Category: Traumafessions

The "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s was in full swing in my small town when I was introduced to one of the main recruiting tools of the dark lord, Dungeons and Dragons. TSR's role playing game was a one way ticket to a steady diet of brimstone and piping hot Fresca for all eternity. A few of my older friends had mentioned that they were starting to play, and I was more than just a little interested. I had stumbled across a copy of the "Dungeon Masters Guide" at my local Waldenbooks and was captivated by the cover, a wizard or mage type person fought valiantly with a Paladin companion against a giant red devil wielding an equally giant scimitar. I remember glancing around the bookstore hoping that the devil or one of his minions wouldn't notice me as I dared to pick up the book. As if on cue a small black pamphlet fell out of the book and on the floor. It was the infamous Jack Chick tract, "Dark Dungeons."

Jack Chick tracts had already traumatized me for a few years prior to this point. The tract, "Bewitched" had exposed me to the horrors of drug use and the day to day battle that praying grandmothers had with Satan himself. The image of poor Ashley Wilson's face melting off as she looked into a mirror during a drug "Freak out" had insured that I would stay away from drugs until I was at least out of middle school!

"Dark Dungeons" is one of the mostly widely known and parodied Chick tracts. Poor Marcie and Black Leaf ! The horrors of role playing games were spelled out as people died with their characters, while other cast, "Mind Bondage" spells on their parents so they could play more. The reclusive Jack Chick spread his hysterical propaganda with a formidable output on many subjects, Halloween and Catholicism being rich and oft visited targets. It's debated whether or not Jack Chick is one person or a group of people writing under a pseudonym, but what is not debated is that his methods impacted readers.

I eventually learned by playing Dungeons and Dragons, that it wasn't a portal to hell and damnation, but rather a conduit for the imagination. How many people wrote stories about their adventures and went on to discover great fantasy literature or even developed the games that we play today. Dungeons and Dragons hysteria also produced the seriously awful movie, "Mazes and Monsters", starring a pre-fame Tom Hanks as a role playing fan that takes things a little too seriously.

Every once and a while I feel like pulling the dice out of storage and dusting off my trusty cleric character sheet, but then I realize that there is real life to attend to, and that Greyhawk has passed me by. Hopefully my son will gravitate towards role playing games and exercise his imagination with me on a campaign someday.

— Eric J.

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I love your site. I found it after reading Kris Straub's masterful creepypasta "Candle Cove" and finding your interview with him about it.

When I was little, I saw an animated TV movie, PUFF THE MAGIC DRAGON AND THE INCREDIBLE MR. NOBODY. It's about a boy named Terry who has an imaginary friend, an anthropomorphic duck named Nobody. Terry's active imagination is met with scorn from parents, teachers, and kids. He makes some art for class using spaghetti, but it's so well done that the teacher doesn't believe that he made it himself, so eventually he starts attributing his art and talent to Nobody. I think I must have been too little (probably five or younger) to cope with the many surreal sequences in the movie. It also traumatized me because I also was very creative as a kid, and adults and kids treated me like that all the time!

There is a crack under Terry's window and he says he sees a path in it. Everyone thinks he's totally weird. The scene where the crack transforms into a path leading to a trippy sunset was really disturbing to me as a kid. It's probably the thing about the movie that traumatized me the most. I realize that it was supposed to be this kid's happy fantasy, but it just seemed awful to me that you could disappear into a wall and walk along a path that seemed to stretch on forever. That image haunted me, and I even remember being scared of an actual crack on the wall of my house.

Then when Terry gets fed up with being misunderstood, he tries to run away, but Puff the Magic Dragon transforms the crack in the wall into an actual path, and the two of them go to a surreal fantasy world together. All sorts of bizarre things happen. One of the most disturbing was when Puff shows Terry some kids who are being very mean and evil. They also look at a large version of Terry's pasta art that really creeped me out, especially the spider-like trees. And the surreal sequence of musical instruments floating through the sky scared me as well. They made me feel threatened, like they were swarms of monsters or something. These images were so embedded in my subconscious that they still seem creepy to me now, even though other people seem to think it's a cute, heartwarming movie.

