Category: Traumafessions

I must admit, the thing that traumatized me most as a child was not in fact a scary movie at all, but a television commercial that would never be considered scary now. You must look at this from the eyes of a sensitive five-year-old child. The commercial was for a nasal-spray type of decongestant. I do not remember the brand, as I never watched the commercial for that long.

Anyway, the congested person featured on the commercial had a giant nose in place of a head. (I found out years later that once they used said decongestant, they had a regular head again.) I have no idea why this scarred my fragile psyche so much at the time, but every time the commercial came on, I ran from our family room screaming "IT'S THE BIG NOSE!"

I was frightened by this commercial for years. Even now, 14 years later, the thought of someone with an abnormally large nose in place of a head scares me. This is a humiliating traumafession, but I had to get it off of my chest somehow.

UNK SEZ: Halloween came early to Kindertrauma Castle when we recently opened our gates to the ultimate treat! The wisest of the wise, AMANDA BY NIGHT dropped by for some spiked cider and ginger snaps. Being the ultimate source for all things television related, we also got her to fix our reception by climbing up top the west tower and nudging our makeshift, clothes hanger bunny ears! Always the charmer, before she took off into the night she was kind enough to leave us with something we had been dreaming about all evening, an AMANDA traumafession! Aunt John whipped out a peacock quill and diligently took down her every word. Here is what she told us…

I have thought long and hard about my Kindertraumas after finding this great site. I have so many of them! And a lot are mentioned here already, so to be all unique and stuff, I really went into the recesses of those blocked traumas… you know the ones you purposely forget because they are so absolutely terrifying that you still get chills to this day? Well, I dug pretty deep and came up with a doozy.

I was under 7 years of age. I know this because I was still living in our house in Ventura, CA. But how much younger is in question. All I remember is going into my parents' bedroom and they were watching television.

* A note about my parents who both passed away in 2005 – First of all, they were terrific and they also loved the creepy stuff, although they would never admit it. My dad read true crime and my mom secretly indulged in horror films every so often with me, and was a devout fan of all mysteries in all forms of media. They also worked at Camarillo State Hospital which was one of the largest mental hospitals in the ‘70s. I remember that for a time my dad worked on the violent ward (talk about traumas!). They were really involved with the darker aspects of life, so it's kind of funny to think that they were so perplexed as to why I ended up loving horror movies so much. They pretty much gave me carte blanche on what I saw too, just as long as they had some idea of what I was putting into my head. However, they never warned me about what they might be watching!

So, back to my story… I came into their bedroom and they were watching their usual hoity toity PBS stuff – I had no idea what it was at the time – and this guy is somewhere… I dunno… maybe he's running, I can't remember. And this giant balloon comes down upon him… and I think he's screaming! The guy, not the balloon… but that would have been even creepier!

Uh, aren't balloons a childhood symbol of joy? This balloon was, like, killing this guy or something. It was absolutely horrifying. Still is when I think about it.

I'm not even sure when it was that I discovered it was a scene from the popular British series THE PRISONER, but I did and I have avoided that show ever since. I just looked it up to see if I could find any images or information about the balloon. The most shocking thing I read was a definition of Rover (i.e. the murderous balloon) on Wikipedia:

Rover was depicted as a large white inflatable balloon, not quite fully inflated, with a flexible skin. Rover would often produce a muffled roar sound when attacking. It would also sometimes emit a strange light display / luminescence from its interior. Once released, Rover could bounce and glide across the land and sea for a long range and at high speed, faster than say a vehicle or boat.

Rover is pure evil. Like, totally. But at the same time, remembering him reminds me of my parents and that makes Rover's deadly blow not so bad.

NOTE: The amazing AMANDA BY NIGHT knows no bounds! Besides her endlessly useful hideout/tribute to all things tube-related MADE FOR TV MAYHEM, she's also got a killer column over at PRETTY SCARY called LIFETIME KILLS, a drop-in-anytime stint at the ever praiseworthy HORROR YEARBOOK (Check out this spot-on post LITTLE KNOWN HORROR TREASURES) AND she's known to keep the blood flowing freely over at the inimitable RETRO SLASHERS BLOG! How does she do it? We'll never know. All we know is that if she rocked any harder, she'd be Stonehenge!

