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It’s a Horror to Know You: Daniela of nowhere on the internet because I don’t have a website.

1. What is the first film that ever scared you?

I really don’t recall much stuff that reaches so far back as to be dubbed childhood, not in terms of movies anyways. But I do remember the first movie that should have freaked me out, but failed epically to ever scare me: Mom + Dad were working in the garden one Sunday afternoon, Jaws (1975) was on TV (translated to The White Shark in my native Germany), and shivering with excitement about doing something forbidden, six-year-old me watched it – and watched – and nothing in any way shark-related happened in the scenes I caught, and a while later my parents walked in and frantically stopped the show. I had seen zilch of interest, and to this day, by now having grudgingly digested the full length of the movie, I still don’t care for Jaws. I’ve never forgiven it. It’s always been, and will ever remain, an anti-climactic movie for me.

2. What is the last film that scared you?

Tales Of The Black Freighter (2009): I saw this short only last week, and boy, was I shocked and disgusted… I’m usually highly unqueasy, but this artfully animated companion piece to Watchmen really got to me – physically and psychologically intense.

3. Name three Horror movies that you believe are underrated.

1) Martyrs (2008): Of all the supposed New French Extremism (which especially many French directors deny as an existing genre), I liked some (À L’Intérieur: wow, yes! Haute Tension: pretty decent) and despised others (Frontière(s): enervating and pointless). But rarely has a movie blown my mind, my retinas even, as profoundly as Martyrs. It almost never happens that I sit open-mouthed facing an empty screen minutes after the movie is finished as I did with this one. I believe this movie is smart and thought-provoking yet heartrending and bittersweet and so many other praising adjectives that I can’t think of right now. It might also be the only extreme horror movie that made me cry with its sad, violent, disturbing beauty.

2) YellowBrickRoad (2010): As with such great nîche movies as Triangle, The Woman, Frayed, Død Snø, Perkins’ 14 and Maléfique, I must have discovered this beautiful(ly) low-budget gem here at Kindertrauma. YellowBrickRoad was a terrific viewing experience – I had avoided any potential spoilers, had no clue what to expect, and it blew me away! It could have been cheap, badly acted and sloppily executed crap (and maybe it is?), but to me it completely worked on so many levels – a deep, creepy, existential piece of underground horror. Plus the ending truly scared me shitless, which rarely happens to me these jaded days since I’m probably as jaded as all you jaded lot.

3) The Ring (2002) / Silent Hill (2006): Equal shares go to these two – both of whom address with compassion and terror the theme of abused and neglected children, whose darker versions become manifest on a haunting tour de vengeance in a sad, hopeless, twistedly atmospheric, white/gray/black netherworld. In Silent Hill, the maze of BDSM nuns, the barbed-wire janitor and mighty Pyramid Head did it for me. The Ring freaked me out with the horse going overboard and with the frosty detachment between mother and son – and fresh-up-from-the-well-through-your-TV Samara is the topos I envision to creep up on me, staccato-style, in a dark corridor.

4. Name three horror movies that you enjoy against your better judgment.

1) Tokyo Zankoku Keisatsu (2008): So totally fucked up, typically grotesque and way-out extreme J-bodyhorror gore splatter exploitation thingy… um, what? The fist cannon! The katana-limbed cybergoth amputee! The huge nozzle-funnel-whatever mutant dick! I mean… wait… I don’t know what to mean about this movie! It’s just so frigging irreverent, self-ironically wallowing in its own sexo-socio-political depravity and bucketful of transgressive ideas and… wait… let me simply call it cooool.

2) Shakma (1990): Stupid in a lovely way. During a nightly LARP session at the lab, a bunch of students are hunted down by a fluffy, red-assed baboon. Said baboon is very angry, innocent people die, and at one point, the splendid dorks attempt to save their lives by throwing cutlery through the shutters out of a window. Featuring an intrinsically incompetent Christopher Atkins and a deliciously odd Roddy McDowall. Oh, and not to forget: Chris Atkins’ hair is in this, too, even if it’s uncredited (and unpermed). [It has about the same effect as a miniature Kristin Chenoweth tap-dancing in front of histrionic Shakma. And if this last sentence makes sense to you, you're just the person who should go see this movie!]

