Category: Traumafessions

It lasts just a second, but in this scene from the Pink Floyd movie you see Pink at 6:38 encrusted with his Comfortably Numb goo, his eyes looking very scary.

In the late '80s or early '90s, I caught the last 40 minutes of a horror film that was truly chilling.

'The Monster Club' is a film split into 3 vignettes.

In the last one, a man drives into a mysterious village and slowly discovers the townspeople do not want him to leave. He then meets a young girl who decides to help him attempt escape.

The ending has a fantastic twist!

The rest of the film stars Vincent Price and other Hollywood old-schoolers and features an all star soundtrack as well. (The animated, dancing skeleton scene is infamous!)

Anyway, I've set up this youtube link to start at exactly the last story. Enjoy!

Where do I begin?

1) I remember watching Phantom of the Paradise on TV when I was about five or six years old. It left me slightly confused and creeped out. I actually love that movie now. It's funny and cheezy at the same time.

2) Carrie. Saw that when I was about seven years old. The music, the blood, the hand popping out of the grave at the end. My twin used to threaten that the "hand" was going to get me. Yep. She did that for at least five or six years.

3) Amityville Horror. I was afraid to look at crucifixes and rocking chairs for a looong time.

4) I remember the nanny committing suicide by hanging when I watched The Omen on TV. Again, I was only a child. (My older sisters watched these movies in front of us.)

5) The Exorcist. I think I was about eight years old. Part I & II. Just bits and pieces of the movie I remember watching. I was afraid to go up the stairs and look at the white door that led to the bathroom because the door reminded me of the girl's bedroom.

There's probably more but those movies above stick out of my mind the most.

Hello,

I am obsessed with this site. As a child, I was a bona fide televisual masochist, and remain so to this day. I could submit any number of things, from the fear that lingered after one look at the cover of the Dolls VHS to my fervent childhood belief that Chuckie lived under my bed with Talking Tina from The Twilight Zone. But instead, I'll focus on one viewing experience that left haunted me through my childhood until well into my twenties: viewing a Lifetime movie starring Valerie Bertinelli titled Murder of Innocence.

You're probably thinking, "Lifetime?!" But this is one fucked up tale. Valerie Bertinelli is a perky young waitress who catches the eye of a handsome young man. They marry before he realizes that she is batshit crazy. Sure, he knew she was a little nervous and indecisive, but when he returns home one day to find the refrigerator full of make-up and the walls covered in lipstick drawings, he realizes some serious shit is about to go down. They get divorced and she goes completely off the wall––making hang-up phone calls to her ex-sister-in-law, crushing dead flowers with gloved hands and stealing cuts of raw meat from the grocery store.

The thing that freaked me out the most––I was already a very astute student of psychology as a child––was that her symptoms made no sense. She obsessively washed her hands, but then hoarded and fondled raw meat; she loves kids but feeds them drugged rice krispie treats. Of course, it all ends terribly: she buys a gun and shoots a couple of kids in a classroom, retreats to a nearby house and then kills herself. It haunted me for years, until eventually I found it on Hulu (Below). And then it haunted me all over again. YOU'RE WELCOME.

I think I've read this one as a repeat offender, but I could be wrong. I know this traumatized quite a few of my generation, and it eventually was pulled from Sesame Street. This link probably won't last long, so view it while you can.

It probably isn't as scary as you remember it, but if you DO remember it, you probably remember being scared by it as a child. Enjoy the memory.

One of the earliest TV memories I have, is of the show, 'SOAP'.

I haven't thought about this for years, but the episode that totally freaked me out, was the one where the baby became possessed by the Devil.

Alfred Hitchcock Hour episode 'Special Delivery'

This is online somewhere. Can't locate where. A little boy orders a kit for growing mushrooms. Slowly, the boy's personality changes and his behavior becomes odd. I think what freaked me out about this episode, is that it was one of the few times on television that something strange like that .. would happen to a child. Which definitely doesn't happen these days.

Thanks! Great site!

