Category: Traumafessions

In the late '80s or early '90s, I caught the last 40 minutes of a horror film that was truly chilling.

'The Monster Club' is a film split into 3 vignettes.

In the last one, a man drives into a mysterious village and slowly discovers the townspeople do not want him to leave. He then meets a young girl who decides to help him attempt escape.

The ending has a fantastic twist!

The rest of the film stars Vincent Price and other Hollywood old-schoolers and features an all star soundtrack as well. (The animated, dancing skeleton scene is infamous!)

Anyway, I've set up this youtube link to start at exactly the last story. Enjoy!

Where do I begin?

1) I remember watching Phantom of the Paradise on TV when I was about five or six years old. It left me slightly confused and creeped out. I actually love that movie now. It's funny and cheezy at the same time.

2) Carrie. Saw that when I was about seven years old. The music, the blood, the hand popping out of the grave at the end. My twin used to threaten that the "hand" was going to get me. Yep. She did that for at least five or six years.

3) Amityville Horror. I was afraid to look at crucifixes and rocking chairs for a looong time.

4) I remember the nanny committing suicide by hanging when I watched The Omen on TV. Again, I was only a child. (My older sisters watched these movies in front of us.)

5) The Exorcist. I think I was about eight years old. Part I & II. Just bits and pieces of the movie I remember watching. I was afraid to go up the stairs and look at the white door that led to the bathroom because the door reminded me of the girl's bedroom.

There's probably more but those movies above stick out of my mind the most.

Hello,

I am obsessed with this site. As a child, I was a bona fide televisual masochist, and remain so to this day. I could submit any number of things, from the fear that lingered after one look at the cover of the Dolls VHS to my fervent childhood belief that Chuckie lived under my bed with Talking Tina from The Twilight Zone. But instead, I'll focus on one viewing experience that left haunted me through my childhood until well into my twenties: viewing a Lifetime movie starring Valerie Bertinelli titled Murder of Innocence.

You're probably thinking, "Lifetime?!" But this is one fucked up tale. Valerie Bertinelli is a perky young waitress who catches the eye of a handsome young man. They marry before he realizes that she is batshit crazy. Sure, he knew she was a little nervous and indecisive, but when he returns home one day to find the refrigerator full of make-up and the walls covered in lipstick drawings, he realizes some serious shit is about to go down. They get divorced and she goes completely off the wall––making hang-up phone calls to her ex-sister-in-law, crushing dead flowers with gloved hands and stealing cuts of raw meat from the grocery store.

The thing that freaked me out the most––I was already a very astute student of psychology as a child––was that her symptoms made no sense. She obsessively washed her hands, but then hoarded and fondled raw meat; she loves kids but feeds them drugged rice krispie treats. Of course, it all ends terribly: she buys a gun and shoots a couple of kids in a classroom, retreats to a nearby house and then kills herself. It haunted me for years, until eventually I found it on Hulu (Below). And then it haunted me all over again. YOU'RE WELCOME.

I think I've read this one as a repeat offender, but I could be wrong. I know this traumatized quite a few of my generation, and it eventually was pulled from Sesame Street. This link probably won't last long, so view it while you can.

It probably isn't as scary as you remember it, but if you DO remember it, you probably remember being scared by it as a child. Enjoy the memory.

One of the earliest TV memories I have, is of the show, 'SOAP'.

I haven't thought about this for years, but the episode that totally freaked me out, was the one where the baby became possessed by the Devil.

Alfred Hitchcock Hour episode 'Special Delivery'

This is online somewhere. Can't locate where. A little boy orders a kit for growing mushrooms. Slowly, the boy's personality changes and his behavior becomes odd. I think what freaked me out about this episode, is that it was one of the few times on television that something strange like that .. would happen to a child. Which definitely doesn't happen these days.

Thanks! Great site!

