Category: Name That Trauma!

There is a movie that I watched at my uncle's house when I was around 7 years old that scared the bejeezus out of me. I cannot figure out what it is for the life of me. I am assuming it was on either HBO or Cinemax sometime around 1987.

From what I can remember it took place on either a space ship or some futuristic tunnel system. There was a lot of blue lighting in theses tunnels. People were being chased in these tunnels by aliens or
Cyborgs that looked human. These things were naked but I seem to think they had prosthetic crotches (like LINNEA did in THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD). That is all I can remember.

I would like to find out what it is so I can rewatch it and see if it has the same effect on me now. Quite a few years back before I saw FROM BEYOND I thought it was the movie I was looking for due to the poster art and the lighting. Once I watched it I realized that it obviously wasn't it.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Stacy

Hello Fellow Fans of Kindertrauma:

Thank you so much for having this great website.

It really brings back wonderful memories from our childhoods.

I have been trying to find out the name of a movie I saw about 30 years ago. It was the very first movie I saw on my first BETA VCR.

All I remember was that there were people playing cards at a casino table, a man unties a woman's dress and her breasts are shown, the people at the casino are surprised and somebody seizes the confusion and throws a knife and kills another man.

That was the first scene from the movie, my mother did not allow me to see the rest of the film because of the nudity on it. I really don't know if it was a horror movie, maybe it could be from Spain or Italy. Perhaps it is from the mid ‘70s. All I remember that the name of the movie in Spanish was "EL HACHA".

I have tried to look it up as "The Axe" on IMDB and all I found was:

Lisa, Lisa (1977)
aka "Axe"
aka "The Virgin Slaughter"
aka "The Axe Murders"

Il rosso segno della follia (1970)
aka "An Axe for the Honeymoon"
aka "Hatchet for the Honeymoon"

This book has helped me to trace down films that I couldn't watch when they were first released at the theaters because of my age. It has the original name of the movies (in the language they are from) and the movie names in Spanish given at the movie theaters in Mexico.

I hope somebody can help me with the movie I'm trying to find.

Thanks,

F. Munoz
Mexico

Dear kindertrauma,

I am older than the most recent traumatized citizen, and would like to ask if anyone knows the name of this movie. It is a ‘50s space movie where the astronauts land on some unidentified planet and in just the area where the ship lands, it is transformed into an earth-like atmosphere with the usual plant life.

The astronauts go to explore and find a cave, which seems okay but there is a mysterious curtain of plant tendrils that seem to guard a secret! When one of the astronauts puts his hand through the curtain, he screams in pain and pulls his back and it is frozen! Some kind of aliens fooled the earthlings so that they would land their ship on their planet. That scene is the only part of the movie I remember.

Does anyone have a clue?

Thank you very much.

saraeg

UPDATE: NAME THAT TRAUMA SOLVED! Two times the thanks to Kahotep & Senski (WordPress, KINDERTRAUMA's content management system of choice, is a cruel mistress) for coming forward with JOURNEY TO THE SEVENTH PLANET.

Here goes – I remember having this friend growing up, and he would always show me really creepy comics whenever his parents weren't around that scared the crap out of me (one even made me run out of room all the way home!)

Out of all the creepy things I saw, there is one that sticks in my memory and I think about from time to time. I'm pretty sure it was a comic or a book, and it was about a little girl who was lost in a subway station. She kept trying to get out and look for her mother, but she was always running into creepy characters, one which was an old bag lady or something along those lines.

One image stays with me – the little girl sees a bird's nest and goes up to it, relieved to see something normal, but when she looks into the nest there are not eggs or adorable hatchlings, but human eyeballs. That is always the point where I stopped reading and would freak out.

Does anyone know what I'm talking about? This would have been when I was four or five, so we're talking 1990/1991, but it could have very well been before that time. If anyone could help me out, I would really appreciate it!

Caitlin

Hi Kindertrauma,

I sent a trauma last month, but alas it's unsolved so far. However, I have total faith in Kindertrauma to identify these two trash-movie-memories that came back to me last night.

Both are horror movies, probably ‘70s – ‘80s, and maybe Italian.

One has a scene near the beginning; a character walks through a dark passage with expressionistic paintings covering the walls. Later it is revealed that one of the portraits was actually a living person hiding among the paintings. The face was "witchy," I think. The trick must've been well executed because we rewound the video to inspect the original scene and, sure enough, the live actor (or actress) was there. We just hadn't noticed the first time around.

The other movie had a final act which owed more than a passing debt to THE SHINING. Dad's gone berserk, mother's traumatised, and her attempts to protect her young son are frustrated by whacked-out shape-shifting highjinks. I think there's a scene where she approaches what appears to be her son, only for "him" to reveal his face as a grotesque monster (shades of DON'T LOOK NOW, although the face here was more of a supernatural-rubber-prosthetics-fest). I know there was a scene with a surprisingly successful "effect," whereby the son appears to the mother at the end of a corridor, rushes toward her, and on arrival, morphs into the maniacal father. This was achieved by positioning the camera so that the boy drops out of shot as he is arriving at the mother's feet, at which point the actor playing the father springs up in front of her.

Keeping my fingers crossed that one of these will ring a bell with someone.

Thank you!

Liam

UNK SEZ:: Liam, so sorry that your last "Name That Trauma" still stands unanswered, don't give up though! As for these two new queries I am glad to say that one is already solved. That second movie you mentioned, the one with the boy morphing into his crazed dad, is one of my favorites, MARIO BAVA's SHOCK A.K.A. BEYOND THE DOOR 2 from 1977!

