...:::Traumafessions:::...

Hi Aunt and Unk,

They used to show an animated film somewhere around Christmas every year, before the advent of VCRs; one that our mother used to circle in the TV Guide as not to miss. “It’s a beautiful story”, she would say. Mom also thought that the story of THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL was beautiful, so you see where this is leading. Not surprising, both were by HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN, who evidently gave the BROTHERS GRIMM some stiff competition in terms of painting the bleakest possible situations for children in stories.

THE SNOW QUEEN, at least the version I saw, and I guess there have been others, almost had a ’40s Disney vibe to it, at least in terms of animation quality. And along the lines of PINOCCHIO and SNOW WHITE, it didn’t hold back in dishing out some old school fear. It was narrated by a little fat elf named Old Dreamy.

The main gist of THE SNOW QUEEN is that it spins the tale of two blonde-haired kids, a girl and boy, up North in Finland or somewhere in the 1800s, who are happy by the fire in their cottage during a cold winter’s night. One of them makes a joking remark, offending the Snow Queen, who is some kind of supernatural goddess type with an icy heart who rules in a castle even further north, and has command of the weather. I guess she can hear all too, and is not to be taken lightly.

In retribution, we see her large face fill up the window looking inside. The kids gasp, and she sends an ice storm into the house, which blows open the window, and somehow affects the young boy by entering him through his eye, turning him into a cold-hearted, mean-spirited jerk. I remember him stomping on the little girl’s roses and making her cry. He is later picked up by the Snow Queen in a sleigh, and held captive in her castle, much the same in spirit as the Narnia Ice Queen. The rest of the story is the little girl’s harrowing ordeal to get him back, since Lord knows, no adults seem to be interested.

Fast-forward to the end, where she gets to the castle, hugs the mean boy, and melts his icy heart, bringing him back to her. Something is expelled from his eye, and we get a look at it… an ice splinter, about two inches long. Somehow after that, it all gets better and the story ends.

My sister and I both found this more horrible than a decapitation. We grew up in an old wood house without much carpeting, with plenty of splinters extracted by Dad, armed with a needle and a cigarette lighter for “sterilization,” so splinter trauma abounded. Couple that trauma with the eyeball, and even a normal splinter would be too awful to bear, but to get a look at the roofing nail of a pointy ice dagger that was somehow stuck in this little boy’s eye…..oh, I’m getting nauseated just writing about it.

I’m almost certain this was pulled from the Yuletide T.V. schedule for being just too plain miserable for kids to watch.

Anyone remember this?

Bigwig

UNK SEZ: Bigwig, thanks for the frosty traumafession! Sorry if the images I gathered are from a different version of THE SNOW QUEEN than the one you speak of. (They are all from the acclaimed, 1957 Soviet version.) I myself seem to recall THE SNOW QUEEN being shown back-to-back with THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL in the early eighties but I can’t find any reference to it on IMDb even when I search under HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN. Let me know if you ever locate the version you are looking for. By the way, my mom had a thing for THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL too!

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Should a 44-year-old man actually ask for a different room when on his last trip out of town he was going to be assigned Room 217 in the hotel he stayed at? I did. I INSISTED on a different room. Here’s why:

One day when I was 13 years old, I noticed a book my Dad was reading, with a silver cover and a picture of what looked like a man without a face. I was immediately drawn to it. Good old Dad, knowing how overactive an imagination his son had, and his son’s fondness for scary movies and Aurora monster models, just mentioned it was about an old hotel, nothing I would find interesting. I knew then, I must read it. I watched and waited until I knew he was finished. I searched carefully though his closet and dresser until I found the book tucked in the back of his “junk” drawer.

“The Shining” by STEPHEN KING.

Oh God.

The chapter “Inside 217″ and what waited there.

I was still enough of a little kid to be there right with Danny Torrance. To be Danny Torrance, to know that what grinned in the bathtub was just as much my problem as his, and if she couldn’t get him she was gonna get ME.

