Category: Traumafessions

I was scared for life by the T.V. movie DAVID: THE DAVID ROTHENBERG STORY.

Very cruel & scary movie.

JOHN ERMAN (director), 1988, with BERNADETTE PETERS and JOHN GLOVER.

UNK SEZ: Ugh! Why'd ya have to go and remind me of the feel-bad television movie of the century Riccardo? A father setting his son on fire and burning over 90% of his body? Of course, something so mind-boggingly heinous has to be based on a true story and guess what? Dad spent all of SIX years in jail!

Don't feel bad, American judicial system, you're new; I'm sure you'll iron out all of those little kinks one of these centuries!

It's not a horror movie. It was a political statement docudrama. The name of the movie was SILKWOOD and the shower scenes… still…. ::shudder::

SO here's what it is. A woman is working in a nuclear facility of some kind. All the workers exit through some sort of radiation detector (I've since seen these at a medical research facility I worked at.) Well, it goes off and she is carried away to a shower room where she is scrubbed raw by what I can only imagine was some sort of Brillo pad on a long stick. The whole time she's screaming her poor little head off.

I hope I'm not the only one who remembers this…. It's freaked me out forever.

UNK SEZ: You are not alone Little Fox! Every time Silky would go through that radiation detector I would grit my teeth! That gal got scrubbed!

NOTE: The SILKWOOD trading card is courtesy of THE AUTOMATIC LIFESTYLE DISPENSER; find more "Improbable movie trading cards" HERE!

I love your site! Haven't made it all the way through yet, but just thought of something that used to scare the crap out of me as a kid. Remember TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE?? People always cite that story at the end, with the alien on the wing of the airplane. But what always got me was the third story, about the kid who lives in a cartoon world. A woman takes him home after she hits him with her car, and he traps her there with his creepy cartoon family.

Two things specifically stick out. In a room upstairs he shows the woman his sister, whose back is facing them. He says something like, "She doesn't talk much," or something, and when the camera pans around, you see that she has no mouth. So scary!!! The other is when he orders his uncle to do a magic show, and he pulls a terrifying, snarling, bloody bunny out of a hat.

Please add these to your list! I wonder if everyone will remember this!

UNK SEZ: Thanks Sarah, Aunt John and I were just watching this one the other day on T.V.! I have to agree with you that the JOE DANTE directed segment "It's a Good Life" is the absolute highlight of the movie (in fact, I could do without the first two segments completely.) You can thank effects genius ROB BOTTIN (THE THING) for that rascally rabbit and all the other surreal creatures that pop up unexpectedly throughout. By the way, this segment was based on a classic episode of the series and you can spot original kid star BILLY MUMY (LOST IN SPACE) hanging out in the diner at the beginning!

Hi, it's Jeffrey again, the one who told you about FRAGGLE ROCK and THX, and also asked about the school supplies commercial. Here is something that might have material that could scare kids under 6, maybe 7. It's not a movie, a T.V. show, or a book. It's a videogame. I'm talking about Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island for SNES, and also GBA. It has some creepy stuff like fake giant floating flowers disguised as real ones with evil grins that roll towards you when you get too close to them, monkeys spitting seeds at you, mud, cleverly hidden enemies, spike and thorns, creepy bosses, etc. This game should not be played by kids 6 and under, it's CREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEPY.

You gotta devote about 3 minutes of your time to look at this short film. Trust me, it's worth it. Creepy, eerie, and unsettling are three words that come to mind. Exactly what kind of drugs do you need to be on to dream this stuff up? Even so, I love it!

I saw this movie in 1965 with my younger brother and sister when I was six years old. The movie starts with two astronomers in an observatory discussing a possible UFO sighting. We then see the flying saucer landing. A cute little dog that saw the saucer land runs up to it and starts barking at it. The top of the flying saucer opens and a helmeted alien with a ray gun pops out and Sparky, the cute little dog, gets zapped into a gruesome little dog skeleton that clatters to the ground. …Instant trauma!

I have never forgotten that moment, none of us kids said a word, all three of us just sat there in shock as the all too human looking alien took off his helmet and more aliens emerged from the saucer to examine poor little Sparky's skeletal remains. Later in the movie, one of the aliens goes into a small town and several people get skeletonized in a gun battle. My sister was five at the time and still remembers little Sparky getting zapped into skeleton bones. That movie is probably why my three-year-old little brother feared skeletons through most of his childhood.

Some of my biggest T.V.-trauma moments from childhood were brought about by the 1985 version of THE TWILIGHT ZONE. I was seven when it started, old enough to know that I wanted to watch scary things, but too young to really handle more than Disney-fied frights (the SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES movie springs to mind as a safe favorite at that age) without nightmares.

