kindertrauma

Year: 2008

Official Traumatizer :: Zelda

Posted on By unkle lancifer

zelda pet sematary

What's so scary about Zelda? The better question is what's NOT scary about the Z-bomb! When we first encounter her in PET SEMATARY, it is by way of a tale told by her surviving sister Rachel (DENISE CROSBY) who at a young age was left responsible for her care. Zelda (played by not really a lady ANDREW HUBATSEK) automatically inspires a wave of mixed emotions. She is pitiable due to her suffering, but one is made extremely uncomfortable by her almost corpse like form. This collision of sympathy and nausea tends to produce a blend of acute anxiety and remorseful shame in viewers. These feelings are underlined further as Rachel explains a similar emotional conflict immediately after Zelda's death. In fact, it is difficult for her to recall whether Zelda's sickly demise inspired her to cry or to laugh in relief…

All that would be disturbing enough, but due to some unleashed and unfriendly forces stomping about (the novel points a finger at American Indian legend the Wendigo), Zelda gets a new lease on life via monstrous hallucinations. I don't know about you folks, but I've always been a light touch when it came to witches. I'd take on a vampire any day over a cackling twisted hag. Zelda2.0 brings to mind early fairy tale memories of just such a creature (she should also be set up on a blind date with "Bob" from TWIN PEAKS). Maniacal, gleefully inflicting terror, Zelda is shown crumbled up in a corner like a discarded newspaper and then crookedly expanding herself. Even more disconcerting is how she walks TOWARD the camera (and the audience) howling and screeching as she curls her paws like a rabid raccoon doing a MR.BURNS impersonation.

"NEVER GET OUT OF BED AGAIN!!!"

Zelda may have been a victim in reality, but the thought of her when shoved into a blender with some malevolent mojo is the stuff wet beds are made of. Just think of your darkest most regrettable memories coming back to vicious life…or have you already? That's the power of our lady Zelda,and that's why she's an official Traumatizer. We didn't give her that honor; she swiped it out of our hands.

Official Traumatot :: Miko Hughes

Posted on By unkle lancifer

Who is this mac daddy with the pimp cane? Why it's MIKO HUGHES a.k.a. Gage Creed from PET SEMATARY. Who would deny this little fellow honorary traumatot status? Not me, I value my Achilles tendon! Our little friend is of Native American ancestry and his name MIKO actually means "Chief" in the Chickasaw language! At the tender age of three, when most child actors are using a twin for back up, MIKO delivered one devil of a dual performance. In the course of one film he goes from Cupid cute to cuckoo crazy with only a cursed-soil catnap in between, color us impressed!

But wait, MIKO was not quite finished with the world of horror just yet. In the 1994 film WES CRAVEN's NEW NIGHTMARE he got a chance to stick it to Freddy Krueger himself when he played HEATHER LANGENKAMP's son Dylan. That's right, he actually got to kill the DON RICKLES of modern horror! Go MIKO! Wait a minute, didn't he have to play in traffic in that movie as well? Was that some kind of sick joke or something?

In any case, MIKO who is now enjoying life as a D.J. more than deserves this notoriously priceless award. We'll gladly deliver it to him, if he promises to stay out of the road!

Pet Sematary

Posted on By unkle lancifer

Thank God MARY LAMBERT directed STEPHEN KING's PET SEMATARY. I don't think anybody could understand the material as well as she does. Certain parts (especially particular lines of dialogue) may come off as clunky, but her ability to blur the lines between a believable reality and an obtuse spiritual world is what makes the film so powerful (check out her earlier film SIESTA for even more evidence of this talent). Scripted by KING himself, this update of the MONKEY'S PAW was never in line to be your typical slash-and-boo show, but LAMBERT's personal touches somehow make the film's taboo busting creep-outs all the more universal.

The story centers around a young family so optimistic and unstained that they might have been plucked from a department store catalogue. DALE MIDKIFF as father Louis is a dedicated physician who is rugged yet soft as suede, and mother Rachel DENISE CROSBY has a habit of jutting her jaw-line like she's contemplating war bonds. They have 2.5 children (Smokey-blue cat "Church" being the .5). Daughter Ellie (BLAZE BERDAHL….GHOSTWRITER!) has a knack for asking all the big questions and is as equally whiney as she is psychically inclined. Our perfect family is completed by rugrat Gage MIKO HUGHES who begins the story looking like a Christmas tree ornament and ends it looking like the non-tranny version of SEED OF CHUCKY.

