Category: Traumafessions

Growing up in England the ‘70s-‘80s I was very (un?)lucky to witness many scary moments on TV, but one that always comes up in discussions is SAPPHIRE & STEEL starring DAVID McCALLUM as Steel and JOANNA LUMLEY as Sapphire – a pair of psychic-sci-fi detectives, who would turn up in odd places where strange things had happened. They were usually shown in 2 or 3 parts, and always left you on a creepy cliffhanger – after which I would be sent to bed to terrify myself wondering WHAT was going on!

The two that stuck in my mind were: A couple are downstairs whilst a little baby is in its crib, something happens and the baby turns into grown man! That part ended with a bare leg stepping over the side of the crib and the foot standing on the rug in close-up (I know it doesn't sound that scary, but the atmosphere was so WEIRD and I had no clue as to what it was all about); the second one that freaked me out involved a man walking down a staircase who turns to camera to show he has no face!! Brrrrr … that one still gives me the chills.

Luckily for me, the entire set of series 1 and 2 is available on DVD (Region 1, but fortunately I have a universal DVD player). And as my husband and I sat down to watch the first episode (he having equally scary memories about different parts of the show), Assignment 1, I was gratified to find that it STILL creeps me out and I STILL have no idea what's going on – even the theme tune scares me!

Watch the opening of Assignment 1 HERE (nursery rhymes will never be the same again)!

My first traumafession was a shining example of what would ultimately lay the groundwork for my lifelong affair with the macabre and grotesque side of cinema. RAWHEAD REX was an obscure/ridiculous example of irrational fears that ultimately does not stand the test of time, however the works of STEPHEN KING namely PET SEMATARY, IT, SILVER BULLET and, to a lesser extent, SLEEPWALKERS.

Shall we begin?

First off the one thing we all must take into account is this I saw all of these movies before I hit the ripe old age of eight (it amazes me how liberal my parents were), but I still contend that for the most part these movies still retain their scare factor. The reason why I believe these movies were so effective is that in some way shape or form they all share in common either young people as heroes or villains and the fact that they flesh out the characters and how they react to the circumstances surrounding a paranormal circumstance, which adds to the believability of the events taking place. And they all share in common this; for the most part the antagonist is/was viewed as a trusted or loved pillar of the community.

STEPHEN KING is undoubtedly a master of horror however I would say he has cornered the market on what I would call dramatic horror, wherein the protagonist are not simply meat puppets being dangled over a flame until the inevitable flame roast them for our amusement no they are much more than that and that is what makes these films stand the test of time.

These movies all scared the hell out of me as a child because of the monsters involved, but as a 23-year-old adult they unnerve me because of the realization that, for the most part, the evil often takes the form of an individual that we take great trust in (i.e., a minister, that cute guy next door, your child, or a very creepy clown.) Yes, in their true form these monstrosities are sure to turn the driest pair of pajamas into something resembling the Mississippi River after a recent down pour. These movies play on the one assumption that we all like to hold onto and that is we can trust the people who are closest to us, and they all flip that notion on its head.

The funny thing is my parents who have been the best parents ever, probably watched most of these movies with me and I thank them for that because these movies taught me that yes love the ones who are closest to us, but never forget that sometimes even they may be the ones we should watch the closest (especially if they can turn into giant demonic spiders, werewolves, cat monsters or come back to life after being buried in an Indian burial ground.)

On a final note I would say that my childhood was a blur for the most part, but these movies and other film adaptations definitely stood as pillars amongst many good and bad childhood memories.

UNK SEZ: Awesome images above were found HERE and HERE!

Hi,

When someone mentions childhood trauma I immediately think of E.T. That film terrified me and shaped me in ways I can't describe. Thanks to the Internet however, I now know there are countless others who feel the same and so writing about it would be kind of pointless, because now it is acknowledged as a scary film by thousands.

So instead I will write about what is perhaps a more obscure fear, and one that remains creepy even to type about to this day.

I speak of course of Judge Doom from WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT.

After BACK TO THE FUTURE, I loved CHRISTOPHER LLOYD. As Doc Brown he was hilarious, crazy and exactly the kind of guy you'd want as a 'fun uncle' type relative. Not responsible enough for kids, but manic and exciting enough to spend a summer on holiday with him (the metaphor is weak but you get my drift). So you can imagine how fricking horrible it was to see an actor who'd been entertaining and lovable in one of my favourite films to appear as THIS:

Christ, look at him.

