Category: Traumafessions

In the summer of 1969 my twin sister and I were nine years old. My father took us to the drive in for a double feature: WILLARD and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. I thought it was bad enough that the mean teenaged boys made rat noises when we walked to the concession stand during intermission, but that was nothing compared to how I felt when my father drove us through a cemetery on the way home and pretended to run out of gas. We screamed and screamed and screamed. To this day he insists that was the best way home, but we had never seen that cemetery before that night, and we never drove through it again. I can't watch NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (a personal favorite) without chuckling over that memory.

 

I was just watching FROSTY THE SNOWMAN for the millionth time this evening and remembered how it traumatized me as a child. The part where Professor Hinkle locks Frosty in the greenhouse to melt made me cry every year. I just knew he was melted forever and I was crushed. Also, Santa took his sweet time explaining that Frosty would be okay.

Thanks Mickster for the great Traumafession! And thanks to all who have sent in traumafesssions this year, you are the magic hats that keep Kindertrauma alive! Happy holidays to you all from Uncle Lancifer and Aunt John!

One film that traumatized me for life was DEADLY FRIEND. I saw this film when I was around 6 when my babysitter used to work at a video store and would rent all the horror movies for me to watch. She got me DEADLY FRIEND one day and the scene where Samantha's having a dream and her dad comes in and starts cussing at her and going crazy like he's gonna rape her or something, and then she takes a flower vase and sticks it in his eye and he starts laughing and screaming while blood is streaming out of the vase! Of course I love this film now, and it's one of my faves, but it still kinda freaks me out when I see this scene. Also some other good scenes in the film would be when Elvira Parker (ANNE RAMSEY from THE GOONIES) gets her head blown off by a basketball that Sam threw; when Sam kills her dad in the cellar by burning him; and the ultra close up shots of brain surgery.

 

There is an episode from the first season of G.I. JOE called "There's No Place Like Springfield" in which Shipwreck is captured and put under hypnosis in an attempt to get some top secret information out of him. In one part of this dream, Shipwreck watches as some of his fellow G.I. Joe team members literally melt before his eyes! It was this part that just freaked the Hell right out of me. I think I must have come in on the episode halfway, because I didn't know at the time what was happening in the plot. I never watched another episode of G.I. Joe again, for fear that I might unknowingly stumble across "that" episode. 

Unkle Lancifer says: All you critters out there feel free to visit Ryan any time of day at his home turf MOVIES AT MIDNIGHT! And check out this link to the EPISODE IN QUESTION. Ryan ain't kidding, it's a real doozy mind-screw that plays like JACOB'S LADDER: THE ANIMATED SERIES. (If MACAULAY CULKIN's part was played by a parrot!)

 

Years ago when I was younger one of my brothers and a few of his friends were talking about THE AMITYVILLE HORROR and how scary it was. I eventually talked my older brother Dan into letting me watch it…BIG mistake! At the film's end, I thought "That wasn't too scary," but I was dreaming if I thought I would find sleep that night or any night anytime soon. That movie had such a profound effect on me that I was not able to sleep for nearly two weeks. My parents eventually had to take me to a therapist to help me with my insomnia. That movie terrified me so badly, and my brother was in the doghouse for a long time for showing that to me! What scared me so bad is that I thought it was all true and that something like that could happen to me as well. There are not many things that scare me on this planet, but the Devil does. To this day that movie still gives me the creeps!

If you'd like to read Christopher's take on many of your favorite slasher flicks, check him out over at Unkle Lancifer's Alma Mater RETRO SLASHERS!

… A movie that traumatized me and put me off scarves to this day… was ISADORA (1968), and stars VANESSA REDGRAVE as the dancer Isadora Duncan. I've searched the Internet in vain for that death scene in which Isadora jumps into her convertible, her long flowing scarf getting caught in the rear open-spoked wheel and strangling her as she attempted to drive away. All I remember is VANESSA REDGRAVE's neck and body stretched into a horrible pose.

