Category: Traumafessions

I, like many other people, like to think that I have always had a high tolerance for horror. "Not so," says the Truth. And lo, the Truth hath spoken, but I'm being totally honest when I say there are very few things that have actually managed to frighten me to the point of H.P. LOVECRAFT-inspired insanity.

Case in point: THE PHANTOM OF THE MOTHERFUCKIN' OPERA. Naturally, the B&W version.

I must've been about four years old—arguably the quintessential age for trauma. The mums and I were down in the basement watching TV, making a mother-daughter connection that only good TV watching can produce when…she turned the channel. And Sweet Allah eating breadsticks, there was LON CHANEY with his sunken eyes, sunken face, and absolutely FUCKED-UP nose. Forget the de-masking, the monster had already been revealed, and all I could do was sit there, scrunched up between my mom and an end-table, scared stiff. My mom didn't notice anything—shoot, I didn't notice anything: I couldn't even shake from the fear. What made it even more terrifying? Sitting there, even when I remember there was no tangible reason for my having to stay there while my mom smoked her Benson & Hedges, reading the dialogue all calmly and quietly. I could've left; I could've taken my beloved Play-Doh with me and gone somewhere else. But no, I chose Hell.

I don't remember how, but afterwards I put two-and-two together and associated the movie with the musical (that's an especially scary thought, considering, y'know, ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER). Two years later, I heard the theme on the car radio while riding with my dad and I became nearly paralyzed with dread. After we got out of the car, it kind of tapered off into a sort-of dull, morose feeling. It felt like it settled into my shoulder blades and would never leave. My dad and I played Frisbee for a while, and I remember feeling so distressed because I consciously tried to get that feeling to go away and it wouldn't. The song was stuck. The image was stuck. I was stuck. Frisbee couldn't save me.

The worst part, for me anyway, was just how popular and recognizable THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA was in its many incarnations. There was an NBA half-time show that featured the infamous duet between the Phantom and Christine. I couldn't fucking believe it. All I could do was bury my little head in the sofa cushions and pretend to take a nap for what felt like HOURS before I thought it was safe. It was in THE MUPPET BABIES for Christ's sake! Gonzo opens a door and BOOM, LON "THAT FACE" CHANEY. I gazed up at the ceiling long after it was over wondering who in the hell thought that was a great idea to broadcast on daytime T.V. It was one thing to be initially exposed to it, but to have it appear in the most unlikely of places? How much trauma can a kid take?

Over the following year, my fear of anything to do with THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA tapered off dramatically. My friend actually burned the soundtrack for me a couple years ago, and I listened to it until I developed a low-tolerance for Broadway musicals. Now I see "THAT FACE" and have the inexplicable urge to get some piano wire and tie it around my face so I can look terrifying. I have been thinking about changing my vocation…maybe I should get into the movie biz? Be the next harbinger of nightmares and kindertraumas? "B.A. in Fucking Scary Shit" sounds better on a resume than "B.A. in Psychology."

Greetings from Mexico City:

First of all I have to say, that your website is one of the best I've ever found on the web.

Keep up the good work, because it seems I´m getting addicted to small bits of forgotten horrors… hehe.

Well, here is my little contribution. It may not be one of the best horror films but back in the day I watched it and it gave me some paranoiac feeling about my schoolmates… haha.

This is an ‘80s Mexican movie that features a small evil girl that will do everything she likes until she gets what she desires.

Its name is VENENO PARA LAS HADAS (POISON FOR THE FAIRIES), even though it's not a typical horror film, I think it slides in the small cracks of our minds.

I found this small but complete synopsis about the film.

Now I will talk about my kindertrauma and just watching that disturbing scene looking for more info to send to you made me uneasy.

When I was a small child, there were T.V. spots from one of the Mexican Government Culture Ministries. They were common stuff during the ‘80s, most of them were about European or art movies. In one of these T.V. spots I got the biggest kindertrauma I can remember.

It was one cloudy afternoon before a thunderstorm (great cliché ) and I was playing with my toy soliders and stuff when I got the glimpse of a weird movie being advertised on T.V.