I still have a real problem with hotel rooms sometimes. Sometimes I sleep with the light on when I have to stay in a hotel room alone. The shower curtain must be open at all times. She even haunts my house. Once as I was drifting off to sleep, I suddenly bolted upright in sheer terror and panic because I heard the shower curtain rattle loudly and a thud from the bathroom. Did I reach the logical conclusion that the new kitten had leapt up on the shower curtain and fallen down? No. I was suddenly 13 again and SHE WAS FINALLY COMING FOR ME! I hadn’t thought of my dead friend in years, but it all came back to me like I had read that damnable book that very evening.

I am a grown man, I am 44 years old, I know there is no dead, grinning, decaying, stinking, reanimated, corpse waiting for me in a hotel room somewhere, waiting to drag me into whatever foul pit she came from I know that it is not real… no no no no no no no no no no no no no no.

I saw the movie. It took me a few years to work up the balls to sit through it. I was strangely unfazed. It was so unlike the book, and while I am a fan of the movie, JACK NICHOLSON’s encounter with the resident of room “237” was not what haunted me. What haunts me is infinitely worse. If I could somehow let you into my head to show you what was in that bathroom. . .

Really, I’m O.K., I don’t cower in the face of a strange shower, I still love scary movies and monsters and books. I live as normal (whatever that means) a life as anyone else. In a way, my special shower friend has helped me face many other fears; real ones even, because nothing could possibly be more frightening than her. Oh, and for any armchair psychoanalysts out there, I was not abused by my mother or other female relatives and/or teachers/friends/acquaintances. I do not know why that book and that scene in that book had such an enormous impact on me. I have theories, but I won’t bore you with them here.

One think I will always know is this:

If there is a hell, it’s a bathroom in a resort hotel where I stand facing a tub with the shower curtain drawn and a shadowy shape behind it, about to pull the curtain back.

– CJ

UNK SEZ: CJ, thanks for the literary traumafession! I pity the horror fan who has never read STEPHEN KING‘s THE SHINING! Now of course, in KUBRICK‘s film version we never get to see Danny’s encounter with the bloated hag-ghost. He walks into the room and then is later shown in a daze with his shirt torn. His mother assumes he was abused by his dad.

In KUBRICK‘s movie the room is shown as 237 because the real hotel didn’t want people freaking out about staying in room 217 and since they didn’t have a room 237 it seemed a better idea. MICK GARRIS‘ 1997 television adaptation corrected the room number (it’s actually filmed in the Stanley Hotel, the inspiration for the book) and gave Danny and the decrepit oldster their face to face meeting. Unfortunetly I don’t think it’s as scary as KUBRICK‘s Jack and hag encounter and I know it’s not as scary as the version in your head!

By the way, have you ever noticed that in the novel THE SHINING page number 217 occurs within the chapter you mentioned, “Inside 217” ?

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My students laugh at me about this, but this was the most terrified I’ve ever been of a movie theater. I was five. My parents thought this would be a good family movie, comedy, a little sci-fi, probably rated PG. LILY TOMLIN plays a housewife who, due to exposure to common chemicals, begins to shrink… and shrink.

And then there was the garbage disposal scene. She falls down the garbage disposal, and the housekeeper, who’s supposed to be watching her, doesn’t notice. The housekeeper has on a Walkman and can’t hear the screams. She goes to turn on the switch… and the doorbell rings. My mother relates how I ran screaming out of the theater about then.

It was years before I could even watch TOMLIN do her funny telephone operator shtick again.

– Brian Katcher

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Hey guys,

I discovered your site about two months ago and now I’m on here every day. So much good stuff on here. Anyways…I’ve loved horror flicks my whole life and there have been plenty during early childhood that scared the living shit out of me. My dad had a pretty big collection of vhs tapes and movies taped off of T.V. CUJO did a real number on me… I was scared of dogs for awhile after that one… and LADY IN WHITE had me sleep with the lights on for a week or so. But one that had an unexpected effect on me was DIRTY HARRY… with Mr. ANDY ROBINSON as the Scorpio Killer (who was based off of the Zodiac Killer.) My dad had the CLINT EASTWOOD spaghetti western trilogy on at least once a month… so I had seen all three and was familiar with CLINT as an actor.

I can’t remember how old I was or what grade I was in, but there was this Friday where I had faked sick and stayed home from school for a three day weekend. It was great… nothing but cereal and T.V. all day. It wasn’t too long after watching THE PRICE IS RIGHT that I switched to a movie channel and DIRTY HARRY was on. I had missed probably 25% of the movie already… but I knew CLINT from the spaghetti westerns so I decided to watch. It wasn’t until I got to see ANDY ROBINSON as the Scorpio Killer that things started to get real scary.

