I was frightened by the old British Public Information films of the seventies. They told of a world where not only stepping out of the front door meant entering a world of danger, but they emphasised that staying in could lead to electrocution, sudden death by slipping and that frankly it wasn't worth getting out of bed in case you died.
Thanks,
— wellyousaythat
AUNT JOHN SEZ: To read more by wellyousaythat on British Public Information films, be sure to check out his blog posting HERE.
The video for MICHAEL JACKSON's "Leave Me Alone" was in heavy rotation on MTV when I was a kid. I wasn't old enough to be in charge of the remote yet so whenever I heard the music start for it, I knew I had at least a minute to get away from the T.V. and find something else to do. The part that freaked me out about it when I was a kid was when MICHAEL dances with the Elephant Man's skeleton. My Mom had told me that M.J. bought the Elephant Man's bones which she said was pretty morbid. At 8 years old, I also thought it was very strange.
I didn't know who the Elephant Man really was. The only frame of reference for a man that resembled an elephant I had was my Snout Spout figure from the HE-MAN/SHE-RA cartoons. To think that there was an actual 6-foot-tall man with the head of an elephant walking around at one time and now MICHAEL JACKSON had his bones at his house really disturbed me.
Years later, I saw the movie THE ELEPHANT MAN with my Mom. I remember feeling sorry for him and thinking how silly I felt believing the Elephant Man actually had the head of an elephant as portrayed in the video for "Leave Me Alone." It also turns out JACKSON never actually purchased the bones, although he did make an offer to buy them.
— Grimpressions
I just discovered your website and I can't stop reading it! I'm reliving a lot of childhood horrors seeing THE EVIL HULK, MAGIC movie trailer, TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE opening, and so many others. But the thing that scared me the most as a kid (and I was quite the scaredy-cat) was Bigfoot!
Although I grew up in New England, I believed Bigfoot would come cross-country from the Pacific Northwest to get me in my sleep. The blurry black and white film clip of him trudging along in the woods was my first introduction, followed by what seemed like a never ending series of movies, T.V. shows and commercials throughout the mid ‘70s that would keep me up all night. The IN SEARCH OF episode featuring Bigfoot certainly didn't help. But I didn't know true terror until I saw the ultimate monster: Bionic Bigfoot!
There were two versions. The first was played by ANDRE THE GIANT, the second by TED CASSIDY. Both were slightly different but equally terrifying. I was a huge SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN fan and had all of the action figures, except for the hard to find Bigfoot. Despite my utter fear, I had to have him. My parents went all over Massachusetts and Rhode Island trying to find him in time for Christmas and had him under the tree Christmas morning. However, I was not only terrified of the T.V. version, but the action figure also scared the hell out of me too! My parents went to all this trouble to find the damned beast and I couldn't even look at it!
In the end, Bionic Bigfoot became friends with Steve Austin and Jaime Sommers. They may have grown to love him, but I never could. He will always be my childhood nightmare.
— Tim
HELLO KINDERTRAUMA!
I've debated telling this one because I have yet to identify the details, but finally decided the world should know…
When I was in 3rd grade or so, I had a friend in my class who owned a peculiar book. From what I remember, it was taller and wider than a regular book, but much thinner and full of nothing but photos. We would look through it from time to time when the teacher wasn't around and I remember requesting him to bring it on many occasions… a request I would always regret once the day was over and it was bedtime. The subject matter was consistent; dead people. Decomposing people photographed in a portrait like manner.
Specifically, the photos were of remains of coffins that were dug up mere decades after their burial. Probably less time had passed; many of them had suits and dresses on that were not completely eaten away. They were mainly just skeletons with clothes on, and some even had some hair left. One photo was of a woman who apparently was buried alive; a separate photo of the top of the coffin contained scratches and pieces of fingernails.
To this day I do not know what the book was, why it was made or how it fell into the hands of school children (… and yes, I would love a copy).
AUNTIE SEZ: Before we were able to publish this Name That Trauma, Grayson followed up with this email:
If you DO use the kindertrauma that I sent, I have an update; I found the book!
Here it is on Amazon: The Mummies of Guanajuato.
Thanks Kindertrauma!
It all started with the Daleks. You know what a Dalek is, don't you? The amazingly long-lived British T.V. show DOCTOR WHO never quite conquered America, but I think even Americans will be familiar with the Daleks, because they're without doubt one of the scariest monsters ever invented. Hell, they're scarier than quite a few of the real ones.
