Category: Traumafessions

Well, I grew up knowing the legend RODDY McDOWALL as an ape in the whole PLANET OF THE APES movie series and that short lived T.V. show from the mid '70s. I rarely saw him without makeup. I did see him on a T.V. showing of THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE and I heard his distinct voice in a few cartoons. But asides from that I only knew him as Cornelius and Galen.

Then came his two appearances in FANTASY ISLAND as Satan. Oh boy! VERY creepy! Here I am used to him being the good ape and now he's the scary Devil! Asides from the end sequences of the two episodes he wore no makeup and wore a suit and look VERY convincing! Now, these clips are not out on DVD as of now. The first one is out on YouTube as a "minisode"…

O.K., I would see him again a bit later in LASERBLAST both in its original form and on MST3K, but his Devil was a good scary moment in my early teens!

UNK SEZ: Hey kids, here is a special traumafession from CHRIS McKINLEY, the producer and editor of one of one of our favorite fliks, MURDER LOVES KILLERS TOO, which is now available on DVD! Check it out and make sure you check out MLKT!

I'm with the folks who had commercials as their first run-in with things creepy or ridiculous. Long before I was allowed to see anything above PG, advertisers were doing work on my impressionable little brain. In my case, no advertiser gets more credit than the US Government.

The public service announcements for the War on Drugs get at least partial credit for warping my young sense of humor. Before I ever saw my first FRIDAY flick, those wonderful PSA's taught me that some of the funniest stuff on film comes from people playing material completely straight.

I gotta hope whoever actually put the spots together also secretly thought they were hilarious. Some of the humor in the spots was a little more subtle, (even though the "I wanna be a nurse" moment in this one is still laugh out loud funny to me):

But at some point they kicked it up a notch, and we started getting PAUL REUBENS, serious as a heart attack but in full on Pee-Wee character, talking about crack… with the best sound effects ever. I think this was a series with other actors doing spots too:

However… it looks like the best example is one that I never saw growing up, but would have loved. While looking these others up, I came across this GREMLINS PSA from New South Wales:

Really? Drinking & drugs are bad?? ‘Cause it looks to me like those Gremlins are destructively partying their asses off with zero consequences while Gizmo has storytime with a square Chinese dude. But maybe that's just me.

As a boy watching TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE: THE MOVIE, I couldn't help being envious of young MATTHEW LAWRENCE. To me, his involvement as the prisoner of DEBORAH HARRY seemed both terrorizing and titillating. DEBBIE is calm and cool, caging this boy and getting ready to cook him for dinner. Meanwhile, the middle LAWRENCE child desperately reads stories from this book in an attempt to distract her, and hopefully keep himself off the menu. My point being that at a young age, I found myself completely attracted to Chef DEBBIE's dominance over little MATTHEW. Even though it would have been terrifying, I always wished that I could switch places and be that boy in the cage, while the Blonde One pre-heated the oven, as well as my libido. Was I the only youngster to be turned on by this scenario? I still think TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE: THE MOVIE holds up today as a great and scary film, and my fantasies of being Ms. HARRY's little pet to be devoured have never gone away. Eat to that beat!

UNK SEZ: Ralphus, I second your love of DEBBIE but maybe not the cage thing so much. Did you know that currently you can watch TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE: THE MOVIE on the Youtubes starting HERE? Plus, check out this traumafession on the movie's segment THE CAT FROM HELL right around over HERE!

I don't think that anyone has addressed this trauma yet, and I'll wager that this is one that more than a few of us out there share…

"It's ten o'clock…Parents, do you know where your children are?" Since the 1960s, that's been a familiar late-night refrain from the bumper of many a local newscast. Its treatment varies with each station, some quite benign, but in Central Wisconsin in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the local CBS affiliate dealt with it in truly ominous fashion. They had the announcer who also did the severe weather bulletins handle the voice-over, a sepulchral "voice of doom" who stressed the "your" with dark portent. It was implied that if your kids were out there, they were up to something horrible…that is, if you heard it as a call against juvenile delinquency.

See, on my channel, it was also accompanied by a black and white title card of an over-sized clock face. Running along the bottom were ghostly silhouettes of children, no older than 10 or 12, even some toddlers among them. (I can still see the little girl in a skirt and pigtails.) This wasn't THE WILD BUNCH we had to be on the lookout for – these were happy little children who could disappear at any time…and their mommies and daddies wouldn't be able to find them! I knew of other kids in my school who refused to even step outside of the house after 10pm lest they be snatched away forever by whatever lurked outside. It was never that bad with me, but it sure made me pull the covers up a little tighter – especially on Wednesday nights, after I had just seen NIGHT GALLERY on NBC.

