Category: Name That Trauma!

Hi Kindertrauma!

I have been looking for this one for years and could use your expert help.

One day, in the early 90s, I turned on my black and white TV to the only channel it got, which was a UHF PBS channel in Washington State, and there was a very strange film being shown. (I believe it was British, like most things on the channel.) What I saw began with two people in a car diving up to a forested hill in the country and getting out. (My memories are super rusty…) I think they may have been cops. They walked into the forest and explored until they came upon an old house/shack. They went inside and found an old box…. they opened the box and… there was a baby with one eye inside the box – alive. Just then, they saw someone running off in the woods and one of the men chased after them. I don't know why, but it gave my child mind the creep chills and I shut it off.

I vaguely remember looking it up in a TV guide later and finding something called "The boy in the box", but again, my memories are likely rotten and I'm getting it mixed up with the classic Corey Hart song.

Any ideas would be appreciated – thanks!

This Traumafession comes from a co-worker. He has been seeking out a movie, a single clip of which has been burned into his psyche for decades now, but all his Google-fu has come up short. He said it's a post WW2 'Earth invaded by aliens' B-movie in black and white that was released around the same time as the original 'The Blob'. In the movie, the first time the hapless Earthlings glimpse the alien invaders it's on a black and white closed-circuit TV in the subway and the aliens resemble grasshoppers or cockroaches. That's it, that's all he remembers. Please help him solve this mysteria othopterae.

Thanks!

-bdwilcox

UNK SEZ: I think I got it! I had no idea and then it hit me like a ton of bricks! I think your co-worker must be talking about QUATERMASS AND THE PIT which is rife with both subways and grasshopper aliens! If he saw it in black and white then it must have been the 1958 TV version rather than the 1967 theatrical color version from HAMMER (AKA FIVE MILLION YEARS TO EARTH). Let us know if your co-worker recognizes the video below!

OK, so I've got one thats been haunting me for twenty years of so. I remember watching this particular trauma on TV in the early nineties. Maybe '92?

All I remember is a little kid playing with a voodoo doll. I want to say the kid started using the voodoo doll after seeing parents fornicating. – I could be wrong on the motive. I remember the action escalating to a point where the man was set on fire. I've had very vivid memories of this particular nightmare, but have never been able to place this movie or TV episode.

I know this isnt much to go on, but it's all my fading memory has given me to work with. I've been a genre fan as far as I can remember and this movie or TV show has yet to cross my path twice.

Any help would be appreciated!

Hey Guys,

Have had this one rolling around my head for a while and thought I might be able to find it but no luck so far so am turning it over to the experts.

This may be a combo of memories that I've created one movie with but I think I have the majority of details right. I saw this one night as I was half asleep and wanted to track it down to watch the whole thing.

The following may or may not be true:

• Recent-"ish" movie from say within the last 10 or 15 years
• I think it may have been Spanish or Mexican in origin. If not the male and female lead were both Hispanic
• Involves a family who come under attack by paranormal sources
• There is a daughter who is maybe 15 or 16 and the son is 11 or 12. I think the son may be seeing things or have some other contact with the paranormal and the Dad either doesn't believe him or doesn't want to believe him. The sister either believes him or sees these things as well
• At the end I think there is some sort of confrontation involving the kids and Mom against the Dad

Again, these memories are all very vague and half of them might have been dreams I had while falling asleep/waking up while this was on. Sorry it's not much to go on but hopefully I've got a few things right to identify it with.

Thanks for any help and thanks again for the great website, for someone like myself who grew up in the '70s/'80s, it is truly a treasure chest of horror nostalgia.

— Sonny W.

Hiya!

I Just thought of another thing that scared me as a child. The only problem is, I don't know what it's called! It was a game for the PC from the '90s and in the game you are trapped inside a haunted house. The only way to get out was to search the house to find thirteen keys before the clock in the house struck thirteen o' clock. If it struck thirteen, the game was over. Characters would appear in the room you are in now and again and you could give these characters an item and they will give you one in return (sometimes a key). There was a two headed monster, Frankenstein, a female vampire, a hunchback, a little boy, a mad scientist and a genie or ghost named Graeme (only character name I can remember). Characters weren't the only thing to appear, but monsters would also appear every now and then. These monsters weren't friendly as they would attack you if you didn't leave the room in time. My older brother thought that some of the monsters were wimpy, but they did scare me. Especially the hangman victim who grew long fingernails and clawed you! That affected me for ages afterwards.

If anyone can help me figure out the name of this game that will be great.

Thank you!

