Category: Name That Trauma!

Greetings from Chicagoland!

Circa 1980, I'm flipping through a black-and-white horror mag, title unknown, and see a bit of story involving a man with a cleaver cutting up a conscious woman. A big panel shows her arched backwards over a table or butcher's block, her arm cut off at the elbow, while he's holding her down with one hand, cleaver upraised in the other. A few panels later, his attack is over. Another small panel shows him mostly offscreen; he's standing before her head, now split in half lengthwise at the front, lying on the table / block. Cleaver hanging at his side, he cries(??!?!??!!?), with dialogue saying, "Oh, Ellen…. Ellen…." (Could've been Helen, but I think Ellen is correct.) The last panel I recall shows him clutching a struggling bird while splitting it with the cleaver. I quit reading when he started going after other animals.

I'd like to know what the hell this made-up murderer's problem was and to get some satisfaction in seeing him suffer. Thank you, thank you, thank you for any leads.

Thank you more for helping humanity, one Kindertrauma at a time!

Greetings! I've enjoyed the site for many years, but I believe this is my first request for help identifying an old trauma of mine.

It's my hope that someone can help point me to a movie/show that deeply disturbed me as a young child in the early '90s. I know it had to have been made prior to 1995 because of the house I was living in when I saw it, but I have no idea if it's a movie or TV show. Someone in my family was watching something on TV on one of the broadcast stations in northern Virginia (I don't remember if we had cable in that particular house at the time) circa 1992, and I saw a portion of it while going through the room a few times while doing other things. Pretty sure it was on a channel with commercials. The snippets I saw made a big impression.

In the movie (just gonna call it a movie for simplicity's sake), there's a sick young woman on the run. She's just recently escaped from some kind of hospital where she was in quarantine for some kind of horribly contagious disease. She has been accidentally exposed and doesn't realize she is spreading a terrible disease, but doesn't trust the hospital staff or authority figures for reasons I don't recall. Her state of mind is confused, and she is getting worse. The woman has shoulder length or short hair and is wearing a white hospital gown or house coat (pretty sure it opens in the back), and she keeps pausing in her flight from the authorities to vomit. Every time she gets sick, there's an ominous music chord and stock footage of bacteria multiplying is shown. She looks sweaty and sick, and keeps desperately trying to stop people on the street to ask them for help (and getting sick on them). The music stings and bacteria clips keep happening, illustrating that she's spreading the disease. Each time, the bacteria pile increases more and more until the single bacterium splits into hundreds and fills the entire screen with them. I think she collapsed before it cut to something else or a commercial break, and I never saw anything further or learned her fate in the end. The whole thing was absolutely horrifying to me. Even today, I think of these few scenes every time I see a clip of bacteria multiplying.

I think the movie may have also played from the point of view of the people trying to catch her and stop the spreading of the disease (maybe police or detectives?). The tone is more like a '90s TV police procedural thriller where you're following the characters as they track down a suspect. Like, they keep being one step behind and are trying to get to her in time before she succumbs and infects everyone. Production value may have been akin to something like an episode of In the Heat of the Night, and it may have said something about being based on a true story so it might have been a TV movie or a TV show of the era. I think an ambulance crash happens at some point, with her escaping from the back of the vehicle (possibly right before the scene of her escaping I described above). I also think the color grade of the movie leans a little more to the red shade of the spectrum when following the sick lady, to help show her deteriorating health.

Who is this lady? Did she make it? What was my family watching?! I must know, fellow trauma enthusiasts. Can anyone help identify this horror from my past? Please and thank you!

-Beth from Georgia

Hello from South Africa!

Long time fan, first time writer. Thanks to your site I was able to relive the memory of a movie that scared the bejesus out of me as a kid, "The Haunted" about the Smurl Haunting. I'm hoping you can -please- point me in the direction of another childhood trauma. Here are the deets, bit of a read, but I hope you will find it interesting.

In South Africa we had an early subscription based TV channel called M-Net. One of it's regularly scheduled program slots was K-TV. (Kids television.) During the school holidays they would have "the K-TV holidays special" which meant extended broadcast hours and also movies that we would never have a chance to see otherwise. (This was the late 80s to mid 90s)

Thanks to them I saw so many weird movies that I may need to revist Kindetraumas services in the future. The titles I do remember catching were "Robotech the movie" (That weird butchered one which flopped in the cinema) the Robotech Sentinels pilot episode, The Peanut Butter Solution…that kind of stuff.

One of the films we saw was about a spoiled upper middle class kid (live action film) who had a ton of cool toys and basically could regularly pick any toy he wanted from the toy store. He offers his Euro friend the opportunity to get a toy, but his friend turns him down and shows him a ball with lights on it. The friend tells him he needs no other toys except this ball. So of course our "hero" steals this ball for himself.

That night his mom has to go out, leaving him home alone. The ball activates and his toys come to life and try to murder him. I remember a cackling skeleton and an almost Tyco looking train set that tried to shoot him, as well as others. The vacuum cleaner also tries to murder him and then he hears his friends distorted voice coming from the ball taunting him. (the movie starts to veer into wtf territory)

He heads downstairs and encounters his mom, except it's not his mom it's actually a freaky killer cyborg version of her. (no reason for it..just insanity.) This thing chases him out the house and his real mom arrives home and runs it over.

I know it sounds a bit like a fever dream, but I have a buddy who also saw it. We connected via our love for the film on the he-man forums. Coincidentally he is in the toy design biz himself now. Helping design action figures for Battletoads.

I have tried EVERY source, from repeated word combos on google and youtube, to keyword trawling on IMDB and am now searching archive.org. I find it worrying that there is no sign of it as I think it would be insansely popular online with the ongoing trend of adult toy collectors and retro revivals. I mean, not a single hint of it??? It was definitely not a South African production, I think possibly it was dubbed into english which means the original title might be very obscure.

It is not a holiday themed movie, it is not part of Silent Night, Deadly night…I have no idea what it was.

Sorry for the wordy mail, thanks for reading. Any help at all would be so very appreciated.

All the Best!
Mike W

Hello everyone, what movie features a death by a stuffed toy snake in a car or pick-up truck? I'm pretty sure it was late 80's or early 90's. It's beyond cool that Kindertrauma.com exists, you guys are the best.
Doug P

Hi there! For years I've been trying to find a fire safety film I watched in elementary school back in 2003. Here's what I've managed to remember from the movie:

I remember the camera zoomed into the fire as she was screaming and there was knocking heard at the door. I also remember one of the scenes after the fire was of the girl (I think her name was Jamie) walking down a hospital hallway covered from head to toe in bandages like a mummy, walking with a walker. Another scene I remember is of her and her mom in either her bedroom or a hospital room and she was asking her mom if she could take her bandages off because they were hot and itchy. Other friends of mine remember it as well, but none of us can find it. Hope someone here can help!

–Meg N.

Hello there,
I'm looking for a title again.
Asian movie.. All I remember is this girl asking 3 guys if they can watch her dog for a minute while she goes in the store real quick and they wack that dog in a bag to the wall. They kill it and just leave it there on the ground.
The dog was a small Pomeranian dog
Hope someone can help, thanks

Hey, I'm looking for a horror movie, i think its from 2000+ , 

It's about a couple (boy girl) that are driving in the car and they see a 'free puppy' sign or road sign.. once they arrive there, there's a truck with 2 guys and 1 of them lures the woman to the trunk to 'look at the puppies' and drags her in the trunk. The boy gets held at gunpoint. One guy drives the couples car to a remote place while the other guy drives there with the couple in the car. Once they arrive there, they give the boy a gun and tell him to shoot himself in the head if he wants to save his girlfriend from being raped etc. Once he pulls the trigger there are no bullets in the gun..

I hope u can help me to find the movie title, thanks in advance.

Back in the mid-80's my parents would bring us kids along when they would hang out at their friend's house.  This friend had an EXTENSIVE horror and science fiction library, and I spent every hour over there reading all the Stephen King, Clive Barker, Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Magazines that I could get my hands on. It was in one of those Twilight Zone Magazines that I recall reading a story that I have wanted to re-read for years, as it freaked me out so much as a kid.

But, of course, I cannot find anything on this short story anywhere online…
The few details I do remember is that it was about a man who was staying in a stone cottage by the sea (maybe at the top of a cliff?) and for whatever reason, he ignores warnings to not do something or other, and winds up awakening some large stones that are sticking out from the sea, and during the night, he can hear them making their way up the path to his house, and they end up (I think) melting into the house, and engulfing him as well. I think the stones may have been referred to as The 3 Sisters? 

I know it's not a movie or TV horror, but I'm hoping someone can help!
-Werewoof_of_London

UNK SEZ: Our old pal kirbyreedloveshorror found a short clip online of a woman being thrown out a window next to a prominent Santa Clause Christmas decoration. Kirby wanted to know if I could identify the film but sadly I could not! We're both big Christmas horror fans so now we're both going crazy with curiosity. Does anybody know the answer? Help!