The image that still give me bumps and nausea is the one where a guy sharpens his razor at his balcony door and tests the razor on his thumb. He then opens the door, and idly fingers the razor while gazing at the moon, about to be engulfed by a thin cloud, from his balcony. There is a cut to a close-up of a younger woman, being held by this guy as she watches in the camera direction. Another cut occurs to the moon being overcome by the cloud as the man slits the girls´ eye with the razor.

I was horrified at what I just watched, and when another of those T.V. spots threatened to appear any time of the day I will switch the channel as fast as I could. At least I knew that those spots only lasted a couple of weeks, so I dared to watch the first seconds of the T.V. spot to see if it has already changed.

Later I made a little research and found out that this movie is one of the greatest surrealistic movies ever made, even SALVADOR DALÍ had something to do with it.

The movie is UN CHIEN ANDALU (AN ANDULUSIAN DOG) from LUIS BUÑUEL and here is the creepiest and scariest scene I´ve ever seen:

UNK SEZ: Dear Alex V., thanks for the kind words and your wonderful traumafession. Before we started this website, I thought I had seen just about every scary movie but thanks to readers like you I realize that there are many more to see and learn about. Tracking down VENENO PARA LAS HADAS is now on the top of my list of things to do. It sounds amazing!

As for UN CHIEN ANDALU, you are not alone in being effected by that little stunner. In fact it even inspired one of my favorite PIXIES tunes! "Got me a movie, ha ha ha hoa, slicing up eyeballs, ha ha ha hoa!"…

Instead of writing what scared me before, I will write about what scares me now, which is still Kindertrauma since I am only twelve. Marilyn Manson's video for his song Sweet Dreams, which is a cover of the Eurythmics classic, never fails to scare the crap out of me. It is of the king of creepy, Marilyn Manson being creepy in a creepy cathedral while his creepy band mates play the creepy song. As you see, this adds up to ultimate creepiness. I have seen lots of creepy things, but this has to top my list.

My father's computer has a screensaver that shows the album art of all the albums on his iTunes. One of his favorite singers was a folksy singer named Cat Power. She was way cool, but she had one album called What Would the Community Think that had an album cover showing a face with two black bars on the sides that went over left and right side of the face, leaving only the middle colored, except for both eyes, which remained normally colored. At night, whenever I would get up for the restroom, this cover would never fail to be on the computer in my dad's office. The way the eyes stood out made my freak, and I would close my eyes whenever I walked past the computer at night. I would always imagine the eyes in my room staring at me when I got back to the bed. Now that I see the album art again, I don't know why the eyes scared me so much. I guess to a little kid like me, anything was scary.

UNK SEZ: Maxon, I feel your pain. Those MARILYN MANSONS are creeping me out. Just be ever thankful that, unlike myself, you were not raised listening to the voluptuous horror of HELEN REDDY….

This is kind of embarrassing but we're all friends here right? I don't really have to worry about my horror cred being destroyed anymore as that was pulverized beyond repair when I admitted to bawling at the end of THE BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA. Here is the thing…I once walked out of a movie because I was just too mortified to endure any more. I wasn't a kid either, I must have been twelve or thirteen at the time. The movie was CHARLES KAUFMAN's MOTHER'S DAY and although it no longer has much of an effect on me at all, the truth remains, that movie scared me right out of the theater.

The year was 1980 and my older brother somehow snuck both me and my younger brother into the theater with him. (He either worked there or had a friend that did at the time.) Sneaking into the theater usually worked out fine for me and my little brother (like when we got to see THE BOOGENS) but this time we were both in way over our heads. All was fine at first, three pretty campers out in the woods alone, two crazy hick psychos and their lunatic mother out to get them, it wasn't worse than anything else we were consuming on vhs on a nearly daily basis. Then suddenly out of the blue MOTHER'S DAY starts getting all weird and twisty with the rape action. Say what you will about FRIDAY THE 13TH's Jason Voorhees, he may have had a violent streak but he was always a gentleman.

