Category: Traumafessions

ALL DOGS GO TO HEAVEN. Seems innocent enough, right? It can't be bad telling from the title, can it? It involved dogs, one of my favorite animals and heaven? Heaven is a good thing, right?

WRONG.

I can't remember how old (maybe 7 or 9) I was when I saw this movie, but when I think about it, this one scene from near the end of the movie replays in my head: One of the dogs being dragged down to hell by this black demon things spurring out of the concrete. It scared the hell outta me and I couldn't watch it again.

Unfortunately, I was made to watch it again, when I was twelve or eleven. I was at a friend's house and I couldn't bear to watch it. I couldn't watch the poor innocent dogs get killed and be sent back and fourth between heaven and hell. That's a great thing to be showing kids, right? Dogs being killed only to be dragged down to the pits of hell. Riiight…

It's been years since I've seen the movie but it still sparks a bad feeling when I think about it. But I gotta know if I was the only one bothered by this movie or not.

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Nope, you are not alone on this one… just ask Reader Miriam67.

Hey Aunt and Unk:

FAT ALBERT AND THE COSBY KIDS was always a main staple of Saturday mornings, with good ole' Albert becoming the moralistic voice of reason countering the bad decisions of his cronies.

"You shouldn't pick on little Ginny, just because she's deaf! Hey Hey Hey!"

But somewhere down the line, there was an episode where they just happened to wind up in a stolen car, and were given a tour of a Philadelphia prison in an attempt to be SCARED STRAIGHT by the police. I'm not kidding. I had read a post earlier this year about a gun violence FAT ALBERT episode. I would wager this came from the same "unsyndicated, no holds barred" season.

Does anyone remember how out of place and unsettling this was? Granted there was no profanity, but it was certainly not something for a 6 year old, and I doubt teenagers were the target audience of the show.

I remember my sister and I transfixed by this prison house of horrors as depicted in a trustworthy happy cartoon, listening to the cacklings and howls of the pedophiles and psychopaths.

When the psycho inmate lusts over Albert, "Mmm… give me the BIG one.." like he's some kind of plump New Year's ham, I think it sealed the deal that we were going to keep on the straight and narrow.

So I supposed it worked, Mr. COSBY; thanks for the nightmares!

All the best,

Bigwig

I really enjoy the site. Keep up the good work.

Anyhow, I suppose that as a young child, I was exceptionally sensitive and was repeatedly trauma'd by 1970s pop culture: the cover of the Queen album News of the World; those huge monsters that ate people on the MUPPET SHOW; the trailer for THE DEVIL'S RAIN (which ran before some thing much more mundane at the drive-in); and of course my cousin Roger's thoughtful description of PHANTASM which I really didn't understand but caused me to steal and bury my neighbor's silver sphere garden decoration.

However, I must (somewhat shamefully) admit that the mightiest trauma didn't come down until I was 12 or 13 years old. I was told by some of the older kids on the block that I should see this hi-larious movie called RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD. Now, I've seen the film a few times as an adult and it is pretty damned witty, but the kids on my block forgot to mention that the film could also be regarded as being UTTERLY HORRIFYING by a kid that was afraid of (certain) Muppets. I was doing O.K. until the "tar-man" zombie showed up. After that it was zero chuckles and pure white knuckles.

There was something about the RETURN zombies that really shook me up. These zombies were so much like living people that their acts of cannibalism seemed much more terrible. Freddy's slow transformation from loving boyfriend to brain-craving zombie really underscored the point. Further, although they were much more human than other zombies, they were essentially unstoppable, which made me feel helpless. Finally, they wanted to eat living human brains, which greatly bothered me for reasons that I still don't fully understand to this day.

My viewing of RETURN began a new phase in my life that lasted for years. I would not go near a cemetery and memorized the locations of every one in town so that I could plan my bicycle rides accordingly. Same with funeral homes, natch. Hospitals were nearly as taboo, as I knew that corpses were kept somewhere therein.

I was very uncompromising about my new extreme phobia. A friend of mine lived a couple of houses away from a cemetery, so he was scratched off my buddy list. My grandma lived near a gigantic military cemetery, and although I could not opt out, I counted the seconds until we left during each visit.

Nightmares about a full-scale zombie uprising were the norm. Looking back, these were really the catalyst that kept the trauma rolling along. I clearly recall waking from these night terrors covered in sweat and spending the rest of the night looking outside my bedroom window, anticipating the moment when that first decaying shambler would appear under the streetlights.

