I would be remiss if I were not to inform y'all of a recent post over at EVIL ON TWO LEGS entitled "Childhood Horrors." It's a superb list of grade "A" traumatizers that I think you will really enjoy, plus they were kind enough to mention ye ol' Kindertrauma as well! That kinda made my day and was sorta like a bloggy neighbor dropping off a surprise Bundt cake on account of they rule. While you're there, make sure you look around and and stay awhile, there's tons of great stuff to dig through and those guys really know their horror! Jump to the post HERE!
It was an awesome article. Thanks for giving the heads up! I love that he mentioned Witchboard, because you know… that movie owns.
That whole article really freaked me out and brought back a lot of memories. A lot of my sleepless nights as a child were caused by Daniel Cohen or the Scary Stories book pictures. That last image of Michael Myers sitting up gave me the chills. Last night Halloween was on tv and I ended up having a nightmare about Freddy Krueger for some reason. I bet I'm going to have more bad dreams tonight. Hooray. 😉
Amanda,
Unk, thanks for this. I now have Evil on Two Legs bookmarked as a blog to visit daily…right after Kindertrauma, natch.
Ahhh, Daniel Cohen…Anyone out there read Ghostly Terrors? That one gave me the serious willies. I remember one very simple story in that one that freaked me out just by its myserterious implications. I may get some details wrong here, but it was about a town minister who isn't a bad man, but I think I remember that some people just feel uncomfrotable around him. Anyway, he dies…His funeral is held in the town, and afterward some people are driving out to the minister's mother's house for a reception. The people in the car think they see the minister walking along the side of the road, but they don't get a good look at him and they don't stop. When they get to the minister's mother's house, his mother is passed out on the floor. They revive her, and she says that she'd been standing in the kitchen when she saw her son through the window, glaring at her with a look of pure evil on his face. She fainted. And that's it…Cohen tries to speculate about why he would come back and be evil now, but there's no explanation (of course, the stories are all supposed to be true). That lack of a conclusion or a reason for the minister's total change of temperment (plus, of course, it's true!) was one of those things that my mind really wanted to mull over, but the idea scared me too badly for me to let my thoughts wander there!
Oh, I also remember in one of his books that Cohen laid out the entire plot of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Colour Out Of Space," and that scared me pretty badly…And in one of his books about horror movies he included a studio still of Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs, and his grotesquely exaggerated smile used to make he want to avoid that page. Now that I'm thinking about it, that may not have even been a Cohen book. But whatever, it was scary. 🙂
Yeah, that captured every terrifying moment in my childhood. Halloween still gets to me to this day, and Witchboard had the scene with the guy cutting someone's head off with an axe, that scared the hell out of me.
Tales of Terror? I think I read that book, though the one I had had a skeleton hand holding a pocket watch for the cover. The jigsaw puzzle story and the furry color were the creepiest stories by far.
I gotta say EVIL ON TWO LEGS never fails to impress. You have to check out their posts on the fashion of Friday the 13th series, it really blew me away.