kindertrauma

Year: 2011

Name That Trauma :: Reader Taffeta V. on a Swinging Tot Smash

Posted on By aunt john

First time writer, long time reader – LOVE your site!

OK, this is a sketchy memory, and it's troubled me for ages – here's what I know:

There is a scene where a man has picked up a little girl (by the ankles) and is spinning her around – starts as fun, then he violently continues to spin and starts bashing her head into walls, killing her.

Likely made in the '70s or '80s. No idea of male star or girl, can't tell you plot or anything else about the movie. I just remember that this scene disturbed me substantially, and I'd love to know from whence it came!

Sincerely,

— Taffeta V.

Name That Trauma :: Reader Lauren B. on Suburban Savages

Posted on By aunt john

Hi there, I just stumbled upon your site after visiting The Dreamin' Demon, and I am so glad I found you, perhaps you can help me figure out what movie it was that traumatized me as a kid. It's a movie about a cannibalistic family living in the suburbs. It was made in the '80s, possibly early '90s, and it was a horror/comedy type movie. If memory serves me right the dad wore a pair of thick black horn-rimmed glasses.

The scene in the movie that freaked me out was when the family was all sitting down at the table sharing a meal, and one of the kids got into an argument with the dad, and the kid stabbed the dad in the leg (or hand) with a fork (or butter knife). I remember seeing this movie as a young child, and I am 27 years old now. This scene still sticks with me, and for the life of me I cannot remember the title of the movie. Can you help me??

Thanks so much!

— Lauren B.

UNK SEZ: AUNT JOHN got this one right off the bat! The horn-rimmed glasses and cannibal parents made him think of 1989's PARENTS. Check out the trailer HERE and below I found a classic clip of SISKEL & EBERT discussing and disagreeing about the film! Thanks Lauren and thanks to DREAMIN' DEMON for sending you our way!

Name That Trauma :: Reader Sara B. on Dastardly Dolls

Posted on By aunt john

This has been bugging me since I was around eleven – that would be in 1992. I saw a little bit of a film in a friend's house – probably a video – and one image stayed with me. Some people – a man and a woman, I believe – are trapped in a cave. They are tied, so they can't escape. Little mechanical children or dolls start walking towards them from the opening of the cave. They have sharp pointy teeth that open and close mechanically. Someone must have set the dolls walking, but I don't remember who. Also I don't remember how the scene ends. My only other clue is that MAYBE in the same film there were some flying creatures, human-like, but with big wings, maybe dressed in white and golden colours.

There.

Any idea, anyone?

Much appreciated!

— Sara B.

UNK SEZ: Biting dolls and people (Pygar!) with wings? That's gotta be BARBARELLA! Thanks for bringing this one up Sarah B, It's such a cool movie and it's been way too long since I've last seen it! Check out the clip below!

Traumafessions :: Reader David O. on The Legend of Lizzie Borden

Posted on By aunt john

Hey Unk!

Seeing as it's the season of horror and whatnot I wanted to present one of my traumafessions from childhood that stuck with me through the years. The year was 1975 and I was an impressionable 7-year-old infatuated with television and all things horror. Oh, and BEWITCHED. So imagine my surprise to see that ELIZABETH MONTGOMERY was starring in a made-for-TV movie called THE LEGEND OF LIZZIE BORDEN. Now, I had no idea who Lizzie was or the hideous crime she allegedly committed, but after watching the movie I was forever scarred by the image of my beloved Samantha Stevens taking an axe to the heads of her father and step-mother! Most of the film is a courtroom procedural drama, with tidbits of flashbacks of Lizzie and her family near the turn of the 20th century. In other words, pretty boring stuff for a second grade kid.

But then WHAM; ELIZABETH MONTGOMERY, as Lizzie, takes off her clothes (scathing!), gets the axe from under her bed, and proceeds to bury it into her step-mother's head, with blood spurting all over the place. So there I was, befreaked by the thought of someone killing their mother, much less with a sharp, shiny axe. Lizzie cleans herself up and continues to go about her business, as if there is nothing amiss with the dead body in the bedroom. Well, it quickly becomes obvious she didn't get it all out of her system because in a little while she goes for round two, one again stripping nude and dividing her father's skull in two while he laid on the couch for what he expected to be a nice afternoon nap. Again, blood and gore abound! After that it goes on for a bit with the trial and blah blah blah until she's acquitted of the murders.

