Category: Traumafessions

It's such a beautiful day outside, so I think I'll stay in and watch HELTER SKELTER. Lunatic Charles Manson seems to be popping up everywhere lately thanks at least partly to Damon Herriman's recent duo performances of the cult leader in the Netflix series MINDHUNTER (great show) and Quentin Tarantino's latest flick ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD (Maybe I'll borrow it from the library someday?) Herriman has some big old giant shoes to fill because the incredible STEVE RAILSBACK truly brought an intense A-game to his unnerving take in the 1976 two-night event television miniseries. You'd think that what scared the hell out of me when I watched it as a kid would've involved one of the two savage home break-in multiple murders (the first so depraved it involves an eight-month pregnant Sharon Tate) but nah, crazily enough what gets under my skin takes place in a courtroom (which is especially nuts when you know that nothing puts me to sleep faster than a courtroom scene). The bit works as a kind of cliffhanger for the first night's segment. Manson wildly enters the courtroom and takes a seat as GEORGE DiCENZO as prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi (who authored the book) notices that his watch has inexplicably stopped and remarks, "It's never done this before". He then looks up to see Charles Manson smiling at him, the implication being that somehow the madman has OMEN-like telekinetic powers and is responsible. RAILSBACK's smiling, whacked-out expression is the true epitome of insanity. It's beyond uncanny and far scarier than any special effect could possibly offer. It absolutely terrified me as a kid because I knew that what I was watching was a TRUE STORY and it seemed that what was being suggested was that Manson indeed had supernatural powers and that idea chilled me to the bone.

I have no idea why my parents would think that HELTER SKELTER was an appropriate thing for me to watch.  Truth is though; I was already well aware of the appalling crime thanks to a visit to my cousin's house where I had stumbled across the book and the gruesome photos inside. Still, I suppose nothing could prepare me for STEVE RAILSBACK's hyper-convincing delirium and the way he almost seemed to look through the TV screen at me. In typical beat you over the head seventies-style subtly, the monstrous visage freeze frames for even more of an unsettling impact that nearly branded itself inside my head. Watching the movie again as an adult it becomes clear how much the musical score guided by mounting hysteria. It's something I'm sure I wouldn't even notice at the time but looking back I recognize so many of the era's prerequisite musical jabs, nudges and cues. Having been raised on TV, it's possible I've been trained to panic at these blunt obvious sounds like a nervous dog. Composer BILLY GOLDENBERG has a long list of television credits including DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK (1973) and CIRCLE OF FEAR which explains a lot.

Note: When I finally did venture outside I stopped by my favorite thrift shop and randomly procured an album by The Brady Bunch entitled "Meet The Brady Bunch". The record is mostly an assortment of covers of then (1972) popular mellow seventies songs; one of them being Don McLean's "American Pie". For some reason known only to them, the Brady kids jump ahead with the lyrics and start their version with "Helter Skelter in the summer swelter…" Yes, the Brady kids actually sing about the Manson murders (Somehow this is even more inappropriate than their cover of Bread's "Baby I'm-a Want You")! It's crazy, right? It just goes to show you how ubiquitous and inescapable the Manson murders were (and apparently still are). Also, I would be remiss if I did not also point out that HELTER SKELTER sports an impressive performance by the late great horror icon MARILYN BURNS ( THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE ) as key witness Linda Kasabian. How she and RAILSBACK eluded Emmy awards is a mystery for the ages.

Hello Unk L, Aunt J, and assorted cats, bats, and belfries; I know that there have been more than several mentions of Wizard of Oz as a traumatizer on this site, and I figured that I would never have anything to add to the discussion. Then came the discovery of WoO with Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon on YouTube (HERE).

