Silent Snow, Secret Snow
First of all, allow me to suggest that if you are up late at night looking for something to watch, yet you feel you can't commit yourself to an entire film, then the answer to your dilemma is NIGHT GALLERY on Hulu. So there, THAT possible future problem is solved. I know because that is exactly the position I found myself in the other evening and I wish I had just jumped into GALLERY earlier rather than wasting so much time being indecisive. The episode I viewed contained a segment that was perfect for throwing my brain a bone to gnaw on as it closed up shop for the night. I'm talking about season two, episode five "The Phantom Farmhouse/Silent Snow, Secret Snow." "Phantom Farmhouse" is fine enough but it's "Silent Snow" I want to trudge through here.
Actually for more on that NIGHT GALLERY segment, just jump on over to the always necessary HAUNTED CLOSET over HERE ( & watch it HERE!), that way I can focus on an earlier version (‘66) that I found which is of equal interest. It can't boast an ORSON WELLES narration and the acting may be a bit off but what it lacks in polish it makes up for with sheer creepiness. As it turns out both tellings were directed and adapted by the same guy GENE R. KERNEY so don't feel you're stepping on toes if you prefer one to the other. The NIGHT GALLERY version is certainly slicker but who can deny the unquestionable emotional power of black and white? Check it out in two parts below…
NOTE: The end kinda cuts off the final line: "We'll tell you the last most beautiful and secret story. A story that gets smaller and smaller, that comes inward, instead of opening like a flower. It is a flower that becomes a seed, a little cold seed. Do you hear? We are leaning closer to you…"
How about that? It's like an after school special directed by DAVID LYNCH with a casting assist from JOHN WATERS. It's wild how closely it resembles the later version yet has a distinguishable vibe all it's own. After viewing both renditions I thought I'd read the original 1934 CONRAD AIKEN story too (find that HERE). The story ends with this even more provocative line: "The hiss was now becoming a roar-the whole world was a vast moving screen of snow-but even now it said peace, it said remoteness, it said cold, it said sleep." Like the snow it speaks about, I couldn't get the story itself out of my head. What is going on here? Is the kid going crazy and if so, why does crazy sound so fucking great to me? I sense that I should be feeling a dread that the protagonist is slipping away from reality and yet the words used are so exuberant that I can't help mentally congratulating the child on successfully adopting the fine art of escape.
I'll blame the world for my reaction, disasters both natural and man-made, a twisted soulless culture that worships the blatantly superficial, pure hate masquerading as morality …VICTORIA JACKSON. Ah, the snow, is the snow really so bad in comparison? The snow truly is beautiful and clean and it washes it all away. Some folks rashly believe that the kid in the story is buckling under advancing schizophrenia (or autism), but I just see a good ol' fashioned dissociative disorder galloping up to save the day. School sucks and that child wasn't born to entertain his parents, why not take a little snowy holiday in his brain? Am I just playing Devil's advocate when I say that there's not much wrong here and what a lucky dude for finding a trap door? If you ask me, it's as beautiful as a Tommy Ross poem. O.K. so there's a scary PINK FLOYD "Comfortably Numb" element as well, but did someone say sleep? Sleep sounds nice. Maybe it's me but I detect a valiant rejection of the mundane, a refusal to accept the norm and the understandable desire to commission beauty to counteract an ugly world. Reality shmeality I always say. No, serious I do always say that.
Truth told I had my own "secret snow" as a kid. On a trip to Universal Studios I discovered a machine that when activated with a quarter poured hot red wax into a mold and after a couple minutes of cooling, dispensed a too fragile, wax Frankenstein figurine. Now this was in grade school when horrible children brattier than even myself would call me Frankenstein because I had a scar on my forehead so this figurine doubled as an identity totem. Whenever a situation got scary or worse, lethally boring, I simply imagined a hole on the top of my head and red wax being poured into my body. It would start in my toes and rise until it started spilling out of the crown of my head. Another problem solved! While filled with my imaginary wax I could bare just about anything and the problems of the day would Calgon blur away. Oh, Frankenstein figure why'd you have to go and break into pieces? I guess I could have survived without my secret but is there anything more important than finding something in life that allows you to forge a private alliance with yourself? It's entirely possible that I am missing the whole point of the story, on the other hand the snow falling on my keyboard is encouraging me to think whatever I like.