But that's not all. This advisory was immediately followed by a commercial, frequently a spot for a movie that was being shown at one of our five area cinemas. Since horror films were usually platformed across the country and needed local media to be sold, this was when we got to see ads for films like LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, DON'T LOOK IN THE BASEMENT, and for me the most memorable of the lot, 1973's TORSO:

Nighty-night, kiddies, huh? I can still hear my mother saying "Jeez!" as she saw that! Ten o'clock was Terror Time, just another reason why the '70s were magical for a young horror fan.

UNK SEZ: It's 10 o'clock do you know where JOAN RIVERS is? Senski, it looks like the old ten o'clock parental heebie jeebie alert is still going on to this day. Watch this bizarre oddity I caught while fishing about the YouTubes (WARNING: This video may contain trace amounts of JOELY FISHER)…

I know have written in about anthropomorphic dogs and music videos before, but this video I recently saw combines both of those fears. This, like the Manson video, is a current traumafession and it is for the extremely disturbing video for Goldfrapp's "Number 1."

I am a huge Goldfrapp fan, and I love the whole "Supernature" album, especially the tracks "Ooh La La" and "Number 1." One day, I decided to go on Goldfrapp's website and watch both of these videos. "Ooh La La" was harmless, but then came the video for "Number 1."

I clicked on the video and a dog in a green nurses dress popped up on screen. The video was of a plastic surgery clinic were all the nurses and patients have dog heads and human bodies. I cannot even begin to describe the horror, so everyone will just have to watch the video themselves.

I love your site! So many buried memories…

My dad was a big slasher/gore fan, and he never had second thoughts about letting us kids watch with him. By the time I was 6, I'd seen enough red Karo and latex to be effectively desensitized. So it wasn't the usual horror staples that traumatized me. No, the one scene that still haunts my nightmares is from a made-for-T.V. movie called TERROR ON THE BEACH.

I tried to find the actual scene, but my memory is really hazy. I know it involved something floating in the water. I thought it was a body, but after watching the only youtube clip I could find, it looks like the bad guys are traveling with a male blow-up doll.

Is this what kept me up at night?

I'm hoping you can help me track down the actual scene.

Thanks!

UNK SEZ: Jessica, I had completely forgot about 1973's TERROR ON THE BEACH! I too caught that one on television at a very young age. It is remarkable how much it resembles WES CRAVEN'S THE HILLS HAVE EYES which would not come out for another four years (1977). No luck finding the scene you remember, but I have a hunch that the body you saw floating in the water was, in actuality, a mannequin that the hippie aggressors drug around with them. From what I've gathered, there is not much actual violence in this made-for-television thriller. Lack of violence aside, you can't beat a cast that includes DUEL's DENNIS WEAVER, LOOKER's SUSAN DEY and Oscar winner ESTELLE PARSONS (BONNIE & CLYDE.)

NOTE: T.V. movie and ESTELLE PARSONS fans, you can currently check out THE UFO INCIDENT based on the famous Betty and Barney Hill case starting HERE!

This one part in a movie from my childhood made me cry so hard. The crooks beating up Johnny Five. That was my personal nightmare.

AUNT JOHN SEZ: There, there Brayden, I know the scene is highly upsetting, but the legal proceedings that followed the savage beating were, believe it or not, even more disturbing. Studied by first year law students across the country, and still heavily debated in criminal prosecution circles, the beating of Johnny Five produced one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in the late ‘80s with the case of People v. DeBarge, et al. Traditionally, witnesses in criminal prosecutions utilized the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions that may incriminate them. In People v. DeBarge, et al., the witness for the defense opted not to take the Fifth, and instead took the unusual and unprecedented move of repeatedly badgering the prosecuting attorney with the singsong response, "Who is Johnny?" A subsequent courtroom appearance by then glamorous starlet ALLY SHEEDY, in what appeared to be an acid-wash apron, and a cardboard cutout of STEVE GUTTENBERG further deadlocked the jury, which led the prosecuting attorney to suffer a nervous breakdown and don a pair of GROUCHO MARX glasses. The judge had no choice but to declare a mistrial, and the perpetrators responsible for the beating walked. Whereas Johnny Five was repaired after his unfortunate attack, many Constitutional scholars feel that the justice system has never been the same since.