I was about five years old when saw this movie. I would like to see it again sometime just to see if that scene is still as freaky as the image that is burned into my memory.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Thank you Laurel for broaching a subject that is on many people's minds this time of year, SCARF SAFETY! We here at Kindertrauma are old enough to remember the grisly accident that took place at Crawford academy all so many years ago. One of the school's elite "top ten" was repairing his motorbike when his trademark scarf got tangled in the spokes of it's wheel and the results were grisly to say the least. So remember kids, by all means DO bundle up against the elements but remember safety first! We want all of you guys to be around on Christmas day when the baby Jesus sings HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!

The scariest dolls are the ones in BARBARELLA. They make horrible clacking sounds and they have metal teeth. My older brother was in love with this movie for obvious reasons but it scared the crap out of me! I just remember them biting into JANE FONDA's legs and I loose it.

One of my earliest memories of a movie creeping me out as a kid would be the 1953 original INVADERS FROM MARS. I caught it on television when I was probably no older than six or seven on what must have been a black and white set because I was recently surprised to find the movie was actually shot in color despite my recollections. So this kid sees a flying saucer land in this spooky field out behind his house in the middle of the night and tries to convince his parents and the authorities of what he saw. Problem is, each time someone investigates they get dragged down beneath this sandpit that the saucer has burrowed beneath.

What's worse is that these victims come back…different. The kid's father, who was sucked into the ground, is cold and even hostile toward his own son. At one point the father even smacks the kid down to the floor when his son spots a strange growth on the back of the dad's neck. Soon the father is taking his wife up to be abducted and reprogrammed and the poor boy doesn't even know his own parents anymore. As a child, the Martians (when we finally see them) were much less scary than the thought of my parents suddenly becoming unfamiliar or mean. To this day I still sometimes double check the back of my parents' necks for any strange protuberances!

It was 1980. I was 11. My brother said he would take me to a movie that night, and I could just pick whatever I wanted to watch. I narrowed the choices down to THE LONG RIDERS and some horror flick called FRIDAY THE 13TH. So we left that evening and as it turns out, there was rain, heavy rain that night in Savannah, GA. The city itself kind of looks creepy at night, but with the downpour and the streetlights there was a weird orange glow outside as we headed towards the Lucas Theater. So not only were the streets looking eerie, but the theater itself was in an old, Victorian building. (more…)

It was a childhood visit to my cousin's house in Blacksburg, VA that scarred me for life. My visits to Dwight's were usually spent playing R.C. Pro-Am, or pool, or baseball, if the weather was nice. But for some reason, that afternoon we wound up in sitting in front of PET SEMATARY—a horror-movie experience that I'm not quite sure I've ever recovered from.

I had actually read the book, so I knew that the whole thing would end badly—but the novel hadn't prepared me for the movie's scene in which the mother finds her crippled sister in a filthy upstairs bedroom. As she looks in, the woman rises from her soiled bed and hobbles insanely around the room, screaming, "Rachel! You'll never walk again! NEVER WALK AGAIN!" As an eleven-year-old, I could handle mean cats and even scalpel-wielding zombie toddlers—but this scene was unmanageable. It was so viscerally disturbing that I had to avert my eyes, but by then, the damage had been done. And besides, I couldn't block out her cackling shrieks.

When I went back to my grandparents' house that night, I was, as clichéd as it sounds, afraid of the dark. I flipped the light off and jumped into bed, afraid not of little Gage slicing my ankle from beneath, but of a demented, abandoned woman with protruding vertebrae. Even today, if I'm stumbling around in the dark and I think of that scene, I break into a minor panic.

I don't know why we didn't play baseball that day.

Editor's note: After an extensive background check, we here at kindertrauma could find no real evidence that Jacob Lambert and PET SEMATARY director Mary Lambert are in any way related. What we did discover though, was Jacob's hilarious satirical news site THE PHILADELPHIA TURKEY.