Traumafessions :: Reader Isabella on Grease
Not sure if this would EVER come across as more than a "WTF?" type of moment, but I have held a confession for over 20 years. Most kids would have been scared of Freddy Krueger (don't get me wrong. Uncle Freddy is not exactly babysitting material), or even the part in Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video where he turns into a werewolf (admit if, folks. You got a little spooked). NOPE. Not I! My trauma had to come from everyone's favorite T-Bird, Pink Lady lovin' movie GREASE.
In the opening of the movie, the signature "Paramount" mountain appears and then the orchestrated violins begin to play while the the sea splashes against the rocks on the side. THEN the choir opens up with "The Sound Of Music" lyrics. By the time you could say, "Hey, where is she running to?" my 5 year old self stuffed in a sleeper onsie (with the feet, thankyouverymuch), was already in the bathroom, covering my ears and hoping that somebody will come to find me and let me know the "song" was over.
To this day, now that I have a 5 year daughter of my own who ADORES this movie, I still cringe at the opening sequence. This time, though, I'm not running into the bathroom, screaming "TURN IT OFF!!!!"
My therapist is so happy about my progress.
Hopelessly devoted to you,
— Isabella
Traumafessions :: WB Kelso of Scenes from the Morgue on Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
After taking in a PLANET OF THE APES matinee marathon back in the mid-1970's that ended with CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, despite Caesar's assurances that the violence was over I wasn't buying into that. So, I had seen the HESTON trapped in a madhouse, watched the entire world nuked out of existence, twice, several brutal apeicides, and the fall of man in one siting.
And, to make matters worse, being around four years old at the time, and sufficiently wigged out already, I hadn't quite grasped the difference between guerrilla fighting and gorilla fighting that they kept talking about on the nightly news broadcasts yet, and so, WALTER CRONKITE had me convinced that General Ursus and Aldo were already massing their troops and the ape revolution had truly begun, and the Earth's annihilation was imminent, which led to many a sleepless nights until these semantic snafus got cleared up.
Sincerely,
WB Kelso
UNK SEZ: Thanks WB! Kids, you all know how much your Unk digs movie ad clippings. Well, SCENES FROM THE MORGUE is like a dream come true for folks like me. Stop by the place today and make sure you check out my personal favorite section, FILM INDEX 1980-1989! There's tons of amazin' stuff to be found there!
Name That Trauma :: Fiji Mermaid of Sideshow Cinema on Auto Attackers
I have a vague memory of a made for T.V. movie from the '80s. The opening really freaked me out for some reason, it's still a scene I remember, but how precise my memory is I can't say.
The beginning of the movie has a young mother with two kids, one is a baby I think, and they are driving through a bad part of town. The car breaks down or has a flat tire and she pulls into an empty, dark parking lot. After sitting there for a few minutes, a large group of thugs show up and attacks the family and starts smashing the car apart like the bullies did in CHRISTINE. I believe they end up killing the mom and the kids… what happens after that I have no idea.
If anyone can dig up a title for this and a clip even that would spectacular! Thanks!
AUNT JOHN SEZ: I have no idea what this movie is, but I do know that Fiji Mermaid runs THE go-to spot for hard-to-find soundtracks over at the awesome SIDESHOW CINEMA.
Stream Warriors: Dagon & Dreams in the Witch House
A recent traumafession regarding DOLLS left me filled to the gills with love of all things STUART GORDON, what better way to celebrate than with a double feature of streaming, screaming, crafty LOVECRAFT-ian tales? Grab some tartar sauce the first course is DAGON!
DAGON (2001)
DAGON keeps on swimming upstream through the river GORDON in my head. It seems every time I plunge my noggin into its soggy clammy world, I feel a little more at home there. Based (mostly) on the LOVECRAFT short story "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," DAGON delivers non-stop nightmare atmosphere but beneath the waves of horror rests a satisfying transformative hero's tale dunked in GORDON's devious dark wit. EZRA GODDEN plays Paul Marsh, a bespectacled and twitchy graduate of Miskatonic U., who we gather has difficulty steering a direct course in life. Waking from a prophetic dream he is thrown via shipwreck into a savagely slimy battle for survival in an increasingly surreal dismantled town inhabited by unfriendly fish folk. DAGON may be low budget and there are a couple of missteps into curdling CGI territory, but all in all it creates an impressively distinctive universe of its own.