Two scenes in particular did it for me… the first was at the Mount Davidson cross where Scorpio was wearing a ski mask and giving Harry a royal beating. The second was near the end where he has an entire school bus full of kids held hostage. LALO SCHIFRIN‘s music added to the creepiness of his character even more.

Needless to say… a great sick day turned into me home alone and scared shitless. I just watched DIRTY HARRY again recently and he is still one of the best villains I have ever seen in a movie. Goddamn..when he’s yelling, “I’ll kill all your mothers!” to the kids in the bus… that may have been the scariest part. I have nothing but love for the film now… and still think of that particular day as a point where rabid dogs and ghosts didn’t seem as terrifying as an extremely disturbed human being who enjoys killing people.

I managed to find the “bus scene” on YouTube. I never had to ride a bus to school… my grade school was in walking distance. Thankfully.

P.S. At some point in my early teens I had purchased a vhs copy of DIRTY HARRY.. which I watched constantly and showed to everyone I knew. I was such a fan of Scorpio at this point that I started lacing all my black shoes and boots with white laces. I was surprised to find the below video on YouTube when I was looking for Scorpio footage to submit.

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OK, guys…this one is strange.

When I was a tyke, I hated, HATED getting my hair cut. In the small town where I grew up, our barber actually made house calls to cut the hair of small children, and it was always an unpleasant experience. I can recall the hideous sound his antique electric clippers made, and the way they overheated and filled the kitchen with the sickening scent of burning hair. And I just wailed like a banshee through it all, watching my hair fall on the floor in big, blond clumps. To my mind, that hair was a part of me that was being lopped off, no different than a hand or limb, and now it was on the floor, dead. And I also was very upset by the trope of sudden baldness as a source for T.V. comedy. (In fact, as I write this, I’m recalling seeing either a sitcom episode or a movie about a beauty parlor full of beautiful women, all having their hair burned off by malfunctioning hair driers, and being played for laughs. I’ll have to do a Name That Trauma search on that!)

But my adverse reaction to disembodied hair reached its apex in an episode of SUPER CHICKEN, one of the other animated series that accompanied installments of GEORGE OF THE JUNGLE in 1967. In it, Super Chicken and Fred combat a giant living toupee, growing to Kong-like proportions and wreaking havoc across America. My brain didn’t register it as animation, and I had nightmares for months about that writhing, ferocious mass of hair. And how did they kill it? By causing it to shed! This just verified what I thought — that my life was endangered every time I had a visit from the barber. (Add the fact that in the cartoon they use the deceased scalp for a practical purpose, and that just layered a whole ‘nother level of weirdness on for me.)

This wasn’t a trauma that lasted long; by the time I was seven, I was going to the barber shop without incident (and to his credit, he invested in new clippers). Now I just consider it a prescient flash-forward, as male pattern baldness made me its bitch starting in college. Maybe I was screaming and carrying on because I should have been sweeping up my precious locks and saving them for a follicle-challenged day!

UNK SEZ: Thanks Senski for the wonderful traumafession! If any of you out there have not visited Kindertrauma legend Senski’s fortress of smartitude HEART IN A JAR then remedy your folly right quick YONDER! Biggie thanks to clucking awesome DAVE’S UN-OFFICIAL SUPER CHICKEN HOMEPAGE for the hirsute capture above!

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I just remembered a huge trauma from my childhood, associated with what should be a happy time – Christmas. Every year my sister and I were encouraged to watch whatever version of Charles Dickens’ A CHRISTMAS CAROL was being screened on T.V. that year (this being England in the ’70s there were only three channels) as our parents were big on getting us to read and understand lterature.

So, I’d seen a few different versions, the old black & white film with ALASTAIR SIM, and probably one or two others. Being only young (7–10-ish) I was terrified of ghosts, but I knew the ones in A.C.C. were not THAT type of ghost (except the last one who was in a cowl and a bit creepy, but it all ended happily so I was O.K. with him.)

