Category: Name That Trauma!

I have a real stumper – just a few flashes of memory. An unpopular teenage guy is walking home and is taunted by a younger girl on the way. He throws a rock at her – maybe he hits her with a rock – anyway, she dies. His mother's solution is to move him into the basement and conceal the entrance to the basement. His mother dies, and another family moves in. I remember he steals food from them at night.

The final scene I can recall shows him stabbing one of his paintings/ drawings/ murals in the subject's eye and blood coming out. Saw it on T.V. in the mid-‘70s. I don't know if it was made-for-T.V. or if there'd been a cinematic release.

Cheers,

Karen

UNK SEZ: Karen, that one's a cinch, you're talking about the made-for-television classic BAD RONALD from 1974. It starred SCOTT JACOBY and was based on a novel by JOHN HOLBROOK VANCE. If you'd like to know what we here at Kindertrauma think about that movie, just buy the DVD (there's a link right down there on the right) and check out its back…we're proud to have a laudatory blurb posted there for all to see!

Trying to find the name of a fire safety film that scared the crap out of me in the ‘70s.

When I was about 13, around 1977, they put us in the school auditorium and showed us a fire safety filmed that haunted me for years.

Here's the setup: there's a family of 4, Mom, Dad, and two red-haired kids, one boy and one girl. You spend the first part of the movie following them through the nice summer day: the dad goes and sits in an office, the mom cleans things and maybe goes shopping, and the kids walk over to some pond and go fishing. The narrator remarks on what a lovely day it's been.

Then, after dinner, the dad is sitting on the couch smoking and drops some ash behind the couch. Then in the middle of the night the couch catches on fire, and then the house, and everyone dies. The son dies because he's sleeping in the top bunk and smoke inhalation gets him without him waking up. The daughter wakes up, but tries to leave by the bedroom door instead of the window and the smoke gets her. The mom dies because she tries to get the kids instead of leaving the house. I forget how the dad dies.

Pretty horrible, huh? Thank goodness home smoke detectors came out around then or I wouldn't have gotten any sleep for years. I have Googled around for old fire safety films but nothing seems to match. I don't think it looked particularly dated when I saw it, but it could have been filmed in the ‘60s and I probably wouldn't have noticed in '77. It was definitely in color.

Any ideas?

– JLP

Hi, I love your site. Here's one I don't know the title of:

I remember this as a horror anthology that was shown on ELVIRA's TV show in the mid 80s, but I checked a list of the films she played and it did not match any of those. The part I remember was about a strict schoolteacher who is mean to her students. Eventually the children attack her in her home. I think they were wearing Halloween masks, which may have been removed to reveal actual facial deformities.

This scared the crap out of me as a kid, and I've never seen it mentioned in discussions about horror anthology films. Maybe you can help.

Thanks,

Ryan

UNK SEZ:: So there I was grabbing my magnifying glass and galoshes, prepping up to sleuth the Googles when I get another email from Ryan saying:

Actually I just found it. It was a segment of the film HOUSE OF THE DEAD, and was indeed shown on ELVIRA.

UNK SEZ: So Ryan solved his own "Name That Trauma" and I got to learn about a movie I never heard of. Thanks Ryan, I'm always interested to hear about any horror movies that I may have missed especially if they happen to be an anthology. HOUSE OF THE DEAD aka ALIEN ZONE is from 1978 and any interested folks can watch it HERE.

Kindertrauma,

I just discovered your site, and thank goodness, because I have been trying to think of the name of this movie for years now.

I saw it on HBO in '86 or 87', I think. The story is told in flashback. A brother commits incest with his sister, spawning a monstrous creature that lives in the basement of their mansion years later. The brother is middle-aged now, still living in his boyhood home. He has imaginary conversations with his long-dead father. In his flashback the father has discovered the incest and is trying to have a heart-to-heart with his teenage son…"I know you're very popular with the girls," he intones in a fatherly way, as an opener to accusing his son of incest. "Your sister was beside herself. She was in tears," or something like that. After being confronted, the brother relives murdering his father so many years before.

Meanwhile, there is a female visitor to the house. She knocks a bowl of fruit to the floor, and then bends down to pick it up. She is right over a floor grating. Cut to the offspring inside the floor grating, looking up at the pretty lady, breathing heavily. The ends of her long scarf are on the grating. We see them get slowly pulled inside the grating. As she tries to stand up the monster starts slamming her face-first into the grating, over and over again, using the scarf as a handle. I don't think we see much gore, just her hand squeezing some grapes to mushy pulp, and then going limp as she finally dies. Her face is, we assume, fully pulped as well. Isn't this how Isadora Duncan really died?

Does anyone out there know what this movie is called? This scene is this movie gave me nightmares. So naturally, I want to see it again.