And therein started my unhealthy infatuation with axe murders in the movies. Thanks to that movie I never looked at Samantha Stevens the same way ever again. Here's a clip of the good stuff, starting at the 3-minute mark:

Happy horrors!

— David O.

Name That Trauma :: Reader Becca V. on a Heartless Villian

Posted on By aunt john

I hope you can help.

I am looking for a movie I saw late-night on T.V. as a child. This would have been in the mid-to-late-'70s.

The details are very sketchy, but here are the key points I remember, and I may be mixing up the details because the memory is SO vague:

  • There may have been some kind of invisible monster.
  • There were soldiers/warriors/combat-group type of people on some kind of quest.
  • There was a villain that had his heart separated from his body, up in some kind of tower or something.
  • At one point, the heart falls out a window or something after someone throws it deliberately or it falls accidentally or something, and there's this horrible shot where the heart lands with a hard PLOP on the ground.
  • There's some kind of path through misty swamp/caverns/something where taking one step off the path will do something horrible to you, like turn you into a caveman or kill you instantly or send you back through time or something.
  • The bad guy, if I recall, resembled Genghis Khan or something, a Hun-type person, if I recall.

This piece of, uh, fiction, terrified me as a little girl. The atmosphere of it was literally so spooky I couldn't sleep. At all. For three days.

Help, KINDERTRAUMA, YOU'RE MY ONLY HOPE!

— Becca V.



UPDATE: NAME THAT THAT TRAUMA SOLVED! Special thanks to reader Logan for naming it with THE THIEF OF BAGHDAD. I think it's best if you read what Becca had to say via email.

Kindertrauma Jukebox :: The King Sisters "It's Halloween"

Posted on By aunt john

UNK SEZ: Eegad, we almost went through the entire Halloween season with out playing Aunt John's Jukebox! That's not right! It's a Kindertrauma tradition! Luckily Aunt John dug up the clip above just in time for All Hollow's Eve! We hope that all of our readers have a spectacular Halloween this year! Thanks for all the support and remember to eat things your dentist would not approve of and to cause random acts of mischief whenever possible! Stay safe!

Twelve Horror Houses You Should Avoid When Trick-or-Treating.

Posted on By unkle lancifer

It's time to go trick-or-treating again but why waste your time on houses that don't deliver? Here are twelve horror homes that we recommend avoiding!

12. HOUSE OF WAX
This place? The only "candy" they hand out are those wax soda bottles with colored juice inside. Unless you are a fan of those things, don't bother.

11. CREEPSHOW Billy's House
Don't be fooled by the pumpkin in the window! Billy's dad is cranky and not such a fan of horror in general.

10. HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES
Props go to the Firefly family for their year round commitment to Halloween decorations but unless you have time to sit through an amateur variety show, it's not worth the trouble.

9. HELL NIGHT (Garth Manor)
One two many Gorks. 'Nuff said.

8. TRICK 'R TREAT (Steven's house)
I should probably warn you about Principal Wilkins' house because he and his son Billy are liable to carve your decapitated head like a pumpkin but instead, I say stay away from Mr. Kreeg's place because he thinks generic peppermints are passable as treats!

7. THE HAUNTING (Hill House)
This place is far off the beaten track and once there nobody will be around if you need help. No one lives any nearer than town. No one will come any nearer than that. In the night. In the dark.

6. HALLOWEEN (The Myers house)
The place has been abandoned for years and not only will you not get any candy, you may bit hit by a stray rock thrown by an angry mob of Haddonfield locals!

5. FRIDAY THE 13th part 2 (Jason's shack)
Yes, hillbilly Jason has THE BEST Halloween centerpiece for his table in the form of the rotting decapitated head of his mother but other than that the place is still a shack and the candy he hands out is super low end (Mary Janes)!

4. PSYCHO 2 (The Bates house)
Speaking of dead mothers, you might as well skip Norman's house when trick or treating too. Not only are the front stairs a bitch to climb, but who in their right mind hands out toasted cheese sandwiches for treats?

