Category: Traumafessions

Since 1979, the horrific image of a half-psycho/half-mannequin, knife-wielding maniac from TOURIST TRAP has repeatedly appeared in my dreams. I was forced to watch this movie as a five-year-old by my older brother and his pals. They decided their plot to scare themselves silly would be foiled if I ran screaming out of the room crying to my mommy. So, they blocked the door, plopped me down right in front of the T.V., and proceeded to induce a deep-seeded fear of inanimate clothing models with removable limbs and bad hair-dos.

I've always loved horror movies, but I've never been brave enough to figure out the name of the first one that sliced and diced its way into the very depths of my subconscious. I've so enjoyed the stories of fellow Kindertrauma readers that I've had to take a deep breath, google "mannequin horror," and finally put a name to the face that continues to haunt my dreams! Thanks Kindertrauma!

When I was a young'un in the '70s, whenever my 6th health teacher didn't want to teach, he'd show a film. (The one on the dangers of alcohol that starred SONNY BONO was groovy, man.) The one that scarred me for life was a safety film about electricity. I was fine with the 'don't fly kites near electrical wires' and the 'don't climb electrical pylons' portion of the film…and then a little girl with her dolly decided to play with the electrical box in her front yard. (I don't know the technical term for the things, but they're kind of rectangular, stand several feet high, and are painted a dull green.)

The lock was broken on the electrical box on that fateful day little Sally decided to explore, and she opened it right up. Inside were two white electrical thingies that Sally thought would make a perfect house for her dolly. So Sally reaches in…ZAP!...cut to a scene of a blackened, burnt up doll. I could only assume little Sally looked the same way.

To this day, if I see any neighborhood children anywhere near those boxes, even those that are safely locked, I want to scream at them to RUN AWAY! DON'T GO NEAR THE BOX! So I guess the film worked…

My name's Tracy V., and I help out at Joe Bob Briggs' website. (Joe Bob being the most famous expert on drive-in cinema ever to come out of Grapevine, Texas.)

Thanks for letting me get that traumafession off my chest,

Tracy V.

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Thank you Tracy V. for bringing an oft unspoken issue to our attention. The importance of electrical safety cannot be stressed enough! While I was unsuccessful in locating the film that traumatized you, I did unearth this chestnut from across the pond which plays out like The Gashlycrumb Tinies set in a electric sub-station. Poor J-I-M-M-M-Y!

I was inspired to send along a trauma that I feel may not be unique to me, but I'm pretty certain I've never heard of anyone else who was emotionally scarred….

…by Aerosmith.

Well, more specifically, by Aerosmith's performance of "Come Together" in the SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND movie. Mind you, I was about 5 or 6 years old when I saw this movie (I didn't see it when it was released theatrically in 1978, I caught it on T.V. I assume it didn't make the T.V. rounds until a good year or two after its release, so I'm fairly confident but not 100% on the timing). As much as it's mind-blowing to comprehend, I was aware of the SGT. PEPPER'S movie before I was aware of the Beatles. So in my young mind, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" was a Bee Gees song. "Got to Get You Into My Life"? Well, that's Earth, Wind, and Fire, of course. And don't even tell me some dude named Paul McCartney wrote "Maxwell's Silver Hammer." That was sung by the King Tut guy from SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE!

Sadly, that's not even the tip of the trauma.

No, the mind-scarring came during the introduction of the FVB – Future Villains Band. Played by Aerosmith, they sang a version of "Come Together" that still taints my appreciation of the song and haunts my dreams. Something about the sleazy, snake-rattle opening of the song, the way the band marches out, head down like zombies, and Steven Tyler's hideous mouth hissing words like, "hold you in his armchair, you can feel his disease" – Well, it just TERRIFIED me.

Years later, when I discovered this was actually a John Lennon song – it made no difference. The song still conjures up dark images of Steven Tyler attempting to turn Strawberry Fields into a "mindless groupie" with his big evil lips. Shiver.