UNK SEZ: Thanks for writing in Michelle! I believe I found your game. You were very close on the ghost's name but it was actually "Gahan" as he was named after the man who inspired the game, kindertrauma legend Gahan Wilson! The game is called GAHAN WILSON'S ULTIMATE HAUNTED HOUSE. You can read up on it HERE and HERE and there are plenty of videos on Youtube to check out if you want to revisit some haunted memories!

Hello,

I do not watch horror movies as a rule, because I like to sleep, however, there is one film in particular, that I know I saw as a child, that has stuck with me…. There is an old woman who sits in a chair in an upper room of the large house where the film takes place…there is also a swimming pool in the house that is possessed, and when people get in, it changes temperature or something and kills them. Sound familiar? Pretty sure I saw it on television in or around the early 1980s.

UNK SEZ: Hmmmm, I'm open to other suggestions but it sounds to me like you are talking about frequent trauma offender BURNT OFFERINGS. That one got me good as a kid too. Check out the trailer below and tell us if it looks familiar. Better yet, you can watch the full movie HERE.

Hey guys! Love your web site and while I have some confessions I have more of a question, hopefully you and maybe your readers can help. I've been trying to find a movie to be exact. Last year I saw a youtube Christmas mixtape of various footage of Christmas themed horror movies, one clip in particular drew my attention. It had a group of people outside around a bonfire, and there was a man dressed as a priest with the collar saying how evil Santa was. The people had a effigy (or maybe even a corpse) of a Santa. The effigy had a corpse face and they were feeding it into the fire. Can you or anybody help me with the name of the movie? Nobody has been able to tell me where that clip came from, I've been on various comment boards, looked for it in a search engine and on blogs to no avail. Hopefully this can be solved. Thanks!!!

Always a fan,

Rich B.

Seasons Greetings Kinderdudes!

Let's get right to it.

I recently saw just the intro of a movie, that I never ended up watching the rest of….follow me?

This young girl is walking home from school (most likely) and she is strolling down a forest path. She either hears something or senses something, and then all I remember is the 'forest' literally pulling her in! Then the camera closes in on either a music box or record player as it seems to crumble/slowly implode.

Ok, WHAT!?!?!

Please help, I'd love to see the rest of this movie.

Awesome site as always!

Aunt, Unk, Kidnertraumatized….

I have a trauma that I've hung onto for years and years that no one can properly diagnose.

The closest person to the trauma, the person I shared this trauma with (my older sister), has suppressed the memory so deep that she has no idea what I'm talking about when I try to describe what I remember to her.

Instead of a long, rambling description of the film that did this to me – I will simply list what I remember in concise bullet points.

– This was either a British film OR happened to be set in Britain with a British cast.

– From the look of the film, it was made some time in the early 1980's to 1990.

– It was a ghost story. Bleak. Humorless.

– Parts of the film took place on a lake. The lake was involved in a drowning or cover-up.

– In the final scene of the movie, a main character in a small canoe is killed by a tree falling on them. This character would have otherwise gotten away with something or gone unpunished. The audience is led to believe that this was an act of revenge by the film's ghost.

Sadly -that's it, friends.

I remember watching this film with my older sister. Possibly on VHS taped from TV. Whenever I ask her "What was that British movie where a ghost made a tree fall on a person in a boat?" she acts like I made it up.

BUT I KNOW IT WAS REAL!

WHY WOULD I STILL BE THINKING ABOUT IT 25 YEARS LATER?

Hola, you are brilliant. I love your site.

Here's one that hit me pretty hard as a kid. It was on network television after Saturday Morning Cartoons had run their course. Time period was early eighties. It was live-action, a kind of after-school-special feel to it. It was about bullying, or about bad kids. I remember a warning about "This program contains content that may upset younger viewers." Ha! I can take it!

The music is hyper-dramatic, almost like the theme to "The Black Hole." One smaller boy is attacked by a larger one. The attack is very slow. The smaller boy, in glasses, is backed against a brick wall. The bigger one pulls a knife on him.

The knife goes into the smaller boy's belly. The mean kid cuts neatly from one side to the other, and we see blood. He leaves. The younger boy, again with slow, slow reactions (he didn't defend himself) slowly collapses against the wall. The camera zooms on his agonized face. The end.

None of this looked real, of course. But when has that ever made a difference? When I was a kid, this made me feel like I was going to vomit. I was small and wore glasses. Sucks.

UNK SEZ: Thanks Derek! I so wish I knew the answer to this one ! That way I could repay you for bringing up the theme to THE BLACK HOLE! It's so swirly and hypnotic and frequently stuck in my head!