3. POLTERGEIST (The Freeling house)
This house folded up into itself and then disappeared into another dimension and with no front door to knock on, it's really a waste of valuable trick or treating time.

2. THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE
This place offers the opposite of candy because the opposite of candy is being shoved on a meat hook. Am I wrong?

1. CARRIE (The White House)
Talk about evil! Rather than candy, Margaret White hands out Chick tracts!

BONUS TIP: If you find you've eaten too much Halloween candy this year just stop by THE CHANGELING (1980) house on November first! Nothing burns calories faster than running away from a ghost powered wheelchair!

Name That Trauma :: Reader Mike F. on Time Traveling (Pre)-Teens

Posted on By aunt john

Okay, this isn't your standard trauma but it's been bugging me for years. It's the major pop culture mystery memory that I've never been able to solve, so maybe someone here can help!

Anyway, this is in the early '60s (probably '65 or earlier), and I'm visiting my grandmother's house. For some reason am horribly sick and kind of delusional/hallucinating (and somewhere around 5-8 years old). In the afternoon I remember seeing a T.V. show that's remained in my brain and I can't figure out what it was or why I remember it.

What I do remember is some kids (maybe two to four boys in the 10-15 year old range) on a raft in a river or a marshy area. I have the idea that they've accidentally traveled back in time. I think (this is very tentative) that maybe they were in a natural history museum and entered an exhibit and found themselves transformed back into prehistoric time. There might be dinosaurs. One of them is blaming another for getting them into that mess. I think it was in black and white (I think my grandmother had color T.V. at the time).

I think it was a series or serial of the kind they had on MICKEY MOUSE CLUB or later on THE BANANA SPLITS. I sort of remember seeing it more than once but that one awful afternoon when I was really sick stands out. So it's related to trauma even if it didn't really cause it.

Would be really grateful for any help in tracking this thing down.

—Mike F.

UPDATE: NAME THAT TRAUMA SOLVED! Special thanks to reader tychoanomaly for naming it with JOURNEY TO THE BEGINNING OF TIME.

Traumafessions :: Carole Lanham, Author of "The Whisper Jar" on Dolls Gone Wild

Posted on By aunt john

carole lanham

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Kids, gather around and give a big Kindertrauma welcome to Carole Lanham, author of the forthcoming must-read "The Whisper Jar." More on her new book in a minute, as Carole has kindly agreed to share with us her very own traumafession!

Take it away Carole:

It was going to be the greatest night ever. My friend Tammy and I had decided to camp in a tent in her backyard. We hammered down the stakes and shoved our pillows in through the zipper, and then we made a dangerous mistake. Instead of climbing into our sleeping bags while things were all rosy, we sat down to watch an episode of NIGHT GALLERY with Tammy's mom. The Doll, it was called. It goes without saying that dark tents and dolls with scary teeth make for terrible bedfellows. Alas, we were only about ten years old at the time (ever notice how many traumafessions feature kids who are about ten years old?) and so we had yet to learn that rather important life lesson.

"Don't worry," Tammy's mom said, after ROD SERLING and a levitating oil painting of a rag doll with a skull melting out of its head had bid us a decidedly troubling goodnight. "Dolls almost never bite." With an encouraging shove, she sent us out the backdoor, turned off the light, and left us to face the forbidding black triangle of our tent alone.

We couldn't stop thinking about it, of course. Couldn't get the mascara-smeared eyes of The Doll out of our heads to save our souls! We turned on a radio, hoping for some relief, but the DJ, swear to God, was talking about a possible Big Foot sighting. Big foot! This was distracting at least, but not in a good way. There was nothing to do but click on our flashlights and take a trip around the block. Someone had to ensure that there were no creatures with big feet and/or crazy-haired dolls prowling about the neighborhood.

When we got back in the tent, we felt safer and started saying things to each other like, "This is the life, eh?" and "That Eric Brown sure is cute!" but it's hard to enjoy a cozy sleeping bag and a good crush when you're under the spell of a creepy doll. Next thing we know, strange shadows are circling our tent and there is a weird sound not unlike the sound of the clacking teeth of The Doll. We huddled together, our brains swimming with the NIGHT GALLERY theme music and vivid images of fez hats, fireplace pokers, and doll-bitten skin dancing before our eyes in the wonderful world of color. The clacking clacked closer. After much panicked deliberation over how we might transform our supply of Doritos and tampons into a proper weapon, the clacking dissolved into the stupid girlie giggles of the stupid neighbor boys.