One of the staples my misspent youth was enjoying, "That's Incredible!". It was a kitschy hodge-podge of stuntmen, magicians, psychics and other dentally challenged fraudsters looking for their fifteen minutes of fame. I loved it! Sometime this show would slip in some really disturbing stuff, and this is prime-time TV mind you. One segment was about this lady who died and had this vision (near death experiences was a T.I. mainstay btw) of Jesus and the Devil battling for her soul! The cinematography was creepy! It was filmed in black and white, and if I remember correctly, they used this low camera with a fisheye lens looking up at these two hooded characters writhing about. And the scenery was like this burned out hillside with a dead tree. Very nightmarish! I wasn't prepared for that kind of imagery on a Monday night! Might have been the inspiration for the cult art film, "The Begotten". But who knows. Anyway, the next day, I remember a schoolmate being equally disturbed by that segment as I was. Wish I could see it one more time.

Oh and hey! While we're on the subject of Creepy and That's Incredible!, let's talk about John Davidson! I mean, what's going on behind those eyes? That smug smile! (Cue psycho shower scene music) My Dad never liked him, ever since that streets of San Francisco episode where he played a cross-dressing (as Carol Channing) murderer, he didn't want anything to do with him! I later learned that Johnny Depp is also afraid of John Davidson…. so there! I'm not afraid as the aforementioned, but I wouldn't want to meet him on a lonely road at night.

Well, I've done it, fellow KinderCats and KinderKittens; I have found what I believe to be my earliest childhood trauma inspired by the media, going all the way back to when I was three or four. This required a bit of YouTube digging, but at long last it has been exhumed. It's pretty silly, but for my parents, this one was oft-mentioned to friends.

From a very early age, my folks took pride in my fondness for scary stuff. This was linked with my early ability to read, and since I was a straight A student, they saw no problem with encouraging my macabre tastes. Typical parental bragging would usually ensue, but it was frequently linked with this observation:

"And to think that when he was a baby he was scared of a commercial for Zest soap!"

It was true. I was a pretty placid little kid, but during the handful of times this spot hit the airwaves, I would cry like the hordes of Hell had been unleashed against me:

To me this is a kindertrauma in the purest sense of the concept – an otherwise innocuous something that, for whatever reason(s), pushes buttons that set off a chain reaction of fear. Seen in retrospect over four decades later, it has absolutely no similar effect, but it's easy for me to identify three elements that came together to make this commercial terrifyingly toxic to my very young sensitivities:

1) Bars of soap should not unwrap themselves. I was three, what did I know of the world? Was this something that could happen anytime to the bars we would pass in the supermarket aisle? Or even worse, to the ones Mom kept in the hallway closet? And once unwrapped, could said bars…

2) produce lather that was ALIVE? Those suds were out to get me, and I'm pretty certain I associated lather with getting it in my eyes and stinging like hell. Stephen King has often remarked that the purest form of a monster is that of the blob – mindless, hungry, consuming anything in its path. Some primal fear was resonating here, people. But the worst of all by far was…

3) The voice. That "…ooooOOOOH" grows out of nowhere as the soap exudes from the unwrapped bar, the sound made by ghosts, the wordless siren-song of all things spooky. (I'll even go so far as to assume that as a child I thought the female singer was dead, spectral; after all, we couldn't see her, right?) She has the oversold quality that's common to 50s and early 60s singers of being just a bit too emotive, too enthused about that shampoo lather. I think it's something David Lynch nails whenever he employs music from this period. Hearing it now, I recognize that "voodoo lounge" quality to the melody that was popular at the time. Plus, the tune is neither major nor minor but modal, a relative rarity in pop music that makes it more eerie and exotic.

I've found a couple of other Zest ads from subsequent years that use that four-note "Oooh, what lather" motif, so this commercial must have done its job at branding. But none of them had the effect this one had upon me. It was my first clue in life that I was hardwired to detect the horrible and the haunted.

And to answer the obvious question: Yes, I occasionally use Zest.

Like most ‘70s kids, our television selections were the three networks and PBS so my television viewing was pretty well limited to educational stuff like Sesame Street and Electric Company with the occasional avant garde kids shows like the almost counter-cultural Zoom and the elusive Hodge Podge Lodge. Since children's educational programming was in its infancy, things that have since been deleted or would never even make it past the censors was common fare. Psychedelic scenes, barely toned down music and dances (I remember one African themed dance group that would have made Katie Perry's short skirt and cleavage look tame- this one prompted my grandmother to change the channel) and frankly scary clips dominated this new genre of television.