The whole movie, Judge Doom is little more than a menacing, icy presence. Dressed in all in black with those dark, emotionless glasses, he was indeed scary, but nothing more than a relatively basic villain.
Then, as we approach the end of the film and he gets flattened by a steamroller, his true colours show. In classic Michael Myers style, his flattened, paper-thin body gets up from the ground with a new, high-pitched voice and he's revealed to be a ‘Toon. He re-inflates himself and it's all pretty intense, but not all that scary. The he turns around with those big, popping red eyes and screams and half the world's children (including me) piss themselves.

The next scene is him using his ‘Toon powers to attempt to brutally slaughter Eddie, and eventually he is killed by the Dip and melts, screaming all the while.

It's not just the eyes and the voice. It's the face. And the laughter. And the idea that a cartoon, something that's meant to be funny and entertaining could be so evil and murderous. And it's the fact that there is no explanation given as to why he killed Eddie's brother, you just get the idea he's a batshit insane killer. It's also the idea of an authority figure (he's the Judge of Toontown or something) going rogue, which is still a fairly common horror device.

Overall, that reveal traumatised me to no end, so I felt I should share it with your site.

Honourable mentions also to WATERSHIP DOWN, PLAGUE DOGS, WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY and PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE. Also the scene in THE BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER when the NICHOLSON-esque Air Conditioner goes crazy and just explodes. Its little burnt face at the end is almost sympathetic.

So yeah. I had a fun childhood.

George N.

I love the site and it's become one of my favorite spots to pop in every few weeks during a lull at work. I always get hours of enjoyment reading about everyone's creepy childhood scares and thought I would share my own vivid memory. I almost sent this in as a "Name That Trauma" but after 25 years of wondering I was able to figure it out a few months back.

My twin brother and I were fairly insulated as children and didn't interact much with anyone other than our parents. Mom and Dad only had one or two "date nights" for the entirety of my childhood, so the simple fact of being left home alone with a babysitter I didn't know was traumatic enough. I vividly remember that my parents went to see KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN during their night out, so that places the event squarely in 1985 when I was four years old (the film always sounded scary and became amalgamated with my trauma and stuck in my memory.)

The babysitter, as they often do, plopped my brother and I down in front of the T.V. but didn't turn on any lights in the house once it got dark. This created a very weird, alien atmosphere in my house that was entirely different than the way my parents kept things. Then it happened, the babysitter changed the channel to G.L.O.W… THE GORGEOUS LADIES OF WRESTLING and I saw something that absolutely scared the hell out of me.

It was a ladies tag team match and one of the women proceeded to hypnotize a member of the other team and force her to attack her own partner. She had some sort of black magic gimmick, and I was positive someone was going to do the same thing to my parents and make them violently beat me when they came home. To a four year old, this scene, both the wrestling and the hypnotism, were unquestioningly real.

Thanks to the powers of the internet, I was able to find out recently that the woman in question was a masked wrestler known as "The Princess of Darkness." Not only that, but I found the actual match (The Princess of Darkness and Palistina versus Olympia and California Doll, obviously not dubbed into Spanish when I saw it). It's strange to revisit it now, and I can see how it could be pretty unsettling to a four year old.

Another very vivid memory from around the same time period was that during Halloween my teachers would inevitably pop in the THE SKELETON DANCE video from Disney, you guys know the one right? The old black and white cartoon from 1929… I'm sure a lot of kids have been horrified by this thing over the decades.

-Harley A.

I was 9 years old in 1992 and I was at home with my mom while the rest of my family was at school or work. My older brother worked at a video store and he would pick up VHS copies of movies every night on his way home from work and leave them on top of the VCR at home. It's early in the am and my mom is out front tending to a garage sale. Being the bored kid I am I grab the first film in the stack of tapes left on top of the VCR from the night before by my older brother.

The film was WILLIAM FRIEDKIN' s RAMPAGE.

As I recall the film opens with a nice, good looking man standing on the street of a nice suburban community in a red jacket. My first thoughts are "It's Martin Riggs from LETHAL WEAPON…cool"

Negative!

The man waves and smiles at passing residents while crossing the street to perform a violent home invasion on an unsuspecting elderly couple. He knocks on the door of their home, one which looks ideal for raising a family in. A sweet old lady answers the door and greets the nice young man in the red jacket. After forcing his way in he shoots her in the forehead with a Lugar handgun. The husband of the now dead woman comes rushing to investigate and meets the same horrible demise. The killer then recons the kitchen for a large vegetable knife and carves them to pieces.

