Category: Traumafessions

I saw an article on your site in GEEK MONTHLY and decided to check it out. There's lots of fun to be had, and I'm still reading it even now, but I did want to respond to your article on THE THING. Because as good as the movie is, it will never hold a candle to the original short story ("Who Goes There?" by JOHN W. CAMPBELL JR.), which I read as a child and which terrified me like nothing else. It's an absolutely gripping read, tense and claustrophobic in a way that even CARPENTER's excellent (and faithful) film can't match.

The most terrifying thing about it was that after I finished reading it and went to bed for the night, a friend of mine stopped by our house. He didn't want to wake my parents, but he did want to see if I was awake and up for sneaking out, so he tapped on my window and whispered, "John? John, are you there?" through the curtains. Needless to say, I didn't respond, primarily because I was sure that saying anything or even moving would result in being devoured by a shape-shifting monster.

UNK SEZ: John, thanks for reminding me just how great and effective "Who Goes There?" really is. I read it in my youth as well. In fact, before JOHN CARPENTER's THE THING was released in theaters, FANGORIA magazine held a contest asking readers to draw THE THING based solely on the description provided by CAMPBELL's text. The young Unkle Lancifer worked diligently in his Trapper Keeper and produced a work that, by rights, should have changed the history of art forever. (I had just discovered a revolutionary shading technique that involved smearing pencil lines with my eraser!) I'm not sure what exactly happened, but for some reason I DID NOT win that contest. I have developed many conspiracy theories over the years. Did the editors of FANGORIA decide that my work was so astounding that I was clearly a seasoned professional with far too many awards already under my belt and therefore disqualified me?? Did my postman, having entered the contest as well, destroy my submission in order to secure his own unwarranted victory? Was JOHN CARPENTER himself involved? Perhaps he was concerned that after seeing my illustration audiences would find his film somehow inadequate! Or was it the government? Maybe THEY stepped in and destroyed my masterpiece because it was a far too convincing a depiction of an alien life form and could potentially blow the lid off their decades long U.F.O. cover-up! One things for sure, "Who Goes There?" is one story that really can really produce paranoia!

P.S.: Thanks to the beyond excellent OUTPOST 31, I have found the winning submissions to the obviously rigged FANGORIA "contest." If you look below you will discover evidence that concludes, without a shadow of a doubt, that I have been robbed! FANGORIA, if you're reading this, it's never to late too make amends. Simply print a retraction in your next issue that states that you acknowledge the fact that you made a HORRIBLE, HORRIBBLE, MISTAKE!

NOTE: For even more horrible mistakes related to THE THING go HERE.

ALIEN was the first real horror film my parents allowed me to watch. My mother saw it in the theater when she was eight months pregnant with my sister. That kind of freaked her out. I always heard stories about the "chest-burster" scene and my imagination would run wild with horrifying visuals. A few years later it aired on broadcast T.V. I was about 9 at the time, and my parents only let me watch up to the part where the facehugger dies and JOHN HURT wakes up. Conveniently, there was a commercial break right before the infamous scene, so they sent me to bed.

At that time, in my mind, the alien wasn't the 8-foot, phallic-headed monster we all know and love, it was the spidery facehugger. That's what I thought popped out of Cane's chest and picked of the crew systematically one by one. I had to imagine what the rest of the movie was like with this facehugger killing all the crew.

The next day I drew a comic book called "ALIEN 2!" The plot was simple: The Facehugger escapes the ship and falls to Earth.HAL LINDEN from BARNEY MILLER fame was a beat cop who stumbles upon the facehugger who wakes up and starts destroying the city… and the only one who can stop it is, HAL LINDEN of course.

When I finally saw the entire film a few years later, I wasn't disappointed. As a matter of fact, I was floored. It has become one of my top favorites of all time.

I guess it just goes to show you that sometimes your imagination is not always better than the real thing.

