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

Hi there, dear folks at Kindertrauma

My name is Antonio Augusto, I’m from Brazil and a regular reader of your amazing blog. So many awesome posts and traumas I totally identify with. One of my biggest kindertraumas is probably the reverend Henry Kane from Poltergeist II. I saw it when I was very little and couldn’t sleep for MONTHS thinking about him. And more recently in my life, a really big trauma is BOB from Twin Peaks.

UNK SEZ: Thanks for the traumafession Antonio and for letting us know about Cinema Parasita! I don’t speak Portuguese but I like what see! Nice work!

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I was born in 1965, and actually did not see Star Trek for the first time until I was ten years old and it was in reruns. One would never think of Star Trek as a scary show, and this episode has been panned by most critics. But it scared the crap out of me. The garbled speech made by the victims of the Zetars is probably a source of amusement for most, but to me it was the stuff of nightmares. My brother knew this and would try to imitate it to get a rise out of me. As well, like Dr. McCoy, I found the scene where they teleported into darkness on Memory Alpha unnerving.

I’ve always found the idea of having one’s mind taken over frightening. I was raised Catholic, so the concept of demon possession was very real to me. However, although I can’t watch The Exorcist alone in darkness, I could still watch it alone with the lights on. I can’t watch “The Lights of Zetar” alone at all, and I’m now almost fifty years old!

I think what makes “The Lights of Zetar” so intensely terrifying, even as opposed to the concept of demon possession, is that they destroy the ability of the victim’s brain to function at all. Once the demon vacates the host, the brain is still intact. Not so with the Lights of Zetar. They blow out every circuit. Their attack is comparable with a deadly stroke or seizure, something that none of us wants to think about. You can’t hide behind a strong door or shield and you can’t run away in your ship. If they want you, they’ll get you.

It’s a funny thing: I saw Alien with my father (rest in peace) when I was fourteen years old, and even though sometimes if I enter a dark room I swear I can see those things in the shadows, nothing has scared me quite as much as one unpopular episode of a 1960′s TV show which generally was anything but scary.

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Back in the shrouded past, before the formulas of TV were set, HBO had Short Cuts. It was a short film series acting as interstitial material between the movies. Amongst the shorts was one of the earliest sources of my nighmare fuel…Flesh Eating Film Reels!

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I’ve been haunted by the memory of a telepathic, wide-eyed, blue decapitated head with wires protruding out of its skull and frighteningly strong arms dangling from a wall that are controlled by brainwaves. I always wondered if this was a dream, or a traumatic memory that I invented. Now I know that it was this film I’m about to discuss and not THE BRAIN THAT WOULD’NT DIE. That film is a trashy classic in its own right, but I must admit, I was mildly disappointed when I first saw it because as demented as it was, I needed some closure in the form of a whispering blue head that controlled people’s will and minds.

Dana Andrews plays Dr. Norberg, a Ronald Reagan or Walt Disney-esque Nazi with an experimental basement lab (similar to the one Grandpa Munster had). It’s filled with Maytag-like appliances and giant red and green buttons. He lives in a mansion with a butler that looks like a German Michael Berryman. Dr. Norberg is hiding frozen Nazis in his basement and has a failed reputation in cryogenics. His mannerisms and personality have all the charm of a honey-baked ham. The ghoulish prison like lab is filled with cripples and brain surgery failures. Two hippie girls show up outside, one of them is Norberg’s niece Jean and the other will soon be decapitated. His lunkhead, Igor-type assistant must find a brain and the search is on, this will somehow help the Dr. reanimate the Third Reich (not exactly sure how). When Jean’s friend Elsa (Kathleen Beck) is strangled by a loose dimwit in the house, the doctor, a supposed Nazi, actually objects to murder! Did he forget he’s a former Nazi? Later on he tells his murdering assistant that things in this age are different and Nazis only killed for political reasons!

The eerie blue makeup of the woman’s head in the box is a cross between Jambi from PEE WEE’S PLAYHOUSE and Margaret Hamilton. Later on, a burn victim named Mrs. Smith shows up in one of the oddest moments, in an already unhinged ‘60s film, she puts on a leatherface like false face and answers the door. This strange moment is confusing to me and I’m not sure where it ties into the story. As a kid, the blue face gave me the heebie jeebies, especially when she whispers incoherently (I’ll leave the final cryptic words up to the ears of the viewer). THE FROZEN DEAD is one of those bizarre British horror films in league with CIRCUS OF HORRORS, but not as heavy and sadistic as PEEPING TOM. It’s a fun B-movie that was worth revisiting in order to get some confirmation that it all wasn’t some fever childhood nightmare.

UNK SEZ: Make sure you Visit Crankenstein regularly at THEATER OF GUTS!

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Every horror fan of a certain age talks about it. The thrill of the VHS covers in the horror section at the video store. They were so deliciously unlike anything that existed in life that you couldn’t imagine what sorts of evil magic those tapes contained. The first image that drew me to the horror section was actually a “New Release” poster on the wall for the movie Waxwork (1988, Anthony Hickox). I was enchanted by the image of a redheaded little person in a tuxedo standing in front of a huge door filled with screaming heads. The image seemed strange and yet familiar, unnerving and yet comforting, as though I had experienced it in another life.

I realize that I must have started renting horror movies before I knew how to read, because I remember pointing to the poster and asking my mother to read me the title and the movie’s tagline: “Stop on by and give the afterlife a try.” I wanted to, desperately. The idea of a doorway that opened to a world filled with formal wear, screaming heads, weird lighting, and hot pink credits fonts appealed to me then as much as it does now. I insisted on renting it, and miraculously, my mother obliged.

