Category: Traumafessions

My very first video store was called "Hollywood Video" and it was located at the King of Prussia mall. It was a tiny place as home video was still in its infancy. The horror section was about the size of a closet door. I've always been fond of bragging that I watched every horror tape that was available but I realize now that is not true and I have been exaggerating all these years. The truth is that I could never bring myself to watch a film called DEMENTED (1980)!

A major reason for that is because DEMENTED is a rape movie but unlike say, LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT and I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE it doesn't have nearly the reputation to push me into enduring it. In fact, when I worked at a video store years and years later I bought a used copy of DEMENTED for the place and I still never watched it- even for free. I suppose my main reason for resisting mostly involves the photos on the back, particularly one of the rapists wearing ghoulish masks. There's also a photo of the attack in progress with a couple guys wearing stockings on their heads. There is nothing scarier than a stocking on the head. I'm reminded of both THE BOOGEY MAN (1980) and the SALLY STRUTHERS' TV movie A GUN IN THE HOUSE (1981) both of which freaked me out at around the same time.

Another thing that unnerved me about the box for DEMENTED was the fact that it was pink! There's something twisted about using such a bright color in juncture with something horror related. Who would do such a thing? For a while DEMENTED was available on Netflix Streaming but it seems to have disappeared into the ether once again. Maybe that's for the best. Though I have to say, watching the trailer now makes me think that the movie is probably too amateurish to be taken quite so seriously by me. Has my aversion been unwarranted all these years? I sorta love the synth-y soundtrack! In any case, the box still gives me the creeps.

By the time I was 5 or 6, I had already seen Psycho, House of Wax, and House on Haunted Hill (the originals of course!) One night, Psycho was on a double bill with the Brian DePalma classic Carrie on TBS Superstation. My mom decided to let me stay up and watch it, figuring, I guess, if he can make it through Psycho, he can make it through Carrie.

WRONG! I was fine up until Margaret White drags her poor child, Carrie, into the dark prayer closet. What caused me to run out the room screaming was that St. Sebastian statue in there with Carrie. The way its horrified green/yellow-ish eyes looked into your soul, judging you…the candle light flickering…the organ music! It was just too much! I HATED organ music as a child. There was nothing scarier.

UNK SEZ: Thanks for another great traumafession Chris! Folks can check out Chris' previous traumafessions HERE and HERE and remember, you can watch his movie PERVERSION any time you like over HERE!

As a kid with an over-active imagination, the thing that scared me most was a poster for a SAW film (probably). You could just see the outlines of something that looked like a rotten green head under a huge "censored" sticker. The bus drove past our school everyday while we were having lunch, leaving me pretty terrified and unable to eat. Am I the only one wimpy enough to be scared by a poster?

xx, Flo

During the first half of the 1990s, which I remember as a generally underwhelming time for Kindertrauma TV, late night HBO blissfully bludgeoned my unsuspecting young mind with everything from Suspiria to Scissors to Sorority House Massacre 2. All of those movies made a lasting impression. But none of them traumatized me like Fabrizio Laurenti's Witchery, starring David Hasselhoff and Linda Blair.

In 1991, I was eight years old. At this point, I was already obsessed with horror movies. I often tracked them down by watching The Prevue Guide Channel, an oddly hypnotic station on which T.V. listings would rise in an endless scroll across the bottom half of the screen, while previews of coming attractions for movies like Rent A Cop played on top.

One night, I became fascinated by the Prevue Guide trailer for Witchery. So far as I recall, the trailer included four scenes: a girl in a wheelchair saying "Your dad shouldn't buy that house! My mom told me, a witch lives there!," a woman standing in a black cloak on a beach, Linda Blair decked out in a nightgown and huge hair laughing maniacally in a voice that was not her own, and the word Witchery, the letter "T" replaced by an inverted crucifix.