This year it was a cartoon – “even better” thought I (what kid DOESN’T love cartoons, right?). Oh dear, what a terrible lesson was this little girl about to learn; the animation style wasn’t at all Disney, and was rather dark. Then Marley’s Ghost appears, looking scary indeed with his head thrown back at an unnatural angle, then six minutes in, he removes the bandage around his head and HIS MOUTH GAPES OPEN AS IF TO DEVOUR THE VIEWER!!

I found in on YouTube and just about had kittens! I’m 40 years old for goodness sake!!

I had nightmares for years where he came into my room, for some reason in my dreams he was a white outline, but he ALWAYS had that gaping maw.

Watch part one below – but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

A re-traumatised Bluegrasslass

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As a child growing up in the late ’80s and early ’90s in the Midwest, I was normally entertained by video tapes and television shows. I can’t really remember a time where I wasn’t watching a cartoon or kids program. We didn’t have a lot of money so I watched a lot of things over and over again. This is the time where the young mind is very fragile and can be shaped easily for the long journey that lies ahead. None of these tales that I am telling you have anything to do with horror or anything around it. It’s amazing what parents think is good and healthy for their children to watch. Oh how little do they understand a child’s mind.

I don’t remember the first time I watched AN AMERICAN TAIL, but it was never a movie that I could just sit through. There are three occasions where I was always forced to run to my VCR (no remote) and fast forward. The first time is at the beginning of the film when the Russian cats appear on top of the snowy hill growling and snarling. The sound of their lips smacking as they smiled used to crawl under my skin and get my heart beating quickly.

The second time is right when the mice sing the song “There Are No Cats in America” and the thunder and lighting strike which leads into the severe storm and tidal wave monster. It was so huge and swallowed up the boat over and over again. I grew up along the Mississippi River and was warned constantly not to swim without a life jacket or I might get swallowed up under the current. Fievel just kept getting hit and hit by the waves. The face inside the water would open up its huge black mouth and my own eyes would grow big. It kept me away from the river during bad storms.

The third time is, of course, “The Giant Mouse of Minsk.” This stuck with me for so long. The film builds up to this perfectly. I never understood that it was made by the mice, I swore that it was alive. The sounds that it made when it first breaks open the boarded up door made my spine tingle. The roar, I feel, is way too much for the target age group. It was so powerful. Plus, the giant mouse was extremely ugly with its huge white eyes, jagged teeth and insect-like body. To this day I have a huge problem with rodents, dead or alive.

PBS was also big in my house. I watched a lot of SESAME STREET. Now don’t get me wrong, I loved the show and I always had a great time watching it but a large percentage of my nightmares as a child resulted from watching the show. Characters from the weird animations showed up in my dreams over and over again. I remember dreaming I was at the top of the stairs that lead down into my basement. It was dark and I could only see the light reflection from the linoleum floor, I remember seeing little clay animation creatures like “Teeny Little Super Guy,” spider creatures, and animals that didn’t seem to have mouths…ever. There was even a horse like creature that had the skin and texture of the Pillsbury Dough Boy except it didn’t have a mouth. It moved like a horse, however the head would turn and react to things like a cat or dog.

There were always crazy psychedelic shorts that were full of color and creativity but I never thought it would have caused me to sleep so badly. I always had to play the trick when I wanted to wake up from a dream I would close my eyes really hard until I woke up. However, sometimes I would open them and what ever animal or mutant there was had gotten right in front of me. I was trying to escape but the monster won…

UNK SEZ: Thanks Kristian for that traumatic traumafession! Kids you can check out Kristian’s recent short film “Bird Seed” over HERE and check out his experimental short “Drawings by Billy and His Friends” below!

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I am still traumatized by the 1973 “Prevent Forest Fires” PSA starring JOANNA CASSIDY. Do you remember the one? The one where she RIPS HER OWN FACE OFF to reveal that she is actually Smokey the Bear in disguise?

You can watch it on YouTube.

You can…I can’t.

Just the thought of it, even now, makes me want to hide behind the couch.

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As a child of the’70s, I was immersed in the popularity of the PLANET OF THE APES film series. I had the coloring book, I watched the animated TV show, I played with the action figures…

But amongst all that ape-lovin’, a Traumafession of mine was born: the ending of 1971′s ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES.