UNK SEZ: Turnidoff, do not sell your vision of a HAL LINDEN starring ALIEN sequel short. Although JAMES CAMERON's take is very difficult to top, yours, if made as you envisioned it, would certainly not be the worst ALIEN sequel in existence. I also think it is very generous of you to want to assist Mr. LINDEN's jump from the small screen into multiplexes. I always thought his mustache was made to be seen larger than life, on the big screen. In fact, now that you mention it, HAL's 'stache just may be the absolute perfect foil for a wayward facehugger!

NOTE: TV GUIDE ad from HERE, ALIEN toys from HERE.

Earlier: Turnidoff's take on MADAME.

There was this episode of THE CAROL BURNETT where they show her being sucked down a bathtub drain. They show her slinking all through the drainpipes. I had to be three or four when I saw this. It took my parents months to even get me in a bathtub to take a bath without screaming my bloody head off. Even to this day, knowing rationally that it can't happen, I get that weird feeling around tub drains.

It was just this morning that I suddenly remembered something that totally freaked me out as a child. When THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS came out, I was ten. I remember seeing commercials for it on T.V., and there was one commercial that featured the one scene after Jack dresses like Santa and visits all the houses leaving creepy gifts. There's one boy holding a present and his parents go, "What did Santa bring you, honey?" and he pulls out a scary shrunken head and they scream.

That always totally scared me and it was years before I actually watched the movie. It's one of my favorites now, go figure. I looked on You Tube and found it. The shrunken head is right at the end, at 1:17. Still gives me a bit of a shiver.

Sometime during the ‘70s, a local T.V. station used to show old action movies and serials on Saturday mornings and at one point they showed TARZAN ESCAPES.  Another possibility is that I saw this first at the Saturday Morning Fun Club which was similar fare put on by a group of students at the University of Texas (where my Mom attended) who got a hold of a theatre on campus on Saturdays and provided popcorn and reams of discarded copy paper to make airplanes to throw at the screen during goofy moments – I also remember some funny smelling smoke that seemed to hang above the last few rows of the theatre…  Anyhoooo.

There is a scene from TARZAN ESCAPES which seems to have floated into iconic status – at least all the references to it I found online don't mention the specific movie it's from and just refer to it as basically occurring in just about every TARZAN movie ever made, but I don't think that's the case.

What happens is this: a party of pith-helmeted white explorers are being led back to civilization by their friendly native guides through the jungle when they encounter a big, not-too-friendly tribe.  A trade deal begins and goes wrong because frankly, head bwana devil is a pigheaded idiot.  Instead of killing the explorers right there, everyone is dragged back to the jungle village where much partying ensues and where the main entertainment happens to be, of course, the execution of the explorer party.  Now the most fun way to do this apparently is to whip up a gizmo consisting of two spring-loaded tree trunks crossing each other and held in place with a single release rope (imagine what the Professor from GILLIGAN'S ISLAND would come up with if he was an escaped Nazi scientist), and then lash a poor captive to both trunks just below the cross point, cut the release rope, and watch what happens.  Mr. Hayes wasn't about to let the Saturday Morning Fun Club show everything (this movie also marks where MAUREEN O'SULLIVAN was cast out of her skin-tastic loincloth bikini from TARZAN AND HIS MATE and into a mid-thigh tunic) but what they did show, the hapless struggling schmuck being tied up upside down in absolute terror ('cause you know if you're being tied below the cross of two spring-loaded tree trunks, things are going to suck pretty quick) and then the tops of the trunks suddenly whipping away from each other accompanied by the most horrendous grown man scream you've ever heard, was enough for my fertile little imagination to fill in all the details.

Cripes!  What's worse is, TARZAN actually shows up right after the first guy is ripped apart, but while they're grabbing the second guy and ripping the bejeebus out of him, he's pussyfooting around secretly cutting the ropes of the other captives.  Finally, just before the first white guy – of course – is about to get his E ticket punched, TARZAN calls in his herd of elephants to break up the party and saves everyone.

My memory of this scene has a "big-screen" quality to it – part of why it made such an impact – so I think it likely the Saturday Morning Fun Club was responsible.  It also had enough force that, until I watched the movie again recently, my recollection was of this tree thingy being utilized many times even though they only actually show it working on the first guy.  Regardless, I still remember the power inherent in that device as it loosed its stored up energy on those poor screaming extras.

