Category: Traumafessions

Could it possibly be that no one has mentioned the Sleestak from LAND OF THE LOST as a leading cause of childhood night terrors? Surely I must have missed that post.

The way they would creep silently around their labyrinthine cave passages stalking their prey was simply chilling. The Sleestak would slowly emerge from the blackness not unlike Michael Myers in HALLOWEEN to claim their prey. Nocturnal hunters, they prowled the darkened forests in packs; large, reptilian, and totally without mercy. They were known to sacrifice their human victims to their God who dwelt deep within a pit in the bowels of the subterranean city (a creature Holly would confront face to face). And don't get me started on their Library of Skulls. Amazingly, these terrifying denizens of darkness were creatures from a Saturday morning T.V. show for kids!

Fast forward to the present, and most folks remember LAND OF THE LOST as just a silly little children's show from the '70s. They've forgotten the dark underside of LAND OF THE LOST: the sinister Mist Marsh, the mysterious Zarn, and, most of all, the brooding horror of the Sleestak.

AUNT JOHN SEZ: What child of the '70s could really forget about those nasty Sleestaks? Kindertrauma surely hasn't, and Unkle Lancifer personally inducted them into the Official Traumatizer Hall of Fame this past year. Speaking of the '70s, be sure to check out Kinderpal Gilligan's super-cool Retrospace!

Growing up I watched a lot of horror movies; guess you could say I grew up with them. My cousins are not the bravest of folk and when they rented horror movies I was "forced" to watch them as well. This started when I was about 4 years old. I've watched everything from ‘80s slashers, to old classics, to horrid B-movies even MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 wouldn't touch. I was not afraid, the only thing that remotely frightened me was CHILD'S PLAY, but that wasn't even bad. I was quite confident I could watch anything or see anything and not be scared.

I was wrong.

My horrors came not from movies… but from a book. SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK. I believe this has already been covered, but only a particular picture was discussed and it wasn't the one that made me sleepless for months.

I was about 10 when I discovered this book in my school library; the cover was rather eerie so I was drawn to it. Without looking inside, confident I would be entertained judging by the cover alone, I checked out the book and was on my way back to class.

It wasn't until I got home that I started to read the book. The stories were rather cruddy but the pictures were what struck me. They were so otherworldly in the way they were drawn it sent shivers down my spine in a good way. That all ended when I saw 'the picture.'

The story I believe was called "The Haunted House" or something close and the image that accompanied it was that of a woman's face; if it could be called a face. Decay had taken most of her visage away leaving a wraith like being with scraggly hair and empty sockets with piercing pinpoints of light visible in the back of the skull. Her mouth was agape, lips nearly rotting off her and her teeth were few and far between. I was literally frozen with fear, staring at this being in the pages of a book.

Once I regained my composure, I slammed the book shut and threw it from me, never to finish it. My mother had apparently heard me yelp, I didn't recall making any noise, and came in to see what had happened. I explained what I saw and she had to see for herself and was shocked to see such a graphic image in a kids' book. She promptly did the mother thing and told me it was just a picture and couldn't hurt me, but what kid really believes that? I was convinced this thing would come and kill me in my sleep.

The face haunted my dreams for the next few days, that simple image and my explosive imagination had done what no horror movie had ever done to me. I was afraid to sleep in the dark; I couldn't sleep without waking up from a nightmare in a cold sweat. After a month or two the initial scare wore off and only trauma remained. To this day I cannot look at that image without shuddering, so imagine my despair when they released a new edition of the same book with that face adorning the cover.

Does anybody remember the 1973 movie, Sssssss in which a young DIRK BENEDICT undertakes a position as lab assistant and is slowly transformed into a cobra? I believe I first saw this film at a drive-in theater in New Jersey, though I remember also seeing it on T.V. I'm not sure. I would have been 3 in 1973, so I'm not sure if we saw it that early, but it's possible (maybe '74-'85).