According to legend, their creator, the late TERRY NATION, was in his local library when he happened to glance at the volume of The Encyclopedia Britannica labeled "DAL – LEK" and the proverbial cartoon light bulb appeared over his head. His next problem was figuring out what something as alien-sounding as a "Dalek" could possibly look like. But when he saw the pepperpots in the BBC canteen, cartoon light bulb #2 clicked on, and the rest is history and staggeringly lucrative toy-sales.
I was a nervous child. Pretty much anything concerning ghosts, monsters, or Very Bad Things generally would disturb my sleep-patterns for weeks. I even had recurring nightmares which nowadays would be identified by those excitable types with the tinfoil beanies as alien abductions, but fortunately this was back in those innocent days before Whitley Streiber explained to us that made-up space-aliens are real after all, so at least I didn't have that to worry about as well. But of course I was scared of Daleks. Every child in Britain was scared of Daleks. Well, we are talking about Nazi dustbins with voices that could grate cheese going around killing people for no particular reason, despite being armed only with an egg-whisk and a toilet-plunger, and anyone aware of this website knows that kids take that sort of stuff very seriously indeed.
And, being an imaginative sort of child, it got me thinking. So: you're four years old, and you know that a completely non-human, inorganic thing about five feet tall that looks like an everyday household object can suddenly come to life and kill you for no reason at all. Having established that your immediate environment is mercifully Dalek-free, what else do you need to worry about?
Well, for starters, there are those horrific charity-collecting boxes that you hardly ever see any more (I can't imagine why.) You know, the ones consisting of a life-size fiberglass replica of a disabled child with a disturbingly blank stare that your average zombie could take a master-class from. Of course, being made entirely from fiberglass, they're obviously rigidly immobile.
But the trouble is, they've got that cylindrical base just like a Dalek.
And we've all seen how well Daleks cope with extreme disability. Wait a minute – those boxes are thrusting a box in your face on behalf of the disabled… Do you see a connection forming here? When you're four years old and political correctness hasn't been invented yet, by God you see a connection forming…
I had nightmares about those things! I really did! They only came out at night (of course), but when they did, they invaded my house (of course.) Shiny, rigid, melancholy polio boys gliding around in absolute silence, holding out their collecting boxes for – who knew what? At that age my grasp of economics was at best vague, but even I knew that a horror of this magnitude was unlikely to be kept at bay by a four-year-old's pocket money. Luckily they had one screamingly obvious design-fault – a total inability to climb stairs. If my bedroom had been moved downstairs, or if the BBC had decided 20 years sooner that Daleks could fly, I think I might have been in a certain amount of psychiatric peril. But it wasn't and they didn't, so I had that magic staircase to protect me from those glossy lads.
Freddy Krueger didn't really scare me the first time I watched A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET when I was about 8 years old. I saw Freddy as more of a cartoon character than anything else. Maybe it was because he could change shape and had a wicked sense of humor. Don't get me wrong, I love ROBERT ENGLUND's acting, but I found him funnier than I did scary. There was another horribly-burned mangler that traumatized me, even though I wouldn't get to see him in action for over another decade, the killer from 1982's HONEYMOON HORROR.
My parents got their first video rental membership in the late '80s from a discount drug store called Phar-Mor. They were always trying to find a bargain so we ended up shopping there a lot. Their rental section was tiny, consisting of maybe a few hundred videos, but I remember it was usually swarming with people mainly trying to snatch the new releases. I spotted an empty video sleeve which had an illustration of a couple, in their underwear, sitting on a bed, surrounded by flames, and a guy with a hatchet looming over them. I picked it up and flipped to the back to be startled by a picture of a bald man that looked like the skin on his face was burned away.
I remember it looked like he was in pain, maybe because he resembled a normal person rather than a one-liner spitting maniac like Freddy. I couldn't really tell from the taglines on the box if this guy was supposed to be bad or good, but I gathered that he was the character with the hatchet on the front. The thought of being disfigured by fire scared me more than anything. Since the couple on the cover were in their underwear, there was no way my parents would let me rent it because that insinuated a possible sex scene or nudity which was off limits. Now if the couple who was about to be slaugtered were fully-clothed, that would've been a different story. I was too afraid to watch the movie anyway. I think we ended up renting GHOST DAD that day.
