Author: unkle lancifer
Name That Trauma:: Paul K. on a Tortured Family and a Television Trap
This happened when I was living in northern Minnesota during the '70s to the early '80s. We had 4 tv stations to choose from. I turned the channel to PBS and watched something strange. A dad, mom, boy and girl sat like crash-test dummies unmoving at a table. The room they sat in (maybe a kitchen) had very little in it. A prompt would come up saying something like "wind". A giant wind storm would blow through the room as the family just sat there and took it. Another prompt would come up like "quake". The room would reset itself as if the wind storm never happened. The quake would shake everything out of place but when the next prompt came up everything would be back in its place. This would go on for many prompts. The only time the room didn't reset was after the prompt "sand". A foot of sand blew into the room and stayed there even after other prompts. It was almost like I was watching an immobile family subjected to various torturous conditions that were removed after each testing except for the sand. This might have been from 30 to 60 minutes long. That is all I know.
I also remember something on PBS during the same time period where a young good guy gets transmitted inside a TV by a young bad guy. The good guy pounds on the TV's glass screen. The good guy's girlfriend risks getting stuck inside the TV trying to save him but is able to get the good guy out. She traps the bad guy in the TV and they leave him in there fearfully pounding on the glass screen. Â It isn't John Ritter's film "STAY TUNED". That too is all I know.
I hope my memory is correct and I hope you can help. The bad guy stuck in the TV had extreme fear and made the good guys look amoral.
Name That Trauma:: Amanda Z. on a Madman's Torture Tunnel
Hey there and thank you for reading!
This has been driving me mad for thirty years. I caught a brief moment in a movie when I was very young, and all I can remember about it is that there was a madman who was murdering people in various ridiculously complicated ways (sort of like The Abominable Doctor Phibes) and one way was to force a person through a small tunnel or a hole or something. I think the contraption was set up like a model train table and a conveyor took the person along a track where they were compressed or pushed through this hole.
This would have been on network TV some time in the early 1970s. Could have been a TV show, or a movie shown on TV. I'm sorry I can't be more specific. I caught just enough of it to flip out, at which point my parents sent me back to bed. Does this ring any bells? Even remotely? Thanks in advance for your help.Â
Traumafession:: G.G.G. on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Like a lot of city kids, I would get shipped out to my grandparents' house in the suburbs for a week or two each summer, supposedly to give me an appreciation of grass, trees and fresh air. The candy was terrible, the plastic covers on the furniture annoyingly sticky in the heat, and the rules regarding "guest" towels and soap labyrinthine. The one glorious redeeming feature in all of this? The finished basement had a huge color TV, my grandfather's state of the art VHS, and a pile of tapes that would do a Blockbuster proud.
Bored on a rainy day and rooting for something to watch, I pulled The Texas Chainsaw Massacre out of the pile, since it was obviously something scary, and even 8 year old me loved horror above all. I had a steady diet of midnight B movies, Twilight Zone reruns, and silly slashers like Chopping Mall. I could TOTALLY handle this.
All of 3 minutes later, I bolted upstairs and hung on to a very bewildered cocker spaniel mix for dear life as my whole concept of terrifying rearranged itself. I didn't watch the rest of the film for several decades. It didn't have quite the same power, but I had twenty plus years to learn more sophisticated ways of torturing myself.
Traumafession:: Rob M. on a Classic PSA
Probably my greatest trauma happened every day just before the ten o'clock news. I grew up in the late 70's/80's in the NYC suburbs. During this time, there was a lot of real life horror (Stranger Danger, Toxic Tylenol, Satanic Panic, Son of Sam, child abductions, AIDS, Drugs, Cold War etc). But I digress… imagine being in this environment and unexpectedly before every ten o'clock news intro… a still motion shot of a lone child riding a bike on a deserted side street illuminated by a street lamp. Then comes the voice over -> "It's 10pm. Do you know where your children are?" The person who provided the voiceover was the great Lou Steele. He was known as "The Creep" btw. I'd have to run out of the room every time it came on. The reason it scared me was because of the images it conjured in my head. "Does this person know something?" "Geez, kids are getting snapped up left and right". "Why do parents need to be reminded to check on their children?" And ultimately reminded me of the infamous "Have you checked the children?" from When a Stranger Calls. The spot, the voiceover and the current social climate all made this a fearful moment of my youth. They later added another spot at 7pm which asked the question "Have you hugged your child today?" That also felt kind of creepy too… just the idea that parents needed a reminder.
Thanks,
Rob
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