Before seeing it again on DVD in the past couple of years, my memory of the film was sketchy, at best. I remember key scenes: the freak half-snake, half-man hybrid at the carnival; the snake eating the man after choosing to select a key to his locked room from a coral snake or a milk snake; DIRK BENEDICT peeling his shedding skin off in the bathroom; but mostly I remember "Snakeman." In fact, that's what I used to call the movie- I didn't know it was Sssssss until much later. My memory of the Snakeman was a phase in DIRK BENEDICT's transformation in which he turned pale and hairless, his folded arms fused to his body, and his mouth became wide and speechless (with the exception of pained "mmmmm-mmm!" sounds). He was locked in the lab by the professor character and his scenes involved him clumsily stumbling around the lab, bumping into things and going "mmmm-mmmm!" In actuality, this memory is actually a fusion of various scenes in the movie: the carnival freak; the discovery of the previous lab assistant; the final transformation; and the actual scene (shown below).

After seeing this, my nighttime fears became an obsession with Snakeman. Snakeman was under the bed, Snakeman was in the closet, Snakeman was looking in the window, my brothers' suggestions as to Snakeman's whereabouts and intentions didn't help.

Well, as I mentioned before, I watched it again on the no-frills DVD my brother lent me. It's a terribly insipid movie. The Snakeman scenes are only a few minutes of screen time and hardly the stuff of horror legend. I cannot overstate the inevitable let down you're setting yourself up for when re-viewing movies that effected you as a child. It's best just to let these things remain what they were to you. Most of my childhood terrors were comprised of the bits and pieces of horror films I had seen (until my parents told me to close my eyes or go upstairs to bed) and the creative continuations and reconstructions of those scenes. This was one movie where I fixated on one scene and just blew it out of horror proportion.

I am writing to you about the weirdest musical ever…and the only movie written by Dr. Seuss himself! THE 5,000 FINGERS OF DR. T.! This is a classic Kindertrauma film. Imagine a live action version of Dr. Seuss's drawings but way before RON HOWARD's HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS and MIKE MYERS' CAT IN THE HAT.

Dr. Seuss wrote the script and the lyrics and designed the sets (of course). This is an amazingly weird, wonderful film that will creep the crap out of you. There's a dungeon for all non-piano players who then perform an extend dance sequence. There are doors in floors and stairs that lead to nowhere and hands coming out of the wall. There are Siamese twin guards, connected by their beard, on roller skates. Oh yeah, the main kid Bart and all the other boys forced to play piano, wear a hat with a hand coming out of the top!

The best part is that the adults in the film learn to, "Always listen to kids, even when they lie."

I remember when I was little in the early 90's my dad and older siblings were watching something on T.V., I believe it was called THE CAT FROM HELL. The only thing about it I remember is at the end the cat kills this person by crawling in their mouth and down their throat. I think it eats the person's heart, but that might have just been what I was told. I can remember you could see the cat moving around inside the person and it really freaked me out.

UNK SEZ: Thanks Elizabeth! THE CAT FROM HELL is actually the second story in the anthology horror movie TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE: THE MOVIE. That film began life as CREEPSHOW 3 but its title was changed by producers to take advantage of the notoriety of the television series TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE. That particular segment was directed by genre legend GEORGE ROMERO and adapted from a short story by none other then the master himself STEPHEN KING!

NOTE: This bottom image was borrowed from DEADLANTERN.COM, they have a great list over there called KITTIES OF HORROR check it out HERE.

Okay, the story goes, I have a lot of films that scared me in my childhood. THE GRUESOME TWOSOME, was another one that scared me out of my socks. Later, I had a dream that Rodney was chasing me. I swore to myself never to watch that film again.

But when I got older, I saw the DVD of THE GRUESOME TWOSOME. I bought it and now it doesn't scare me anymore. I thinks it's a classic.