The cast is rounded off by what LAMBERT refers to in her DVD commentary as the "good" and "bad" angels. "Good" being BRAD GREENQUIST as the recently dead and nearly translucent Pascow, a tsk-tsking Cassandra prophet in jogging shorts. "Bad" being a scene stealing FRED GWYNN as the history-hoarding neighbor Jud, who is also the king of bad ideas and an unknowing underminer. If he is not exactly consciously "bad" he is at least toxically passive aggressive. Advice like, "Sometimes dead is better" would be a little more effective without the "Sometimes" part. A small amount of redemption is found as Jud realizes his blunder, but let his folly be a lesson to us all: "Sometimes keeping your pie-hole shut is better."

When the industrial (urban) world of metal and steal barrels through this Maine rustic mirage of safety in the form of a giant truck with RAMONES music blasting it snatches away a dream. The nightmare of not only every parent but also anyone who ever loved anyone is revealed to be always just a stone's throw away. This is a tale of profound loss and the unhealthy lengths one might go to in an effort to resist moving forward; LAMBERT creates a child's drawing of a happy family and then lights it a flame. Ironically it's rare that real death is presented in a horror film, but SEMATARY's fascination echoes a child's determination to turn over road kill with a stick just to see what's on the other side.

Many of our first encounters with the subject of death are through that of storytelling by those who walk before us in life. KING's tale provides several flashback inserts that operate the same way. LAMBERT relishes these scenes and the eerie quality she provides them with would probably have been lost on a less earnest director. Rather than concentrate on the flight or fight response that dominates most modern horror, we have here a meditation on a certain horror that is steady and unavoidable. Various characters actions may speed the process along but the inevitability of all our outcomes hangs just below the surface like a carpet of fog. It's not without its humorous moments, but any chuckles you might be able to produce are akin to whistling past the graveyard. In this world, as in our own, there are only two types of people, those who have suffered a great loss and those who WILL suffer a great loss.

Critical response to the film might have been lukewarm, but audiences gravitated in droves. If there is an innate desire to work through death issues by attending a horror film PET delivers in spades. (In fact it's sort of like dumping a loaf of bread on a pigeon that is anticipating a crumb). Although the film is far from seamless, its determination to move past assembly line murder and glare at the after effects of tragic death rings a too seldom heard bell. Ultimately horror films are naturally critic proof, alphabet grades are about as durable as autumn leaves when a film successfully touches a nerve as this one does. PET SEMATARY's success proves that empathy and character identification can trump gore and visceral thrills when given the correct amount of attention. Die hard fans of the original novel might be less convinced but as a film PET SEMATARY left an imprint all it's own.

As far as Traumafessions go, PET SEMATARY is one of the most prolific providers. Besides the several found on these pages a thread on Imdb concerning the effects of encountering the character of Rachel's sickly sister Zelda is currently up to 130 responses. There's no denying the film scared the bejesus out of many. MARY LAMBERT, whose directorial output never again reached this particular zenith, took what many would have made a glorified zombie flick and gave it a vulnerable bloody heart; a heart whose rhythmic beating reminded audiences of their own.

Traumafessions :: Reader Lea on Drunk Skeletons

Posted on By unkle lancifer

I saw this anti-drunk-driving P.S.A. when I was about five and spent a long sleepless night vowing that when I grew up, I would never so much as look at beer…

I found it on youtube a while back and decided to face my childhood fears, and discovered that between the MICHAEL JACKSON, the eighties hair, the ominous voiceover, and the rather regrettable acting, it was actually incredibly silly, but of course one does not notice these things when one is five. Perversely, this spot and the many other P.S.A.s that turned TV-watching into an unsettling adventure for me and no doubt many of my contemporaries also left me with a lifelong interest in public service and cause marketing, so that I can say for certain that it is a very lucky thing I didn't grow up in the U.K.; since their public-service ads make the drunk-driving skeletons look like Winnie-the-Pooh, and not even the creepy live-action Winnie-the-Pooh who talks about "not-okay touching", but the regular cute kind.

(It turns out, too, that Matt from X-Entertainment, who is about the same age as me, had a similar reaction to this classic. (Check that out HERE).

Anyway, I love your site; I was a pretty easily traumatized child and am now fascinated by the childhood nightmare-fuel phenomenon. Keep up the great work!