One of the staples my misspent youth was enjoying, "That's Incredible!". It was a kitschy hodge-podge of stuntmen, magicians, psychics and other dentally challenged fraudsters looking for their fifteen minutes of fame. I loved it! Sometime this show would slip in some really disturbing stuff, and this is prime-time TV mind you. One segment was about this lady who died and had this vision (near death experiences was a T.I. mainstay btw) of Jesus and the Devil battling for her soul! The cinematography was creepy! It was filmed in black and white, and if I remember correctly, they used this low camera with a fisheye lens looking up at these two hooded characters writhing about. And the scenery was like this burned out hillside with a dead tree. Very nightmarish! I wasn't prepared for that kind of imagery on a Monday night! Might have been the inspiration for the cult art film, "The Begotten". But who knows. Anyway, the next day, I remember a schoolmate being equally disturbed by that segment as I was. Wish I could see it one more time.

Oh and hey! While we're on the subject of Creepy and That's Incredible!, let's talk about John Davidson! I mean, what's going on behind those eyes? That smug smile! (Cue psycho shower scene music) My Dad never liked him, ever since that streets of San Francisco episode where he played a cross-dressing (as Carol Channing) murderer, he didn't want anything to do with him! I later learned that Johnny Depp is also afraid of John Davidson…. so there! I'm not afraid as the aforementioned, but I wouldn't want to meet him on a lonely road at night.

Well, I've done it, fellow KinderCats and KinderKittens; I have found what I believe to be my earliest childhood trauma inspired by the media, going all the way back to when I was three or four. This required a bit of YouTube digging, but at long last it has been exhumed. It's pretty silly, but for my parents, this one was oft-mentioned to friends.

From a very early age, my folks took pride in my fondness for scary stuff. This was linked with my early ability to read, and since I was a straight A student, they saw no problem with encouraging my macabre tastes. Typical parental bragging would usually ensue, but it was frequently linked with this observation:

"And to think that when he was a baby he was scared of a commercial for Zest soap!"

It was true. I was a pretty placid little kid, but during the handful of times this spot hit the airwaves, I would cry like the hordes of Hell had been unleashed against me:

To me this is a kindertrauma in the purest sense of the concept – an otherwise innocuous something that, for whatever reason(s), pushes buttons that set off a chain reaction of fear. Seen in retrospect over four decades later, it has absolutely no similar effect, but it's easy for me to identify three elements that came together to make this commercial terrifyingly toxic to my very young sensitivities:

1) Bars of soap should not unwrap themselves. I was three, what did I know of the world? Was this something that could happen anytime to the bars we would pass in the supermarket aisle? Or even worse, to the ones Mom kept in the hallway closet? And once unwrapped, could said bars…

2) produce lather that was ALIVE? Those suds were out to get me, and I'm pretty certain I associated lather with getting it in my eyes and stinging like hell. Stephen King has often remarked that the purest form of a monster is that of the blob – mindless, hungry, consuming anything in its path. Some primal fear was resonating here, people. But the worst of all by far was…

3) The voice. That "…ooooOOOOH" grows out of nowhere as the soap exudes from the unwrapped bar, the sound made by ghosts, the wordless siren-song of all things spooky. (I'll even go so far as to assume that as a child I thought the female singer was dead, spectral; after all, we couldn't see her, right?) She has the oversold quality that's common to 50s and early 60s singers of being just a bit too emotive, too enthused about that shampoo lather. I think it's something David Lynch nails whenever he employs music from this period. Hearing it now, I recognize that "voodoo lounge" quality to the melody that was popular at the time. Plus, the tune is neither major nor minor but modal, a relative rarity in pop music that makes it more eerie and exotic.

I've found a couple of other Zest ads from subsequent years that use that four-note "Oooh, what lather" motif, so this commercial must have done its job at branding. But none of them had the effect this one had upon me. It was my first clue in life that I was hardwired to detect the horrible and the haunted.

And to answer the obvious question: Yes, I occasionally use Zest.