So that's one down, let's see if any one out there recognizes the first one, it sounds familiar…

UPDATE: NAME THAT TRAUMA SOLVED! Thanks to Taylor for getting the first one with DARIO ARGENTO's DEEP RED.

Ok, many years ago, c.1970-72, when I was just a little thing of about 4, maybe 5; I recall a movie that struck terror in me that hung around for years to come. My babysitter was to put me down for an afternoon nap and I begged her to let me stay up and watch the scary black and white movie that happened to be on the T.V. She hemmed and hawed but finally I was able to break her down and she allowed me to watch (this, of course, became something I would wholeheartedly regret.)

There was a scene in the movie that I'm not sure is exact in my memory due to the fact that I was a small child but the images burned themselves into my psyche forever more. The scene seemed to involve a man and a skeleton. The man was carrying this skeleton in his arms. The skeleton's hand just so happened to fall into a standing pail of water as the man tried to maneuver the skeleton to wherever he was heading with it. I believe the water somehow causes the skeleton to grow skin and come alive or something.

Anyhow, this skeleton was now alive due to the hand in the water and he is now wearing a raincoat and actually hitchhiking down the road in the dark of night. There is a rainstorm beginning and you realize that the raindrops are going to continue to infuse this skeleton with even more life. The image of that skeleton in the raincoat, in the dark with his skeleton thumb sticking out hitchhiking, truly horrified me.

For the remainder of my little kid years, I often had dreams involving skeletons somehow coming alive and chasing me. One that I had was so horrible that I remember the dream just as well as I remember that terrible skeleton scene/movie. I haven't ever been able to find this movie or seen it anywhere based on what I know about it.

Can someone help?

Thanks,

Kim

I ADORE your website, and always seem to spend hours just reading your posts. My favorites are the Name That Trauma! bits, and do I have one for you. As I am probably one of Kindertrauma's youngest readers, this probably occurred late ‘90s or early ‘00s, when I was around 6 or 7. I remember catching two clips on our television that haunted me for the next several years. I would play them over and over in my head lying in my bed at night, and just sit there and shiver.

The first had escaped me over the years, but I clearly remember the second. It was not so much overly creepy as just simply excessively violent and grim. There are two women trapped in a cave and I don't think they can find their way out. They are both scraped up and grimy and the lighting is dark. They begin to fight and one picks up a pickaxe and stands over the other, who is now crying and pleading for her life. The first then swings the pickaxe down into the lower stomach of the second, and there is a gush of blood as the woman screams and cries. I don't know what happens after this, or before, but at the time it scared the living bejezzus out of me!

Anybody have a clue of what this may be?

UNK SEZ:: Sarah, glad to help out a budding horror fan! My guess is that you must be talking about NEIL MARSHALL's modern classic THE DESCENT. The scene you describe sounds like that film's ending. My only misgiving is that THE DESCENT is from 2005, a bit more recent than what you remember. Check out the trailer below and see if it rings any bells and if you haven't already seen the movie, make sure you do!

Hey all,

You may remember me from when I submitted my Traumafession about the BBC Animated Macbeth. This time I can't remember the name of the movie that scarred me so.

When I was about 7, I had a brief love affair with anime. What this means is that I liked to watch the episodes of SAILOR MOON that were shown on Cartoon Network early in the morning. What can I say; the short skirts drew me in. My mother, thinking that because I liked this particular show I must like every anime, rented this one movie for me that really damaged my psyche.

All I remember is that the main character is a little boy whose mother is very abusive. I don't remember if the abusive is physical but I'm pretty sure she was neglectful. This would have been enough to upset me: the whole tone of the movie was pretty dark and unsettling. What I remember most, though, is a scene with a green monster. I remember that the monster is called "a lost soul." One night, it comes to this family's house, breaks in, and tears shit up. As I recall, it's a pretty bloody scene.

I don't remember much of the movie (if it is a movie at all) but this image stayed with me. Maybe some of you anime experts out there can help me find it so I can watch it again and reassure myself that it's not as terrible as I remember.

–Annie

UPDATE: NAME THAT TRAUMA SOLVED! Extra special thanks to Va of Va's The Cinema Experience for emailing us MERMAID'S SCAR.

I remember seeing part of a Creature Feature-type movie on weekend television as a kid. This was probably in the late ‘70s, but the movie was an older black and white film. I don't remember much about it, and what I do might be distorted or wrong at this point.

Anyway, I think some people found one or more mysterious rock eggs. The eggs might have been baseball or softball sized. The eggs are brought back to a house and are left unattended. The people may have left the eggs in their fireplace. One or more monsters hatch out of the eggs and leave "burned" creature footprints on the carpet. I guess the monsters had extremely hot body temperatures.

I don't remember much about the monsters, but for some reason I think they might have been reptilian and/or invisible. I assume the monsters attacked various people, but I can't remember anything else.
Any help figuring out this movie would be much appreciated!

Thanks,

Carl

UPDATE: NAME THAT TRAUMA SOLVED! Special thanks to DavidFullam for solving this one with SOUND OF HORROR!

YO TRAUMATOTS!

I got one for you guys….

It happened when I was 11 or so. There was some claymation ‘toon on T.V. I was in a restaurant so there wasn't any sound, but I vividly remember:

1. A woman in a wrestling ring surrounded by acid
2. A dog (her dog?) getting thrown into the acid
3. The dog struggling in the acid
4. Cut to a scene a few seconds later with a dog SKELETON, still moving, in the acid pit and then sinking

I want to say it was CELEBRITY DEATHMATCH because of the wrestling ring.

Thanks.

UPDATE: NAME THAT TRAUMA SOLVED! Thanks to Tracky JonJon for pointing us towards the correct episode of CELEBRITY DEATHMATCH.