That was one long night.

Sad to say, I had not learned my lesson about dolls yet. Many years later, writer Richard Matheson tried to teach me once and for all, by way of KAREN BLACK.

The film was called TRILOGY OF TERROR and the first two stories were mysterious and fun, but for my money they might just as well have dropped the trilogy and the of and called it straight up singular terror since the last segment is the one that makes grown men wet their pants. It's definitely the one that sticks.

I had never seen this film until recently so you'd think I'd be wiser this time around. Well, I wasn't dumb enough to plan a camp-out for that same night, that's for sure, but I did sit down to watch the movie with my kids just as a storm was moving in.

Same dif.

Come bedtime, my daughter (about ten at the time) had no better luck forgetting the doll in this movie than I did forgetting the one on NIGHT GALLERY. Throw in the fact that she's scared stiff of thunderstorms even on a Pixar night and it's probably clear why I should keep away from bad dolls at all cost. Not a wink of sleep was had by either of us, and if you've ever seen the Zuni fetish doll in this movie, you know why. Without meaning to do it, I had given my daughter her own dolly traumafession.

Don't let the cover of this movie fool you. It looks like the font is the scariest thing about it so that's probably why I ignored the thunder and turned it on. Matheson changed the name of his doll story from Prey to Amelia when he wrote the script, to go along with the fact that KAREN BLACK was playing a different woman in each of the three segments. Prey says it better. Even as an adult, I huddled up with my family, wincing and jumping as Amelia and the doll had showdowns in the bathtub and the oven and the living room. There's a missing carving knife that provides for a lot of suspense, and a horrifying bit involving a suitcase that for some reason made me squirm more than all the rest. There are no real special effects to speak of but the film holds up because the story is truly terrifying.

After all this time, you would think I'd know better than to play with dolls, but I'm afraid I still have a thing for them. I'm planning a scary doll give-away when my book comes out and this is purely due to the fact that I was damaged all those years ago by people like Algernon Blackwood, who wrote the short story that The Doll was based on, and Richard Matheson's Prey. Scary stuff!

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Thanks for sharing that Carole. I feel your trauma as my own kid sister suffers from extreme pediophobia, a condition I might have used to my advantage on numerous occasions when we were kids. But I digress… I really want to talk about Carole's new book "The Whisper Jar" (available Monday, October 31st in print or pre-order now, in electronic format via Morrigan Books).

Just in time for Halloween, "The Whisper Jar" is an anthology of seven short stories and two poems which all feature, in Kindertrauma parlance, traumatots grappling with the supernatural and the mundane. As Unkle Lancifer will be the first to attest, I have a very limited attention span and the idea of reading for pleasure is a luxury I rarely enjoy since I can't sit still long enough. I am the fidgety type who can barely make it through a movie without having to check email, smoke a cigarette, or, well, fall asleep.

Such was not the case when I embarked on "The Whisper Jar." As evidenced by her traumafession above, Carole knows how to turn a phrase, if you will, and I was sucked right into her fantastic world of slightly-off child protagonists. Some are dealing with sibling vampires; some are vying for the undivided attention of a pixie; and one has to come to the heart-breaking realization that nuns at her orphanage were less than truthful about her lineage. Honestly, Flannery O'Conner came to mind when I read the orphanage story "The Blue Word." There is a definite moment of grace, and the final path to salvation is nothing short of heart breaking.

One last thing about Carole's collection; "Maxwell Treat's Museum of Torture for Young Girls and Boys" seriously begs for a small or silver screen adaptation. There is a powerful overarching theme of parental loss and Carole places her tragically displaced protagonist with one of the quirkiest families ever, one that includes three brothers who have the gumption to erect a museum devoted to archaic torture devices and two parents who fully support them in this endeavor. I want to live there!

OK, I am done. To read more by Carole Lanham, be sure to check her out at THE HORROR HOMEMAKER , her personal site, and snag a copy of "The Whisper Jar" HERE.

carole lanham