Loving the site, folks, though I wish I had proper access during the day to answer some of the questions first…

You got me thinking about some more of the work which scared me as a tot, and something which definitely remains fixed in my mind were some of the T.V. commercials for horror movies in the mid-to-late '70s. Four stick in my mind especially:

DAWN OF THE DEAD: That rolling scroll warning that no one under seventeen will be permitted into the theatre – with the zombies bursting into the elevator! Could never ride an elevator the same way after that, I always stood at the side of the doors, presumably so they couldn't get me.

PROPHECY: This image of a deformed bear fetus coming closer into view while an announcer says something about it being "15 feet tall and a gazillion tons in weight" or something – and then some attack scene where a kid in a sleeping bag gets mauled and feathers from the sleeping bag fly everywhere. Or something.

PHANTASM: Random clips of the Silver Sphere flying around, and the Tall Man pulling the kid in through a mirror…

And probably most profoundly, SUSPIRIA: It opens with a view of the back of the head of a woman brushing her blonde hair (and puts a flower into her hair too?), while a little girl sings "Roses are red/Violets are blue/This little flower… will be the end of you!" And the "woman" turns around to reveal a…

Okay, it's a skeleton in a blonde wig. I know that now. I know it was a cheap little advertisement for a rotten little film.

Damned if it still doesn't give me a bit of a chill…

Anyway, thought I'd share that and find out if anyone else underwent similar traumas. Keep up the good work!

Regards,

Kahotep

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Actually Kahotep, you are not alone! Readers Bilgin & FatherOfTears have gone on record about the skeleton from the SUSPIRIA trailer and David has discussed the infamous baby bear in PROPHECY.

This scene has haunted me for a while. I was going through a vampire phase during the 6th grade, and had fallen in love with THE LOST BOYS. I loved the bloody effects and the dark humor. Well, since I liked it so much, my father got me one of those "two-for-one" packs, vampire themed, with a DVD copy of THE LOST BOYS. The other DVD was FRIGHT NIGHT, which my cousin Derrick told my parents was perfectly okay for me to watch, and no worse than lost boys. And, for the most part, it wasn't. In fact, the blood throughout the first half of the movie was nothing compared to the constant slashing in THE LOST BOYS. I liked it a lot, and it would have been my new favorite if it weren't for one terrible scene: The death of Evil Ed.

I think what made it so brutal was the fact that, unlike the guys in THE LOST BOYS (who, to me, all looked like full-grown adults), Evil Ed was just a kid. He was probably my favorite character in the movie. Now, I would have been more than okay if he had simply been staked and died as a werewolf. But he didn't. After screaming his brains out for a good forty seconds as a hellish dog-beast, he turns back into a 14-year-old kid. And then he continues to squirm in agony, making possibly the most gut-wrenching noises ever recorded on film.

But I would have been okay if it weren't for a single shot. Just the two second shot of the young boy, covered in blood and throwing his head back, eyes full of unimaginable pain, still has the ability to chill me. He doesn't die in a comic way, or a "gross" way. He dies in the exact way that you would expect a 14-year-old with a table leg through his chest to die, screaming in agony. For such a light movie, it's an incredibly intense and heavy scene that STILL makes me feel more ill than anything in a SAW/HOSTEL movie. Needless to say, I ran from the room and didn't watch it again until last year when I turned fifteen. But every time I watch it, those screams stick with me for days after.

3 a.m. and I couldn't sleep, I was alone in my bedroom. I turned on my T.V. and I find this show called BEYOND BELIEF: FACT OR FICTION, where five weird tales are depicted, and in the end, the host tells whether they were true stories or not.

I handled the first four stories quite well, although they were pretty scary. And by the end I was getting sleepy; my mind already half asleep.

And then, the final story, where a beautiful but vain and shallow lady gets punished by a witch; the lady now has a skin disease and looks horrible. She goes to the doctor covered with a mask. By the end of the story, the girl reveals her face. WOAH. My heart instantly turned at full speed, I jumped from my bed: one of the scariest moments I've ever had.

I couldn't find it on youtube; it's the 32 episode, from the third season, the short is called THE MIRROR OF TRUTH.