Category: Traumafessions

I can remember it like it was yesterday. I was sitting on my neighbor's couch, watching MTV with her and her older brother (I was about six, she was about nine, and her brother was 19). We'd gathered around to watch the BRITTANY SPEARS video for "Lucky" (our favorite song), and were about to go off and play Barbies and leave her brother to his teenaged business when we heard a song that we both liked. It was the Gorillaz's "Clint Eastwood." We were both far too young to understand the drug induced lyrics, but liked the beat/tune and had been dancing to it in her room a few minutes beforehand.

The video started off with the band's name being written across the screen, as some creepy laugh played in the background. It then went on to show cartoon people (avatars of the band members) singing. Innocent enough. All of a sudden, this creepy fat blue lightning Rastafarian man starts rapping. That got our attention right away. As the song goes on, the white background turns into a graveyard. Then, mid-song, this monkey arm shoots up from the ground, and the screen becomes filled with thousands of zombie apes, all marching to the beat of the song. I'm not sure if I remember correctly, but I think that the video ends with one of the adorable cartoon people kicking a zombie ape into outer space.

I didn't sleep a wink that night, afraid that the zombie apes would take out my bedroom wall and squash me, and I refused to watch MTV until I turned thirteen.

MTV betrayed me AGAIN at age 14. A few of you may remember my traumafession about Happy Tree Friends. Well, the incident had terrified me so much that, all through puberty, I had a constant fear of coming across Happy Tree Friends on T.V./in a movie's coming attractions. If I had even the faintest clue that there WAS an actual T.V. show right around that time, I don't think I would have turned on the TV at all.

I was watching the morning wakeup countdown before going off to school, and the screen announced that the next video would be "The Carpal Tunnel of Love" by Fall Out Boy. This was during my Fall Out Boy phase that I refuse to speak of.

(AUNT JOHN SEZ: Umm, too late, you just told everyone.)

Well, you can imagine my joy when I found out that my television was about to deliver a song from their not yet released CD. That joy ended as soon as the video started. It was as if God was bitchslapping me through my TV, because staring back at me was a familiar yellow bunny, flirting with the little pink rodent that had haunted me for so long. Totally forgetting the fact that it was 5:30 am on a Monday morning, I screamed at the top of my lungs and hurled my cup of o.j. across the kitchen, fleeing to my bedroom and hiding under my covers. I didn't stick around long enough to actually watch the video, but, needless to say, I didn't watch MTV until I was SURE that nobody liked that song anymore.

Ah, memories. Let me start by saying that I love scary movies, and always have, which makes my own kindertraumas even more amusing.

One of my earliest traumatic memories was watching a black and white movie about giant invading spiders (I think it was 'Invasion of the Giant Spiders', but I've never been able to verify). In one scene, there's a toddler in a playpen in the front yard of a house while the spiders invade. People are running and shrieking, the town's on fire, the toddler is *screaming*, and NOBODY IS COMING to save it. I think I was about 4 years old, and that scared the beejezus out of me.

AUNT JOHN SEZ: I believe the movie you are thinking of is the 1958 chestnut EARTH VS. THE SPIDER, or THE SPIDER as it is also known. THE SPIDER trailer is kind of dull, so let's take a gander at the greatness of the trailer for 1975's THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION:

Sorry for the interruption, please continue Harmonyfb:

At six, I used to hide behind the couch any time ads for "Sir Cecil Creep" (our local scary movie host) came on TV.

When I was 8 or 9, I developed a love of TWILIGHT ZONE repeats and NIGHT GALLERY first-runs. One NIGHT GALLERY episode scared me so badly that I still occasionally have nightmares about it. It was about a painter who winds up with his face permanently morphed into the 'op art' painting he's been working on. Notice I have no idea what the actual plot was – it was the image that was burned into my tender psyche. Someday I'm going to have to find a copy of this episode.

AUNT JOHN SEZ: I just combed through the exhaustive NIGHT GALLERY guide, and didn't see anything about an op-ed artist with a Cubist face. Could have it been a TWILIGHT ZONE episode?

O.K., growing up as a kid in the early ‘70s the local T.V. stations in Jersey showed reruns of the original STAR TREK. Like many other elementary-school-aged kids at that time, I became hooked. I even got that cool toy bridge set with the action figures-including Uhura, but in time I broke the spinning transporter that made the figure placed inside "vanish." So I wound up getting rid of the whole set and then, decades later, I was told that it was worth a lot of money. That's an adult trauma! However, seeing this show did give some childhood scares. There was that "Empath" episode where Kirk, Bones & Spock were taken by aliens and left in a room with a mute female who was an empath. She could absorb the injuries of those she touched healing the victim while temporally getting the ailment till she healed herself. When Bones is tortured and brought back, she absorbs his injuries and winds up getting his facial wounds. She gets a pained expression on her face which was a bit hard to look at:

Then there was "The Lights of Zetar" where Scotty's new love interest Mira, becomes possessed by the life forms of an alien race that look like flashing lights. The flashing lights were not the scare, it was when they entered a person. The crew found what was left of a planetary settlement and a near death woman who had the Zetars in her. Her possession was shown by having her face "solarized" and when the aliens first try to speak through the person, it's all slow and garbled.