Name That Trauma :: Reader Maritsa on a Boarding House Franken-Mom

Posted on By aunt john

I have a question maybe someone can help me with. In the early eighties I remember watching a slasher film where a man lived in a boarding house with his domineering mother. She would tell him that he needed to find himself a girl just like mother. He was killing the girls that would move into the boarding house. Using their body parts, he created a woman that looked like his mom. Then he locked his mother up with the body and told her to teach it to love him just like she did. Does it ring a bell? I can't seem to remember the title of the movie.

Unk Sez: How about it kids, anybody know this one? Leave your thoughts in the comments or email us kindertrauma@gmail.com if you do!

Traumafession By Proxy :: Mickster on Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue

Posted on By unkle lancifer

UNK SEZ: Our pal Mickster left this in the comments section of the last post, but I think it's front page material and I wanted to make sure that nobody missed it:

What about the use of numerous wonderful cartoon characters in 1990's Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue? My niece and nephew viewed this several times when they were little. I'm surprised that no one has had a traumafession related to this cartoon. Read about it HERE

Born Innocent

Posted on By aunt john

After 14-year-old Chris Parker (LINDA BLAIR) runs away from home just one too many times, her parents decide to teach her, and in essence everyone who has ever sat through BORN INNOCENT, some valuable life lessons by making her a ward of the courts. Young Chris is processed by the justice system, and dispatched to a juvenile detention center where she is promptly cavity searched, deloused, and initiated into the hard-knock life of a girls' home where plenty of sexually unambiguous girls with feathered haired abound. Make no mistake though, THE FACTS OF LIFE this isn't.

Chris draws attention to herself in class by impressing the home's lone schoolteacher a.k.a. "Mom" (JOANNA MILES) with her geography prowess, and shortly thereafter ends up on the business end of a plunger handle while four tough girls hold her down in the shower. Since there's nothing like a little forced sodomy with a plunger handle to send a person's normally sunny disposition down the toilet, our tragic heroine spends the rest of the film in a downward spiral.

She returns home for a weekend visit, only to runaway again from her abusive dick Dad, and is carted back to juvie where she ends up in solitary confinement for inciting a food fight to protect her pregnant friend. The pregnant one happened to be involved in the shower rape, but this seems to be lost on both Chris and the script supervisor. After the pregnant one miscarries, Chris becomes even more bitter and eventually incites a full-scale riot after the school's house mother Mrs. Lasko (ALLYN ANN McLERIE) refuses to give her shampoo. There's an inquest into the riot, and Chris straight up lies about her involvement.  The movie anticlimactically ends with Chris stomping off across the schoolyard, arm-in-arm with the other delinquents, just another child left behind by a failed rehabilitation system.

Released as made-for-T.V. movie of the week in 1974, BORN INNOCENT garnered high ratings and its shocking shower scene was cited for inspiring a real-life act of forced sodomy with a soda bottle by a group of underage girls. A subsequent legal battle based on this copy-cat crime led to the establishment of the Family Viewing Hour, and the shower scene was cut from all re-broadcasts.

Perhaps equally as criminal is the oversight of BLAIR's lightening rod performance by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. Not only did she not receive an EMMY for her work, she wasn't even nominated.  In the hands of a lesser contemporary, say HELEN HUNT (There, I said it. I never cared for her poor-man's JODIE FOSTER schtick and her big forehead), BORN INNOCENT would have just been a Primetime After-School Special. Whether she's carving her initials in her forearm with a heated bobby pin or slapping a schoolmarm upside the head, BLAIR lends a natural believability to the unfortunate proceedings. You really want her to escape this hell hole, and when she doesn't, you can't really fault her for becoming a charter member of the old-school bad girl's club.

Traumafessions :: Reader Joey on Scary Coaster Toaster

Posted on By unkle lancifer

I remember an animated short that was shown on an episode of THE GREAT SPACE COASTER back in the early '80s. It started off showing the history of fire or something like that. Now it's the present day and we see an older couple getting ready for dinner. I think the wife is having problems with the oven and the husband's getting frustrated with the toaster not working and jams a fork in it. Fire pops out of the oven with an evil face at the wife. More living fire comes out and engulfs the whole apartment building and then move on to the neighboring buildings and homes. Eventually they set the Earth ablaze and then jump to the other planets. I remember the end narration stating that the gods were angry and that they would give fire to woman instead of man next time.

I would see this short again no long after on late night pay-T.V. in between movies. I was either 9 or 10 at the time so that really screwed with my head.

Anyone else ever seen this?

Note: Toaster image swiped from HERE.