I had heard the lore, and even tried to do it once or twice in college, but lacked the patience/sobriety to continually flip the album.  Finding it with the music overdubbed made actually getting through it more of a possibility.  Because circumstance dictates that I am unable to currently deal with reality, I had a steady supply of jazz lettuce, the Devil's coleslaw, reefer, see? on hand, and embarked on the journey most potheads only dream of. For the most part, it was a lot of fun. Certain coincidental peaks were scarily dead-on, while others required some allowance.  It was when our good green goddess of ghoulishness, The Wicked Witch of the West pops up in the crystal ball, mocking Dorothy's tears.  The sudden PKTD (Post Kindertrauma Disorder) kicked in, and I was five years old again, watching this movie in a vintage movie house.  My parents had taken my sister and I to see a special showing, and that was our first time ever seeing it.  I was fairly stable until this moment, at which point I crawled under the movie theater seats to hide from her.  (And, being five, to no bout eat floor JuJuBes.)  I have watched this movie at least, no joke, 100 times since I was five, but not once have I so viscerally remembered this moment, which my mother loves to laugh and laugh about.  So, thanks for the recommendation stoners everywhere.  I'll send you my therapy bills.

Best Regards, Dylan Donnie-Duke

In my tiny head, I think I can divide the types of movie scares that hit me hardest into three major categories. The first type of scare is PHYSICAL and it covers the fear of injury, violence, body damage and mutation. The second is SPIRITUAL and includes ghosts, demons, the supernatural and the unknown. The third is MENTAL which covers the fear of insanity head-trip movies and anything that's just so dang weird that it leans toward madness. DEMON SEED covers all three of those bases but for me, it especially hits that last category really hard. DEMON SEED (especially its bonkers climax) freaks me out basically just because it's so insistently bizarre.

I recently re-watched DEMON SEED to confirm the recollections that my accosted brain failed to bury after catching it on a local channel afternoon broadcast in the early eighties. It seems I remembered the insanity accurately as this movie makes me feel like CHARLES GRODIN trying to decipher MARTIN SHORT's infuriating oddness in CLIFFORD ("Can you act like a real human boy for one minute here?") DEMON SEED, which is somehow about a computerized house deciding to rape a woman and force her to have its impossible baby contains crazy 2001-style psychedelic strobe effects, an abundance of nutzo slow-mo dissolves and a truly bizarre score that sounds like a robot being tortured in hell. On second thought this movie is one of those rare birds that is actually more disturbing than I remember it.

I hate to spoil the ending but the crazy computer's plan to create a hybrid robot/human baby is shockingly successful. Trapped victim Susan (the superb JULIE CHRISTIE), who has really been put through the wringer at this point, is not keen on welcoming the abomination into the world and tries to pull the plug but ultimately fails. The "baby" emerges from the machine covered in goo and insect-like metallic scales and looks a hell of a lot like the mask in the MR. ROBOTO video by STYX (and I wouldn't be surprised if it was an inspiration). But forget the molten lava Buddha bad looks- the awful screeching sounds it makes really get under the skin. I thought the robot's nightmarish voice was bad enough but the newborn sounds like an animal getting run over by a car and I'm not here for it. Eventually, we'll find that the monster has a kid under its shell that seems to be a perfectly engineered clone of the daughter poor Susan had lost but before you can get sentimental, it opens its mouth and starts talking like the computer! This leads to the camera going into a close-up of the child's eye and more drugged-out strobe effects. It's an ordeal, folks. DEMON SEED, I don't need to watch you again for a couple more decades. We good. 

Hi! It's me again.  I'm currently watching "Perfect Murder, Perfect Town".  It's a movie about the murder of Jonbenet Ramsey.  I wanted to watch it again…well to be truthful, I wanted to watch the whole movie for the first time.  The first time I attempted to watch it was in 2008.  The scene where John Ramsey, her father, finds Jonbenet dead in the basement, he picks her up.  Her arms, which are tied over her head, do not move.  This was the first movie I'd ever seen where they actually depicted rigor mortis the right way, because the dead body was stiff as a board.  I mean, I knew intellectually at the time I saw the scene for the first time, that they used a dummy.  Still, though, it really disturbed me.  I'm pretty good at suspending my disbelief, so of course, I was pretending that it was really Jonbenet and I was watching the discovery of her body. 

I didn't turn the movie off right away.  It wasn't until they had a morgue scene where the body was displayed from toe up to the head.  Again, I knew it was a dummy, but it still disturbed me to see a little girl's "body" on the slab.  I turned it off then and didn't watch it again until just now. I used to live in Colorado, but it wasn't Boulder.  It was Colorado Springs. 

Ironically 1996 was the year my family moved from Colorado back to Ohio, where I'd spent most of my life.  We moved back to Ohio just weeks before Jonbenet was murdered.  I was 14 and the news blew me away. 

