Author: unkle lancifer

Name That Trauma:: Reader Tomb on a Delusional Dad & a Sacrificial Son

Posted on November 7, 2013 By unkle lancifer

I remember a show on TV: Possibly mid-70's? Made for TV? CBS?

Anyway, the only scene I remember was a father, under the delusion that God told him to sacrifice his son old-book style. The father held the wriggling tyke shouting verse, he might have had a knife or scissors and a frantic wife was trying to stop him. I was pretty young trying to process the whole drama; why would a Daddy try to kill his son? Years later I would do things that would bring me to near death by my father, but it had nothing to do with divine machinations!

Thanks

Name That Trauma:: Melody M. on Two Monsters in Disguise

Posted on November 6, 2013 By unkle lancifer

Okay, since I got my first real horrifying experience off my chest before, I was wondering if anyone could help me identify two things from my childhood that have stayed with me for a while. Both have to do with "monster in disguise" type things.

I'm not sure if it was a movie or TV show, but the scene in question took place on a boat. They were trying to figure out why people have been disappearing on the boat, and one of the guys starts laughing, and a huge pair of fangs appear in his mouth. He confesses to eating the missing people. I switched the channel at this point, because the idea of people being killed and eaten freaked me out. I never found out what it was from, though, and I never saw it again. I do know the people seemed kind of like pirates or adventurers of some kind.

The other one was kind of a medieval sword and sorcery flick, and I think the scene took place in a dungeon. The heroine was trying to seduce her way out of being a prisoner, and she knees her antagonizer in the balls. There's a sound like a piece of wood being struck, and the guy doesn't even flinch. He says something like "Allow me to show you my true form!" in a weird garbled voice, and then he reaches up and splits his face in half. Again, it freaked me out, the channel was changed, and I never saw it again.

Sorry if those are vague, I was like 5 or 6 years-old at the time. But if anyone can help me, it's definitely the kind people at kindertrauma!

Thanks!

Melody M.

UNK SEZ: I wish I knew what that first one was Melody! I'm curious to find out because I dig horror movies that take place on boats! The second one, is most certainly THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER (1982)! I just watched the scene again and your memory is spot on! We were just using images from that one to illustrate a post the other day so maybe that's what dislodged your trauma! Does anybody out there think Melody's vampire on a boat trauma sounds familiar? Make sure you let us know!

Name That Trauma:: Dustin P. on a Filmstrip About A Vampire Plagued Town

Posted on November 5, 2013 By unkle lancifer

I grew up in the '70s and '80s, and watched plenty of filmstrips in school. Although we normally watched them in class, sometimes we would be able to watch a private viewing on a small screen in our media center (what we called our library).

I recall watching one around 1979 or 1980 about vampires. It think it involved a young boy who lived in a town plagued by a vampire, possibly around the turn of the century. At some point in the filmstrip, a panel showed him sitting straight up in bed with a look of horror on his face. I think it was implied that he had realized that he was the vampire. Music then started to play with a stereotypical Bela Lugosi-sounding vampire voiceover, mentioning how vampires had stricken fear into people for over 500 generations.

The part with the boy realizing that he was the vampire scared me the most. That part caused me to lose sleep. I guess no child likes to consider the possibility of the monster within.

Did anyone else see this filmstrip? Can anyone tell me what the title was?

Name That Trauma:: Mr. Lowdoor on a Medieval Sorcerer's Spit Roast Illusion

Posted on November 4, 2013 By unkle lancifer

Hi fellas,

I've been trying to figure this one out for a long time. I remember seeing a movie in the late 80s or early 90s that was either set in medieval times or in some medieval fantasy world. It included a scene near the end in which the hero (or one of the good guys) is confronting a magician or sorcerer who creates the illusion that said hero is roasting on a spit turning over a fire. I'm picturing the hero as a young guy in a medieval bowl cut. I don't remember anything else about the move except I used to think it was Sword of the Valiant, but I'm pretty sure that's not it. But that was the feel of the movie. Maybe it was made for TV? It wasn't really scary, but the image stuck with me for years, and I'd love to know where the heck it came from.

I appreciate any ideas you or anyone else here might have. I love the site – it's my favorite thing on the internet.