Talk about a double-edged trauma. First, the movie ruined the song "Come Together" and, for a long time, Aerosmith itself, AND it had me thinking for years that the Beatles' concept album was actually a god-awful ‘70s cheesefest narrated by GEORGE BURNS. SGT. PEPPER, I shake my fist at you in rage!

Thanks! Keep up the trauma. Love the site.

For your reference, here's the performance terror itself…

Hello once again Unk and Aunt and all you wonderful Traumatots out there who continue to brighten my journeys on the internet with your delightful Traumafessions and Name-That-Traumas that keep me constantly on the prowl for the gems you manage to dig up. It's nice to once again be writing to you.

Ever since I sent you my traumafession about the Groke way back in…I think it was October or September… I have tried to think of something else from my childhood that had frightened me… but either I was a more hardcore kid than I thought, or my parents were just too protective of what I saw, or I am a forgetful ninny, since absolutely nothing came to me at all, both to my relief and my disappointment.

That is, until one day, searching for various nostalgic stuff on pages like Youtube, I stumbled across one of my favorite cartoons from a young age… COURAGE THE COWARDLY DOG (I was 9 when this show was on. Bear with me – I am well aware that I am in the younger end of the Kindertrauma guests).

Anyway, I loved Courage. For one, the dog was a delightful character, second, even back then I had my delvings in the macabre with the writings of J.K. Rowling and Danish author Dennis Jürgensen and third, it was absolutely hilarious and wild.

For those who do not know the show's premise, it is quite simple: Courage is a pink dog who lives in the middle of Nowhere (literally) with farmer couple Eustace and Muriel. Every day, something strange and creepy would happen, and it would be the cowardly dog's job to save his owners even though he was scared out of his mind. The show was often just as creepy as it was funny, and is probably the straightest played horror I have seen for children in cartoon form.

I loved every single minute of it, but as I sat rewatching my childhood and laughing twice as much since I now understood ALL the jokes rather than just half, I would soon know fear… in the shape of the most frightening "monster of the week" from this fantastic show… Freaky Fred!

The episode was a nightmare unlike the others – the premise was basically that Muriel's nephew Fred was coming to visit… but it turns out he is a loony barber with quite a strange fetish for cutting people's hair. During some mishap, Courage ends up locked up with Freaky Fred in the bathroom while Eustace go to find something to fix the door with… and Freaky Fred just ADORES our dear little puppy's hair and continues to shave him with childish glee.

And that childish glee was the frightening part. The entire episode were told in a rhyming, sing-song tone of voice with creepy children's singing as background music. During these musings, he would tell of the various people he had shaved and described it as an urge that made him act…. "NAAAAUUUUUGGGGHHHHTYYYYYYY."

That "Naughty" was the single scariest word in existence for me – it was said in a completely different tone of voice, a malicious growl from the very darkest pits of his throat. While I watched this in English on Youtube, I still distinctly remember his Danish voice… which was even happier and gigglier, just making everything worse.

Don't get me wrong, it was as funny as every other episode… but Freaky Fred sure as hell freaked me right the frig out!

Today I recognize it as a delightful Sweeney Todd parody… but back then… good Lord, it was terrifying. Especially since you can hardly say Courage even wins, as he winds up completely shaven before Fred is taken back to the Looney Bin.

And thus ends my tale of the freaky barber that scarred my fragile psyche. I hope you enjoyed it.

Play nice, or I might get…. "NAAAAUUUUUGHHHTYYYYYYY."

— Bjarke "Eshbaal" J.

One of my childhood trauma inducing characters (along with STEPHEN KING's IT – God, that movie made going to the toilet/taking a bath/cleaning your teeth/walking past drains terrifying for years!) was from an Australian T.V. advertisement in the late ‘80s. Most likely between '86 and '89 when I was at my most impressionable.