  I recently introduced this site to my parents.  Ma Bigwig found it particularly fascinating, and both enjoyed and remembered a great many of the subjects in my posts over the past decade. She brought up one that I hadn't thought about for dozens of years, that I only vaguely remembered since I was no older than four or so, but Ma insisted it should be included on my trauma highlight reel. I researched based on what she remembered, and we watched it on the youtube, and yeah, I get it.

Gumby – The Small Planets.  Art Clokey must have read Le Petit Prince and decided there was plenty of room for a quick moralistic Gumby adventure in the same vein.  With little to no buildup, Gumby announces he's fed up living like a slave, controlled by his parents, and sets out to find his own planet to live in peace. He's made his choice and is already happy about it.  A reluctant Pokey is along for the ride, as they hop in a book, and a spaceship therein.

They visit three small worlds in their whirlwind odyssey, each inhabited by a child who (presumably) also got fed up and ran away from home. These kids demonstrate poor behavior, and Gumby decides his situation wasn't so bad after all.

The first planet is the lair of Train Boy, a Davey and Goliath leftover puppet, who kicks them off rather than share his world and glorious train sets and fires a missile at them.

Second, we have a girl who delights in frightening our duo with a giant dinosaur mask, but then wonders upon their hasty egress why she has no playmates. (also a Davey and Goliath looking castaway)

And third, the clincher…they find a very intense Claymation boy unlike the previous two playing a piano. Pokey sneezes, which sets the kid off, pulling his hair and screaming that his "Beautiful Arpeggio" was ruined. If that wasn't bad enough, he morphs into a lycanthropic demon hybrid to further hammer the point home that they are not welcome.

Mom says I hid under the kitchen table after watching this one. ( AKA – young Bigwig's Fortress of Solitude)

So there you have it, kids, if you ever think you have it bad at home, take a look at what else is out there waiting for you….the selfish;  those who find delight in your fear, and bonafide psychotic monster children just waiting to tear your arms off for sneezing.

All the best,

Bigwig

For decades, I was haunted by a movie where a mom dies by getting electrocuted in a kitchen. I couldn't remember the details and when I saw it, I didn't know what the title was. It was a scene that terrified me and stayed fresh in my mind for nearly 30 years.

Recently, my wife and I went and saw Hereditary in the theater. We loved it. Once we got home, we immediately did a horror deep dive and started watching movies with similar themes. That's what led me to the 1987 voodoo, child-sacrifice thriller The Believers.

The movie starts with the death of Martin Sheen's wife by electrocution in their home. As his son watches terrified while screaming, Sheen's wife played by Janet-Laine Green seizes up and dies in front of their eyes. That's how the movie starts before we even get to the credits.

I was probably six or seven when I saw this on HBO around 1990. For years, I thought it was part of the film Pulse starring Cliff De Young, but it wasn't and I could never track down the scene even when internet searches became an option. The thought of this movie where a mom got fried in her kitchen always stuck with me, lingering in the back of my mind and occasionally popping up.

Now that I've seen it again thanks to Heredity, I can say it's not nearly as traumatic as I remember, but it's still a very effective scene. I don't recall trying to watch the rest of the film when I was younger, probably because I ran away from the television terrified, but as an adult I can say The Believers is a pretty good flick.

I recommend seeing this one not only for the scene that scared the hell out of me, but also for the other traumatizing parts in the film. The Believers features a lot of great familiar character actors and has a pretty great story written by Mark Frost of Twin Peaks fame. I liked it, even though it still kinda freaks me out.

Something has been driving me crazy. I have a pretty clear childhood memory of a scene in the movie IT (1990) where Pennywise the clown says "Beat it, Audra! Beat it! Beat it!" in a mocking fashion and laughs scarily. But I've watched the movie a few times in the last couple years and the scene is mysteriously nowhere to be found. Google is no help and it's making me BONKERS. Is this just something I hallucinated as a child? The only thing I've found that remotely corroborates my memory is this meme:

I know in the final scene Bill says "Beat it, Audra, beat it" while he's trying to wake her up on the bike, but I swear I remember the clown saying it too. Does anyone else have this memory/can anyone produce a clip? Thank you!