Three stories from the series were particularly traumatic. I remember one scene from the episode called "Monsters!" making me run from the room while watching it with my parents and brother. Most of the episode was kind of sweet, about a kid (POLTERGEIST's OLIVER ROBINS) befriending a lonely old man in his neighborhood. It turns out that the old man is a vampire, and if he lives too long in one area, the humans around him turn into monsters that are out to kill him. The humans' transformations start out very mild with seemingly normal flu-like symptoms, so everyone just thinks there's a bug going around. Then one night the kid and his parents are all sick, coughing and sneezing, resting together in their living room…His dad has a really big sneeze that bloodies his nose and sends him collapsing to the ground where he, and then the mother also, suddenly start groaning and convulsing, finally changing all the way into monsters. That was all I could handle…I sprinted out of the room. The only other time in my life that I did that was a couple of years later when watching the chestburster scene in ALIEN.

Another was "Need to Know"…It's about WILLIAM PETERSEN and FRANCES McDORMAND trying to figure out why people in a small town are suddenly going crazy one by one. We find out that the source of it is one local man's discovery of the ultimate, true meaning of all life, and when you find out what it is, the implications of it instantly make you lose your mind. Of course the meaning of life is never shared with the audience, but several times we see someone who knows the secret whisper it into a sane person's ear for only a few seconds, and then sane person will start laughing or screaming maniacally, having been sent around the bend by the info. That was unforgettable and deeply chilling to me that something that only took a few seconds to say could be so monumentally important to everything that exists in the universe that the human mind couldn't handle knowing it. There were no "run from the room" moments in that one, but it's always stuck with me as psychologically terrifying.

But the biggest ‘80s TWILIGHT ZONE trauma for me was the STEPHEN KING adaptation "Gramma," starring the kid from THE NEVERENDING STORY (a.k.a. BARRETT OLIVER) as a kid named Georgie who is left at home one afternoon to look after his overweight, bedridden grandmother. He's already scared of her because she's old and gross, but gradually we learn that she practices Cthulhu witchcraft, and she's wants to take over Georgie's body since hers is dying. What really got to me was that you never see Gramma (maybe some at the end, I don't remember), you just get a sense of this hulking mass in the bed and you hear her deep, breathy voice calling for Georgie: "Georgie! Tea!" She eventually gets Georgie to come close enough to the bed that she can grab him, and as he's screaming it dissolves to later on. Georgie is sitting at the kitchen table and his mom comes home. He tells her that Gramma died while she was out, and the mom walks over and hugs him. She can't see it, but Georgie looks at the camera and he's got freaky cat eyes! I saw this one with my family while on my first ski trip, and "Georgie! Tea!" and the cat eyes are my two most vivid memories of the whole vacation.

Am I the only person in existence who was traumatized as a child by the mere COMMERCIALS for the '80s horror film CURTAINS?

I love a good horror movie, but even I couldn't watch this film until last year (now that I'm in my 30's). And it still scared me!

I could never get the image of the masked killer skating across the frozen lake in broad daylight out of my mind. It absolutely terrified me!!

::shudder::

My Dad was a big STAR TREK fan so we always had it on in the house when I was a wee lad. The one episode that was forever burned into my mind was "Operation: Annihilate!" The crew set down on a planet that was inhabited by these flying pancake like parasites that would attach to your spine. They would stick to the walls and for some reason be immune to phazers.

As a kid who already was freaked out by leeches, this was a terrifying thought. Even if poorly executed, just the thought of one of those floating by and clinging to your back was traumatic.

Apparently, as we learn from Dr. McCoy, they would inject tissue into your back and some how "meld" with you so that if it was torn off, you'd be killed along with it.

Fortunately this paved the way for my first viewing of ALIEN to be almost something that was passé! Well, not really.

Another trauma of mine, although a minor one, was an episode of SPACE 1999. One might wonder what could be scary in a dated-looking 70's style family sci-fi series? Well, the episode "Force of Life" has an alien entity that feeds on "energy" taking the body of one of the characters. The man now "possessed" starts absorbing energy from lights and small plants just by touching them but soon grows greedier and the first human victims are found frozen, all the heat absorbed from their bodies.

Near the end the need for more energy forces the villain into the nuclear reactor in which he will literally burn becoming a slow moving black crispy monster with glowing creepy eyes. Well that was a pretty scary show for the audience (kids mostly), and for that time.

I can't call this a major trauma, it didn't leave permanent damages but it's something that stuck in my mind. As a matter of fact when I was a kid I dreamt of this black-burnt man with glowing eyes chasing me around like a zombie.

UNK SEZ: Thanks Errico, you can find more SPACE 1999 trauma HERE!