In this third installment, Cornelius and Zira land on present-day Earth from the future, and they’re soon treated like celebrities: police escorts, shopping sprees, new threads, swank parties, speaking at the United Nations…it’s all very lighthearted and fun.

But when Zira has a baby, an evil doctor named Hasslein fears that intelligent ape procreating will lead to the apes taking over, and he decides the baby must be killed.

Cornelius and Zira switch their baby with a baby chimp from the local circus, and flee to an abandoned oil tanker for the film’s finale…which is where the movie gets real dark, real fast.

Hasslein shoots Zira, then — in extreme close-up — puts about 4 or 5 rounds into the swaddled baby. (Yes, it’s a baby chimp, and you can’t see it, but the idea of shooting a baby was still shocking for my childhood eyes to take in.)

After shooting Hasslein, Cornelius is then shot by the military, and lets out a sick gurgling growl before plummeting from the top of the tanker to the deck below.

THEN, Zira dumps the baby’s body overboard (which I still don’t understand, but is still a harrowing display), crawls to Cornelius, lies across his body, and they both die. The end.

The best part? Despite this violent and bleak ending, ESCAPE is RATED G!

You can see video of the above carnage here (starting at the 5:30 mark), but it’s interrupted by the guy reviewing the film and it loses some of its impact:

Thx guys,

Eric aka FilmFather

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I’ve seen PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE mentioned around here in various posts – but I’m surprised no one has done a traumafession about it.

Sometime between 1979 and ’81 my mom’s boyfriend’s daughter (who was a teenager) took my sister and I (who were 10-12ish) to a double feature of PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE and YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (these both came out in ’74 – but because of when my mom started dating this guy I’m pretty sure I was about 10 when I saw them.) These movies are both pretty hilarious, but it’s kinda funny how horror comedy seems to be totally lost on kids. I’ve seen both movies many times as an adult, but when I was a kid, after having watched one seemingly traumatic movie on a huge, huge screen, and then half of another seemingly traumatic one – googly eyes ceased to be funny and sitting in the lobby for the last half of the comedy YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN seemed like a total necessity.

PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE is basically PHANTOM OF THE OPERA set in a rock club in the ‘70s. I won’t go into the plot – just the parts that scared the hell out of me. The first scene is towards the beginning of the movie – where the songwriter, Winslow, gets his teeth yanked out and replaced by freaky metal teeth. Then he gets his head squashed in a record press, which totally deforms his face – and totally sent me into kiddie shock. Then he skulks around the dark corners of The Paradise in a freakaziod, beaked mask and cape and sings his songs in this horrible metallicy, warped voice.

If all these events aren’t scary enough to make a kid run out of the theater, just wait. At the end of the movie, after we see Beef get killed on stage (Beef kinda scared me too), weirdo, creepy, short, devil guy PAUL WILLIAMS (who I just reencountered in THE HARDY BOYS AND NANCY DREW MEET DRACULA – yay!!!) gets his gold mask yanked off to reveal a bloody face. My kinder memory of this event has massive amounts of blood all over his face. In reality, there’s not so much blood. Even now -when I see the scene, I am surprised that there isn’t more blood or gore – cause seriously, I remember it being more like CARRIE.

And Beef? Silly? Yes. Funny? Yes. Over the top, campy fruitcake? Yes. Scary? Nope.

I actually didn’t leave the theater until my sister told me she wanted me to go with her to the bathroom during the second movie, YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN. We both wound up on a padded red theater bench in the lobby with her telling me how she couldn’t go back in and look at “that guy’s” face anymore, and I sat next to her telling her that his movie isn’t really as scary as the other movie. But I think the one I was really trying to convince was me – ’cause I couldn’t make myself go back into the theater any more than she could.

Oh, and you may be asking who “that guy” is whose face scared my sister so bad.

MARTY FELDMAN.

Another early horror-movie-in-the-theater experience I had was right around that same time – with the same chick – who took us to see GHOST STORY. The popping out of nowhere ghost lady scared the CRAP out of me so bad and forced me to stare at the back of the seat in front of me for most of the movie and I still remember a very distinct trapped feeling – like the darkness and the GIANT gross faces in the movie were all closing in on me.

Now that’s scary.

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