Keep in mind that at this point I had already seen I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE and LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT and been rightfully disturbed by but not completely devastated by both. It wasn't as if I was some Pollyanna or something. I thought I could handle just about anything. MOTHER'S DAY was just so damn perverse though. This wasn't some SALLY STRUTHERS in A GUN IN THE HOUSE type of deal (yikes, now that I think of it that T.V. movie did a number on me too.) For some reason this particular sexual assault involved dressing the victim up as SHIRLEY TEMPLE, taking Polaroids of her distress and all under the watchful eye of a laughing elderly crone. Sorry folks, lil Unky Lancifer just had to bail! I took as much as I possibly could, looked over to my little brother (poor guy was about ten!) and then we both made a silent agreement that it was time to scram.

I didn't try to watch MOTHER'S DAY again until I was in my twenties. By that time the movie, although still not a walk in the park, was at least partially redeemed by a clever level of satire that was previously lost to me and the fact that if you stick around you get to the part were revenge is served to the repulsive brothers and their not so sweet mom. So there, now it's out there. I admit it, I walked out of a movie because it just scared me and horrified me too much to take one other second of it (every subsequent time I've walked out a movie it was due to a different emotion-boredom.)

I can't say MOTHER'S DAY traumatized me for life, but it certainly ruined SHIRLEY TEMPLE movies for me for a long time after.

This by far trumps everything else that put the fear of God in me as a child; and of course it had to star another range of puppets….from JIM HENSON….(WTF!!!!)….the loveable duo, Ernie and Bert.

I must have been 4 years old when I first saw this episode on T.V., and it was the first time that I witnessed fear in one of the SESAME STREET characters. Now, as a four year old, you're pretty much completely naive to all things frightening, so you would never think that you're favourite first-openly-gay-puppet-couple would even think of stepping foot in a dark Egyptian pyramid….but I was sorely mistaken. They didn't just walk in…they ended up splitting up because Ernie was too scared to go into a "dark and scary cave" with Bert. As I sat watching in absolute disbelief that they had even stepped foot in there in the first place, Ernie started to show signs of true panic and uneasiness. I TOO started to feel the same…..this all started to get way too out of hand when Ernie walked past two "statues" (looking exactly like Bert and Ernie, but in 'King Tut' wardrobes) and one of them poked him on the back with his cane.

The mere fact that it moved made me instantly start screaming and crying. I had never ever seen my little buddy Ernie so scared….so what happens next? Bert comes racing back into the main chamber and the statue goes back to its spot, making Ernie look like he was just "seeing things." BERT DIDN'T BELIEVE HIM!!! I even remember trying to yell at Bert to look at the goddamn statue, or touch it, or something so that he would believe Ernie and then they could get the hell outta there!

Anyways, it wasn't until a few years later that I saw it again…and although the fear came back in floods…I quickly scoffed it all off, changed the channel back to T.M.N.T. and carried on with my fantasies of living in sewers and being taught to fight by a huge rat. (now how the hell is that not scary?!)

Kinder-dudes, you guys have created a site that allows us all to open up our memories to what truly scarred us as children. And now that I have two daughters I am always questioning to myself when THEY are going to have their first…. Kindertrauma ….mwuuuaaahahahahahahaaaaaa!!!!! (I hope they don't though because I love them and I don't want them to ever be scared….mwuuuahahhaha..ah forget it…).

AUNT JOHN SEZ: This is one of them there TRAUMAFESSIONS that first came over the transom as a NAME THAT TRAUMA! Here's the first dispatch from Reader Steve G.:

Hey there,

I've recently finished a course in cognitive psychology that focused on the ways memory fails and is distorted, all the while becoming more firmly entrenched. So I'm even less confident of this recollection than I was a year ago. But I have the advantage of repeated exposure, so I think I can report some details that are probably not way off.

This is a literary request, and I can even give you the name of the book. "Ghosts." Yes, this is kind of a needle-in-haystack sort of search. I don't know the author's name or the illustrator, but I promise you that this book is worth finding. It's non-fiction, a collection of "true" ghost stories aimed at kids about grade-school age. It contains several of the classics: Fifty Berkeley Square in London, the restless coffins in that tomb in Barbados, and maybe half a dozen more, told in a fairly lurid style that doesn't pulls its punches. And illustrated with…how shall I describe the illustrations? Black-and-white watercolor? A bit like the "Scary Stories" collections except more subdued.

