Category: Traumafessions

I fearlessly watched every Creature Feature run on Detroit's WKBD Channel 50 from the late sixties through the seventies, but one managed to sear its way directly onto my retinas. The 1966 ROGER CORMAN/SAMUEL Z. ARKOFF film QUEEN OF BLOOD was patched together from a bunch of eerie footage from a 1960 Russian sci-fi film called NEBO ZOVYOT. In QUEEN OF BLOOD an American spaceship crew (which includes JOHN SAXON and a young DENNIS HOPPER) intercepts a space capsule containing an inhabitant of Mars–a green-skinned, green-haired and incredibly creepy mute alien female. She turns out to be a blood-sucking space vampire who starts knocking off the crew one by one. Given that she's just an over-the-hill glamour model in green makeup and a beehive wig that might not have been so scary except for the way she does it–by hypnotizing her victims with her TERRIFYING GLOWING EYES.

The sequence that drove me over the edge was when a sleepy crewman observes her walking from the lava-lamp-equipped engine room on the other side of the ship and slowly stalking toward her victim (me in this case), then unveiling her blazing eyes (accompanied by a maddening buzzing sound) in child-scarring close-up. Later she takes out DENNIS HOPPER in the engine room in a scene that anticipates HARRY DEAN STANTON's death scene in ALIEN. We later see her licking blood off one of the crewman's wrists but in a wicked death by irony she turns out to be a hemophiliac who bleeds to death when she's scratched by the spaceship's lone female crew member.

I went to bed that night with the image of that creepy face and those electrifying glowing eyes (director CURTIS HARRINGTON achieved the effect by beaming pencil-thin points of light directly onto her eyeballs) jolting me awake every time I tried to drift off to sleep. The movie showed up on T.V. on MGM Hi-Def so I can now preserve it forever–it's ridiculously cheap and cheesy, yet when I showed my wife the corridor-stalking scene even she admitted it was creepy as hell.

UNK LANCIFER SEZ: Thanks Jeffrey for the great traumafession and thanks for turning me on to QUEEN OF BLOOD. I had no idea it was such an extraordinary looking film. (Those who'd like to get a peek of QUEEN OF BLOOD's exceptional visuals can get a gander HERE and HERE. ) While we're at it, I should also thank you for naming a magazine after folks like me and Aunt John; here's to GEEK MONTHLY inheriting the earth!

If there are any advantages to having alcoholic father, one is the utter lack of parental guidance on what movies a kid is allowed to watch. My father took my older sister and I to see a double feature of FRIDAY THE 13TH and SCREAMERS. It was 1980, so that would have made me seven years old and my sister nine. I remember wanting to see SCREAMERS because people were supposed to be turned inside out! My father took us to the theater and gave me a handful of quarters so I could go to the lobby and play video games if the movie got too scary for me. Needless to say, I spent most of FRIDAY THE 13TH in the lobby.  I could tell that the movie was coming to an end by the peaceful music that was coming from the theater, so I decided to take a seat next to my sister and Dad. The image of a woman in a small boat floating along a still lake was being projected on the screen. It seemed like the worst was over. The next thing I know is that my eyes were being assaulted by the disfigured Jason popping up out of the water and pulling the hapless woman down into the lake. My sister began screaming uncontrollably and I was practically crawling under the seat out of fear and embarrassment of my sister. My Dad picked us both up, one in each arm, and carried two screaming kids out of the theater. We laugh about it now, but we were scared half to death! I never did get to see SCREAMERS!

UNK L SEZ: Erczilla, as traumatic as that final scene may have been you should be thankful that good old Jason spared you the misery of sitting through SCREAMERS! That movie's "Man Turned Inside-Out" ad campaign was all a disguise to hide an Italian film about an island of fishmen! For a better view of that film's super fishy history, check out this great blog, JOHNNY LARUE'S CRANE SHOT and for a very thorough review of the film (which actually has developed a bit of a cult following), I suggest BADMOVIES.ORG!

I suffered mightily at the hands of PUNKY BREWSTER when I was still biting ankles. You see, my sister was a DEAD RINGER for SOLEIL MOON FRYE, and I am not exaggerating when I say that we couldn't leave the house from '87-88 without being mobbed by unruly children looking to get close to their idol, "Punky."  I can even recall my Mom arguing with other mothers at the grocery store: "If she's Punky, what the hell are we doing in this dump?"

