Category: Traumafessions

DAVID BOWIE had a birthday a bunch of days ago and that made me remember the first time I was made aware of him, as a youngin' staying up late watching SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE. In a few short years I'd be a huge fan, my first stadium concert experience would be seeing his "Serious Moonlight" tour but that SNL performance did nothing but freak me out. I think I was sadly raised with a rather concrete understanding of what was normal and what wasn't and it was truly alarming for me to witness someone acting so wildly bizarre. He was shamelessly strange and my little brain couldn't comprehend. I decided I should find the episode on Netflix Streaming and so I did and appropriately enough the often unnervingly intense MARTIN SHEEN was the host.

Fast-forwarding through the episode to find the musical portion, I spotted a skit that I had completely forgotten about but recognized at once and it's so kindertraumatic in theme that I have to share it here. SHEEN plays dad, JANE CURTIN plays mom and GILDA RADNER expertly portrays their excitable daughter Jenny. Dad has just finished reading POE's "The Raven" to Jenny and now it's time for her to go to sleep. He turns off the light, leaves the room and Jenny is soon terrified, imagining she sees a bear. She calls to her parents who come in to calm her and inform her that it's all in her mind. Next an intruder (GARRETT MORRIS) enters the room and Jenny screams. It's just a handyman returning for his tools the summoned parents reveal and so it's lights out and back to bed she goes. Next her bed starts to shake EXORCIST-style and the child yells again for her parents who return exasperated and explaining that they rented out the underside of her bed to a family of gypsies. Left alone once more, poor Jenny decides to put her mind at peace by making sure there is nothing in the closet. When she opens the closet door she sees this…a bloody-faced man with one eye falling out of his head, holding a hatchet!

How did I ever forget this? It was 1979, I was mad into horror and gory special effects and now I recall how amazed and fascinated I was by this figure! I remember how excited I was when she opened the closet door for a second time so that I may get another view! This was live television, I couldn't rewind it, I could only ogle heartily and try to gather as much detail as possible while I could, chances were I might not ever see it again! Jenny calls to her parents one last feeble hysterical time and their angry, frustrated voices are all she needs to know. Rather than call them back into the room and face their wrath, she'll take her chances with the psycho in the closet. I know how she feels. I realize it's highly unlikely that it was BOWIE under all that make-up doing double duty as the scary monster in the closet but I don't care, I'll imagine it was him anyway.

Longtime reader Eddie Quist here. HUGE fan of the site. You guys did me a solid awhile back by identifying the movie-of-the-week FANTASIES for me, and I'm still grateful.

This isn't really so much a Traumafession as a cry for help–some way to confirm that I didn't dream this bizarro memory up. See, like many of your site's regular readers, I'm a massive fan of Fred Dekker's THE MONSTER SQUAD, and, also like many of them, I discovered it in not in theatres but on cable (You guys had HBO but up here in Canada, we had First Choice and The Star Channel. Same diff. But I digress).

Anyway, some time before I saw SQUAD in its entirety, I became aware of its impending release from a segment on Entertainment Tonight. Now, my memories of this are a bit fuzzy, but I would swear that, from what I remember of it, the ET camera crew visited Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, the Wolfman, and the gang while they were shooting a music video to promote the film. It likely would have been for Michael Sembello's awesome end-credits rap, but I don't know for sure. What I DO know is that no trace of any kind of MONSTER SQUAD music video seems to exist, outside of the fan-made variety. It's not on YouTube, it's not a special feature on the DVD or Blu-Ray…any evidence of its existence is as elusive as Abraham Van Helsing's diary

So here's the thing–did I imagine it? Did I remember that segment incorrectly? Does anyone other than me actually remember seeing that ET segment? Has anyone affiliated with Kindertrauma, or any of your readers, ever heard of such a video? I suppose it's possible that they started production on a music video to tie in with the film but cancelled it some time after Mary Hart or John Tesh or whoever visited the set. But I swear on my "Stephen King Rules" t-shirt that I saw the monsters dancing in unison before a camera crew. Am I delusional? Help me, Kindertrauma! You're my only hope!

PS: The stupidest thing about all this is that I actually met Tom Noonan at this past year's Festival Of Fear during Toronto's Fan Expo and I didn't think to ask him about it. As Frankenstein's Monster would say, "BO-GUS!"

Here is a PSA that used to absolutely terrify me in the 1970s – Mr. Yuk. It got to be a love/hate kind of thing, where I'd wait for this commercial to come on that would scare me and send me out of the room. Though I did think it was pretty cool when our local poison control center came to our school and gave us some awesome Mr. Yuk stickers to place on poisons in our home!

I love reliving my childhood terrors on your site, and discovering others I hadn't known. Cheers.

Dustin in Minnesota

I grew up in a very informed household; my parents regularly watched local and national news several times a day and the radio was always on during the day while my mom watched me. In the 70's we primarily listened to a local AM station that was a CBS affiliate. Every hour I was warned of impending doom by the news sounder that came on before the reporter started reading (the exact news sounder is at 1:14 in the Youtube link).

When I heard that sound, I knew bad things were getting ready to be told: serial killers, cattle mutilations, hijackings, mass shootings, bombings, and the worst of all – gorillas (guerillas) killing people somewhere in a tropical hell. To a 5 or 6 year old, that news sounder, and the dread that always followed, warned me to never go to big cities, airports, or foreign countries. Other than the ominous storm warnings from the National Weather Service, which have been covered already on the site, nothing else came close to producing this kind of trauma in me.