At that age I was already enthusiastic about ominous children, excessive women, spooky houses, and the defilement of religious imagery. I did not know the meaning of this word "witchery," which sounded like witchcraft only somehow more sinister. In my head I imagined that the movie was about a brothel or women's boarding house full of witches. I had to see it. Unfortunately, Witchery was airing on Showtime, and my family didn't get the channel. So I waited…waited…waited… Finally, months later, it appeared on HBO in the middle of the night, and I taped it.

I watched in awe as a group of sinners ended up at a mysterious, deserted hotel on an island in "Massachusetts." One by one, they were transported to some kind of alternate dimension where they were brutally raped, tortured, and/or murdered by the deformed minions of a glamorous old woman in a black cloak. The woman might have been the vengeful ghost of a pregnant witch who (in flashback) jumped from a window to her death to escape murderous pilgrims, or she might have been a has-been Hollywood actress. Or both. The movie leaves it artfully ambiguous.

To me, this was one of those movies that, pre-Internet, seemed so weird that they could only have been documentaries transmitted directly from other worlds. There was so much I didn't know when I watched Witchery: I didn't know that it was (or would one day be) considered to be notoriously awful by many horror geeks. I didn't know that Hildegard Knef, the evil old woman, was a totally chic and fabulous German movie star and chanteuse. Sometime later, when I first saw Baywatch (which had mysteriously escaped my un-monitored eyes up to that point), I thought "Oh! That's the guy from Witchery!" when The Hoff appeared on screen.

I also didn't realize, while I was watching Witchery, that it was traumatizing me. While watching the movie, I didn't notice feeling scared. But something about Witchery got to me and, like most traumas, the effects didn't occur until later. In the coming days and weeks, I couldn't stop thinking about Witchery's weird atmosphere. When I looked in the mirror, I'd be petrified of seeing Hildgard Knef's scary diva face looking back at me (a recurring warning in the film). I was haunted by a horror movie convention that always gets to me: a film projector that mysteriously ran on its own without being plugged in, showing the visitors avant-garde witchy cinema. For the first time, I found myself having an existential crisis, pondering questions like "Can one really feel good that some of the characters escaped the island at the end of the movie, when they first had to watch their loved ones be brutally murdered?"

Witchery haunted me so much that I launched a personal boycott against anything that had to do with the horror genre for what seems, in my memory, like years (in reality, it might have been months). I taped over Witchery with "Paul Simon at Central Park." When that wasn't enough to destroy its evil powers, I hid the tape in the back of my closet in my old bedroom (where it probably still resides!). Not since the Flowers in the Attic crisis of 1989 had my world been so up-ended by media, and nothing has had such an effect on me since.

Like so many kinder-traumatized, I watched the object of terror again over a decade later and thought that much about it was kind of inept and funny. And yet sometimes, when I go to bed anxious, I still dream that Hildegard Knef is coming to get me. And sometimes, when I wake up in the middle of the night and half-consciously wander to the bathroom, I start to worry that maybe, just maybe, I'll see her staring back at me from the mirror…

— Ben S.

Browsing over RedBox's offerings, I noticed that they had the original Batman movie on offer. This is the campy 1966 Batman movie with Adam West and Burt Ward (Baaaaaaaby on booooooard…something…something…Burt Wards…this song writes itself!) I innocently rented it to relive the fun, campy atmosphere of that crazy, tilted, pastel world Batman inhabited at one time. Little did I know that a KinderTrauma was around the bend.

Not having seen this movie since I was a kid when it was shown on ABC's 4:30 Movie (anyone else remember the 4:30 movie? I completely forgot about a scene that totally freaked me out as a kid. The kicker is that upon seeing it, my mind allowed me to peer inside and see why it was so traumatic. I'm sure, since we're all here, that we're equally fascinated with the mysteries of what scares us as children, so to have my mind reveal itself in regards to a trauma was a wild experience.

