Category: Traumafessions

Over the space of three of five years, I associated the Warner Brothers logo from the '70s and early '80s with fear itself. At least three films were to blame for this: SALEM'S LOT, THE SHINING and THE EXORCIST.

On each occasion, when that weirdly abstract logo showed up, my Mom said, "Time for Bed," and that the grown-ups were watching a SCARY MOVIE, and I would have bad dreams if I saw any of it. Of course, by then, I felt I had already seen part of it. And it was BAD. Given the time line and setting, THE SHINING and THE EXORCIST must have been cable broadcasts.

I vividly remember THE WORLD BEYOND like it was yesterday and I was 7 years old when I saw it (now 39). My Parents were out and Grandparents were babysitting. When they fell asleep, I flipped channels to that movie by accident and it really was what led me to an affinity for the genres of horror and sci-fi ever since.

I was also turned on by a movie or short sequences within a movie which I think was called THE MONSTER CLUB or something like that. There is a short within that film that was nightmarish S-C-A-R-Y! At least to a nine year old anyway. I don't remember all of the details. Maybe you guys can refresh my memory?

I also vividly remember being freaked out by the original version of THE CRAZIES which is now out as a re-made feature.

Another film that always freaked me out was a HAMMER -type horror flick with PETER CUSHING where these aliens invaded the English countryside. They looked like a cooked turkey in size and shape and had a long snake-like neck. To kill them, you would have to split them in half with a blade and (what looked like) chicken noodle soup would spill out. It was twisted!

And one of my absolute favorite vampire flicks of all time…SALEM'S LOT.

No movie vampire was ever so gruesome.

I originally always felt that CHRISTOPHER LEE was the ultimate Dracula, but the way REGGIE NALDER played him in Salem's as kind of all powerful yet feral was terrifying.

When the character actor that plays "Mike" gets bit and he gives the college professor a heart attack after surprising him in the rocking chair. What a killer scene!!!

It would be great to see if my memories are accurate and if other folks related to these images as well.

Thanks.

UNK SEZ:That PETER CUSHING flick you mentioned has got to be 1966's ISLAND OF TERROR directed by TERRENCE FISHER! You can check out the trailer HERE!

NOTE: Thanks to BADMOVIES.ORG for the yummy picture above!

First off, I LOVE this site. It has brought back some long lost memories for me.

I was a child of the early days of cable and was able to watch whatever I wanted. So needless to say I have quite a few traumas to share as the '70s was a pretty wild era for movies. For now I give you this one.

Let's see I must have been 7 or 8.

My Trauma?

TOMMY!!!!

Just typing the words to this freaky rock opera gives me the chills. I recall the Acid Queen with flashes of a skeleton and snake. The weird uncle and pedophile cousin with the torture tools. ELTON JOHN with super high platforms and the TV vomiting out beans in a white bedroom with ANN MARGARET "bathing" in it yuck!! Just typing this out I feel the need to take a long hot shower. All I can say is this movie made me feel dirty and violated. I may not be spot on in my memories as I REFUSE to watch this ever again.

And yes I have seen THE WALL and loved it.

When my parents would go on a shopping trip and I'd have to stay with a baby-sitter, they'd always bring me back some kind of present, either a book or a record or both. When I was five, they purchased an LP that became one of my favorites as a child – "Monster Melodies" by Frankie Stein and His Ghouls!

Not an awful lot is known about the group, but during the mid '60s, within the space of seven months, they banged out 5 albums of fairly decent surf rock, with all the hot dances of the time – Frug, Hully Gully, Twist, Swim, Mashed Potato – represented, with song titles like "In a Groovy Grave," "Knives and Lovers," and "Ain't Got No Body." But the real selling point for the records were the eerie sound effects that were scattered through all the tracks – screams, moans, chains rattling, maniacal laughter. In most cases they were just silly fun, but there was one voice that showed up frequently with chilling demands to "Twisssst…..Twissssssssst….TWISSSSSST!!!" (I've checked other boards about Frankie, and it seems there were more than a few who were creeped out by that voice.) They've since come to be prized by DJs, who love to throw some Frankie into the mix at Halloween. QUENTIN TARANTINO, do you know about these?

But the music is not the focus of this Traumafession. After I got my first taste of Frankie, I wanted more, and eventually in a late 60s cut-out bin (God, I miss those!) I found a copy of another of his albums – "Ghoul Music."