EZRA is golden and a succinct successor to GORDON affiliate JEFFREY COMBS. There are long stretches of the film with zero dialogue but you can read every single thought on EZRA's expressive mug. Also on hand is hypnotic BARBARA STEELE clone MACARENA GOMEZ (complete with CURSE OF THE CRIMSON ALTAR-style head gear!) who is somehow lovely enough to parlay tentacles into a fashion asset. A blasphemy is brewing inside me; could this, frog-warts and all, be my favorite GORDON film? Hmmm, usually my favorite GORDON film is whichever one I viewed last so I shouldn't carve anything in stone just yet but on a visual, textural and even inspirational level, I think it just might be. Gory, strange, funny and beautiful in its own grotesquely fantastic way DAGON is quite the catch especially if you have the imagination to blur away its budgetary blemishes.
MASTERS OF HORROR: DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE (2005)
EZRA GODDEN returns this time as Walter Gillman, a heartier Miskatonic student whose journey of the soul goes in the opposite direction as DAGON's Marsh. You'd think it would be a good thing to discover a portal to another dimension comes free of charge in the room you've just rented, but don't forget doorways to other dimensions go both ways. The last thing anyone needs while trying to study is the distraction of a pesky witch and her human-faced rat familiar, both of whom keep nagging you to kill your neighbor's infant. DREAMS is one of the stronger entries into the MOH series and much of what comes across initially as amusing or comical is soon convincing as the nonsensical stuff of true madness. Again EZRA excels and is a joy to watch this time channeling just as much BRUCE CAMPBELL as COMBS. Here's to hoping this guy returns to horror soon. He's effortlessly entertaining and unafraid to respond the way any true man would when faced with the phantasmagorical…by screaming like a tween struck with Bieber fever. DREAMS is delightfully dismal with its baby in peril storyline but is buoyed, like DAGON, with flashes of winking absurdity too.
If you ever find yourself like I did having a STUART GORDON attack I recommend watching both these gratifying streamers back to back (DREAMS is also available on Hulu)! GORDON and LOVECRAFT are a notoriously exceptional pairing and the inspired troika making addition of GODDEN makes these two dips into the abyss all the better.
Name That Trauma :: Reader Sarah H. on Poisoned Ship Passengers
Hey Kindertrauma, I have a bit of a puzzler for you!
About 7 or 8 years ago, when I was quite young, I remember house-sitting with my dad while my aunt was in the hospital giving birth. My dad turned on a horror movie, and for some reason or another, I watched it with him, and it's stuck with me to today! All I can remember is that it (at least the later part of it) takes place on a ship, where there is a fancy dinner where all the guests are fed rat poison. There is a montage of them choking up blood and dying, and later in the movie one of the characters (protagonist? antagonist?) is impaled by a hook violently and swings there, dead. The movie is quite darkly lit, if I remember, though some of these details may not be fact.
Anyone have any idea what movie this is?
Thanks!
— Sarah
UNK SEZ: I think I know this one Sarah H.! People drinking rat poison on a boat sounds a bunch like 2002's GHOST SHIP to me! Check out the video below!
Traumafessions :: Reader Richard D. on Wayland Flowers & Madame
Hi there,
When I was growing up nothing terrified quite so much as WAYLAND FLOWERS and MADAME. In the late 1970's, she was on T.V. all the time and I just could not bear to watch her. Ventriloquist dummies are creepy at their best, but with her huge pointy chin and gaping mouth, she looked like she was going to devour WAYLAND FLOWERS' head. My wife hated her just as much as I did … you can see why we were destined to marry.
Here's a clip of her in the REDD FOXX movie NORMAN, IS THAT YOU?:
Name That Trauma :: Reader Eli on a Boy & a Space Blob
Hi there,
While my movie is not ghost or witches scary, it creeped the hell out of me as a kid. But I cannot find it anywhere. All I can remember is a young boy on a space ship kind of thing and there is a giant blob type being that looks like a Jabba the Hut, that either the boy or another blob boy keep calling "Uncle" in a really creepy voice!
Thanks!
— Eli