The year was 1980 and my grandparents had just got cable television. As a seven year old, I was amazed at the bounty of forbidden entertainment that was now available to me. I remember being astounded and confused by a sleazy aerobic program on Showtime and all the uncensored music videos that they showed in between the movies. My older sister and my older cousin told me that a scary movie called WHEN A STRANGER CALLS was coming on Showtime and we made plans to sneak out of our bedrooms and watch it.

We all sat in the living room with the lights turned off and were scared out of our minds by the first ten minutes of the movie. The tension filled the air as we huddled together and hoped that no one would be calling from another room in the house. Just as the movie was getting scarier and scarier, my sister heard a thumping and scratching sound coming from the coat closet. My cousin screamed at the top of her lungs as the scratching noise got louder. My grandmother came running into the living room and began cussing at us and wondered why we were up so late watching television. She opened the closet door and out sprang her cat. I remember feeling bad that we got caught, yet relieved that there wasn't a murderer waiting in the closet!

I saw DRAGON SLAYER when I was eleven years old, in the year it was released. In the film, the king has made a bargain with a very nasty dragon. In exchange for the dragon not destroying his villages, he provides the dragon with virgins. Twice a year there is a lottery to choose a girl to be sacrificed to the dragon. But one year, the Princess learns that her name has never gone into the lottery. She sees this as a horrible wrong she must correct and replaces all the tiles with her name to guarantee that she is chosen at the next lottery.

Even when the Princess has the chance to escape her self-induced fate, she doesn't. She descends into the cave. You don't see her for a while, until the Slayer (PETER McNICHOL) happens upon her. And there she lays, dead (one would assume), but looking pretty decent except for a little blood…

… and there are baby dragons munching on her leg!

They've eaten off a fairly clean portion, and you can see the bone, and the baby dragons happily munching along like a hungry man eating a bad, fast food fried-chicken leg still attached to the chicken, ripping off more flesh as they go.

And they clean that bone.

It's visible in the darkness of the scene; a long white shank between two hunks of meat.

Just.

Bone.

And I wondered if she was dead when they started eating her. The baby dragons are hungry little buggers that look like nuclear-waste mutated MUPPETS. When SLAYER-boy McNICHOL kills them, they quiver about and are even creepier and sad because although they may be virgin-eating monsters, they're just babies.

Since then, I've never been able to deal with movies where people are eaten, especially if they're eaten alive. And if my ankles are touched or grabbed for any reason, I take serious umbrage!

Then my boyfriend learned of this trauma and thought it would be funny to bite my ankles. It was at his peril.

I found the scene in bits (at about 1:45) in a music video someone made, and it still turns my stomach.

Humpty Dumpty we all know to have been a riddle, with the answer of course being that the mysterious Humpty was in fact, an egg. Nothing particularly eerie about that, right?  Well, as soon as someone decided to take the guesswork out of the rhyme, by illustrating Mr. Dumpty perched atop his wall, and gave him a face, it all changed. To a child (at least to me), we now had the story of a life; a terrifyingly fragile one at that. The rhyme was no longer a riddle; instead it could be surmised as:

"The fragile Eggman unwisely sat top a wall. He fell and died horribly."

I remember being read this out of an Old-school Mother Goose book as a very young child and thinking what a nightmare it was to be Humpty Dumpty, as veritably anything (I had broken many an egg trying to help my Mom cook, promising to be careful) would lead this poor creature to a yolk-splattered death. Humpty couldn't go out and play, he couldn't slide down the stairs…everything I knew to be fun was off-limits to Humpty, with any false move leading to his doom. His only real option would be to stay at home in the nest or egg carton and not move.

Of course I knew Eggmen didn't exist. It was the concept of this absurd fragility that had me so scared.