The one clip that scared me the most featured the word "Burn" with a spooky female voice saying, "Burn" and then the letters bursting into flames. I don't know why this terrified me so much but since I had accidentally seen a show about spontaneous human combustion that had kept me awake with screaming nightmares for weeks, anything with fire in it was horrifying to me. I'm actually not sure if "Burn" was on Sesame Street or Electric Company but I would close my eyes and plug my ears when it came on. A YouTube search hasn't produced any results either.

A fire phobia didn't stop me from smoking as a teenager and young adult. That is until the horrific anti-smoking PSAs started coming on around the mid 1990's- by then Joe Camel and any advertisement that could possibly induce kids to smoke was banned but commercials better suited to the horror genre started showing up. As an adult I felt sorry for the horribly afflicted people but I was still horrified by the ads, which generally showed up after 10pm.

One showed a lady (now deceased) smoking a cigarette through the hole in her neck which gave me cold chills and another featured a lady who had numerous surgeries and treatments that left her with a bizarre sounding robotic voice and sadly disfigured face. One night I woke up to the spot- thinking it was some sort of sci-fi horror film, something like a human machine hybrid like the Borg on Voyager or something- to my half asleep brain it was terrifying. I was almost disappointed to find out it was a sad terminally ill human who has since exited from her pain. I quit smoking after that.

MaryR

To be honest , I never was that adventurous or courageous when it came to suspenseful and creepy TV series. I got scared easily. My mother probably meant well when she suddenly would change channels because she thought something might upset me. She once even put her hands over my eyes while I was watching a TV show; she thought some monster on the screen might scare me. I think her sudden shrieking and putting her hands over my eyes was more scary than anything that might've been on the telly at that very moment.

My parents subscribed to a TV guide. The other magazines my parents subscribed to were too boring to even flip through, so I devoured every issue of the TV guide with gusto.. I must've been seven or eight years old when I saw a TV series that I just knew would be great to watch. I persuaded my parents to let me watch it, I even told my friends at school that I was going to watch a great TV show. It would be magic! I would be adventurous for once! I felt great.

The series was called Box of Delights. There is quite some praise for this series, even after its release, some thirty years ago. The story revolves around a magic box, given to a boy by a magician. Dark forces want to get hold of the box, so suspenseful adventure would be duly unfolding, or so I thought.

I didn't make it through the first episode.

At some point during episode one I realized I got more than I bargained for. Why had I persuaded my parents letting me watch this? Why had I bragged at school?

I knew retreat would be imminent. And I know the exact moment; when 'Rat' (a man, made up and costumed as a stinky, skeevy rat) reared its ugly head. I jumped up from the couch, did a spin and buried my head in a couch cushion. I think I cried. I was so disappointed; in myself and in the show that dared to be way too horrifying.

Needless to say I had raging nightmares that night.

In recent years I did try my best to find Box of Delights online. Because the series aired under a different title (original title loosely translated to Dutch) I had a difficult time actually finding it. But when I did, I was delighted.

I can see why Box of Delights scared me, but there are other scenes standing out now, that I find very creepy. The leader with the freaky puppet! Those priests! The fake looking make up on the old magician to make him look aging and wise!

Because I couldn't find other reviews or confessions deeming Box of Delights scary, I consider myself alone in this.

Well, not all alone. In fact, my sister, who's four years younger than I, would start crying just by seeing a picture of Rat. There was a picture of Rat in the TV listings, along with the article about Box of Delights. That's right. I already knew there would be a creepy character somewhere in the series and I still thought I could make it.

My brother would taunt my sister by sneaking up on her and brandishing the TV guide. My mom got so fed up that she took a pair of scissors and cut the picture out. She did this very neatly. Because the week wasn't done yet, we still needed it.

Here's the first episode (part one anyway):

I also included a pic of Rat. Man, is that guy creepy!