As a young child, from the time I was around 8 well into about 13, I was completely obsessed with the author R.L. STINE. I owned and read just about all of his books both GOOSEBUMPS and the FEAR STREET Series. One summer day, around 1998, my mom brought home one of his books for me to read. The title was NIGHT OF THE LIVING DUMMY. This wasn't an ordinary copy of the book mind you. It contained all three NIGHT OF THE LIVING DUMMY books and the front cover was oh-so-much creepier; it had red eyes that lit up when you pressed a secret button hidden in his mouth.

Just looking at the fiendish ventriloquist dummy on the cover had me excited to start reading. I began right away, reading well into the night. The book so far had no effect on me to speak of, until I laid down to go to sleep that night. I placed the book on the side table and went to sleep. That night I had the most frightening of nightmares of the fiendish dummy chasing after me trying to kill me! He chased me and chased me for what seemed like hours to me, until we reached the edge of a huge cliff. The dummy had me and he knew it.

Slowly backing away from him, I was cautious even though I knew being cautious would do no good to me now as I reached the very edge. There was no escaping him now. Just as this thought entered my brain, he lunged at me, causing me to fall off this cliff in my dream and plummet to my death.

Just as I was reaching the ground in my dream, I fell off my bunk bed, even though we had the guard rails on! As I hit the ground in a sitting position, I screamed as loud as my little lungs could manage. I never again picked up that book and I ended up selling it at a garage sale for a lot less than my mother bought it for about a year later.

I'm not sure why, but that dummy had me terrified and shaking in my platform tennis shoes.

I don't know what possessed my father to take me and my brother to the movies to see William Castle's 1961 HOMICIDAL when we were age 5 and 7. But take us he did and there is one scene near the end of the movie I will never forget. There was an old, creepy, invalid mute lady who lived in a mansion. She used one of those lift chairs that was connected to the wall of the stairway to get up and down the stairs. Towards the end of the movie the camera focused on her sitting in the lift chair in the darkened house as it lurched slowly step by step to the ground floor. When it finally reached the bottom of the stairs, the chair jerked to a stop and………. her head rolled off her body!

Talk about nightmare fuel! I didn't sleep for days and I had nightmares about this for many a year. I saw the movie a few years ago and it is not really that scary (and the special effects were laughable). But the 5 year old me got the shock of his life. Thanks alot Dad!

NOTE: Careful folks, this clip brings new meaning to the term "spoiler"!

I had to search your site TWICE for this one, so amazed was I that no one had brought it up yet…

There's no shortage of traumatic Disney moments. Everybody's traumatized by the Evil Queen in SNOW WHITE, by DUMBO's separation from his mom, by the Death of Mrs. BAMBI, and by the sheer FACT of PETE'S DRAGON, but one extremely traumatic Disney moment that seems to get short shrift is one that caused no end of nightmares for the Lil' Vicar, the "Pleasure Island" sequence from PINOCCHIO.

You remember the set-up–after being tempted off the straight-and-narrow by that sly, conniving Fox, PINOCCHIO joins a boatload of other wayward boys on a trip to Pleasure Island, a bad boy's paradise where everything that grown-ups won't let you do is not only allowed, but encouraged. PINOCCHIO and his friends gorge on sweets, smoke cigars, play cards, fight, break glass, drink beer (maybe it's meant to be root beer, but that's not how I remember it) and gleefully break every rule they can think of, basking in the glow of completely unsupervised freedom.