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Kitty, I feel your pain. My second cousin bore an uncanny resemblance to CAPTAIN LOU ALBANO, sans the facial hair, and it made shopping at the local K-Mart a nightmare. Cousin Pam was what my mother called a "handsome girl," but I digress. Everyone needs to check out Kitty's blog KILLER KITTENS FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE. Be warned though, this kitten definitely has claws!

As a child, I didn't have too many experiences with horror or violence on T.V. and movies.  I watched a lot of fluffy stuff.  But you never can tell just what can traumatize a little kid, and thus begins the story of how I could not stand the thought of watching AIRPLANE! well through adulthood.  Since it wasn't a movie that would raise the suspicions of my parents, I found myself watching it in my Dad's living room with the family on T.V. in 1984. The eminent plane crash idea wasn't bothering me too much and everything was going just peachy until that ridiculous inflatable autopilot showed up.

The horror that seeped into me at that moment was insidious and tricked me into thinking everything was fine, until I went to sleep. You see, I was only five and I had just started being ferried between Texas and Florida as a "child traveling alone" the year before; and obviously, I hadn't gotten over the whole plane ride thing. The fact that I had nightmares about the inflating autopilot gag is kind of embarrassing and yet I couldn't shake my acquired revulsion to the thought of ever giving the movie another chance.

I did finally see AIRPLANE! all the way through for the second time in college.  I am proud to say that I experienced no fear when watching the autopilot inflate, but I have to confess I still hold a bit of a grudge against them.

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Thanks LeEtta for the great TRAUMAFESSION! Surely, y'all must check out LeEtta's super crafty site The LeEMSmachine. Just don't call her Shirley.

UNKLE LANCIFER SEZ: AIRPLANE!'s inflatable Otto Pilot as an icon of fright? I can see it…

When I was very young my dad called us all to the TV to watch an old rerun of THE ERNIE KOVACS SHOW, which featured the Nairobi Trio – three men with ape masks and long-haired wigs, dressed in winter coats and derbies. They sat very stiffly and did a strange little musical routine. Dad laughed. They terrified me to my very core.

It is summer time, which makes me think back to summer trips from my childhood. This always included a week-long trip to Gulf Shores, Alabama without fail. However, it is a day trip to Six Flags over Georgia in the summer of 1975 that left me scarred for life. Sounds like fun right? A day trip to an amusement park, what could be terrifying about that right? Well, any child that visited Six Flags over Georgia in the 1970's already knows the terror that was waiting there.

So here was the family of six (Dad, Mom, oldest sister 17, evil older brother 14, older sister 11, and me 4) ready to enjoy a summer day at the park. For some unknown reason that I have never been able to fathom my parents decided that we would all go through the Horror Cave. Yeah, that's a great idea! Take a four-year-old through a "haunted house" nothing could possibly go wrong! Well, it is 33 years later and here is what I remember from the Horror Cave. Entering through the mouth of a monster the first scene I remember was a bubbly, foggy bog where not one but three Creature from the Black Lagoon monsters rise up (okay, now I am climbing my mom trying to escape this place and get passed to my father), next scene simply made me go mad, there was a woman's bedroom and she is lying across the bed, then I notice that the two creepy looking men in the room are holding her head that they just cut off (now I am climbing my dad attempting once again to escape), the scene that followed was like Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory with a creature strapped to a table and a mad scientist throwing the switch on some electrodes or something (so now I have figured out I can't escape so I close my eyes), so the last thing I remember looking at were two caskets one contained Dracula and the other the Bride of Dracula it looked as though they were breathing, and then you had to walk over a suspension bridge to get to the exit. To exit you had the choice to walk down some stairs or slide down a slide.

After that, I could not handle going through haunted houses. Over the years, I began to wonder if I remembered the Horror Cave accurately. I started searching the Internet in hopes that others had accurate descriptions of the terrors of the Horror Cave, better yet pictures from the cave. I wasn't disappointed because I found the FOLLOWING with PICTURES. I discovered that I wasn't crazy after all. My memories of the events from the summer of 1975 are accurate.