Many thanks,

Fred

UNK SEZ: Fred, the floor grate and the bowl of fruit give this one away. It's 1980's THE UNSEEN which was recently released on DVD. Check out our review HERE, it's a Kindertrauma favorite!

I've been trying to figure out what the name of this movie was. I think it was a short film that showed between features on HBO or Cinemax in the very early ‘80s. It was about a kid who moved from Earth to another planet where it rained all the time. I can't remember the gender of the Earthling, but he or she was always drawing pictures of the sun. Anyway, the kids on the rain planet didn't believe the protagonist's stories about sunshine, and they taunted him or her, chased them and locked them in a closet.

Wouldn't you know it, right then it stopped raining and the sun came out and all those jerks were running and playing having forgotten about the kid they'd locked up. I know I didn't dream this but I haven't found anyone else who saw it.

Maybe one of your readers remembers it?

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Actually, this is one I remember! It ran on HBO in the early/ mid-'80s and it was based on the RAY BRADBURY short story "All Summer in a Day" and, from what I recall, it always was shown in tandem with the other BRADBURY inspired short "The Electric Grandmother."

Dig out your sunglasses Erin, 'cause here it is in its entirety:

Hey, thanks for all the retro-trauma, and thanks for linking my blog in your sidebar.

I've just spent some time looking back at every "Name That Trauma" post from your most excellent site, and was unable to find any reference to my film in question. I saw it at the theater in 1975 or 1976 as a five or six-year-old, and I'm assuming it was first-run. It was a matinee, but not a kiddie film, as I recall some PG-level sexual content. The most traumatizing bit was a woman with white hair and white skin who was out in the woods and threatening some people in a cabin. She had no lines, but just snarled at the camera. More specifically, there was a Native American Shaman-guy who had some magical powers. At one point, he dumps some powder out of a small leather bag on his belt to create a line across a road. A car drives up and smashes into it, as if it were an invisible wall. That's about all I remember.

I'm sure this movie actually happened. I'd love to see it again to check if that white-skinned woman is as horrifying as I remember, or just laughable in retrospect. Won't someone help?

UPDATE: NAME THAT TRAUMA SOLVED! Special thanks to Reader BaronExu for knowing it was SHADOW OF THE HAWK from 1976 with JAN-MICHAEL VINCENT.

I remember a movie from the late 1960s/early 1970s that was a Christmas anthology (I think.)

The only thing I remember is an image of a toy soldier in a waterfall/river/body of water and that of a little girl.

I vaguely remember the term "Kris Kringle" used in the movie trailer, and that it was shown as a double feature with THE CHRISTMAS THAT ALMOST WASN'T (again, I think.)

I also remember that it was somewhat creepy.

Any ideas? I would love to complete this partial memory…..

Sincerely,

Tony M.

Got one that I'm sure someone knows. I remember watching late night anthology horror/sci-fi a lot with my mom in the ‘80s and there's a couple of shorts that I can vaguely recall. It's seems like it might have been a RAY BRADBURY THEATER deal.

One short dealt with paralysis. A man gets in a car accident and can't move, but he brings you along with his inner dialogue. Something must've been sour with the guy, since most of the stories in series like that involved a comeuppance. He's taken to a hospital, and in SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW fashion, pleads fruitlessly that's he's not dead. Most of the short is from his viewpoint, looking at the wheels spinning from the wreck, looking up at the doctors, etc.

I'm almost positive the second short I can't place was during the same episode. It dealt with a man and his wife. The wife had been attacked or raped, and the husband was picking her up from the hospital. On the way home, she shrieks at the husband to stop the car, that's she's just seen her attacker. He parks the car, beats or kills the guy, then continues driving home. Seconds later, she claims to have just seen her attacker. He says something like "Are you sure? I thought that other guy was the one!" and she replies something like "No, I'm sure this time." I think he beats/kills one or 2 more guys until he realizes wifey's brains have gone bye-bye.

Love the site!

Jimmy F.

UPDATE: NAME THAT TRAUMA SOLVED! Special thanks to reader jaakko for knowing that these were episodes "Breakdown" and "Revenge" from 1985's THE NEW ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS.

Please help me out with verifying that this commercial really did exist; In the mid/late '90s there was a commercial on T.V. that played in Canada for Rice Krispies/Rice Krispies Squares that involved carolers singing outside the home of a man and a woman. She fed them Rice Crispies squares, all was well with the world, and the commercial ended. BUT…there was a nanosecond epilogue after the commercial wrapped when the man grabbed at his eye socket and said, "Honey, my eye just fell out!"

EVERYONE saw that commercial, but NO ONE noticed that extra couple of seconds except me. Then one day a friend called up and proclaimed me "not crazy" because she had noticed it too. This is not a joke, or put-on, or the result of drug-use. I swear this actually existed.

Does anyone at KinderTrauma remember this, or have the kind of all-powerful access to finding it that you seem to have with everything else oddball that has haunted someone for years?