I am watching this in pure horror. Attempting to escape the psychological trauma that has been inflicted on my pre-adolescent mind, I drop the Batman Arctic Freeze Karate Chop action figure from BATMAN RETURNS and quickly cut the ground between myself and the control panel on the VCR to push fast forward. Why I pushed fast forward? Not sure. I press play and see MICHAEL BIEHN (investigating cop) and the forensics team show up. I feel a small hint of comfort as I recognize him as Hicks from ALIENS.

Now a mere foot and a half from the television, the glimmer of hope I had for a comforting explanation of the images I was previously shown by the image of that dude that kicked ass in ALIENS is ripped away while forensics picks up carved remains from the victims and places them in bags. I couldn't take the images shown and scrambled to turn the film off. Frantically I took the tape out and hid it so no one would know I watched it.

This film left a serious impact on my psyche. For the next few years I would dread everything about this film to extreme measures. Avoiding this film in movie isles at grocery stores and checking the TV Guide to see if it was on and what time. If it was on I would drink warm milk or cough syrup and try so hard to sleep before it started even though my parents were watching LARRY SANDERS on HBO.

Sometimes I would work up the courage to go to the isle of the video store it was in and look at the cover as a feeling of dread and panic would come over me. Not to mention unpredictable midday crying spells that earned me the right to stay home through the last half of my fourth grade year by suggestion of a psychiatrist. I since then have gotten over the torment that this particular film existed and have seen it here and there more for the interest of what it did to me rather than entertainment.

It's not a bad film but, in a nut shell, this movie FUCKED ME UP!!!

Hello! My name is Charles Pieper, and this is my traumafession.

When I was a little kid I LOVED horror movies. I saw my first R-rated films when I was just in Kindergarten! They were AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON and PUMPKINHEAD. They blew my mind, and I was forever changed for the weirder. I was an instant weirdo, in love with gore and monster effects. The film's effects didn't scare me at all, for I knew they were made by the effects artists, who became my first role models/idols. In fact I met TOM SAVINI at my first Fangoria's Weekend of Horrors when I was just in the 1st grade. I also recall buying an artist made, full over the hand wearable reproduction of Freddy's glove from NEW NIGHTMARE, there which I proudly wore while at the convention.

I became so obsessed with monster movies that I began adapting them into the stories I drew in elementary school, much to the chagrin of my often terrified and confused teachers. I've been chronicling those drawings at YOUNG MONSTERS.

I also started making movies at home with my family's VHS camera. My first film was a mystery called 'Murders at the Halloween Hotel!' I still make movies today, specifically stop motion music videos, but it all started back there in my living room with some fake blood and a VHS tape!

My childhood bedroom was covered in posters of Freddy Krueger, GODZILLA, and CRITTERS. Every trip to the local video-store brought me to the darkened upstairs horror section, which was behind a roped off area, up a rickety staircase. The room itself was covered top to bottom in old VHS tapes, the type with the plastic sheet over the actual video that you had to squeeze at the bottom to release the VHS with that singular sort of skritchy sound. It was from this store that I rented all the sequels to NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, FRIDAY THE 13TH, and THE HOWLING, and that was how I learned my Roman Numerals!

My love for horror and gore grew and grew. Nothing seemed to phase me! My friends and family would freak out and I'd simply explain that it was only a latex head filled with meat or the like.

But then, some random things horrified me out of the blue, much to my parent's and my own surprise. First was PET SEMETARY. I became so shocked watching it that my parents actually turned the tape off before we finished it. This was unheard of! What had scared me so much? Me, who didn't bat an eye at zombies, devils, demons, and decapitations? Well, it was that damned cat! That's right, I was afraid of the hissing cat.

The same went for good ol' Jonesy the cat in the dream sequence in ALIENS. Gah! That sound! I became so frightened by cats that I convinced myself that my house was being haunted by a ghost cat, and that, at night, I had to sleep in bed in a special position with my head focused at the door so as to prevent cat attack!

The next thing to scare me was…MICHAEL JACKSON's 'Thriller.' Me, who loved all and every werewolf movie whole-heartedly, was terrified of that Jackson werewolf…Was it the whiskers that made him look cat-like perhaps? Hmm…

And then came the big one….And believe it or not, it was one of the worst horror movies ever made that reduced me to a quivering mass of fear. It was….drumroll please…..NIGHT OF THE LEPUS. Yes, you read that right. NIGHT OF THE LEPUS, the infamous giant killer bunny rabbit movie. Something about it just floored my young self. Those slow motion shots of rabbits leaping over cardboard cars shook me to my very core. I remember going to bed after seeing that film and dreaming that a giant fanged rabbit with wide swirling eyes was standing at the foot of my bed, grinning and beckoning to me, like the skeletal host of CREEPSHOW!