When I was about 7, there was a great prime-time childrens' show by the name of THE JIM HENSON HOUR. It had a memorable motley '80s cast of new Muppets (many of you may remember Digit) and some old favorites . There was one segment that had a detrimental affect on my perception of death. It was a segment titled THE STORYTELLER, staring JOHN HURT as a wizened, well, storyteller. In the particularly traumatic story, "The Soldier and Death," JOHN HURT regales us with the story of a kindly soldier returning home after a long war. He happens upon many strange circumstances and comes into possession of magical affects: a deck of cards that he cannot lose with, a magical sack that will hold anything that he commands into it, and a crystal chalice with which he can see whether death is going to claim the life of a person lying sick in their bed. The soldier returns home with the tools that he had scored upon the way, and becomes a king. One of the reasons was that he could tell people whether or not they would die, by using said magical crystal chalice. There was the effect that the Henson studio had whipped up that gave the viewer the same perception the soldier had through the chalice to show the most chilling creation of death. This episode had its share of frightening JIM HENSON creations, the waxy snarling demons standing out. But none were as frightening as the infantile, globe-eyed, hoarse-voiced death in his tiny, shiny robe. The bony grimace and scythe of the traditional death, even INGMAR BERGMAN's SEVENTH SEAL incarnation seems comical and approachable to the HENSON creation. When they first showed him through the chalice, my younger brother ran from the room, without speaking. I couldn't take my eyes away, locked into his giant, creepy blue eyes. I got the entire collection of THE STORYTELLER on DVD this past Christmas, and that awful little Muppet still chilled my heart 18 years after the fact. There have to be others out there who were just as shaken by the blue-eyed child Death from the HENSON studios…

UNK SEZ: Matthew I am sure you are correct! Something tells me that intentionally or not, JIM HENSON is second only to STEPHEN KING in the trauma delivery department. THE STORYTELLER is home to some of his darkest work simply because it stays true to the tone of classic fairy tales. Besides the appearance of death itself and those hideous winged demons in the episode you mentioned, there's something to ignite bed time jitters for the wee ones in just about every episode…

…thank god we had this cute talking dog to lighten things up a bit!!!

TERROR IN THE AISLES is a film that has had a profound, lasting effect on the way I feel about horror films and some non-horror films that they, for some reason, included. It turned me on to NIGHT HAWKS, VICE SQUAD and one of my all time favorite's PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE. I took it in to my middle school and for some reason did a report on horror films. Everyone cracked up when LINDA BLAIR did the rolled-back-eyes  hoochie coochie dance (even my teacher cracked up). I had just started buying Fangoria magazine (CELLAR DWELLER was on the cover) and brought it to school,this movie made me want to seek out more gore films and especially makeup effects people like TOM SAVINI and ROB BOTTIN (This is the first time I saw the clip from JOHN CARPENTER'S THE THING and even THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE ). The way DONALD PLEASANCE and NANCY ALLEN hosted the film, it seemed like an infomercial for the worst nightmare that you could not escape from.

UNK SEZ: Right there with you Eric. Every horror fan should see TERROR IN THE AISLES at least once. I gotta say I used to find the cheesy musical montage near the end nearly unbearable, but now it's almost my favorite part! Due to licensing issues, it's not likely that T.I.T.A. is going to be put on DVD any time soon (if ever) but currently you can watch the entire movie on your PC thanks to THIS GUY. If you have not seen it, hurry up and do so now before it gets yanked. It will certainly bring back some fond memories of the heyday of horror!

Right after I watched THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK I came down with a nasty cold, and my illness induced several nights of nightmares in which I was an underpowered Luke Skywalker, stranded on Dagobah. As it turns out, Dagobah didn't have a DAMN thing on the San Fernando Valley. For a long list of reasons I was sent, two summers after Empire hit the theaters, to live with foster parents in San Antonio. That might've been tolerable, if… I wasn't from Portland. Seriously. Name two places in these United States of America that are more different.

…So of course, there I was, 2000 miles from my family and everything I knew worth a damn, still feeling totally stranded, going through hell in school because OF COURSE I'm a discipline problem (gee, really???), when E.T. goes into theatrical release. Using a Speak & Spell to "phone home" when home is zillions of miles away? Getting dreadful sick and lying dying in the sterile beating heart of a funky polypropylene tent, surrounded by guys in positive pressure suits? Jesus on a pogo stick, talk about isolation piled on isolation.  I had nightmares for weeks afterward, in spite of spending a good part of the film with my eyes screwed shut.

…The guardianship arrangement that had caused me such grief was ended in the summer of '83.  Even after 25 years of chances to get over it, I've never watched it again, and if I go the rest of my life so bereft, I'll be okay with that.