3) Deep Rising (1998): I love it! I don’t know why! I say it needs some love! Okay, this is as guilty a pleasure as guilty pleasures come. I’m well aware of the deserved hating done to this movie, and sure, it’s pretty mediocre and flawed, objectively speaking. But whatever it is that made this movie (whose German title translates as Octalus – Death From Down Below – cough) stick with me, I could watch it once a week and not grow bored. Maybe I just love the ocean, exotic scenery, a clumsily designed CGI creature producing heaps of human gore for the heroes to slip and slide through, luxury cruises, Famke Janssen? Could it be that simple?

3½) Honorable mention goes to Troma Entertainment’s cult-fest Poultrygeist – Night Of The Chicken Dead (2006): I judge this movie better than my own judgment of it, which is that it’s one sloppy hell of a sleazy fun ride.

5. Send us to five places on the Internet!

I don’t follow any blogs or hypertextual internet tone poems (aside from Kindertrauma, yey!), so unless you’re dying to be forwarded to IMDB, Youtube, Ryanair and the German versions of Amazon and Ebay, this is the only site link I have for you:

Explosm.net. Totally haha webcomic; style: male college humor; degree of colitical porrectness: zero. I love it.

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It’s a Horror to Know You: Kelly of A Moment A Love A Dream A Laugh!

1. What is the first film that ever scared you?

Definitely a tie between Poltergeist and Jaws. The scene in Poltergeist where the mans face starts falling off in front of the mirror and into the sink. Made me sick when I was younger, I’d never seen any sort of blood in a movie before. The clown and the tree scene were also traumatic. I never actually saw Jaws in its entirety I would just take a sneak peak, afraid something would scare me. I used to think Jaws would be in the swimming pool (irrational) or the toilet (just plain crazy). My mom used to hum the theme and I would start freaking out.

2. What is the last film that scared you?

Probably the first half of Insidious, I didn’t care for the second half. But the first was a good old fashioned haunted housed movie. A scary one at that! The creature pointing over the bed, the tiny tim music! UGH.

3. Name three Horror movies that you believe are underrated.

1.Alice, Sweet Alice- A great horror film, with a lot of great scenes and a semi-interesting twist! I really have a soft spot for this movie. Wish it got more love.

2. May- I really enjoyed this movie and thought it was great. Creepy and demented to be sure. Has a-bit of a cult following though, so not sure how underrated.

3. The Woods- A lot of people hate this movie so maybe this should be in “movies I enjoy against my better judgement” list. But I genuinely liked it. People said they didn’t find it scary but it honestly creep-ed me out. The perfect use of “You Don’t Own Me” sends shivers down my spine. It’s all good until the end.

4. Name three horror movies that you enjoy against your better judgment.

1. Campfire Tales- I found this to be a fun and interesting take on Urban Legends trilogy. There are some genuinely fun times to be had with this movie. Sure it isn’t scary, but it doesn’t need to be.

2. Freddy Vs Jason- I thought this movie was pretty much all it needed to be. I enjoyed the slapstick humor and ridiculousness of it all.

3. The Grudge- This movie genuinely frightens me, maybe I just have an aversion to long black haired ghosts. But I think about that hand scene every-time I’m in the shower. I thought this was an effective remake. Forget the sequels though.

5. Send us to five places on the Internet!

IMDb (I really enjoy the use of lists on this site)

Think Geek (Are you A geek? Shop here!)

aghosthouseproduction (rare horror dvds for sale)

The Haunted Closet (a great blog with vintage books and reviews)

Long-Forgotten (Think you know everything about Disney’s famous attraction Haunted Mansion? Read detailed essays here)

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It’s a Horror to Know You: Stacy Pershall Author of Loud in the House of Myself!