When I watched the film, I was actually disappointed. I’ve now seen it multiple times and I still can’t remember what it’s about. Something about Zach Galligan and Deborah Foreman going to a wax museum in the middle of the night and entering the exhibits. Waxwork proved to be a rite of passage that every young horror nerd must go through: I learned that the image on the cover doesn’t always take place in the film. I didn’t like it, but I would be forced to experience it again and again.

Ironically, even though Waxwork disappointed me because it did not feature a scene in which a redheaded little person opened a gigantic door to a wild and wonderful world of strange, sublimely beautiful faces and weird lighting, that is precisely what Waxwork‘s poster, and the video store, did for me. They welcomed me in to the wild and wonderful world of horror movies, a world in which you could find anything you wanted and needed.

More of Ben’s video store memories HERE!

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While scouring through IMDB during my lunch break, I recalled another film that “traumatized” me as a youngster: 1979′s “Escape from Alcatraz” starring Clint Eastwood.

The part that scared (scarred?) me was when the inmate artist “Doc” chops off his fingers after his painting privileges were revoked. I could watch a murder onscreen without flinching (much, anyway), but for some reason his stone-faced self mutilation really freaked me out. The funny thing is that for years I would mentally place this scene into another Clint Eastwood film, “Bronco Billy“. I was convinced that when they visited the asylum, Geoffrey Lewis chopped off his fingers. And THERE is an interesting idea for a YouTube mashup, if anyone with the video skills wants to piece it together.

Thanks again!

Dustin in Minnesota

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Hi there,

Just sending my trauma story. When I was 6 years old, I pretty much had the run of the living room. I happened to find my brother’s copy of Nightmare on Elm Street – couldn’t read very well yet, just popped the video in. I got to about the part where Tina is calling to Nancy from the hallway and the centipede falls out of her mouth. Nightmares for a week, and occasionally I still have nightmares about Freddy!

Suzie

P.S. Great site!

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Greetings, Unk and Aunt. It has been a while since I last wrote to you with a Traumafession. But sometimes, it simply takes a while before you suddenly remember just how creepy something was, or that it existed at all.

When I was a child, there used to be a little show on TV called “Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids” – a very crudely animated children’s horror anthology show. The concept was really quite simple: it was an anthology show, akin to Tales from the Crypt, with self-contained stories introduced by a host, in this case “Uncle Grizzly,” a stop-motion (although the rest of the show was 2D animation), hunchbacked theatre owner who would show film reels detailing stories of bratty children getting their comeuppance for their bad behaviors – such as being liars, talking back, being lazy and what have you. Apparently, this show was adapted from a series of British children’s books. Like I said, the animation was very crude, the art style rather childish, and every voice was essentially just the narrator doing bad impressions. By all accounts, this sounds like a fairly innocent little Aesop-filled show, right?

Wrong.

This show was completely batshit crazy, and I only just truly realized that a few weeks ago when I happened upon a few episodes of it on YouTube and gleefully went “Aaaw, I remember this!” and started to watch. While I did remember the show having some unnerving atmosphere surrounding it, I must have repressed the rest in some dark corner of my mind somehow, because I was in no way prepared for the carnage I was about to witness.

Either the British really hate children, or British children are considered insanely tough, because things would get just as grizzly and gruesome as the title promises. These children, while definitely bratty and annoying, would be punished in ways that go way beyond simply telling them off for being snot-nosed little bastards: they’d get killed in the most insane ways, such as the boy who refused to eat his dinner being ground into spaghetti by a shadowy “spaghetti monster”, or the “Bunny Boy” who refused to eat his salad (opting to feed it to a bunny in the fields instead) and got run over by a combine harvester in the field and got sewed together with said bunny.

Did I mention said harvester scene features blood splatter and limbs flying at the screen? And these are just two out of a ton of examples. From being forever caught as a golden statue to being burned alive to eaten by trolls or to being pressed into cider, there was no gruesome death that the children in these episodes didn’t suffer – and if they survived, they usually weren’t much better off, with one particularly lazy girl turned into a giant worm because she refused to leave her sleeping bag during a camping trip.

Whatever went through the creators’ heads, I do not know. But it definitely makes me want to eat my veggies, talk nicely to people and never go apple-picking – when I re-watched it in my mid-twenties.

-Bjarke “Eshbaal” Johansen of Horrible Horror.

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Os Amigos do Gasper is a portuguese puppet show about… some city garden, I don’t know. I hated it with all my guts, but I saw it anyway, because anything was better than staring at the walls, I guess.

At 3:20. the most traumatic character, the guard, always getting mad and yelling for every possible reason. Why is he on a kid’s show?

PS: Thank you for your site.

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This one was an oldie even when I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s, but I found it terrifying – yet fascinating – nonetheless: The 1938 version of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer“, starring Tommy Kelly.

I found the movie entertaining, yet was terrifed of Victor Jory‘s “Injun Joe” character – from his throwing of the tomahawk during Tom’s testimony in court, to his discovery of a lost Tom and Becky in the cave. I had nightmares of the scene Tom turning around to see Injun Joe standing there, watching them and grinning. Many a sleepless night was due to that one scene – yet I watched it every time they showed a matinee at our local theater or when it aired on TV.

I must have been somewhat masochistic when it came to fear, as I did the same thing with horror comic books.

Love the site, love “digging up” chilling memories.

Dustin in Minnesota

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