Everytime we went back to Phar-Mor, I 'd scan the entire section to find HONEYMOON HORROR. I would dare myself to pick up the box and check out the back. Half the time I'd chicken out. So when I found the VHS 12 years later in a bargain bin at a video store that was switching over to only renting DVDs, I was finally ready to face the terror. The movie was a sorry excuse for a slasher and wasn't interesting at all for the first hour. I fast-forwarded to the last ten minutes to when the scarred killer busts through and shatters a kitchen door to hack some girl up with and ax. Even though the gore effects were laughable, it was worth the 7 bucks I payed for this scene and to have the video box. He then gets his guts blown out with a shot gun by, who I assume was, the girl's lover. He had also killed a couple of other people before this scene, but his face isn't revealed until the last ten minutes. The best part is, he sits up and throws a knife into a guy's back from across the room for one final kill.
I read on IMDB that Sony Home Video bought the movie from its filmmakers' for $50,000, distributed it, and it made $22,000,000 on rentals world-wide. With the images on the sleeve I can believe it. I'd be surprised if anyone who actually watched it wasn't disappointed. HONEYMOON HORROR was a nice addition to my little video nasty collection. It's since been packed away in my Mom's basement and I haven't watched it for years. It's such a terrible film that I'm not sure it's worth digging up anytime soon.
—Grimpressions
The Visible Woman is an exhibit you used to see in museums. It's a life-sized mannequin with transparent skin, so you can see her organs and skeleton. When I was about six, I was into the human body, so when we went to a museum, my dad took me to see this. We went into a small auditorium, where a real life woman stood next to the plastic one. When the chairs filled, we assumed she'd explain to us about the various organs.
Then the real woman walked back stage.
Then the lights went out.
Then the plastic woman's brain began to glow.
"This is my brain," said an eerie, disembodied voice.
That was enough for me. I began to cry. My dad, realizing how creepy this seemed to me, picked me up so we could leave.
AND THE DOOR WAS LOCKED FROM THE OUTSIDE.
This was so that no one would interrupt the presentation, and you exited through a different door. However, dad couldn't figure out how to leave without disturbing everyone, so I spent about ten minutes crouched in the corner, my eyes closed, covering my ears.
UNK SEZ: Thanks BRIAN, for the great traumafession! For more on author BRIAN KATCHER, visit his home base HERE! Painting above "Visible Woman" thanks to artist VICTOR RODRIGUEZ!
I stumbled upon this great site about two weeks ago and I've been visiting several times a day ever since. KINDERTRAUMA has rejuvenated my interest in old horror movies and pretty much anything that creeped me out as a kid. So as I religiously watched every minute of THE WALKING DEAD this Fall I kept asking myself where I've seen JEFFREY DeMUNN who plays, Dale, the older man in the group of survivors. I looked up his filmography and I realised that he played the father in a made-for-T.V. movie that scared the crap out of me as a kid called THE HAUNTED: A TRUE STORY.
I remember getting our first V.C.R. when I was 8 or 9 years old, around the time the first BATMAN movie came out on video, back when it would take a year for movies to be released on video. From that point on I proceeded to tape anything on that looked scary. We only had basic cable channels so I ended up recording a lot of T.V. movies, mostly based on true stories. It became somewhat of an art for me because I'd pause the taping and kept the commercials out so perfectly so that you almost couldn't tell they were recorded from television except of course for all the black fade-out and fade-in's and the family-friendly tackiness that accompanies T.V. movies. One of these movies was 1991's THE HAUNTED: A TRUE STORY, which was based on the case of the Smurl family haunting which took place in Pennsylvania during the 70's and 80's.
The movie was one of the more effective made-for-T.V. films. I started to realise how terrible a lot of them were as I got older and stated to rent rather than watch T.V. The acting was great and there were a lot of scary scenes. The ghosts that haunted the family were so relentless that they even followed the family when they tried to get away on a camping trip. The thought that ghosts could follow you outside of the house that was haunted terrified me.
The ghost appeared mainly as a floating, black mass. The usual events took place, chairs and dresser drawers moved on their own, radios turned on when unplugged, the family would hear voices, and there would be unexplained cold spots throughout the house. The black marks that re-appeared on the walls even after a fresh coating was applied was different along with the creepy pig squeals and snorts that would be heard coming from behind the walls.
The one scene that traumatized me though was when THE WALKING DEAD's own JEFFREY DeMUNN is raped by a female entity. DeMUNN who plays the father, Jack, is watching T.V. in the living room after everyone else goes to bed when he sees the ghost, who is an attractive girl at first, come down the stairs. She picks him up and throws him across the room. She straddles him and, at first, and he seems like almost doesn't mind it. The scary music swells and the ghost gets uglier and uglier and Jack starts to freak out. I finished recording the movie, but I couldn't watch it again for years.