Now my parents bought it for me, and I don't think I gave the cover too much mind at first. But once I got it home, I couldn't stop looking at it, and it really began to get under my skin. I saw the jacket art two ways: 1) The different-colored claw belonged to someone – or something – else, and it was pulling back the flesh around the eye socket and making it bleed, or more disturbingly, 2) That was the ghoul's own hand, and it was performing a horrible act of self-mutilation. I'd say that, within a month, I had my parents throw the record jacket away, and I kept both of my Frankie albums in the same sleeve. To this day, the concept of eye trauma really gets to me.

In 2006 a company called Groovy Grinds re-released "Ghoul Music" as a CD with Stein's "Shock! Terror! Fear!" – and when I bought a copy, I flipped the CD booklet so that the "Ghoul" art was on the inside!

Thanks, guys – hope you're doing well!

XOXO

Senski

UNK SEZ: Thank YOU Senski! Is there anything better than a fresh traumafession from our pal Senski? What a great way to start the weekend! Remember kids you can take advantage of Senski's wit and wisdom whenever you please by dropping by HEART IN A JAR!

Our family was fortunate enough to have HBO in the early ‘80s, but as a sheltered little girl I was never allowed to watch it past 7:00 pm, for that was when the BAAAAAD stuff started, like a showing of FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH. However, on weekends, I could sneak in some late night programming, sometimes as late as 9:00!

One show that I was forbidden to watch was called THE HITCHHIKER, a half-hour thriller series that featured a vagabond host before and after each episode (think Crypt Keeper, but cute). I don't really know much about the series to this day except that it had violence, sex, and cursing on a much more hardcore level than the prime-time "A-TEAM" crap that I was used to.

I freaked out easily as a kid, but I also had a morbid curiosity, so I'd try to watch this adult program, only to have my Mom send me to bed forthwith. Only once did I *almost* make it through an entire episode, an episode that I remember to this day, but could not tell you the name. My memory's a little fuzzy, but I distinctly remember two criminals, one violent and mean, one reluctant and soft, breaking into a family's house late in the evening. The family was a Mom and Dad, a teenage daughter, and a little boy.

As I recall, the really bad guy proceeded to take hostage and terrorize this poor family, while the softer guy wanted to leave them alone and (I think) teamed up with the daughter to get rid of the bad guy. This episode really terrified me, as I'd never before seen a grown man threaten to murder a little boy or such violence shown toward people who did absolutely nothing wrong. Like I said, I didn't finish the episode, because my Mom made me go to bed, but I could still hear the show loud and clear from my bedroom.

So I'm lying there under the covers trembling as I hear yelling and gunshots, and I run from my bedroom to the living room because I HAD to see what happened. Sure enough, the bad guy had blown away the whole family and there was blood all over the walls. I believe it turned out the girl had actually lived, but whatever! That vision of the blood on the walls and hearing the bad guy's friend begging him not to kill the family has haunted me ever since.

I hope you guys can help me out with the name of the episode. I'd like to watch it again to see if it was really THAT bad.

-Jodi

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Jodi, fortunately for you I am all too familiar with the painted on dungarees of PAGE FLETCHER, the second actor to raise his thumb in the air as the titular host of this, dare I say, adult-themed anthology series. (Admittedly, it's pretty tame by contemporary standards, but back then… HUBBA-HUBBA!) The show you are talking about is the fifth episode of the fourth season, and it's called "Homebodies":

P.S.: For fans of drifters with tousled hair in way too tight jeans, THE HITCHHIKER, in its entirety, is streaming on HULU.

Greetings, Unk and Aunt.

I have one major childhood trauma that I will never forget involving something I saw on the T.V. It was during the 1970s, before we imagined that anything like VCRs or DVDs awaited us in the future, and we were at the complete, horrid mercy of the networks to see any movie, and if we missed it then, it may have been a year or longer before we had the opportunity to see whatever neat little offering we missed again.

Anyway, I have been a fan of horror cinema for as long as I can remember, and also the fan of supposed real life monsters like Bigfoot. So I was thrilled when I checked the TV GUIDE and found out that a movie called CURSE OF BIGFOOT was going to be aired on T.V. that afternoon. This weird and somewhat demented little gem of a film that attempts to cash in on a real-life legend is more than worth the effort of finding on video for aficionados of the more bizarre horror films. The fun–and the major trauma–started (I kid you not) in the prologue before the opening credits!