Thanks,

Mr. Lowdoor

Sunday Viewing:: I Saw What You Did (1988)

Posted on November 3, 2013 By unkle lancifer

I wish I could tell you I was watching something more gruesome and horrific this past mischief night but the fact is, I was taking in the 1988 T.V. movie I SAW WHAT YOU DID. Melody M.'s recent traumafession on the same year's THE BLOB reminded me that there is never enough SHAWNEE SMITH in my world. Like THE BLOB, I SAW WHAT YOU DID is an eighties update of an earlier classic (the 1965 original was directed by WILLIAM CASTLE and starred JOAN CRAWFORD) and no matter how you feel about remakes, who among us is strong enough to resist an eighties flavored spin on anything?

They sure picked the right director for this tale of phone abuse, FRED WALTON previously helmed the at least partially terrifying WHEN A STRANGER CALLS (not to mention its sequel and the much loved APRIL FOOL'S DAY). Although he sometimes makes you wonder what the difference is between suspense and stalling, there's no mistaking that this isn't WALTON's first terror by telephone rodeo. Joining our pal SHAWNEE is future WISHMASTER foe TAMMY LARUREN and FULL HOUSE's CANDACE CAMERON BURE as kid sis Julia. Our story involves the girls learning what we all must eventually learn, that if you keep making random prank phone calls you run the risk , at some point, of contacting at least one CARRADINE brother and that's never a good prospect.

All right, maybe this flick won't scare you but it's fun, brimming with the giddy nostalgic pleasure of misbehaving as a kid whenever your left alone long enough to do so. It's s tame for the most part but it's not without a rather creepy slippery slope undercurrent. It sort of operates like a cross between 1985's SMOOTH TALK and one of those paranoid educational films that offers up the worst case scenario for mischievous girls who stray from the proper path. As always, because it's on YouTube you should not take it for granted that it will always be there and a DVD release is pretty unlikely, so I say check out below while you can and party like it's 1988!

Traumafession:: GCG on Bless the Beasts & the Children (1971)

Posted on November 2, 2013 By unkle lancifer

For this post-Halloween malaise, here's a long-winded, big bummer of a Traumafession. Feel free to reject it if it's too much of a drag (or if you're sick of hearing from me).

As all the unexpected scares I have encountered on film or in real life have managed only to strengthen my spirit, it has been difficult to contribute Traumafessions from memories that have come to make me feel alive and vital through fearâ€”difficult because under the rubric of "trauma," I am more likely to list mundane anxieties like job interviews and beet salad. On an agonizingly slow, brackish day, I look to those more startling memories that will ease the scabbed-over nerves produced by tedium and indifference: everything from the time I was mugged at gunpoint on the street at night to the relatively harmless experience of watching the The Shining in a theater when I was ten years old.

There were a few Melancholiafessions-in-the-making, however, mostly culled from the â€˜70s, when I became aware of my relationship with certain dreary attitudes and conditions depicted on film, and realized how much they could infect my well-being and endanger my love of life.

Chief among these is a daytime television broadcast of Bless the Beasts and Children. I must have been home sick from school, as I recall fading in and out of the story while lying on a couch under an itchy blanket that smelled of furnace dust. So my recollections are piecemeal. I remember the dream sequence during which parents shoot their children in a corral as they behave like herds of cattle. I remember the line of misfit kids at camp having urine poured over their heads. Worse yet, I remember that dreadfully limp title song performed by The Carpenters. And worst of all, I remember the languid piano chords that open the soundtrack music now known as "Nadia's Theme" on Young and the Restless. (Henry Mancini, what have you done?!?!) When I hear either one today, I feel my legs atrophy like the antennae of a snail you touch, and my mind begins to see everything through a dirty window of listless emotions on a hot day. It was pure catatonic misery distilled in that music. As a future musician, I tended to be highly sensitive to the associations of sounds and images. And as a future basket case, I tended to feel depressive states at that age as external assaults by a giant translucent sponge saturated with warm moisture and bacteria. It was all a harbinger of terrible, eventless days to come.

I couldn't sympathize with the misfits in that movie, even though, if nothing else, I am an outsider myself. But I couldn't stand them. Even fighting for the buffaloâ€”a noble cause that resonates intensely with my love for animalsâ€”could not shake my irritation and intense desire to be rid of them. I hated their yellow T-shirts tucked into pants belted above their stomachs, and their shapeless heads of floppy neck-length hair, and Billy Mumy's freckles. Dirty, dusty, hot, dreary, oppressive, cruel, and lacquered by a soundtrack meant to subdue the viewer with tender piano and maudlin strings and Karen Carpenter's perfectly lifeless voice. Like shit trapped in amber.