The same would happen to Mira plus when she was taken over she was slumped against a wall. She had her head bent at a funny angle while the Zetars spoke through her.

Pretty scary for an under ten year old! Get this: Kirk decided to put the possessed Mira in a pressurized "hyperbolic chamber" to kill the Zetars. Decades later Michael Jackson and the 1993-94 Vancouver Canucks would make headlines with such a device! Oh, the authors for this episode: JEREMY TARCHER and his wife SHARI LEWIS.

Yep, THAT SHARI LEWIS!!

Over the weekend, I was listening to a rebroadcast of America's Top 40 with CASEY KASEM from February 1987. There was a song on the countdown that reminded me of a trauma suffered by my nephew. The song was "Somewhere Out There" sung by Linda Ronstadt and James Ingram. This song is from the 1986 animated film AN AMERICAN TAIL. It seemed like a harmless animated movie that could not possibly traumatize a child.

Well, in the fall of 1987 my sister and her husband decided they wanted to go out of town for the weekend and leave my nephew (3 years old) and my niece (8 months old) with me (16 years old). The only flaw in this fabulous plan was selecting AN AMERICAN TAIL as the entertainment. Bear in mind that this was the first time (other than the birth of my niece) my nephew had been separated from his parents. About the time, Fievel is separated from his family and begins telling everyone he meets he lost his family my nephew began crying. For the rest of the weekend all I heard was, "I've lost my family." constantly. Due to a poor choice at the video store, my nephew was traumatized and I was annoyed. To this day, I can't stand AN AMERICAN TAIL.

The show may be only 18 years old, but it's still very kindertramatic in its own right. The opening theme is particularly spine tingling, still gives me goosebumps.

The episode that has stuck with me to this day would have to be Tale Of The 13th Floor. The ending never ever fails to give me the willies. The story is about two young siblings who like to play in the abandoned 13th floor of their apartment building. One day they receive an invitation to the 13th floor and discover it's been turned into a very strange toy store, run by very strange people. The twist ending is well… you'll have to see for yourself! The good part is about 6:26 in.

My wonderful parents are ardent antique collectors, and one of their finds scared the liver out of me when I was a child. The cover of Edgar Wallace's THE CRIME BOOK OF J.G. REEDER became one of my first obsessions. I was frightened to look at it, yet I could not look away. Even now, when I visit my parents from across the country, I sneak upstairs and pull it off the shelf just to recapture that sick thrill.

The second book, a hardcover anthology titled simply GHOST STORIES, was a present I received for my ninth birthday. And it was one I specifically requested; I'd seen it at a bookstore a few months previously and could not get that cover out of my mind. The stories inside were a disappointment (with the exception of an excellent little number called "The Sybarite" which featured a terminally ill man being surgically reduced to a brain in a jar), but thirty years later, the cover is still one of my favorites.

This is one of those traumas that I can't quite explain, but that horrified me to the very core when I was a kid, and still gives me the shivers. LADY AND THE TRAMP gave me more nightmares than any other film before or since. Most people, when I tell them this, agree that it had its disconcerting moments, but it wasn't the feral dogs or the rat with the red eyes that kept me up at night. It was those damn SIAMESE CATS!

Perhaps it was that I couldn't reconcile the cognitive dissonance of MEAN CATS— cats were supposed to be nice animals! Perhaps, as my brother suggests, I just had a natural aversion to negative Asian stereotypes. Or perhaps the tempo of the song was just unlike anything I had ever heard before and struck me as spooky. All I know is that those teeth and eyes and the opening notes of the song used to send me into full-blown panic. Several of my friends had Disney song compilation records that featured the Siamese Cat Song, and every time it came on, I would flee the room. I still shiver a bit if I hear it, especially if I'm not prepared– I had a job at The Disney Store for a while, and one day someone played that song before we opened, causing me to yelp and jump across the store.

Because of the Siamese Cat Song and MICHAEL JACKSON's Thriller, there was definitely a period of my childhood in which I was terrified of all music. There was also definitely a nightmare involving being trapped in PEE-WEE'S PLAYHOUSE while all the furniture and puppets sang the Siamese Cat Song.

Here is the video for your convenience. I'm sure it will amuse you to know that I had to stop it less than 30 seconds in because it's nearly 2 a.m. and my husband isn't home. Better safe than screaming in my sleep.

UNK SEZ: Unfortunately Jillcs, it looks like we can't embed the English version… but no worries, the German one is even scarier! (The curious cats among you can find the English version HERE).

When I was small, the opening theme from IRONSIDE never failed to freak me out. Actually, the opening credits were freaky to watch, too:

— Amy, age 39 ½

When I was a toddler, my friends and I would often have birthday parties at an outfit called Showbiz Pizza Place. (Eventually they all got converted to Chuck E. Cheeses.) While we really enjoyed the arcade, the crappy little ticket toys, and the greasy pizza, there was also an animatronic musical revue. The majority of characters in this show were endearing. However, there was one character that terrified me. He was a keyboard-playing gorilla named Fatz Geronimo. I would generally cry and hide under the table whenever he appeared. I definitely wasn't alone in that regard. I can't believe the character designers ever thought it was a good idea to make him look like this: