Category: Name That Trauma!

First Up! Keep up the great work, Kindertrauma is a wonderful and insightful website!

I am trying to track down a movie that has played on my mind for the last 18 years. I was about 12 when I watched this movie on T.V., the same night I saw what I thought was a ghost in the hallway and had an asthma attack. I've been trying to piece together that particular night for years!

I am sure the plot involved an architect and maybe flashbacks to a site in Egypt. Two scenes I vaguely remember were the lead actor sitting beside a possible redhead while she was in the bathtub and some kind of demon appearing in a car windscreen or looking down from the roof a car and causing a car crash.

The film has haunted me for years, I have never been able to locate it – even after endless plot searches on IMDb! I thought it could possibly be SCHIZO/PLAYROOM but am not sure.

Can anyone help end my trauma????

Thanks,

Tristan

Hi guys,

Long time reader, first time writer. When I was a kid, my friend would have sleepovers and rent horror movies that haunt me to this very day. The one I am seeking today may have been double-billed with BEYOND THE DOOR II, a movie that made me sleep with clenched fists for years afterward – the thought of waking up with a crumbling hand in mine was so terrifying.

The movie I am looking for was watched on video sometime between 1983 and 1989. It featured a man who had obtained an amulet that allowed him to psychically act outside of his body as he slept. I think he received the amulet from a man in prison. I remember two crimes that he committed. He caused a big crate or a piano to fall on someone by snapping the rope it was swinging on. He also scalded a woman in a shower by increasing the water temperature and seizing the glass door closed. She ultimately breaks through the glass door and is covered in cuts – I can't remember if she lives. In the end, he is captured as he sleeps and incinerated – he wakes up as he burns.

One final question, where the hell were my parents when I needed them?

— Craig's Friend Meg

There was what I believe to be a made-for-TV movie in the mid-late 1970s, and I suspect it was some type of supernatural anthology thriller. Promotions for it involved an RV in the desert, a woman in a wheelchair patting a dog or something only to fall down an exterior staircase, and a kid popping up from a circle of plastic milk crates or the like.

The striking portion of the film I saw on T.V. involved the RV: a middle-aged couple on vacation in the desert were attacked by large boulders rolling across the flat desert landscape. The genuinely terrifying part for me was that the husband first was trying to find out what these heat-blurred dots on the horizon were by repeatedly walking further and further away from the safety of the camper to get a closer look with his binoculars.

I think even back then, I suspected the massive boulders were "fakey," but that was just inconsequential to the terror I felt at knowing something is completely and hostilely amiss and yet still being compelled to find out what it is at the expense of your protection. The fact that the distance between the man and his means of escape in their presumably safe RV was shown in a long shot just psychologically added to the danger.
Eventually this RV would also be telekinetically commandeered while the husband was on the roof and the wife was helpless to override the steering wheel of the speeding vehicle, if that's any help in identifying this.

Does anyone know the title of this film?

Thanks again for your help! Take care.

Sincerely,

Stickmann

UPDATE: NAME THAT TRAUMA SOLVED! Special thanks to NurseKrud for solving it with GHOSTS THAT STILL WALK!

Hello,

Can you help me name a movie?

This is the movie that I thought was SLEEPAWAY CAMP, so I rewatched S.C., to find out that I was wrong. The movies are similar, but the difference is in the end. While the S.C. has the very clever "girl with a penis" ending (loved that craziness b.t.w.), the movie I'm thinking about is different.

It must have been perhaps 15 years since I saw it. It's an ‘80s movie and in the end they are chased by the killer in the deep woods (looks like a jungle) with a knife. I think the killer is one of them, and that it's a guy. But the guy's face literally morphs into a girl's face or is it the other way around?

It's really weird. And that is the big twist. I remember it scared the living crap out of me.

I would love to see it again!!

Thanks,

— Nicholas

I saw your site, it's great!

I am looking for a classic horror movie that I saw 10 years ago but I don't know its name; I hope you can help me.

I remember that it's about a man who lives with his mother who brought girls to his home and killed them with aid of his mother. For example, he killed a girl in a bathtub then cut up her body and put the pieces in a plastic bag. I remember that at the end of the film he killed his mother.

Please, if you have seen this movie, give me the name.

Thank you so much.

UNK SEZ:: LoLo, as soon as you said "bathtub" I thought immediately of CURTIS HARINGTON's THE KILLING KIND from 1973. It's got both a killer (JOHN SAVAGE) and a very lenient mom (ANNE SOTHERN) too. I think it may be the one! Let us know! By the way, if I'm right that was CINDY WILLIAMS of LAVERNE & SHIRLEY who found her end in that bathtub!