Little did I know at that age: these outcasts were more or less my people. But Stanley Kramer presented them like unctuous creeps when he thought he was uplifting them.

And I hold Kramer, the director, personally responsible for this. I want to tell him, if he were alive today, "Yes, the problem you present here is terrible and worth combating, but somehow your aesthetic is more damaging than gun violence! Don't ask me how! I realize that sounds ridiculous and perhaps even offensive to victims of gun violence. But, God help me, it's true! The same thing happened when you made that stupid movie about a black prisoner and a white prisoner on the lam chained together, and that may be the best thing you ever did. A good causeâ€”eradicating racism and healing race relationsâ€”but a horribly realized allegory that would make W.E.B. Dubois himself plead with you to stop working on behalf of African Americans."

I saw Todd Haynes' Barbie-doll biopic Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story many years ago, and it was only then that I realized that something good could be fashioned out of something so bland and suffocating. It was my first tentative step toward bringing the â€˜70s back into my heart, however ironically. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was soon to follow, more sincerely stoking the fires of reclamation. In some ways, those two films are the perfect double feature.

And Unkle Lancifer, if you have love for this film and find yourself outraged by my account here, I apologize, but really the best revenge against me would be to include an embedded YouTube video of "Cotton's Dream" (AKA "Nadia's Theme"). I would have a psychotic PTSD episode hearing that again. I would probably throw on a yellow T-shirt, tuck it into a pair of corduroy pants, and run to the closest animal pound with a kill facility and burn it to the ground.

(I would recommend posting the trailer, which is rather remarkableâ€”a phony television debate between a fire arms advocate and Billy Mumyâ€”but it contains footage of buffalo getting shot, and that part is genuinely upsetting.)

Here's to happier days,

gcg

Hello, folks,

This is one I've been tracking down for years. It's in the mid '70s and I was maybe 15 and watching what I thought was a made-for-TV movie. It was a mystery with a detective and a girl sneaks into the house of a suspect one dark night and notices that the moulding along the top of the room didn't match the other 3 walls and realized there was a false wall built in.

They broke through it to find what they thought was hidden evidence (or something hiding behind it), with axes or hammers. But behind the wall they found grandma (?), mummified, wrapped in plastic and apparently buried there decades ago. Actually sitting in a rocking chair, sideways. ("She wanted to be buried here in her own home.") It was a horrific scene and I remember it not being so much a clue as just back story for the eventual suspect. The rest of the film was more a straight forward procedural (I think!). I'm not even sure I watched it to the end so I never got closure that way either!

Certainly influenced by Argento (Deep Red) and Psycho, not even sure if it was an episode of Night Stalker (although I've looked through synopses of those and never discovered a mention of this). I have the feeling it is American rather than an Italian giallo dubbed for TV play.

Does this ring a bell for anyone?

Thanks in advance,

Roger L.

Name That Trauma:: Sebastian L. on a Green-Faced Alien Principal

Posted on October 29, 2013 By unkle lancifer

Hi there! I have a Name That Trauma that I'm hoping someone might be able to help me out with.

From what I recall, it was an episode of a TV series that aired around the mid-90's. It was live action, and was about a boy who noticed something strange about the adults at his school. I believe he suspected that they were being abducted by aliens, or being replaced by them, Body-Snatchers-style, and I think he was particularly concerned about his principal. The scene that totally creeped me out was when the boy was summoned to the principal's office. He walked in, and the "principal" started scolding him in this slow, creepy voice. Something to the effect of he shouldn't stick his nose where it doesn't belong. The whole time he was talking, he was holding a newspaper in front of his face, but after a few moments of suspense, he put down the newspaper, revealing a green alien face! Absolutely terrifying (at least, for seven year old me)!

I think it may have been an episode of a kids' anthology horror/fantasy show, like Goosebumps or Are You Afraid of the Dark? Here in Canada, we also had a show called Incredible Story Studio, which was supposedly based on story ideas sent in by kids (disturbingly, they were almost always more unsettling than anything on Goosebumps or Are You Afraid of the Dark). If it is in fact an episode of one of these shows, or one like it, I'm sure it wasn't nearly as scary as I thought it was. But it's the first jump scare I remember…and a pretty effective one at that!

P.S. Your website is brilliant!

– Sebastian