1. What was the first film that ever scared you?

The first films that scared me did so solely through commercials. My dad’s an insomniac like I am, and when I was a kid and couldn’t sleep, I’d go into the living room, snuggle up next to him on the couch, and watch whatever he was watching. It’s a testament to both his coolness and his complete lack of sense that he let me, because I’d get so terrified by a 30-second trailer that I’d beg to sleep in my parents’ room for the rest of the night.

So my dad would be sitting there watching late-night M*A*S*H reruns, and I’d be getting all lulled to sleep by the theme music, and then they’d cut to a commercial and some terrifying-ass trailer for a horror movie would come on between ads for Marlboros and Schlitz. Because it was the ‘70s, the commercials had that low-budget 16mm drive-in film look and crackly, poppy soundtrack that made them even scarier. All of this is to say that the first horror movie that ever scared me was It’s Alive, but it was just the ad with the crib that turns until you see the monster claw hanging out. I was so disappointed when I finally saw the film as an adult and realized it was really pretty lame. Still, the M*A*S*H theme song continues to evoke a feeling of foreboding to this day.

The first horror movie I watched all the way through that really terrified me was The Exorcist. I was about 14 years old and being raised religious, so it messed with my head pretty badly. I had to watch it over and over again for years, always in the middle of the day, with all the curtains open and someone else present, to distill its power. Now it’s one of my all-time favorite movies, but I didn’t get there until I’d seen it at least a dozen times. And I was still completely flipped out the first time I visited The American Museum of the Moving Image in NYC and realized they had the spinning-head Linda Blair dummy there!

2. What was the last film that scared you?

Insidious, for sure! That’s a great film until the last 15 minutes or so, when it unfortunately becomes stupid. It takes a lot to scare me these days, but watching that one alone in the middle of the night definitely gave me chills. The first you see the red-faced monster is just brilliant, and Tiny Tim’s music has always been creepy as hell.

The last film that came anywhere close to scaring me as much as The Exorcist was Ringu, which was made even scarier by the fact that I saw it on a bootleg VHS my brother brought back from a trip to Japan as an exchange student. Those two films and The Shining are like my holy trinity of scariness.

3. Name three Horror movies that you believe are underrated.

First and foremost is The Prince of Darkness. I love that movie, and still find it genuinely scary. The dream sequence is really iconic for me; I’ve thought of it a lot as I write the book I’m working on now. On New Year’s Eve 1998, when everyone else was blasting Prince and finally partying like it was 1999, I was doing my usual ritual of finding a quiet place to write and reflecting on how it was now “the year one-nine-nine-nine” and the Alice Cooper zombie apocalypse was upon us.

Second would have to be Young Sherlock Holmes. It wasn’t billed as a horror movie, but there are some truly creepy scenes, particularly the one at the end with the bad guys chanting their evil chant and pouring lava on Elizabeth. (Why is it that bad things always happen to red-haired girls named Elizabeth? Seriously.) There’s also the swordfight with the knight who leaps from the stained-glass window – the first time a CGI character interacted with a live one against a live-action backdrop – and the attack of the killer stop-motion cupcakes. It amazes me that so few people seem to remember and love this one like I do.

Third is a tie between 301/302, from Korea, and In My Skin, from France. They’re two of the best examples of body horror I’ve ever seen, but not as well-known as lesser films like Martyrs, which I loathed in a way generally reserved for movies starring Robin Williams or Jim Carrey. 301/302 and In My Skin hold their own admirably against the triumvirate of body horror against which I judge all others: Jacob’s Ladder, Videodrome, and Eyes Without a Face.

4. Name three horror movies that you enjoy against your better judgment.

Yes! A chance to talk about my deep and abiding fondness for Shriek of the Mutilated! How can you not love a movie with whitewashed wood paneling, a Perrey and Kingsley soundtrack, and a yeti mask with deeply disturbing lips? You’ll feel like you need to take a bath in Sea Breeze after it’s over, since, like all ‘70s drive-in horror fare, the actors seem to have doused themselves with bacon grease before shooting every scene. But I always did like the smell of the Sea Breeze, so it’s cool. I suggest a refreshing scrubdown with Noxema first, for old times’ sake.