Ah, except for one of the illustrations. And here's where we come to the money shot. In the chapter about Fifty Berkeley Square there was one depiction of a ghost that I can only compare to the screaming, insane specter that you would get if you were to torture to death Eck, the nightmare-inducing thing from the OUTER LIMITS episode "Behold Eck!" Yeah, that guy. But even worse, because he'd be dead… AND COMING TO EAT YOUR EYES!

Phew, nasty stuff. There was a copy of this book in my grade-school library and I would terrify myself by sneaking peeks at that picture during daylight. I owned a copy of the book in paperback for awhile but had to give it away because it was really freaking me out knowing it was on my bookshelf. So I quite well recall the cover art and it may be the best lead, seeing as how the book's title was so generic.

The cover's background was dominantly a deep blue, and the foreground featured the silhouette of a "haunted" mansion prominently. You knew it was haunted because within the borders of the mansion (which was limned with a thin yellow border) there was a stylized face (cackling mouth and eyes) repeated several times. Not cartoony, but looking more jolly than scary. The title "GHOSTS" was printed in a frazzled kind of font, but quite readable, top center.

Man, I wish I hadn't started thinking about that picture this late at night. I think I'll maybe stay up til it gets light, just in case.

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Upon reading this, my mind went directly to prolific, elementary-school-oriented paranormal writer DANIEL COHEN, and I asked Steve if he was thinking of either this or even this. Steve responded right quick with this:

Hey there,

Seemed like a plausible candidate until I checked the publication date, 1992. I should have mentioned the time frame, of course. It would have to have been published at least as early as 1980 to have been available in my grade-school library.

I did some further Googling using the keywords "restless coffins." I recall that the chapter about the Barbados caskets was presented in a rather matter-of-fact style, and used that odd phrase or something similar. Evidently that's the "canonical" name for the events. That led to this card catalog entry.

Those chapter names sound familiar, and Amazon says it was illustrated and published in the right era. Might be it, but I can't find a cover scan, even among the finished auctions on eBay, which is usually a good hunting ground. A used version is pretty cheap, so I'll take a chance.

Thanks for the leads. If this turns out to be the one, I'll send a scan of the nightmarish Berkeley Square illustration. The names "ghosts simon gammell" show up in plenty of library databases even today, so it wouldn't surprise me if new generations are being traumatized still by this modest-looking book. Hooray!

AUNT JOHN SEZ: The same day Steve sent that, I set out to get my grubby paws on a copy of GHOSTS by SEYMOUR STEIN. While I was waiting for it to arrive via inner-library loan, Steve shot us this message:

It turns out that this was indeed the culprit. The copy I bought was a library edition, and guess what page it happens to fall open to?

Looks like I wasn't the only kid compulsively returning to that godawful picture.

I had forgotten that several of the other illustrations were quite upsetting in their own right, such as the baby-faced coffin that appears in the chapter about Barbados. I probably could have saved myself a lot of work if I had realized that GAMMELL is also the illustrator of the SCARY STORIES books, hardly coincidentally.

It's even mentioned on his CLN profile.

Now, time to track down that novel about cemeteries and alphabet rhymes….

AUNT JOHN SEZ: When I finally got a copy of this book in the mail, I had an intense flashback of wearing Toughskins and obsessively borrowing this title from my grade-school library.

I feel you Steve, seriously, and here are the scans to prove it:

When I was 6 or 7, there were these videos I used to rent called THE MAGIC SCHOOL BUS. It was about a school bus that could shrink and do other things so the students could go on whimsical field trips. There was on episode where the bus got trapped on this one kid's food and was digested. The bus went through all the major organs and eventually got sneezed out. The idea of being digested by a classmate scared the crap out of me, and several other segments of the episode were freaky, such as the bus almost getting destroyed by the stomach acid. I found the whole episode on youtube and it isn't as scary as I remembered it being. I have posted the links below for anyone who wants to waste 20 minutes watching a bad children's show.