To the good people at Kindertrauma:

Assuming you're interested, this is a two part-episode Traumafession, connected only by my father and his Anglophilia. In hindsight, I realize that my dear old dad chose one of my Christmas gifts when I was eleven years old, a board game called The Dark Tower. The game featured a dark gray plastic fortress tower with crenelated edges and a black electronic display screen with buttons that, when pressed, would randomly determine your fate as you moved across the board. The object was to collect keys and conquer the tower, or something like that.

I remember two things about this weird remedial-Dungeons & Dragons board game with the mysterious revolving monolithic phallus (I was just about to enter puberty, so give me a break.) One was the playing card depicting enemies called the "brigands." (This has to appeal to my dad, so they can't be called "boogeymen" or "demons" or anything pedestrian like that.) These fiends were depicted as howling creatures bearing white soulless eyes, black thin bodies with sharp shoulders, fanged beaks, and gnarled goat horns on their heads. They freaked me out, but what was even worse, oddly enough, was encountering and slaying a dragon, a moment celebrated by the tower with an early electronic dragon-shrieking-as-it-dies sound. It gave me the willies, but of course, victory is always bittersweet. (Also jarring were the "plague," "lost," and "starvation" sounds, all of which can be heard HERE.)

The reason why I know my father decided to get this for me: I stumbled on a 1981 television commercial for this game with ORSON WELLES in dark cloak narrating a suitably histrionic tale of battle that one might enjoy in the process of playing Dark Tower. ORSON WELLES, of course, is American, not British, but my dad adored his Shakespearean gravitas, and he probably thought, "If it's good enough for ORSON, it's good enough for my son," possibly not realizing (or in denial about the fact) that poor penniless ORSON would whore himself out for frozen peas and cheap wine at this point. ORSON's enormous bulk takes up half the screen while the titular dark tower glows ominously in the background.

The following summer my dad treated me to a trip to England in order to follow my brother's rugby team on a short tour, during which the American teenagers would be repeatedly, methodically, and quite naturally annihilated by various English school boy teams (perhaps that dragon-slaying sound would be appropriate here). Anyhow, one of the London sites my dad and I visited was Madame Tussauds Wax Museum, including, of course, the notorious Chamber of Horrors. Keep in mind that my father would routinely take me to films that were not exactly… age-appropriate: I was nine during the legendary Summer of 1980, when he took me not only to see THE CHANGELING with GEORGE C. SCOTT, but also THE SHINING.

So here was the Chamber of Fricking Horrors at eleven: the Manson Family with shaved heads, some bespectacled freak named John Christie who dismembered women and secreted their body parts in various nooks and crannies of his home (you get a glimpse of these through a crack in the kitchen walls of the display), and on the staircase heading down to the chamber, there was a wax figure of Adolf Hitler encased in thick glass, probably because too many people would deface the bastard's image. Worst of all—for me, at least—was the display of Marat's body in a bathtub. He was the French revolutionary with a bad skin condition that required, for some reason, lots of baths; Charlotte Corday took advantage of his vulnerable position and stabbed him repeatedly with a knife. His body was immortalized by the French painter David, and this wax display was modeled after it. One had to mount several steps in order to look into the bathtub, as I recall, like walking ceremonially past an open coffin. Marat's head was swaddled in a towel, bearing a disturbingly peaceful look on his face, as if he were just napping and might bolt awake at any second.

Back at our hotel, the bathroom had a claw-foot bathtub that reminded me of the one in which Marat sat slumped in death. From my bedroom at night, I could see the dark form of the tub, and I imagined the silhouette of a toweled head slowly lifting above the edge. It was the first time in years that I joined my parents in their bed, and in the cold light of morning, I felt like a total wuss.

God bless the Internet, right?

Thanks for all your good work.