Luckily some kind, or demented, soul posted the whole film in 10 parts on YouTube.
In the early days of the VHS tape, my family's video outlet was a glorified kiosk in the mall called "Stage Door Video." The horror section was about the size of a closet door and I'd be surprised if I didn't watch every one. The selection may have been limited but the memories of the movies I viewed via that joint are among my strongest and richest horror memories. I'm not sure if TERMINAL ISLAND really belonged in the horror section, it's more of an exploitation/action flick but the synopsis on the back of the box suggested something not unlike ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (although TI predates EFNY by 8 years) so I was more than game. You rolled the dice back then.
The premise of the movie involves the aftermath of the abolishment of the death penalty. Murderous criminals, rather than being jailed, are thrown on the titular island and left to fend for themselves. I only retained one memory of this film but it stuck to me like Velcro. A female prisoner seduces a male prisoner, applies honey to his junk and then grabs a stick, whacks a bee hive in a tree stump and chuckles as the bees swarm his private Benjamin. It really disturbed me. I couldn't tell you why a person (or a bee for that matter) would behave in such a way. The idea was atrocious.
I never saw TERMINAL ISAND again. I never stumbled across it in another video store and I like to think I covered those grounds like an obsessive archaeologist in my day. Recently I was informed by Amazon that TERMINAL was being released on DVD by CODE RED. I waited the allotted time to purchase a used copy and prepared to confront my tormentor head on. When the DVD arrived, I threw it in the machine in the spirit of a private dare and expected an onslaught of depravity. I wasn't looking for scares just SILKWOOD-shower inspiring psychological grime and garden-variety existential dread. What I wasn't expecting was a dragon with puppy eyes. TERMINAL ISLAND is not evil, it's nice.
Well, truth told it IS super violent, there's plenty of that almost pink-hued, seventies tempera-flavored blood flowing; axes pierce flesh, bullets and explosions rain, people are whipped and kept as sex slaves and political correctness is not even a glimmer in a schoolmarm's eye. Still, I was kind of shocked not by the rampant degeneracy but by the winking social commentary. I got this movie all wrong. Even the dreaded bee attack I came to find was not so much psychotically malicious as it was a deserved comeuppance. That lady even worked alongside her bee victim afterward toward a common goal (which is pretty forgiving considering all the attempted rape between them.) I won't wreck the ending but suffice to say, it's nearly golly-gee hopeful.
The island is a mad LORD OF THE FLIES meets BATTLE ROYALE microcosm overruled by grotesque, primitive "might makes right" ideology and the simple fact that the assholes outnumber the non-assholes. The many work as slaves for the few. (Could never happen!) That is until the last remaining women team up with a small band of tight-jeaned revolutionaries and they, using their superior brains, overthrow their oppressors by any means necessary. Here I was expecting to be all scandalized by this movie but I found myself instead enthralled, vaguely inspired and really happy when the bad murderers died and really sad when the good murderers died. It doesn't hurt that our heroes include a pre-MAGNUM P.I . TOM SELLECK and a post LOST IN SPACE , MARTA KRISTEN. In any case, if you fancy fisticuffs and have a soft spot for chika-chika- wow porn music here ya go; consider TI cloud nine. It's probably not everybody's incarcerated cup of T & A, but what the hell is?
Frankly, I'm most shocked that TERMINAL ISLAND is not more wildly notorious and that's not just my nostalgia-bias talking. Not only is it action packed and covertly clever but I found out it was directed by STEPHANIE ROTHMAN, a rare female exploitation director and the very first woman ever awarded a Directors Guild of America fellowship. It's nothing new to return to a KINDERTRAUMA after some time and discover that it's not quite the creature you left it. Usually it's lost some steam and its fangs have become dentures. In this atypical case, I have to say maturity is on my side because no, it's not the film I remember, it's better. In this case, my monster is now my friend because the years have taught me to take a peek beneath the camouflage tarp. I know now that just as sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, by the same token, sometimes a beehive is much more than a beehive. That lady with the honey wasn't crazy, she was pissed!
What scared me as a child most was:
1. A midnight T.V. showing of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. I was 13 years old and a NOLD virgin!
2. Seeing THE EXORCIST on T.V. when I was about 7 years old. I was from a very Christian background so the devil was a constant source of horror.
3. Seeing JOHN CARPENTER's THE THING. At 13 I thought I was beyond childhood terror. Silly boy. The scene where the fella's head dripped off his body and grew spider's legs… well, it stayed with me for a few nights.