When I was around six, I was obsessed with the Goosebumps series by R.L. Stein. (Mostly the movies, as I couldn't read well at the time). One of the first of the Goosebumps movies I ever saw was one of the scariest and most traumatic moments of my young life. It was enclosed in a creepy little VHS tape with an almost AMITYVILLE HORROR-style house on it with the words "Welcome to Dead House" written above it.

I don't remember the plot very well (it WAS 9 years ago, after all) but it was something about this family who moves into a house and the neighbors start acting weird, and then something about burning a wreath. I dunno. I do know that this movie scarred me in ways neither me nor my parents would have expected.

Even now, 15, a freshman in high school, my Dad has to close the windows for me at night and shoo the rabbits out from under my bed (I let them out to run, they like to hide under there) because I am terrified of bending down to look. I have been totally petrified of horror movies and scary pictures to this day (even reading your site has induced some heart-jumps) and I can owe it all to that wonderful story about zombies and some stupid rotting wreath.

Wow, where to begin….

My big trauma as a kid took place at a drive in. There were five of us kids, all cousins and routinely, my mom and aunt would pile us into a an old tank of a station wagon, and take us to the Disney Films as they came out. I guess I was about 6 or 7, anyways, they took us to see DARBY O'GILL AND THE LITTLE PEOPLE. The movie was harmless enough and, as kids do, we would climb over the seats bouncing around to the light music.

I liked cute King O'Brien and Katey Darlin, but then it happened… the storm started up and all of a sudden is there is what seems to be a huge horse that takes on a ghostly looking cast.

"She's chasing a pooka," is what I believe what Darby said as his daughter chased off after her horse into the crags the Irish moors. The five of us kids all screamed at the same time and I hurled myself into the very back of the car and hid under a blanket. I peeked out just in time to see the most horrifying ghost looking thing, wailing and screaming on the screen… the "Banshee."

This was too much to bear. I tore out of the car, in my Dr. Dentons, running to the safety of the playground. I guess I thought the swings could save me. To this day, I don't like the word, or the sounds of that hideous wail. What was supposed to be a sweet little people movie turned, for me, into a tale of horror!

And, to add insult to injury, my husband and I are going to Ireland this spring, I wanted to go see where the "Banshee" was filmed along with the ruins in the scene. Come to find out the whole movie was shot at Foothill Ranch and/or Albertson Ranch and/or at the Burbank Studios…. guess the Banshee is closer than I think!

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Carol, if it's any consolation, one of my elementary school classmates had an even more visceral reaction to this Disney chestnut!

Hey there,

Poking about a bit, it appears you don't have an article yet about PAPERHOUSE. I got a deep little scar from that one a long time back that drove me to buy the film on laserdisc even though I don't have a player. Hasn't made it to DVD so far except overseas, but I see that it's on YouTube. Time to see if it's as disturbing as I recall:

Whoa, yeah.

UNK SEZ: Dear Steve, Thanks for bringing up PAPERHOUSE, a perfect film for the pages of Kindertrauma. I have not seen that one in a while but I remember being impressed with it as well. It was directed by BERNARD ROSE the same guy who delivered one of my all time favorites, CANDYMAN. For those interested, PAPERHOUSE involves a young girl named Anna (CHARLOTTE BURKE) who upon becoming ill begins to draw her way into another world. Whatever she adds to the drawing becomes real in this alternative landscape. This is a good thing when she adds a pal named Marc and a bad thing when she adds her long lost dad. Turns out Dad has a thing for hammers and Anna's dreamworld quickly becomes a nightmare. PAPERHOUSE leans toward psycological fantasy more than horror but there is no denying that Anna's pop is a real figure of menace. PAPERHOUSE is based on a book called MARIANNE DREAMS by CATHERINE STORR which also has a devout fan base. As you pointed out Steve, for the time being PAPERHOUSE can only be viewed on youtube or tracked down on VHS. Too bad Anna can't draw PAPERHOUSE onto DVD!