UPDATE: Actually, Reader Craig is correct on this one… the movie LoLo was looking for is actually BEYOND THE DARKNESS (aka BURIED ALIVE and BLUE OMEGA.)

Hey. I'm a big fan of the site and I'm forever in your debt for exposing me to MR. BOOGEDY, which had been bugging me for years. Anyway, when I was a kid, I wasn't allowed to rent horror movies, but when my mom took me to the local video store, I'd walk up and down the horror aisle staring at the video covers. I was obsessed with them and would go home and draw the ones I could remember. (I still have my six-year-old version of the covers to BLACK ROSES, NIGHT OF THE CREEPS, and DEAD PIT. They're pretty horrible.)

The reason I'm writing you is because there was this face from the cover of DEMONS 2. It was a little boy demon with pointed teeth and red rings under his eyes. I loved that picture. I bought the DEMONS/DEMONS 2 DVD pack and that face is on the actual disc. It makes me happy just looking at it.

However, I remember another horror movie with that face on its video packaging. It wasn't DEMONS or DEMONS 2. It was something else. But it very clearly had the same face on the back of its box. Can you guys tell me what movie dared to rip off DEMONS 2? I always figured it was another Italian movie, but I don't have any reason why I think that.

Thanks,

Evan

Hey guys,

I'm a regular visitor to Kindertrauma, but this is my first time to write in.

Thanks to the Internet, I've been able to track down and re-visit pretty much all of my childhood traumas. There's just one trauma I have never found, and I'm hoping someone can help me.

My trauma was either a PSA or commercial that I saw several times as a kid. It aired sometime between 1983 and 1986.

There was a black silhouette of a child's head (maybe an infant's head and shoulders) against a totally white screen. I'm not sure if the silhouette was a cartoon or not, but I think it was more like a real shadow cast against a white surface. The shadow of a hammer would come down from the side of the screen, causing the child's head to crack down the middle with an eerie, eggshell-smashing sound. Then the silhouettes would fade and words would appear against the white background.

The silhouette reminded me of my younger sibling, and I remember thinking that this was a commercial for a special hospital that would repair a child's head if you accidentally cracked it open with a hammer. The ad didn't horrify me so much as my own interpretation of it did.

I've looked through hundreds of PSA's from the early ‘80s and never found it.

— Wes H.

Cannot remember the title and it is driving me crazy. Film is from the late '70s or early '80s.

Mad scientist figures out a way to bring the monsters of classic literature to life. He turns on the machine and out of the books come Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolfman and The Mummy, but they are only 3 feet tall. I recall this done as a serious horror movie with a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor thrown in. Help save my sanity please.

— M. Nelson

UNK SEZ:: The year doesn't match up but this sounds very much like the 1997 CHARLES BAND film THE CREEPS! Check out the trailer below M. Nelson and let us know! Meanwhile, does anybody out there in kindertraumaville know of any other movies that feature pint-sized classic monsters?

Kindertrauma crew,

I need help identifying a horror short story collection I read in the late 1970s.

The most memorable story was about a crew stationed on another planet (Mars, I think) that becomes infected and turned into murderous zombie-like beings.

The story features someone being killed with a scalpel in a medical lab. At the end of the story, the lone, uninfected crew member escapes onto the planet's surface in a moon buggy-type vehicle.

The vehicle crashes. As his now inhuman pursuers close in, the uninfected crew member opts to kill himself by removing his helmet.

I found this grim story very disturbing at the time.

The only other story I recall any details about featured someone investigating a neighbor's house and finding the occupant to be some kind of spider creature.

The book had several black & white illustrations in it, one of which was for this story, featuring a victim bound in spider webs.

This is a very tough one, I know. Anything you or your readers can come up with would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks very much,

— Terek P.

UPDATE: NAME THAT TRAUMA SOLVED! Special thanks to longtime lurker & first time poster shargraves who knew this was Sydney J. Bounds' short story "The Animators."

I have a Name That Trauma for you… I hope I can provide enough details for you or a reader to recognize it. I must have been about 5 or 6, which would make it roughly 1970-71.

I was up late one night watching television, it would probably have been BBC1 or BBC2, when a film from the silent era came on. The abiding memory I have is of an old hag-like woman who lived underground, perhaps in the subway system, who would climb out from the manhole covers in the street and drag her victims below to her cavernous lair.

I have a suspicion it may have been a French movie, but I could be wrong. All I know is it frightened the life out of me, and I had nightmares about it for a long time after. I know this is very little to go on, but I do hope someone out there can help identify my personal trauma.

Thank you.