In the end I came to realize that what got me so frightened about these things were that they were all REAL. Cats were a real thing. MICHAEL JACKSON too, was, more or less real. And rabbits were also certainly real! The fact that these things actually existed was what scared me, no matter how irrationally presented they were in these movies or videos. Real life was way more scary to me than any imagined monster in a movie ever could be!

And, all these years later, it certainly still is!

Okay, sure. There were many things found on T.V. that gave me many sleepless nights as a child. But how unfair was it that of all the things that could send me running and screaming from the room, the one thing that had me running the fastest and screaming the loudest was from, of all things– SESAME STREET. The segment was called "There Once Was a Hand."

Now at the time, I couldn't say exactly what it was that terrified me so badly about this clip. I just knew I didn't like it one bit. To add insult to injury, my family thought it was funny. They got quite the chuckle from it. Something got me to thinking about that the other day; I'm not sure what. But I thought I would look it up on YouTube just to revisit this appendage that haunted me so.

My God, no wonder I was so creeped out! Of course I am now 43 and can watch this clip without covering my ears and screaming from the room. But still I was sitting there watching it with a slight turn in my stomach and an unsure desire to look away.

Seriously, is this guy the best they could get??? Try educating small children about a hand that is first of all disembodied and self motivated, and secondly, is pissed off because it doesn't know how to make a sound. Its fingers are unusually long and bony and its skin is ghostly pale. Back all of that up with creepy organ music and the narrative of a man with the unsettling voice of a pedo on Prozac. Hell that's all enough to scare an adult LET ALONE a small child.

Anyone remember this?

I just discovered your site after a discussion on a Facebook thread about things that scared the bejeezus out of us when we were kids, and I thought I'd share some of mine.

1. The Cliffhanger on THE PRICE IS RIGHT. I wasn't scared of the climber himself, but I was SO SCARED that he was going to fall off, and when he did, I'd bury my face in the couch cushions and scare bloody murder. I mean, this guy was FALLING TO HIS DEATH!!! It happens at 5:25 here:

2. The TIC TAC DOUGH dragon. This pixelated monster made me want to wet myself.

3. The flying monkeys from THE WIZARD OF OZ. I'm sure I'm not the only person who was terrified of them.

4. Artax dying in the Swamp of Sadness in THE NEVERENDING STORY. I watched this today and was close to tears.

5. The Nazis' faces melting at the end of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. Sure, they deserved it, but I still couldn't watch it.

You guys have covered most of the bases when it comes to all those things of yesteryear that have stuck with us longer than we would have ever imagined possible. But there's something you haven't touched on yet, and I'd like to know if any others had the same experience with this that I did.

The RCA video disc. These flooded video stores in the early/mid '80's, and I'm pretty certain they began my love of horror movies. Some had the standard covers that appeared on their Beta and VHS brethren, but some had the most vile and twisted cover-displays imaginable. And if you could make it past the cover, lord only knew what awaited you on the backside of the disc.

A couple cases in point: FRIDAY THE 13TH had a standard cover, but I will never forget what happened when you flipped it over–every brutal death displayed like a comic book layout. I'm not sure what they did or how they manipulated it, but the killings seem way gorier than what happens in the film (I think it might have had to do with a more saturated red used in the printing, and the shot of the girl with the ax in her face traumatizers longer and harder in freeze-frame than it does for the couple of seconds in the movie). And PARASITE showed the goods on the cover as the title creature was seen chewing through a leg (I think). These things were like modern-day porno movie packaging that gives away all the money-shots on the cover/back and makes you wonder why you would want to rent the thing when you could just slip it under your coat and high-tail it home.

I have a few of these things framed in my rec-room, but haven't been able to find more than 10 or so, and the great one's remain illusive (does anyone remember that really odd video disc cover for THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD?). A friend of mine once found a CD-ROM done by someone who had lovingly photographed every cover and backside of every RCA disc ever released (so I know I'm not alone in loving these things) but it died in his computer and I never got to see it.

I'm sure you guys at Kindertrauma MUST have a fond memory or two to share about these things (along with some images to post…?) 'cause I can't be alone with my memories of the RCA video disc. The strange scotch-tape scent of them mixed with that '80s video store second-hand smoke smell…the gawd-awful quality and image skipping of the actual film…etc.