The picture out of that book sealed the deal, for it depicted the wide-eyed, last-second look of terror as Humpty, seeing the end of his cursed existence a few seconds away, was beginning to fall. I would imagine what the after-effect drawing would look like; that panicked, open-mouth look, and huge open eyes frozen amidst cracked shell and leaking albumen. I could even hear him scream.

I scribbled over his face with a pen, in an attempt to hide the first "Face of Death," I had ever witnessed, but to no avail. I still knew it was there. I remember later watching SESAME STREET where a very freakish looking Humpty, with a mouth that caved in as he spoke, was being interviewed by Kermit the Frog as a nursery-rhyme news correspondent, and feeling the sense of dread that it was only a short matter of time until he was destined to fall from the wall, and no one would be able to help. Such was the fate of the doomed Eggmen.

The Eggmen repulsed me, as if they were the Elephant-men of the nursery rhyme circuit. It was not as if I wanted to save them; rather, I never wanted them to exist.

Earlier: Reader Bigwig not so fondly recalls Struwwelpeter.

Now, at this time of writing, I am 15 years old. I regularly watch violent anime. Recently I was watching WHEN A STRANGER CALLS, and poking fun at it throughout. I often watch documentaries about ghosts, and read about them. Halloween is my favorite holiday, partly because of all the scary things. I've written about sociopathic serial killers before. I love the horror genre, and often know who's going to die first in said movies. And yet, this one, common, everyday object scares me.

A closed door.

No really.

Stop laughing.

There's a reason, and I'm about to share, as I drown my sorrows in Sunkist.

When I was very little, possibly around 5 or 6, my dad was a huge science fiction junkie. Very often, the SciFi Channel was on, and I remember him having alien-related objects around the house. What scared me was this scene, possibly a commercial, but I'm not sure.

What happened was that a door was shown. After a few seconds, a cracking sound was heard, as a decaying hand broke through said door. Suddenly, this zombie/skeleton/ghoul thing, with white shaggy hair, sticks its head through the crack. I don't remember the rest, but I think I remember it saying something along the lines of "Hey. Want to watch a new show?" Or something. I don't remember exactly.

As a result, even at my age, I have issues with closed doors. Whenever I'm in a room alone with one, and it's the only exit, I think of what is behind that door, and get anxious, particularly worried that there is something behind said door. In fact, I keep the door open a crack usually, so I can see any ghouls that will try to bust open my door, in the name of their show. Thank you so much, SciFi, for giving me a fear of doors!

UNK SEZ: First of all Kami, I would like to congratulate you on your honesty and bravery. I can assure you that you are in capable hands, as I have decades of afternoon talk show watching under my belt. I have also read every self-help book on the market from "Why is Everyone Looking at Me Funny?" to "Holy Moly, Your Shadow is Chasing You." In fact, I know exactly what your problem is. The technical term that learned folks like myself like to use is "a-door-aphobia." The good news is, you've already made the first step toward recovery by admitting to a group of strangers that you've got bats in your belfry. Now the healing can begin…

My father, Dr. Satanstein, taught me long ago that the best way to get over my fear of water was to be thrown in the deep end of our pool with my feet chained to a radiator. (Sounds harsh, but guess who just bought a new snorkel!) It's called tough love Kami; it ain't easy but it works. Above and below I present you with a scary collection of doors to stare at until you are no longer scared of them. I also suggest that you play ring and run on at least two of your neighbors before going to bed. Good luck Kami, I have every faith in your recovery.

As for everyone else, can you identify the movies these doors are from? Some are easy and some will make you want to grab torches and storm Kindertrauma Castle. (Remember #1 is above the post!) Leave your guesses in the comments section. I'll post the answers on Monday! (And yes EVIL ON TWO LEGS, I know you just did something like this but you've heard that old chestnut about rip-offs being the sincerest form of flattery right? Besides this is my revenge, now I'm in control! Mwahahahaha!)

UNK: I hope that I do not have to point out that this last one is not a door at all but an adorable little puppy-doggie. I just wanted to illustrate to dear Kami that sometimes there is something very nice behind a closed door (windows of course are a different story). Extra points for whoever can name the puppy and identify what # door he was found behind!