Way" in a karaoke bar!

O.K. that last part only occurred in my mind but I did weasel Traumafessions out of both JOEL and DEVEN on account of I'm always thinking of you readers out there! Enjoy these two traumafessions from two super cool people and then go visit them at their home turf HERE!

Joel Bryant:

I don't want to date myself (that's why I got married – rim-shot!), but the most traumatizing thing that EVER happened to me was seeing the original POLTERGEIST when it was in theaters. From the front row. Age at the time: 8. And I've never been the same since…..

My brother and I were spending the summer at my dad's house (as part of the divorce settlement, my dad had to deal with us every summer. We enjoyed the spoils. How bad did POLTERGEIST traumatize me? Even my parents divorce comes in a far, far, far second place to watching that damn flick!). Up until that time, I had become a huge RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK fan. I'd watched it at least a million times by my best estimate; and I was slowly becoming a movie junkie.

My dad had some friends that had seen POLTERGEIST. They came over and asked if my dad would like to take us with them to see it again. I was trepidatious at first because I knew that "poltergeists" were bad. I had fought them before in Dungeons and Dragons. They were easy to defeat, but were definitely considered "monsters."

My dad's friends would have none of it. They described the movie as "no big deal." In fact, to paraphrase their exact words: "You've seen RAIDERS how many times? You know the ending with the faces melting and everything? Well, that happens in POLTERGEIST, but that's about the worst thing that happens. The rest is really harmless. You'll be fine."

My brother and I believed them.

We were at that young age where you want to see every film from the front row (granted, this was before arena seating and ridiculous sound systems). We settled in, excited, in the middle of the front row.

Then the movie started.

I don't need to give a synopsis of the film, but this is how we watched it:

Within 30 minutes we were in the 10th row. Then the 20th row. Then in the back row by the door. By the end of the film, we were literally hiding under the seats in the back of the theater. Shaking. Literally shaking. It took a while for my dad to find us.

That night I didn't sleep a wink. My dad had to sit up all night next to my bed because I kept waking up, crying, shaking and generally having the same sleep as a flu-riddled crack addict. I could not stop seeing images in my head and imagining that everything in the house – EVERYTHING – was attacking me. That lasted a good week.

I was able to get some sleep over the course of the summer, but my dad had to spend most nights by my bedside.

It took me until I was 20 years old to even think about watching a horror film again. I finally gathered up the strength to watch NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET because it's mostly tongue-in-cheek. That type of movie I can stand. A true horror film? I honestly can say I will never have the nerve/spine/energy/desire to watch one.

(Ironic considering the shout-out that KinderTrauma gave me for my work in BABY BLUES.)

How scarring was POLTERGEIST? To this day – and I'm in my mid-30's now – I can't sleep with the closet open if it's of the hinged-door – not the sliding-door – variety (in fact, even when I'm awake, I insist that the closets be closed). I can't have branches or silhouettes of branches outside of my window lest they break through and try to eat me (O.K., I know it sounds stupid, but it's true!). I can't sleep if the T.V. is static and I get nervous in an all-dark house. Graveyards still kinda freak me out and forget ever, EVER owning a stuffed clown. In fact, I was so rattled by that film (and that clown scene in particular), I can't even own or sleep on a bed that a killer clown doll would be able to crawl under. Hell, I might as well say it: Screw clowns in general!

I know these quirks sound a little BILLY BOB THORNTON-ish, but I fully blame what will always be considered by me "The Scariest Movie Of All Time."

To any parents taking their 8-year-olds to the theater, take it from me:

See a Pixar joint and leave the POLTERGEIST's in the Indian Burial Ground where they belong!

Deven Green:

In the isolated, boreal forests of Northern Canada where I was raised, I experienced something but never made the connection until recently as to why I can't go into graveyards or hospitals. I had been traumatized.

My Grade 7 friend, M* got hopelessly lost in the frozen woods by the river. He illogically tried to traverse the partially frozen river. As he negotiated his way across the rocks he slipped and landed on his back. The water rushed over him and kept him pinned down. The rope he had around him winched its way up his body and slipped around his neck. Two hunters heard his initial scream and raced to the river's edge. They could do nothing as he was held under the water laying face up slowing drowning.

I attended his funeral service (actual burials were only in the summer) and thought that I should have felt something other than the nothing I did feel.