I saw the ad broadcast on a 6pm nightly news program, as at the time it was considered quite controversial. I remember the newsreader forebodingly saying, "If you have young children you may want to ask them to leave the room now." I looked sidelong at my Mum and she didn't respond, which I was quite happy about. I don't remember specifics but I believe it was in black and white and set during a funeral at a graveyard. There were sobbing relatives and the camera was following the coffin being carried by two men into the back of a hearse. I remember thinking at this point that it was totally lame and not scary at all and that I was obviously pretty awesome for not being affected, but then it happened! The driver of the hearse turned around and he was some kind of horrifying werewolf-esque monster!! This shocked me more than pretty much anything, ever. I think it was a warning ad of some kind, maybe smoking, AIDS, cancer? I've tried searching the web with what I know and turned up nothing.

Obviously, I pretended that I didn't care so my Mum wouldn't think I was a wuss bag and went to bed as normal not long after. For that night and many, many after I would lie awake in a state of absolute terror seeing the werewolf hearse driver and IT standing in my bedroom doorway, casting long ominous shadows into my room from the hall light, waiting for me to fall asleep so they could come and get me.

I've never really lived down this fear although now it's been replaced by more grown-up fears like demonic possession (thanks to an UNEXPLAINED MYSTERIES style documentary when I was 11), RINGU-esque Japanese yokai stalkers and this bloody image that I know is probably faked but still scares the crap out of me if I start thinking about it in the dark. (See the freaky escaped-mental-patient looking ghost child in the background.)

Thanks for all the great movie recommendations – you guys have horror movie viewing persistence to be admired! xxoo

When I was 4-ish (1978), the big thing for me to watch was public television. WETA Channel 26. MR. ROGERS, SESAME STREET, and THE ELECTRIC COMPANY.

I don't think we got cable until 1981 (when I was 7) or so… Back when A&E and Nick were the same channel, there were 5 movie channels (everyone knows about HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, and even The Movie Channel, but few people remember the Home Theatre Network), and HBO wasn't descrambled but was set at the tap for your house. (Meaning I could get it in my room via a cable split without a cable box, unlike the descrambled channels.)

You know what the most memorable moment of all that programming was for me? Not a specific show, but the period of silence between SESAME STREET and THE ELECTRIC COMPANY; the period of time where the screen is completely black for an unpredictable amount of time (TV programming was not necessarily run by computers back then, and WETA 26 was, after all, a local public station), followed by someone insanely screaming "HEEEYY YOOOOUUU GUYYYYYYYSSSSS!" and THE ELECTRIC COMPANY logo.

Anyway… The silence between the two shows scared the shit out of me. I wasn't scared of the "Hey You Guys!" scream as much as the anticipation of waiting for it to happen. It filled my adrenal gland and my soul with a sense of dread. The same sense of dread I feel today if I wake up and notice that the music has inexplicably stopped playing. Is the power out? Did my computer fry? Will I be able to sleep without anything to entertain me enough to keep my thoughts from madly racing?

I've never been a fan of silence. I listen to music 24/7/365. I don't sit in silence. Period. Ever. Even if I'm sitting outside in the middle of the woods, alone, I'm going to be projecting my hearing as far as possible, trying to hear as many different sounds as possible. It took me awhile to realize that my dislike of silence goes all the way back to the 1970s. At least I'm consistent.

— Clint

Love the site. It's great reading about the freaky things people remember from their childhood, and I thought I would share one of my own.

There are a few traumatizing T.V. memories from my childhood, including the infamous BBC broadcast GHOSTWATCH (which is one of the main reasons for my current love of horror movies.) But one that stands out in my mind was this advert for soft drink Tango.

Now the Tango adverts had generated quite a bit of controversy here in the U.K. by that time, but when this advert popped out of nowhere, I was caught completely off guard.

A guy is at a football match when the crowd disappears and he is left all alone. Shocked, he sees a little girl skipping on the pitch, however she turns around to reveal it is actually an old woman (an apparent homage to cult classic DON'T LOOK NOW) who is brandishing a giant corkscrew. To the man's side appears a grim reaper-like figure. Both the woman and the reaper began shouting, "No" at the man in what is a very disturbing (and somewhat psychedelic moment.) The man, getting quite panicked takes a drink of his can of Tango, and is instantly 'decapitated' by a mysterious force. Suddenly, the pitch returns to normal, and the man is left traumatized and rubbing his throat in shock.