Again, the specific sounder is at 1:14. Thank you for an outstanding and very needed website.

Jamie L.

First off, I love your site. It's strangely comforting knowing a lot of images that scared me as a kid scared so many others too. The Jumanji posting about the plant made me think of Little Shop of Horrors with Rick Moranis. The full-grown plant scared the crap out of me and to this day I don't like the shot when the camera seems to zoom all the way inside the plant's mouth. The little plants that seemed to grow off it just added to my fright. Getting eaten by a plant like that became my worst nightmare. Those puppets were masterfully crafted. My fear of this movie confused me for years because it's a musical and so light-hearted most of the time that I didn't perceive it as a horror. I think immersion therapy helped me get over this movie but I will still flinch a little if I put it on t.v.

Gary S.

Your site had me laughing so hard I cried. I was just posting on a FB page (people who grew up in Rockland County NY in the 70's and 80's) and I posted a new topic–what class film terrorized you? I then described "And Then It Happened", how I was shown this in 3rd grade and it *still* gives me the willies 35 years later! My brother then posted a link to our blog and I practically wet my pants. Thank you oh thank you for keeping the terror alive! (you know, in that 'I want to watch but I know I'm gonna have bad dreams from it' way)

Hello,

I like your page, I found it by searching for Bunyip, I was really scared by it.

One thing that most scared and affected me was the movie "Jumanji", which is actually a good movie and I liked it, but there is that scene where this gigantic plant grows and attacks people. I am still scared by it, so everytime I see that movie I start having nightmares about big human eating plants. That said, I still have problems looking at flesh eating plants or at unusually big plants, also afraid to touch them. When I am in the bathtub, I sometimes have got day nightmares, that out of the sink there might come a big plant and eat me…

That is still scaring me.

Faithfully yours,

Dominik

Is it normal to base a huge part of your life around a box art cover? Probably not but I have an excuse: it was Friday the 13th on the NES. I couldn't play the game because I didn't have a Nintendo but every time I was in the video store, I would stare at the pixelated map on the back and dream about being able to explore the campgrounds in the films I'd watch every time they aired on the USA network. Friday the 13th was the scariest movie in the world (even when broken up by Rhonda Shear segments and the flood of 900 phone sex ads). So the game would have to be the scariest game in the world right? RIGHT? Well, I got the answer when I finally played it years later. But something stuck with me: there was an idea there somewhere. So I started working on the slasher game I had always dreamed of playing.

SUPERFRIENDS: The Lord of Middle Earth by Kevin of KEVIN GEEKS OUT!

Some might call this episode of the SuperFriends an homage to J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth, others would call it a rip-off, but to 5-year-old me it was just plain terrifying.

Everything about this cartoon has a nightmarish quality. Recounting it here is like remembering a bad dream: It all takes place inside a maze-like cave-world. An evil wizard magically morphs Superman (and friends) into grotesque halflings. The troll-like heroes are stripped of their super-powers and forced to work deep inside in the diamond mines.

Even though it freaked me out, "The Lord of Middle Earth" was easily my favorite episode. This was the first time a show had such an effect on me.

REASONS THIS CARTOON WAS KINDERTRAUMATIC:

SUPERFRIENDS DWARFED
The heroes lose their super-powers. That's a hard thing for a child to witness. But again, some part of me must have enjoyed seeing the all-powerful crimefighters brought down to size. The little SuperFriends are roughly the same height as the kids who watched the show. Like much of the episode, it's simultaneously appalling and appealing.

DYING INSIDE A CAVE
Six minutes into the cartoon, Robin fears he's going to die inside the cave. After spending years battling Lex Luthor, Sinestro and Toyman it could all end here: collapsing in ancient underground kingdom while doing manual labor.

MY RECURRING NIGHTMARE
Full disclosure: When I was very young I had a recurring dream about being trapped inside a volcano where large lava-colored men worked with deadly magma. (This probably has something to do with my Dad being a boiler-house engineer, right?) I don't know which came first: my recurring dream or "The Lord of Middle Earth." Either the episode captured elements of my bad dream or it inspired a recurring nightmare.

MALHAVOC IS ONE BAD MUTHA
Listen to that rich, bass voice – it's even deeper than Superman's! Malhavoc perfectly embodies a child's idea of evil incarnate. Plus his pale skin, crimson eyes and jet-black hair evoke KISS and Alice Cooper (which I also found terribly unsettling when I was 5 years old.)

SCARY CAVE CREATURES
Besides the vengeful warlock, this episode features a long-tongued cave beast, evil spider-people and giant snails. (Granted the snails are "good guys", but they're still unnerving.) Plus the Dragon of Darkness ("the deadliest creature in middle-earth!") Today I recognize these monsters as obligatory obstacles in a sword and sorcery adventure. But this was the first time I'd encountered any of them and it was really scary.

THAT FREAKING STATUE
The gigantic stone gargoyle is the icing on the cake. The statue's face is wrought with dark emotion. If his twisted face looks familiar, maybe that's because both the gargoyle and Malhavoc appear in the series' opening credits. Also, in the opening, the statue comes to life!

MELODRAMATIC SCORE
I know it's the same music beds that appear in all the other episodes of the SupeFriends cartoons – but the soundtrack is especially haunting set against the backdrop of a dreary underground labyrinth.

Today I still enjoy this episode. I've even shown it to my kids. I know this cartoon can't measure up to Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, but those films will never grab me the way "The Lord of Middle Earth" did.