Cheers,

— Greg from Oakland

No single event can top the lasting trauma induced by my childhood viewing of THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, that film scared me so bad that it rearranged my chromosomes. However other events, smaller in individual scope but horribly disturbing in cumulative effect, deserve to be mentioned. Specifically, I confess my lasting, great fear of 1970's album covers.

In the ‘70s, album cover art was kind of a big deal. The cover for an LP was huge by today's standards and it presented a big canvas upon which the music and graphic artists could express themselves. In the race to make album covers memorable, the art quickly turned very weird. Parents would buy those albums and put them into their groovy record cabinets where they were inevitably discovered by curious tykes like me who would spend the next years trying to erase their psychedelic, grotesque and demonic images from our minds:

I have mentioned the first offender before: Queen's "News of the World." This one belonged to my aunt. Absolutely great album. Murderous cover. The interior fold-out was ten-times worse though, with its depiction of bug-eyed people fleeing the giant killer robot.

The Eagles – "Hotel California". Part of my parent's collection. This one is kinda controversial, because pretty much everyone denies that there is a screaming, illuminated face in the lower left-hand window of the "hotel" on the cover of this album. Whatever – I saw that screaming face right away the first time that inspected the album.The fact that no one else could apparently see it made everything that much worse.

Black Sabbath – "Black Sabbath." My uncle had this one. Ozzy and co. managed to scare the world into believing that Black Sabbath was in league with the Devil. This album cover convinced me that Ozzy WAS the Devil.

The Rolling Stones – "Goat's Head Soup." This was a fairly popular album and I'm surprised that more people don't recall being scared by the bizarre image of Mick Jagger's smiling head in a bag on the cover. This album made me consider the awful possibility that something called "goat's head soup" actually existed and that kids somewhere were being forced to eat it.

Funkadelic – "Maggot Brain." My uncle's collection. Hmmm. Screaming woman buried up to her neck a la MOTEL HELL. That's nice. The back cover dispelled any hope that the poor woman got out of there alive. I would remain wary of funk for years.

Elton John – "Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy." Not outright terrifying, but filled with lots of disturbing, freakish details. I was also intimidated when Elton John appeared on THE MUPPET SHOW. And on talk shows. Ok, Elton John just generally freaked me out.

This list is by no means comprehensive, but definitely hits many of the worst cases. I'll leave it to my fellow Traumaniacs to fill us in on any horrors from the record cabinet that I left out.

My very first video store was called "Hollywood Video" and it was located at the King of Prussia mall. It was a tiny place as home video was still in its infancy. The horror section was about the size of a closet door. I've always been fond of bragging that I watched every horror tape that was available but I realize now that is not true and I have been exaggerating all these years. The truth is that I could never bring myself to watch a film called DEMENTED (1980)!

A major reason for that is because DEMENTED is a rape movie but unlike say, LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT and I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE it doesn't have nearly the reputation to push me into enduring it. In fact, when I worked at a video store years and years later I bought a used copy of DEMENTED for the place and I still never watched it- even for free. I suppose my main reason for resisting mostly involves the photos on the back, particularly one of the rapists wearing ghoulish masks. There's also a photo of the attack in progress with a couple guys wearing stockings on their heads. There is nothing scarier than a stocking on the head. I'm reminded of both THE BOOGEY MAN (1980) and the SALLY STRUTHERS' TV movie A GUN IN THE HOUSE (1981) both of which freaked me out at around the same time.

Another thing that unnerved me about the box for DEMENTED was the fact that it was pink! There's something twisted about using such a bright color in juncture with something horror related. Who would do such a thing? For a while DEMENTED was available on Netflix Streaming but it seems to have disappeared into the ether once again. Maybe that's for the best. Though I have to say, watching the trailer now makes me think that the movie is probably too amateurish to be taken quite so seriously by me. Has my aversion been unwarranted all these years? I sorta love the synth-y soundtrack! In any case, the box still gives me the creeps.