I remember expecting this movie to do the usual and wait until the second half of the film to show a clear shot of the titular monster, but this particular prologue was an exception to this often tantalizing rule that ended up making me feel unhappy rather than thrilled. Not only did this opening sequence feature a genuinely creepy voice-over by some invisible narrator describing this alleged prehistoric hominid horror in a way that truly chilled my bones (he said the creature was "more beast than man…", or something like that), but within just several seconds we are suddenly treated to a long shot of the full creature, where the beast-man quickly proceeds to walk straight up to the camera so that we get a very uncomfortable–and bone-chilling–close-up shot of its truly hideous face!

Its wicked scream as it approached the camera was almost as bad as its madness-inducing countenance. And if that wasn't enough, immediately afterwards we saw a totally unnecessary but no less horrifying scene of the creature's forearm and hand up against a huge rock or some sort of solid object with pools of blood pouring down from it.

That was just too much for me, and I quickly ran in the kitchen where a few adult family members were hanging out. That opening sequence of a memorable little B-film from the 1960s provided me with a major childhood trauma, and it did so in what amounted to less than two minutes of screen time in the prologue sequence, no less. Is that a new record for a film-induced trauma?

–Chris Nigro

UNK SEZ: Thanks Chris, for the great traumafession! Maybe you should count your blessings that you dropped out of CURSE OF BIGFOOT when you did because after that opening, it's all down hill from there! In fact, the second half of the movie, if I recall correctly, recycles footage from an earlier film entitled TEENAGERS BATTLE THE THING (1958). That alone wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that T.B.T.T. has nothing to do with our pal Bigfoot at all and instead involves an ancient ape mummy!

Also Chris thanks for informing us about your two traum-tastic websites!

Kids, check out all the coolness that Chris has been up to; one of his websites is a personal homage to Godzilla called THE GODZILLA SAGA, and the other is called THE WARRENVERSE. It concerns those awesome old magazines like EERIE and CREEPY and you can find that one HERE. Make sure you visit both!

Since 1979, the horrific image of a half-psycho/half-mannequin, knife-wielding maniac from TOURIST TRAP has repeatedly appeared in my dreams. I was forced to watch this movie as a five-year-old by my older brother and his pals. They decided their plot to scare themselves silly would be foiled if I ran screaming out of the room crying to my mommy. So, they blocked the door, plopped me down right in front of the T.V., and proceeded to induce a deep-seeded fear of inanimate clothing models with removable limbs and bad hair-dos.

I've always loved horror movies, but I've never been brave enough to figure out the name of the first one that sliced and diced its way into the very depths of my subconscious. I've so enjoyed the stories of fellow Kindertrauma readers that I've had to take a deep breath, google "mannequin horror," and finally put a name to the face that continues to haunt my dreams! Thanks Kindertrauma!

When I was a young'un in the '70s, whenever my 6th health teacher didn't want to teach, he'd show a film. (The one on the dangers of alcohol that starred SONNY BONO was groovy, man.) The one that scarred me for life was a safety film about electricity. I was fine with the 'don't fly kites near electrical wires' and the 'don't climb electrical pylons' portion of the film…and then a little girl with her dolly decided to play with the electrical box in her front yard. (I don't know the technical term for the things, but they're kind of rectangular, stand several feet high, and are painted a dull green.)

The lock was broken on the electrical box on that fateful day little Sally decided to explore, and she opened it right up. Inside were two white electrical thingies that Sally thought would make a perfect house for her dolly. So Sally reaches in…ZAP!...cut to a scene of a blackened, burnt up doll. I could only assume little Sally looked the same way.

To this day, if I see any neighborhood children anywhere near those boxes, even those that are safely locked, I want to scream at them to RUN AWAY! DON'T GO NEAR THE BOX! So I guess the film worked…

My name's Tracy V., and I help out at Joe Bob Briggs' website. (Joe Bob being the most famous expert on drive-in cinema ever to come out of Grapevine, Texas.)

Thanks for letting me get that traumafession off my chest,

Tracy V.

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Thank you Tracy V. for bringing an oft unspoken issue to our attention. The importance of electrical safety cannot be stressed enough! While I was unsuccessful in locating the film that traumatized you, I did unearth this chestnut from across the pond which plays out like The Gashlycrumb Tinies set in a electric sub-station. Poor J-I-M-M-M-Y!