It all seems pretty great until PINOCCHIO, green from smoking stogies and sick on sweets, listens to one of his pals waxing poetic on the wonders of being bad. The boy lets out a long, boisterous laugh that, in mid-guffaw, becomes the bray of a donkey! His bravado suddenly gone, the boy brays again, this time in terror, as his hands curl into hoofs, his ears elongate, his snout grows, and he transforms horrifyingly into a little, LITERAL jackass! The editing, animation, and sound design here is bad enough (terrified by what's happening to him, the tough boy starts wailing pitifully for a mother who ISN'T THERE before the last bit of his humanity disappears and with it his power of speech), but then the same thing starts to happen to all the OTHER boys on Pleasure Island, paradise suddenly transformed into a Boschian Body-Horror HELL! Not content to let that horror suffice, the Disney team turns the screw further by having faceless brutish toughs round up the boys onto cattle carts (Holocaust imagery! Great for the whole family!) to be sold either into hard labor or to the glue factory. As the train pulls away, the jackasses that once were boys can be seen weeping helplessly, the victims of their own uncontrolled appetites and, presumably, lax parenting.

The now donkey-eared PINOCCHIO manages to escape with Jiminy Cricket's help, and later has to face the larger horror of Monstro the Whale; but for me as a kid, that was a cakewalk compared to the horror, helplessness, and horrible separation from one's loved ones depicted in the terrifying "Pleasure Island" segment. I'm even a little shaky writing about it now, more than thirty years later!

DAMN YOU DISNEY! Even THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON didn't do THIS to me!

AUNTIE SEZ: Thanks for sharing Vicar! Kids, be sure to visit the Vicar of VHS at his virtual Pleasure Island, a.k.a. Mad Mad Mad Mad Movies, where bad behavior is most definitely encouraged and will NOT cause jackass ears to sprout from your impressionable heads.

If there was one thing that would throw me for a loop when I was a kid watching either the silver or small screen, it was something about crossing paths with someone that was a "some-THING." The thought of seeing a humanoid left me scared to walk down our dark hallway at night after seeing IN SEARCH OF.  In a related way, I had an equal fear of the sub-human.  This is where the KEN RUSSELL-directed ALTERED STATES comes in.  The mixed-genera flick received a humble blip at the 1980 box office, but ads showed that you were in for a wallop on the senses.  I was 10 when it came out, and would not be allowed to see it. Good thing, since the T.V. advertising was thoughtful enough to save viewers from the shots I'm talking about here: The lead character in his famously-horrifying deformed condition.  (If you know the movie, WILLIAM HURT becomes a deformed screaming blob-o-human due to a regression to a de-volved state of humanoid existence.  Are things brought into clarity upon seeing the film? No… It's a KEN RUSSELL film, folks.)

The fact is, I DID run smack into the trauma-rific scenes of this movie in surprise-attack fashion. California people here may remember an ‘80s Bay Area television show called EVENING MAGAZINE. This was one of those trite local fares covering stories about neat local places to eat, hike, and explore, and was good for getting you between dinner and CHiPs on a school night.  Sounds great right? Well, there was one EVENING MAGAZINE reporter that needed his head examined.

Clearly having seen the movie, this particular reporter's dainty segment on a little-known isolation tank location in San Francisco described that, for a fee, you can be deprived of senses and improve meditation.  So what does he decide to splice into this human-interest piece?  A SUB-human life-form writhing like a banshee and slamming his deformed appendages into walls – yes, the climax of R-rated ALTERED STATES!

A cold sweat hit all the grannies in the Bay Area, and me, simultaneously.

Yeah sure, the movie, like his segment, features isolation chambers – so obviously the thing to do is show the movie's KEN RUSSELL-horror-hallucination-freak-out and shock everybody during prime time!  I guess it was meant as a timely pop culture in-joke, but WTF?

I'll never understand why I had to get that dose of heart trauma at that age by a things-to-do segment.

If I could find that reporter today, I'd get medieval on his a$$!