(As an aside, it seems KinderTraumas are part of the human experience through all cultures and ages. The Indians of South America developed a whole religion around KinderTraumas wherein they believe that traumas from childhood burden us with negative energy and emotions. To free people from such traumas, they developed cleansing ceremonies called "limpias" to first detect traumas and then cleanse them. You can see such a limpia HERE.

Nevertheless, when I was watching the Batman movie there was one part where the Penguin (Burgess Meredith) uses a dehydrator to turn his minions into powder. The minions line up and are turned into powder one by one without flinching. The utter lack of emotion or fear in the minions as they're powderized (mixed with the weird, detached feeling the special effect added) completely freaked me out when I was a kid and that angst came roaring back when viewing it as an adult.You can see the scene HERE.

I started to wonder what creeped me out so much concerning that scene and it was like a trap door opened in my mind and the Architect said, "Step inside so we can talk awhile." So I sat down with Mr. Subconscious, sipped some tea and chatted for a while. He told me that what creeped me out was the fact that these men so willingly let themselves be turned into powder (killed is what I thought as kid) without fighting back or protesting or resisting, happily standing there waiting to be disintegrated. Nor did they flinch when they saw the others around them atomized. What made it completely traumatizing was that they were giving their lives up for evil, happily marching to their own destruction. And then Mr. Subconscious held up flash cards of suicide bombers, Nazi SS officers, kamikazes, and others who were so intoxicated with evil that they would happily sacrifice their life for their mad overlords. Talk about epiphany.

It was a cathartic experience if nothing else. And it was one KinderTrauma I could put to sleep in a warm, comfy bed where it wouldn't slowly tug at the back of my mind anymore. But in the end, seeing Lee Meriwether in the Catwoman suit again made it all better.

— bdwilcox

I have two traumas to confess, both of which I suppose speak to the sheer volume of time I spent as a child with my head in a book to the exclusion of any and all other activities. When I was in the first or second grade a classmate whom I can no longer remember brought a picture book (The Secret Knowledge of Grown-Ups) to school that left me quaking in terror for days. It purported to be a book of secrets that are kept from children by a secret cabal of adults, to be revealed only to those that have turned thirteen. Being a child with the rare gift of being completely unable to understand humor, I saw no indication that this was anything but one hundred percent factual.

Among the claims in that book that I found particularly disturbing were: vegetables evolved from giant man-eating monsters and we must eat them in order to prevent them from reverting back to that state, we must drink milk in order to keep atomic cows from exploding, and worst of all, that if you blow bubbles in a glass of milk your face can get sucked into the glass and left permanently deformed. I remember that after I returned home from school that day utterly traumatized, my mother decided it was a good time to show me the classic movie "E.T." and was baffled when I did not enjoy it because I was preoccupied with horrific thoughts of suck-face. My memories of that book are so bizarre that after many years I began to wonder if I hadn't just imagined it all. But last summer, while volunteering at my local library, I stumbled across it in the humor section.

A couple years after this incident, when I was 8, I was at my grandmother's house, where there is a very strange little room created by an odd angle in the roof, known as the Book Nook. In this Book Nook I found a book called "Strange Creatures From Time and Space", which had apparently belonged to my dad or one of his brothers when they were children. (My dad said he had no memory of it.) It was all about Bigfoot, giants, sea monsters, and other unexplained phenomena. Later I found out that it was written by JOHN A. KEEL of Mothman Prophecies fame, and the cover illustration was by Frank Frazetta, but at that young age I hadn't heard of either of them yet.

In any case I could not put the book down, even though it soon terrified me. The more frightened I became, the more I wanted to read it. I read it nonstop on the way back, which involved a drive across most of Texas as well as a plane flight. The whole way I imagined Bigfoot keeping pace with our car from behind the treeline. In the airport I saw a very tall man whom I became convinced was a giant from Patagonia like I had read about in the book. The whole thing came to a head about a week later, when I came home from a piano lesson in tears and begged my dad to take the book away and never let me see it again. He agreed, but thankfully he didn't actually throw it away, for I found it again almost ten years later and still have it today!

Lewis