Although the advert is done in a quite humorous tone, it was quite shocking for young children and seemed to be pulled of the air quite quickly as I can only remember seeing it a few times.

-Double L-

From my humble beginnings, according to my mother, I was a sensitive child. Quiet, bookish, a catch and release the firefly sort of kid. I would cry when other neighborhood children would keep them in jars or squish them against the sidewalk. This sort of behavior did not sit well with my Father and he would try, to the best of his ability, to toughen me up. We would watch grown up type movies. Not 'adult' movies but movies like TRUE GRIT, TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE, THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN. These watching habits extended to television as well, THE A-TEAM, KNIGHT RIDER, these were all shows enjoyed by me while my dad read the paper and nodded approvingly whenever MR. T punched a dude, my dad even let me have the recliner when they were on.

"This sounds like a perfect childhood, Fauntleroy, where is the trauma?" you ask.

Okay.

The year: 1988.

The person: An 11-year-old me.

The show: MACGYVER. I had to look up the title of the episode, "Kill Zone," and the year (my memory isn't THAT good).

In this particular MACGYVER, he is sent in to some wilderness to investigate reports of animals dying after a satellite crashes to Earth. I may be wrong about the satellite, but the episode had a real ANDROMEDA STRAIN feel to it. It turns out, a weird bacteria has returned with the crashed object and this bacteria, upon exposure to a living thing, accelerates the aging process to fatal levels. We're talking a lifetime in a matter of minutes. A sample of the bacteria is sent to a lab for analysis where it comes into the hands of a dedicated lady scientist who is softened by the presence of her beloved dog. How could this scientist be so obstinate? Look how much she loves her dog.

The episode progresses. MacGyver fixes stuff with a paper clip, etc. etc. Eventually, he is supposed to destroy said organism, its existence deemed too dangerous to the planet Earth. The dedicated lady scientist isn't having it. The organism is simply too important to destroy. She locks herself in the lab with her dog and the organism sealed in a glass container for further study. Alas, the beloved dog misinterprets the glass container holding the bacteria for a toy and knocks it from her hand, releasing it in the sealed laboratory.

The dog immediately begins to age, its black fur becoming gray seemingly before MacGyver's eyes. It limps to the lady scientist's lap and dies in her arms while she also begins to show signs of age. MacGyver runs to find some way to free her from the lab but by the time he returns, she is horrifyingly old and, in my opinion, kind of looks like a gray haired version of The Hag from the trauma inducing movie CURTAINS. It wasn't enough that a dog withered and died in front of my eyes while its owner apologized and said 'she hoped it doesn't hurt', no, I was also treated to the grim visage of death itself, in the form of a grizzled old woman.

I ran from the room, oblivious to my father's cries of, "For crying out loud! It's just MACGYVER!" I never watched another episode of MACGYVER again for truly this was a one/two punch: soul crushingly sad, followed by horrifying.

Finding the clip online was easy, WATCHING said clip, an entirely different matter. I did not, but I am including it for those whose morbid curiosity is unquenchable. Don't say I didn't warn you:

I was wondering if there were any traumafessions yet about MAKING CONTACT (a.k.a. JOEY)?

There was just something about that dusty dummy opening its eyes that disturbed me when I saw it as a kid. I remember when I was 13, my parents had my grandparents' tapes after their house was burned down. We were watching one of the movies, I didn't know what it was, and it ended up being this movie. I forgot all about it until that scene when the dummy comes to life. At that point I jumped out of my skin.

(AUNT JOHN SEZ: The offending dummy comes in around the 5:35 mark. Also, who's JOEY's interior designer? I want those RETURN OF THE JEDI sheets!)

Then there was this ending which was freaky:

I've been having dreams about a giant head, and I think this may have something to do with it. It always disturbed me when the dummy burnt to death at the end too.