At some point my zombie-phobia simply faded and as I grew older I came to enjoy all things zombie. I'm sure a shrink could bill a few grand dissecting how I embraced my fears and wanted to connect with my childhood and blah, blah, blah. Unfortunately, zombies have of late become so overexposed that for the first time in my life I'm becoming finding them to be somewhat boring….

Oh well. All good things must one day end.

Maybe I'll steal a decorative silver ball and bury it for old time's sake.

I just found your site today, and it's great.

Around 1987, when I was 5 years old, I have very distinct memories of being in the video store with my mother. I didn't look at the children's movies though. She would always find me in the horror section, looking at the back of the VHS movies. I remember one picture in particular, a woman in a bathtub holding a toaster. I'm thinking there had to be another picture, such as a leg sticking out of the tub, and the toaster was next to it, maybe. I have no idea what this movie was (I doubt I was a very good reader at 5 anyway), but I don't remember being scared of the picture, just interested. I enjoyed the back of other movies too; I do remember THE THING, MONKEY SHINES, and a movie about flesh eating ants. I'm pretty sure this is where my fascination with death began. I believe the term is death hag. I can view death pictures, like Nikki Catsouras, and there's no problem. It's pictures like the entry on MR. SARDONICUS that terrify me, to this day, at 26 years old.

Another thing that scared me to death was the cover of one of my mother's Simplicity Sewing magazines; I'm guessing from late ‘80s/early ‘70s. The picture was of a young woman with long brown hair (no bangs of course), her mouth was making a small O shape, and her hand was up in front of her. The fingers on her hand turned into a pair of scissors, a thimble…a little rolly wheel thing on her middle finger (this was in front of/below the O of her mouth). The mouth shape and the fact that her fingers "became" scissors is what scared me. Early Photoshop I guess. I would beg my mom to make that face and then it would freak me out and I would make her stop. Funny. I found that picture online once but unfortunately I can't find it again. I hope I find it before I have a kid so I can scare her with it.

Also the usual fare: Wicked Witch in the WIZARD OF OZ (actually, the monkeys), Chuckie, FIRE IN THE SKY, and IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS are the movies that really got to me, that I lost sleep over or slept with the light on. Today, of course, I love horror movies, esp. zombies. I think we can all agree the scariest part is when the characters lose the local T.V. and radio stations. At that point, you're on your own. The end is nigh, huh? This is why I keep a shotgun under my bed and drive an SUV.

I sure wonder about that toaster lady, though.

I just stumbled on this site this morning – it is SO GREAT.

I just saw DEAD OF NIGHT last evening, and that movie lead me to Kindertrauma via IMDb…so hooray!

What scared me most? A few things:

• The Frankenstein T.V. movie with MICHAEL SARRAZIN and the hand that moved around without a body. Totally Traumatized
• TRILOGY OF TERROR
• SALEM'S LOT
• Commercial for SUSPIRIA – weird – movie is nothing like it
• BURNT OFFERINGS

And the big one – MR. SARDONICUS. That movie scared me so much I couldn't even think about seeing it again, even now. I was about 11. We were not allowed to watch horror films, but the ones above are the ones that I somehow saw, probably at Grammie's house. MR. S. was at a friend's house the one time I was allowed to sleep over!

Thanks for having a site like this,

Smidget

I LOVE this site! I have already found a couple of things I forgot about, and a couple others I never knew the name of.

I have to admit though; some of the things that traumatized me most as a kid were books. Not even "scary" books. These were books that we were supposed to read for book reports and such with those little silver seals on them indicating they were depressing enough to scar us for life or something. Mind you, this was grade school.

I think the most depressing ones I read for school were:

• MY BROTHER SAM IS DEAD
• THE ONE-EYED CAT
• CHILDREN OF THE DUST
• WATERSHIP DOWN
• And some book about an autistic kid who gets killed by a swan (I'm still afraid of swans and geese to this day)

(AUNT JOHN SEZ: Was that SUMMER OF THE SWANS?)

Seriously, why these were all on the required reading list for 3rd graders? I mean, granted, my dad was slightly sadistic, so I was reading some Kafka as a kid, but not until 5th grade.