By the time I was 5 or 6, I had already seen Psycho, House of Wax, and House on Haunted Hill (the originals of course!) One night, Psycho was on a double bill with the Brian DePalma classic Carrie on TBS Superstation. My mom decided to let me stay up and watch it, figuring, I guess, if he can make it through Psycho, he can make it through Carrie.

WRONG! I was fine up until Margaret White drags her poor child, Carrie, into the dark prayer closet. What caused me to run out the room screaming was that St. Sebastian statue in there with Carrie. The way its horrified green/yellow-ish eyes looked into your soul, judging you…the candle light flickering…the organ music! It was just too much! I HATED organ music as a child. There was nothing scarier.

UNK SEZ: Thanks for another great traumafession Chris! Folks can check out Chris' previous traumafessions HERE and HERE and remember, you can watch his movie PERVERSION any time you like over HERE!

As a kid with an over-active imagination, the thing that scared me most was a poster for a SAW film (probably). You could just see the outlines of something that looked like a rotten green head under a huge "censored" sticker. The bus drove past our school everyday while we were having lunch, leaving me pretty terrified and unable to eat. Am I the only one wimpy enough to be scared by a poster?

xx, Flo

During the first half of the 1990s, which I remember as a generally underwhelming time for Kindertrauma TV, late night HBO blissfully bludgeoned my unsuspecting young mind with everything from Suspiria to Scissors to Sorority House Massacre 2. All of those movies made a lasting impression. But none of them traumatized me like Fabrizio Laurenti's Witchery, starring David Hasselhoff and Linda Blair.

In 1991, I was eight years old. At this point, I was already obsessed with horror movies. I often tracked them down by watching The Prevue Guide Channel, an oddly hypnotic station on which T.V. listings would rise in an endless scroll across the bottom half of the screen, while previews of coming attractions for movies like Rent A Cop played on top.

One night, I became fascinated by the Prevue Guide trailer for Witchery. So far as I recall, the trailer included four scenes: a girl in a wheelchair saying "Your dad shouldn't buy that house! My mom told me, a witch lives there!," a woman standing in a black cloak on a beach, Linda Blair decked out in a nightgown and huge hair laughing maniacally in a voice that was not her own, and the word Witchery, the letter "T" replaced by an inverted crucifix.

At that age I was already enthusiastic about ominous children, excessive women, spooky houses, and the defilement of religious imagery. I did not know the meaning of this word "witchery," which sounded like witchcraft only somehow more sinister. In my head I imagined that the movie was about a brothel or women's boarding house full of witches. I had to see it. Unfortunately, Witchery was airing on Showtime, and my family didn't get the channel. So I waited…waited…waited… Finally, months later, it appeared on HBO in the middle of the night, and I taped it.

I watched in awe as a group of sinners ended up at a mysterious, deserted hotel on an island in "Massachusetts." One by one, they were transported to some kind of alternate dimension where they were brutally raped, tortured, and/or murdered by the deformed minions of a glamorous old woman in a black cloak. The woman might have been the vengeful ghost of a pregnant witch who (in flashback) jumped from a window to her death to escape murderous pilgrims, or she might have been a has-been Hollywood actress. Or both. The movie leaves it artfully ambiguous.

To me, this was one of those movies that, pre-Internet, seemed so weird that they could only have been documentaries transmitted directly from other worlds. There was so much I didn't know when I watched Witchery: I didn't know that it was (or would one day be) considered to be notoriously awful by many horror geeks. I didn't know that Hildegard Knef, the evil old woman, was a totally chic and fabulous German movie star and chanteuse. Sometime later, when I first saw Baywatch (which had mysteriously escaped my un-monitored eyes up to that point), I thought "Oh! That's the guy from Witchery!" when The Hoff appeared on screen.