O.K., it is November 1978. I am about 18 months removed from seeing the infamous SUSPIRIA T.V. trailer and it's still VERY fresh in my 11-year-old mind. I'm thinking I can "recover" as that was over a year ago. WRONG!!!! Why? Because another scary trailer is released! This is from a pre-Hannibal Lecter, ANTHONY— excuse me —SIR ANTHONY HOPKINS movie called MAGIC.

Basically it was about a ventriloquist, HOPKINS, who kept a killer evil dummy called "Fats." The trailer is a shot of Fats sitting in front of a black background and scary orchestral strings play in the background. The camera slowly zooms in on Fats as he says a poem in a high pitched voice:

Abracadabra, I sit on his knee.
Presto, change-o, and now he is me!
Hocus Pocus, we take her to bed,
Magic is fun…we're dead.

The camera keeps zooming in on his face as he speaks and when he says that last line "…………we're dead," he delivers it in an evil tone. He closes his eyes and the narrator comes on to tell who's in it and who "presents it" all in a serious tone. As this goes on the white movie credits with title come on while Fats opens his eyes. They look around suspiciously and evil looking! His face looks to have a fiendish smile on it!

VERY UNNERVING!!!!!

O.K., it didn't have the same "heart leap into throat" scare like that SUSPIRIA ad, but it was scary nevertheless! After seeing that I could never look at a ventriloquist dummy again without thinking it was alive and evil!

Great!

Back to back T.V. traumas! Looking back, I now wonder if those two trailers were done by the same company! Same black background! Anyway, the next year went by without an incident. However, in the spring of 1980 I had to deal with those "Grady Twins"!

GILLIGAN'S ISLAND was one of my favourite T.V. shows as a youth. However, there were some absolutely horrifying aspects to it:

• The giant spider Gilligan faced down
• Gilligan's many "dream sequences," especially the ones with him as a vampire and Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde (I couldn't watch those!)
• All the references to HEADHUNTERS

Actually, death figured prominently in much of this "family comedy." Bites by supposedly fatal bugs, Gilligan being fake-burnt atop a funeral pyre, quicksand…

At least there was Mary Ann in the halter-top and denim paint pants to look at!

UNK SEZ: Randy, I too loved GILLIGAN'S ISLAND as a kid! I will never forget that giant spider episode as long as I live. (You can read a little more about that spider HERE). Do you remember the one where they actually got off the island for a spell only to wind up in a castle with a mad scientist who switched their brains around? That's the one that freaked me out. The scientist's giant lab assistant Igor even ends up with Ginger's personality! Thank god Ginger was returned to her usual beautiful self. I can't imagine her in Igor form fitting into her "Honey Bees" wardrobe!

When I was a kid, 2 music videos made me wish I still wore diapers: "Land of Confusion" by GENESIS and "Rockit" by HERBIE HANCOCK. The former freaked me out – giant ugly Republican puppets flailing about, doing evil nasty things…and the T.V. show featuring them didn't help either. It got so bad I couldn't even hear the song without shuddering until I was in my teens.

"Rockit"…self explanatory. Empty house, freaky beat, robots….I still won't watch that thing.

My mother re-married and my new step father decided that POLTERGEIST II was a fine film to go and enjoy. I had seen the first one and while grossed out and a little creeped out by a few scenes… I was far from traumatized by it. Now I will utter a four word phrase that frankly starts a lot of stories that end badly…

Then…he… drank… tequila.

The sight of CRAIG T. NELSON gagging and puking up that horrible worm, then its morphing into that disgusting man-thing and slithering off down the hardwood… I am in my 30's and even to this day I cannot drink the bottom out of a bottle of soda, or the last third from any vessel I cannot see through, unless I use a straw that I bite hard so nothing more than the barest slip of liquid can get through.

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Kids, let this be a lesson to everyone planning on imbibing New Year's Eve libations tonight… stick to beer, stay in the clear, and for the love of CRAIG T. NELSON… just say NO to Cuervo!