Not much scares me, and for the most part horror movies have always made me feel normal. My mother didn't much like me watching them when I was young (elementary age) so I would go over to my friends' places and get my fill of stuff like THE SHINING, IT, Freddy Krueger, whatever. When I was about 7 or 8 I was bragging to my mother (who was a child psychologist) how "fun" horror movies were. She turned on the TV (we had an old console T.V. and no VCR- this was in the early ‘90s) and said something like "We'll see how brave you are." (Something like that). The movie she was about to show me was the 1978 masterpiece INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS.

She knew I believed in aliens and I started out brave, but as the film continued and I kept seeing people "changing" into blank automatons and chasing, screaming, after the "real" people my little kid bravado turned sour and I began to seriously clam up. By the end of the movie I was breathing heavy, a combination of the movie and what my mother was doing- as I watched she became more and more emotionless until at the end, she turned to me, my sister and my friend and said in a blank, dead tone (to me). "You look frightened. Are you frightened?"

Still being at an age where reality and fantasy overlapped, I was frightened, but as she progressed with her little "experiment" the message of the movie (that anyone you know can "change" overnight, but still "look" like the person you love) began to take root. When I finally admitted I was "a bit" frightened she turned on me, shot her finger at me and screamed like a body snatcher!

I freaked out.

My sister and friend were hardly phased, but I ran upstairs and began looking for any plant in my room I could toss. When my friend's mom came to pick her up, my mother convinced the other mom to pull the same body snatcher scream on me (except the other mom had the good sense to stop after I began hyperventilating). My mother kept this up for days, and at school I became more and more emotionless, polite and robotic until they finally dragged me to the counselor's office (I was convinced she was "one of them" too).

For months I lived honestly believing that the body snatchers were taking over and that it would only be a matter of time before everyone was taken over, so for months I acted robotic, but at night I had night terrors (the beginning of a lifelong sleep disorder). The movie alone, at that age, would have terrified me, but Mommy made the movie real.

I can watch all of the BODY SNATCHERS movies now (I haven't seen the ‘50s version but the ‘78, ‘93 and '07 versions) and I do okay, but I still get the urge, to this day, to act robotic and stiff upon viewing these films… just in case.

UNK SEZ: Wow Lex, this has got to be one of my favorite traumafessions of all time (about one of my favorite movies too!). Thank you so much for sending it in. I'm not sure that I would recommend your mother's services as a child psychologist, but I feel a certain affinity with her sick sense of humor. More than anything though, I'm impressed with your vivid imagination.

Speaking of which, I really dig the painting that you sent in to accompany your traumafession…

Folks, can you believe how awesomely kindertraumatic Lex's artwork is? We're going to try to get Lex to share some more of her paintings with us in the future, but in the meantime if any of you are interested in contacting Lex about her work, she can be reached at insatiablexphile@yahoo.ca. If you are looking for somebody to illustrate something horror related, I think this is your gal! Thanks for sharing your talent with us Lex, very impressive!!!

So my childhood traumas consisted of the usual fair, including but not limited to: THE GATE, RETURN TO OZ, and the beginning scene in TROLL where the guy and his apartment are being turned into a plant? or mold? or mushrooms? That last one especially scared the crap out of me! However a very specific trauma, which no one seems to talk about, are video game traumas.

I have vivid memories of laying around on school nights watching my brother play the very first issued release of RESIDENT EVIL for Playstation. Wow what a great game! One of the first of its kind, labeled "survival horror." It had zombies, giant spiders, evil swamp creatures with razor sharp claws, zombie dogs, and it all takes place in a scary mansion in the woods! It is like taking my favorite horror movies and putting them into a game just for me, that I can control! I mean what more could you want! It is a playable horror movie!

There have sense been countless more names and sequels to the genre including SILENT HILL, which takes its idea and look from JACOB'S LADDER; but the original RESIDENT EVIL will always have a special place in my heart for giving me chills every time I hear that announcer say, "RESIDENT EVIL" in a overly forceful tone. Oh, and definitely check out the original opening with real actors. Just like bad B-horror, the acting is wonderfully terrible and it leaves an icky feeling in the pit of my soul! I love it!

Also, they have come out with the RESIDENT EVIL movie series, which is "ok" and has little to do with the games, but nothing can compare to that ultimate weirdo beauty that is the opening of RESIDENT EVIL:

UNK SEZ:: Big thanks to fellow Philadelphian Va on her traumafession. All y'all best check out Va's cool website VA's "THE CINEMA EXPERIENCE." Her illustrations are too awesome!