Growing up in upstate NY, there was very little to do so my father would watch horror movies late at night. Well one night my parents were painting their bedroom (mind you I was probably really young at the time) and while mom was off watching THE CLIENT in the living room, dad was watching THE X-FILES in my room. "Do you promise not to be scared?" he asked. Me being young and gullible, I agreed to watch it with him. It was the episode with the Flukeman and all it took was 10 minutes into that episode for me to go screaming for my mother. I'm not really sure what it was that scared me but to this day I haven't watched the episode.

I however continued to be terrified and even got into the old comic books my father had from his youth. The one series that scared me the most, I don't remember the name (it was from the '60s/'70s) but the gist of the series was that it was twists on things you wouldn't normally be scared of led by a story teller witch that really reminded me of the crypt keeper. One such story has always stood with me where a kid is dying and the grandfather spends the whole story trying to keep death out only to fail at the end. I think he dies instead but that part's fuzzy. Another one was about a killer Easter bunny who dipped the children in chocolate and then ate them. Real messed up stuff. It's driving me mad that I don't remember what this series is called!

UNK SEZ: Ericka, thanks for the great traumafession. I'm a big fan of the episode "The Host" from the second season of THE X-FILES as well. It's one of the most disturbing (and sometimes nauseating) of the series. As far as that comic goes, I'm not familiar but an exceptional place to do some archaeological digging for it would be THE HORRORS OF IT ALL. Even if you don't find exactly the comic you're looking for, you are sure to find something equally good or maybe even better.

I was ten during the summer of 1961.

There was a TV show called 'WAY OUT, a sort of take off on THE TWILIGHT ZONE and OUTER LIMITS. There was an episode about a man who visits a sideshow featuring all kinds of weird displays, such as the fish that changes color-every other month, and a severed woman's head. Stuff like that. The highlight of the sideshow was a woman, chained to a chair with a light bulb for a head. The man stays after the show and the light bulb woman, Cassandra, begins talking to him. As the show progresses he falls in love with her and she convinces him to free her from her chains so they could run away together.

In the final scene, you see a woman in a flowing gown. Her back is to the audience. She is standing in front of the sideshow display, only this time it is a man's body with the light bulb head chained to the chair. She is speaking lovingly to the guy. She turns to face the camera, the severed head has been crudely sewn to her body! The male protagonist obviously having been killed by Cassandra and now has assumed her dreaded spot in the sideshow chair.

The jolt of this final scene haunted me for years.

I only overcame it in grad school when I dated a girl named… Cassandra.

UNK SEZ: Cooch138, thanks for bringing up this show. I had no idea of its existence until you mentioned it. 'WAY OUT aired in 1961 on Saturday nights and lasted for 14 episodes. It was hosted by ROALD DAHL, the mind behind Kindertrauma legends THE WITCHES, CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY and many, many others. As of yet, the series has not found its way onto DVD. You can be sure if it ever does, we'll be covering it on these pages once again.

When I was little, my mom rented a movie for me. It seemed harmless enough. I was all excited and watched it by myself in her bedroom. The movie was ALL DOGS GO TO HEAVEN. I watched the whole thing, amazingly. I was a little bothered when the dog got killed and went to heaven. I was kind of upset when the dog stole his "life clock" and added more life to it so he could go back to Earth. That just seemed wrong to me. But at the end, he ended up going back to heaven for good, and I just started crying harder than I can even remember.

I don't remember exactly what upset me so much; maybe it was the movie as a whole. I didn't like that the character was murdered. I didn't like the dishonest stuff he did. (I felt like he was cheating God). I didn't like that he went to Heaven in the end.

I just bawled and bawled and I can remember crying and yelling at my mom "WHY DID YOU RENT THIS??? WHY???"

I never saw any of the sequels. I refused to watch the show. It wasn't that it scared me; it just made me incredibly sad. I was a very sensitive little kid. I have not seen that movie since and I still do not want to! I've never even particularly liked DON BLUTH films in general since then.

Movies about dogs: YES!

Movies about dogs dying: NO!

(I'm glad I've never seen OLD YELLER).

That is my worst trauma, mainly because I can't think of anything else that ever caused me to scream and cry like that.

DON BLUTH owes me big time.