I also didn't realize, while I was watching Witchery, that it was traumatizing me. While watching the movie, I didn't notice feeling scared. But something about Witchery got to me and, like most traumas, the effects didn't occur until later. In the coming days and weeks, I couldn't stop thinking about Witchery's weird atmosphere. When I looked in the mirror, I'd be petrified of seeing Hildgard Knef's scary diva face looking back at me (a recurring warning in the film). I was haunted by a horror movie convention that always gets to me: a film projector that mysteriously ran on its own without being plugged in, showing the visitors avant-garde witchy cinema. For the first time, I found myself having an existential crisis, pondering questions like "Can one really feel good that some of the characters escaped the island at the end of the movie, when they first had to watch their loved ones be brutally murdered?"

Witchery haunted me so much that I launched a personal boycott against anything that had to do with the horror genre for what seems, in my memory, like years (in reality, it might have been months). I taped over Witchery with "Paul Simon at Central Park." When that wasn't enough to destroy its evil powers, I hid the tape in the back of my closet in my old bedroom (where it probably still resides!). Not since the Flowers in the Attic crisis of 1989 had my world been so up-ended by media, and nothing has had such an effect on me since.

Like so many kinder-traumatized, I watched the object of terror again over a decade later and thought that much about it was kind of inept and funny. And yet sometimes, when I go to bed anxious, I still dream that Hildegard Knef is coming to get me. And sometimes, when I wake up in the middle of the night and half-consciously wander to the bathroom, I start to worry that maybe, just maybe, I'll see her staring back at me from the mirror…

— Ben S.

Browsing over RedBox's offerings, I noticed that they had the original Batman movie on offer. This is the campy 1966 Batman movie with Adam West and Burt Ward (Baaaaaaaby on booooooard…something…something…Burt Wards…this song writes itself!) I innocently rented it to relive the fun, campy atmosphere of that crazy, tilted, pastel world Batman inhabited at one time. Little did I know that a KinderTrauma was around the bend.

Not having seen this movie since I was a kid when it was shown on ABC's 4:30 Movie (anyone else remember the 4:30 movie? I completely forgot about a scene that totally freaked me out as a kid. The kicker is that upon seeing it, my mind allowed me to peer inside and see why it was so traumatic. I'm sure, since we're all here, that we're equally fascinated with the mysteries of what scares us as children, so to have my mind reveal itself in regards to a trauma was a wild experience.

(As an aside, it seems KinderTraumas are part of the human experience through all cultures and ages. The Indians of South America developed a whole religion around KinderTraumas wherein they believe that traumas from childhood burden us with negative energy and emotions. To free people from such traumas, they developed cleansing ceremonies called "limpias" to first detect traumas and then cleanse them. You can see such a limpia HERE.

Nevertheless, when I was watching the Batman movie there was one part where the Penguin (Burgess Meredith) uses a dehydrator to turn his minions into powder. The minions line up and are turned into powder one by one without flinching. The utter lack of emotion or fear in the minions as they're powderized (mixed with the weird, detached feeling the special effect added) completely freaked me out when I was a kid and that angst came roaring back when viewing it as an adult.You can see the scene HERE.

I started to wonder what creeped me out so much concerning that scene and it was like a trap door opened in my mind and the Architect said, "Step inside so we can talk awhile." So I sat down with Mr. Subconscious, sipped some tea and chatted for a while. He told me that what creeped me out was the fact that these men so willingly let themselves be turned into powder (killed is what I thought as kid) without fighting back or protesting or resisting, happily standing there waiting to be disintegrated. Nor did they flinch when they saw the others around them atomized. What made it completely traumatizing was that they were giving their lives up for evil, happily marching to their own destruction. And then Mr. Subconscious held up flash cards of suicide bombers, Nazi SS officers, kamikazes, and others who were so intoxicated with evil that they would happily sacrifice their life for their mad overlords. Talk about epiphany.

It was a cathartic experience if nothing else. And it was one KinderTrauma I could put to sleep in a warm, comfy bed where it wouldn't slowly tug at the back of my mind anymore. But in the end, seeing Lee Meriwether in the Catwoman suit again made it all better.

— bdwilcox