For as long as I can remember I've had a fear of wolves. I grew up in suburban Southern California, so there's no chance it was inspired by any real life encounters, but I do specifically remember two storybooks, with illustrations that inspired my nightmares for years. One of the books unfortunately had no cover so I don't know what the exact name was, only that it was a collection of fairy tales and stories probably published in the mid-to-late ‘70s. The story that especially frightened me was the WOLF AND THE SEVEN KIDS. For those not familiar, it's the story of seven goat kids, who are left alone while their mother goes shopping. A wolf arrives at the door and tries several ways to convince the kids to let him in. After he succeeds and eats six of the seven kids, the mother returns, cuts the kids out of the sleeping wolf's stomach, and then fills his stomach with large stones. He wakes up and heads to the well for a drink, where he falls in and drowns. I remember vividly that the wolf was black and had scary eyes with purple eyelids. Like I said, I have no idea what the book was called but if I ever come across the story in a used bookstore, I'll know it instantly by the illustrations.

The second book isn't hard to find at all. Barnes and Noble reprinted it several years ago and it has been in print ever since. It's called THE AESOP FOR CHILDREN with pictures by Milo Winter. Looks like the original was published in 1919, and the extremely old fashioned look of the illustrations certainly made it all the creepier for me. Coincidentally the story that scared me the most is the one called "THE WOLF AND THE KID." Even more than the story just flipping open to the page it was on was enough to freak me out because of the illustration (see above). Here's the text:

There was once a little Kid whose growing horns made him think he was a grown-up Billy Goat and able to take care of himself. So one evening when the flock started home from the pasture and his mother called, the Kid paid no heed and kept right on nibbling the tender grass. A little later when he lifted his head, the flock was gone.

He was all alone. The sun was sinking. Long shadows came creeeping over the ground. A chilly little wind came creeping with them making scary noises in the grass. The Kid shivered as he thought of the terrible Wolf. Then he started wildly over the field, bleating for his mother. But not halfway, near a clump of trees, there was the Wolf!

The Kid knew there was little hope for him.

"Please Mr. Wolf," he said trembling. "I know you are going to eat me. But first please pipe me a tune, for I want to dance and be merry as long as I can."

The Wolf liked the idea of a little music before eating, so he struck up a merry tune and the Kid leaped and frisked gaily.

Meanwhile, the flock was moving slowly homeward. In the still eveing air the Wolf's piping carried far. The Shepherd Dogs pricked up their ears. They recognized the song the Wolf sings before a feast and in a moment they were racing back to the pasture. The Wolf's song ended suddenly and as he ran, with the Dogs at his heels, he called himself a fool for turning piper to please a Kid, when he should have stuck to his butcher's trade.

Years later when I found this book for sale, I was surprised because while the illustrations still had the overall feeling I remember, I realized that many of the details I that had scared me as a kid must have been imagined. I could have sworn that the wolf in the picture was looking directly at me, whereas now he seems to be focused more on the goat. The fact that the wolf was green scared me, almost like his fur was so dirty it had fungus growing in it or something. He was also winking, (at me no doubt) as if to say "You're next." I could just imagine the devilish tune he must be playing on that flute, and the line about the Dogs recognizing "the song the Wolf sings before a feast" still sends shivers down my spine. It makes me think of kids in rural villages all throughout history hearing a strange flute song being played in the distance and their mothers saying something like, "You see? Don't stay out after dark or the Wolf will get you too!" And what's with the jaunty little handkerchief?! Wolves on their hind legs wearing clothing are obviously evil.

Part of what makes the Aesop book so frightening is the realism with which the animals are rendered, and there are plenty of other wolf illustrations in it. But for some reason this one was the one that really got to me. Many of my wolf nightmare featured a green wolf standing on his hind legs and wearing a handkerchief around his neck. Fortunately I don't remember any flute playing.

Eric S.

UNK SEZ: Eric, I may be able to point you in the right direction to track down that first book. THE WOLF AND THE SEVEN KIDS is a story by the Brothers Grimm (you can check out the ending of an animated version HERE). I suggest checking ebay to find the proper edition you are looking for. Let us know if you find it! As for everyone else, be sure to take a peek at Eric's blog The Ol' Sketchbook.