Then there’s Death Bed: The Bed that Eats. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like if Aubrey Beardsley was trapped inside your wall, your bed could eat a bucket of chicken, and rubbing a chain across your neck could make your toes bleed, you’ll find the answers in this masterpiece. I love this movie deeply and without irony.

Then there’s Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell, a TV-movie extravaganza starring Richard Crenna as an unsuspecting suburban father who brings home a bargest for the kids one day. What’s a bargest, you ask? Well, in this case it’s a cute black puppy who happens to be a minion of Satan. Oops! This was a late-late movie I discovered one insomniac night in high school, and I still call my black cat a bargest lo these many years later. Fortunately, he does a lot of evil stuff, so I get to call him that a lot.

5. Send us to five places on the Internet!

Deadmalls – If you’re a sucker for suburban blight like I am, you’ll love this extensive collection of abandoned shopping mall photos.

Underground Ozarks – Dogpatch USA was a second-rate amusement park in Jasper, AR based on the Li’l Abner comic strip. We used to go there when I was a kid, because it was closer than Silver Dollar City in Branson and offered just enough thrills to shut the kiddies up for a while. It opened in the late ‘60s, fell on hard times in the ‘80s, and was abandoned in 1993. The owners left everything to rot, and of course there’s nothing more terrifying than a rotting amusement park, unless it’s a public service announcement.

Tulsa TV Memories – If you grew up in Oklahoma, Arkansas, or Missouri, you probably experienced a number of your kindertraumas on KTUL Channel 8. Even if you didn’t, this site is a great look at a strange and wonderful regional TV station. Check out the Weather Teller and the Indian Sign Language sign-off!

Haunted Legend of Zelda – My favorite Creepy + Pasta entry. If you don’t have the patience for the (very) long story, just watch the videos. They’re such a labor of love, and definitely nightmare-inducing!

Goya’s Black Paintings – Hands down my vote for Most Disturbing Paintings Ever. The story of Goya’s life at Quinta del Sordo is fascinating, if depressing as hell. If you want to see what it looks like when a brilliant mind experiences the terror of insanity, start here. Someday I’ll have Anil Gupta tattoo Saturn Devouring a Son on the back of my hand, mark my words.

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It’s a Horror to Know You: Dylan of Better Living Through Pop Culture!

(If I am lucky it gets updated every 6 months, usually it takes a year. Halley’s Comet takes 75 years to make an appearance. Ergo, my blog > Halley’s Comet.)

1. What is the first film that ever scared you?

Pete’s Dragon. The foster family who “bought” Pete and chased him relentlessly terrified me.

2. What is the last film that scared you?

The Thing remake\prequel\reboot. Not so much scared, as got me to jump a couple of times.

3. Name three Horror movies that you believe are underrated.

Something Wicked this Way Comes. This poor little gem gets white washed by the Disney moniker, but it is kindertraumarific. I still remember our 4th grade class watching it and the teacher finally turning it off before it was over because so many of us were getting freaked.

Street Trash. Written of as a goofy comedy, this is one of those rare movies with unabashed political incorrectness, spot-on satire and wino’s melting in toilets. The F/X are some of the best at that time. A great kick back, poor a tumbler of Viper and enjoy flick.

Near Dark. Not so much underrated as ignored. A well constructed story with good (Okay, sometimes merely passable…) acting and great F/X. Plus loads and loads of Henriksen!!!

4. Name three horror movies that you enjoy against your better judgment.

Friday the 13th Part 7. Don’t you judge me! My favorite of the series. Sci-Fi meets slasher with just a touch of brutal sleeping bag piñata.

Fright Night II. I almost listed this in the underrated category, but didn’t feel that I could justify it merely with the two words, “Julie Carmen.” Nowhere near the fun of its predecessor, but still… Roddy McDowell. That counts for something, right?

Waxworks. I said, don’t judge me! I just watched this one recently with my son, because he had to put up with years of me saying, “Steak Tartar? Oh yes, Steak Tartar,” completely out of context. Now he knows, and he may never forgive me.