In taking a summer job at the only hospital, which was usually empty, I roamed the halls for hours until I discovered a locked room. I stole keys to secret inside and there was M "alive." It looked like he was covered in a contraption of hockey helmets and wires from head to toe…that is how I could best describe it. I read his chart: the freezing water had put his body into a state of hibernation but the energy of the river had somehow wrenched his spine almost from his body…or something like that. There was a pillow with a face imprint in it by his bed. All I knew for sure was that there was no body in his casket.

I never went back in his hospital room again as I was immediately fired.

Summer of that year the frozen earth warmed enough so all the bodies which had died in the winter were now buried in the small graveyard. The town councilman, known for his temper and his drinking, got so drunk one night he took a backhoe and dug up the entire graveyard. M had been his son. I figured he must have put a pillow over his son's face to finally get him physically buried but now that he was actually gone he couldn't let him go. He had done a lot of destruction to the graveyard. So much so that to this day NONE of the bodies match up with any of the tombstones.

*(Out of respect for his family I won't use his name)

KURT SVENNUNGSEN – FRAYED Co-writer, Producer:

I can't just name one particular film that scared me as a kid. It all took place in 1981, at the ripe age of ten. I saw THE EXORCIST, HALLOWEEN and FRIDAY THE 13th PART II. I'm sure my parents were pissed, because that was my year of nightmares and waking them up in the middle of the night scared shitless that Jason was after me. That year was the beginning of my fascination with horror. I think JOHN CARPENTER says it best as to why we love horror, "Fear is our most primal emotion."

NORBERT CAOILI – FRAYED Co-writer, Co-director, Co-Producer, Editor, Composer:

'70s and early '80s horror movies definitely take the cake as having traumatized me as a child, forever burning horrific images in my brain that, to this day, I still can't shake. When I'm alone at night in the dark, they creep back into my brain and make the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. The one that stands out the most would have to be the '70s horror movie BURNT OFFERINGS. This movie had it all – a haunted house, a chilling score, massive suspense, and two of the most unforgettable horror characters to ever appear on screen – KAREN BLACK as Mrs. Allardyce and ANTHONY JAMES, the sinister, smiling chauffeur. I was only 7 years old when I saw BURNT OFFERINGS on HBO and I still remember how I trembled in fear for many nights afterwards, hiding under the sheets, thinking they were going to come into my room at any minute and get me! I will never forget that end scene where Karen Black turns to Oliver Reed, creepily stares at him, with the most chilling violin strings since PSYCHO, and says "I've been waiting for you, Ben!" Then he jumps out (or is thrown out of) the window and lands face-first into the car windshield. A lot of movies lose their creep factor as we grow older, but, for me, this one does not. To this day, when I watch that scene, my heart starts beating faster and my body tenses up. The suspense in that film, like so many films of that era, was so gripping and agonizingly drawn out. It's a style that sadly has been lost in the modern age of fast-paced, short attention span world we live in.

On that note, I have to give a shout out to HALLOWEEN (1978) – the granddaddy of slashers and one of my beloved favorites. I never knew how terrifying a white mask and an eerie piano soundtrack could be. It was the film that got me hooked on horror and made me want to become a filmmaker.

ROB PORTMANN – Co-Director, Co-Writer, Co-Producer:

"Creepy little girls in white dresses" movies scare me. The movie was THE HOUSE THAT WOULD NOT DIE (1970) starring BARBARA STANWYCK. I remember being about 6 or 7 and I couldn't sleep. So I went into the living room to tell my parents. They were watching this "Haunted House" movie. I sat down and watched for awhile. I only watched about 10 minutes. What I saw gave me nightmares for years. It showed a family finding human bones under this house and a "creepy little girl in a white dress" calling in a ghostly voice from the other side of a misty creek. "Aimee, come home," she called. I couldn't shake that eerie image. It freaked me out!!!

THE EXCORCIST then took the "creepy little girl" thing to a whole different level. I will never get that nightmare out of my head, no matter how hard I try!!! That's why, to this day, even though the "creepy little girl" is pretty much standard in every other horror flick that comes out now, it still does the job and scares the hell out of me!!!

UNK SEZ: Thanks guys, for the excellent traumafessions and for keeping the spirit of '70s and '80s horror alive with FRAYED! All you kids out there, FRAYED is being released on DVD tomorrow, make sure you pick up a copy or two (they make great gifts!) at better retailers everywhere. As for now check out this scary scene…