5. Send us to five places on the Internet!

None of these are horror related, they are just places I love:

Cracked. Major time vampire, but, unlike most on the internets, very well written.

Joan of Dark. The life of a knitter, roller derbyer and barista all in one. Plus she’s a friend of mine.

Sword Swallowing to the Hilt. Getcher minds out of the gutter! Great site for a nearly forgotten art.

Show History. While we’re talking side show acts, this is another great site for aficionado’s or beginners.

Sheldon Brown. He may have passed, but his site lives on. Sheldon combines my two favorite things, cycling and a passion for weirdness.

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Tornado Awareness Week will soon be upon the state I call home, and since the latest two years have seen historic numbers of twisters, it is a not unimportant thing. Our high-tech Doppler radar can pinpoint storms right down to the street level, but such was not always the case. When I was growing up, a 1977 storm materialized within the space of an hour out of some innocuous showers over the western part of the state, nary a watch posted for our area. It culminated in the local CBS weatherman going live on camera, eyeglasses askew, literally shouting to viewers that a tornado was entering the city about 10 miles away from my tiny town – only to have the station knocked off the air by the twister. Scary as hell. But that’s not the subject of my Traumafession.

On summer weekends that same CBS affiliate would frequently have time to kill before the local news came on at 5:30; sporting events could be unpredictable in their length. And so a frequent go-to was the 1967 educational film “Tornado!” with its 15 minute running time. It reinforced how a day which began in azure beauty could swiftly and savagely turn violent, with little one could do save cower and pray. It incorporated real tornado footage, difficult to come by at the time. And because such film was grainy and underexposed, it was as frightening as hell, a dark vision of chaos. The film makes much use of children, pets and toys as being particularly at risk. (I understand the admonition not to open windows in advance of the storm was later added when the film was acquired by The Weather Channel; in dreams I would madly race across my house, throwing open windowpanes, while my dog barked and the twister grew ever closer.) Warnings were issued for entire counties – a deceptively large area – and the tornado could strike anywhere in that zone at any time. It jangled the nerves.

I thought I grew out of that by the time I was in high school, but when that tornado of 1977 materialized out of seeming nowhere, I remembered that old film and felt a genuine chill. I’m grateful for the advancements made in storm prediction, but to this day, I respect an angry wind.

– Senski

UNK SEZ: Thanks for the exemplary traumafession Senski! Kids, make sure you keep up with our favorite pal over at his home base HEART IN A JAR!

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Me and SNUFF aren’t friends. I’m going to politely decline the invitation from the trickster in my head that is daring me to watch it again. I suppose that over the years, since the first and only time I saw it, there is a possibility that SNUFF like BLOOD SHACK and TERMINAL ISLAND, transformed from diabolical to adorable but I doubt it. It’s not very open-minded of me I guess, but a person has to draw the line somewhere. For those happily not in the know, SNUFF is, if I recall correctly, an inordinately lousy movie with a notorious tacked on ending that pretends to be real way before people were so hung up on things pretending to be real. So I guess that makes SNUFF a trailblazer, a very awful, boring, tasteless and deceitful, trailblazer.

I saw SNUFF back in the early days of video and when I first came across the box, it looked like fine stuff to me. I still do very much enjoy the artwork on the cover and as I recall, it came off hip and modern at the time. SNUFF was actually made back in 1976 and I encountered it on VHS around 1982. That six-year difference doesn’t seem like much now but it was to me back then, and the distance between the grainy hippie movie I got and the slick eighties flick I expected was drastic. Just look at the guy with the maniacal face on the cover- he’s wearing, for all intents and purposes, an Izod! Izods were big at the time! The 3-D letters being slashed apart, the geyser of blood contrasting with the tightening ropes, the crimson nail polish, the blasting lights, the screaming lady in the background (who I now realize also appears in the artwork for DEMONOID), all conspires to suggest an animated, wild, exuberant time which SNUFF is not.

If there’s anything more gratifying in life than renting a pile of tapes and watching them with like-minded people into the wee hours, I still do not know what it is. I was around 14 and I had a friend staying over and we had a pile of rented horror movies. One of them was SNUFF and as it was the most anticipated, it was saved for last. I knew something was afoul as soon as the film began. I tried to stay with it but it was impossible. Nothing was going on and people were just running around in a jungle with no purpose. My head began to wobble and sway and and soon I was asleep. SNUFF had nothing on glorious slumber. Sometime later my friend jostled me awake. I had to see what was happening! We rewound the last moments and watched aghast as an actress was ambushed by a film crew who recorded her murder cinema verite-style and then waved around her entrails. It was gross but not gross enough to keep me from going back to snoozetown. I never at any time wondered if anything in the film actually happened.

Sometime later I was on a bus coming back from the mall reading the latest FANGORIA magazine. In the letters section somebody was complaining about the atrocity of SNUFF and how disgusting it was that it included a real killing. My stomach dropped and I felt nauseous. Had I inadvertently watched a woman being killed? That poor actress! Here I was supporting her victimization with my rental money! Why don’t the police arrest the culprits? They should not rent this movie to people! Why, I do believe there’s something morally questionable about killing people to make entertainment! I don’t like the idea of censorship but perhaps this movie should be banned! I don’t know when or how I came back to my senses but I eventually did. No, they do not rent snuff movies at the mall and yes, the police might intervene if they did. The funny thing is, that one angry letter in FANGORIA convinced me of the film’s authenticity even after the film itself had failed on every level imaginable to do so. All I needed was an outraged voice and I began to see the same exact phantoms that they did. I sold my own perception to the wind in a heartbeat in exchange for nonsense wrapped in misguided righteousness. So I guess I did learn something from SNUFF, but that doesn’t mean I’d ever want to watch it again.

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First of all, LOVE THE SITE. I stumbled on it, really, by accident (revisiting my THE WIZ trauma) and it’s fascinating, entertaining, and creepy. Maybe I can say that it’s therapeutic, too. Being born in 1974, it’s nice to know that the Sleestaks didn’t just give ME nightmares!

I was reading over the site, and I was shocked to see that some early traumas from my childhood were missing. Namely, THE ELECTRIC COMPANY. Yeah, I loved that show. It seemed to plug right into the 7-or-8-year-old just coming off of SESAME STREET psyche. I was privy to the reruns that seemed to be on TV everyday from about ’77-’83. Always great stuff. Entertaining, informative, funny as hell, and then there’s DRACULA.

Yeah–a young Morgan Freeman dressed as the Prince of Darkness did a number on me. It was tough to watch–and you never knew WHEN he was gonna pop up and freak you out. I mean, how could they NOT totally be freaking us out with something like this:

I am 37 years old, and this STILL gives me the willies. I’m cool with Dark Knight and March Of the Penguins, but somewhere in the back of my head, I’m waiting to start running from this guy!

ALSO, maybe it was a vampire thing, but I sincerely believe I was damaged by some of the ‘scary’ Tom Lerher songs on THE ELECTRIC COMPANY, notably THIS ONE:

Is it the “Time For Timer”-like character singing lead or maybe the standup piano? No, I think it’s DRACULA appearing at the end in a dark room, ready to pounce on me. Yeah. That was creepy.

First of many…thanks for the site. It’s awesome!

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Hi, I absolutely ADORE your blog….so many memories (and so much terror!) I don’t know if this has been covered but I would like to make a traumafession about the 1977 cartoon version of THE HOBBIT. When I was a kid this cartoon (along with many others) sent me into a spiral of panic. The whole mood of the production is eerie, the music is melancholy, the characters drawn in a grotesque, baroque style. Not to mention there is a hellish scene involving goblins, and another with trolls. Oh my gosh! Even Gandalf, the lovably wise and good, was creepy in it! My parents were still together when I was first exposed to this life altering cartoon, so I had to be around the three to five age bracket. I still remember crying and hiding during the goblin battle. However, I’m happy to report that this trauma did not deter me from loving adventures, or the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Thanks! Maren

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