kindertrauma

Traumafessions :: Reader PhantomWerewolf on Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

Posted on By aunt john

Growing up I watched a lot of horror movies; guess you could say I grew up with them. My cousins are not the bravest of folk and when they rented horror movies I was "forced" to watch them as well. This started when I was about 4 years old. I've watched everything from ‘80s slashers, to old classics, to horrid B-movies even MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 wouldn't touch. I was not afraid, the only thing that remotely frightened me was CHILD'S PLAY, but that wasn't even bad. I was quite confident I could watch anything or see anything and not be scared.

I was wrong.

My horrors came not from movies… but from a book. SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK. I believe this has already been covered, but only a particular picture was discussed and it wasn't the one that made me sleepless for months.

I was about 10 when I discovered this book in my school library; the cover was rather eerie so I was drawn to it. Without looking inside, confident I would be entertained judging by the cover alone, I checked out the book and was on my way back to class.

It wasn't until I got home that I started to read the book. The stories were rather cruddy but the pictures were what struck me. They were so otherworldly in the way they were drawn it sent shivers down my spine in a good way. That all ended when I saw 'the picture.'

The story I believe was called "The Haunted House" or something close and the image that accompanied it was that of a woman's face; if it could be called a face. Decay had taken most of her visage away leaving a wraith like being with scraggly hair and empty sockets with piercing pinpoints of light visible in the back of the skull. Her mouth was agape, lips nearly rotting off her and her teeth were few and far between. I was literally frozen with fear, staring at this being in the pages of a book.

Once I regained my composure, I slammed the book shut and threw it from me, never to finish it. My mother had apparently heard me yelp, I didn't recall making any noise, and came in to see what had happened. I explained what I saw and she had to see for herself and was shocked to see such a graphic image in a kids' book. She promptly did the mother thing and told me it was just a picture and couldn't hurt me, but what kid really believes that? I was convinced this thing would come and kill me in my sleep.

The face haunted my dreams for the next few days, that simple image and my explosive imagination had done what no horror movie had ever done to me. I was afraid to sleep in the dark; I couldn't sleep without waking up from a nightmare in a cold sweat. After a month or two the initial scare wore off and only trauma remained. To this day I cannot look at that image without shuddering, so imagine my despair when they released a new edition of the same book with that face adorning the cover.

Kinderpal FatherOfTears on Kill Baby Kill

Posted on By kinderpal fatheroftears

There is a nice list on this website featuring little kids who are killers and they are all great examples. There is another killer kid that should be mentioned; Melissa Graps (VALERIA VALERI) from MARIO BAVA's KILL BABY KILL. Melissa was the daughter of some local hated Baroness and was accidentally killed by a bull during a town festival. The locals were too busy getting plastered and they didn't like the kid, so they ignored her, even when she rang a church bell for help and so she eventually bled to death. Momma Baroness, who happened to be a medium, decided to get revenge on the town by summoning up her dead 7-year-old and having her kill the locals.

The first time Melissa would appear to her victims she would only creep them out. The second time she appeared to them she would force them to kill themselves! She would show up with a mischievous giggle that was years ahead of DR. GIGGLES and there would be P.O.V. shots of her swinging on a swing in the dead of night. One victim, the town inn keeper's daughter, was taunted by the ghost child when Melissa put her hands on her window, placed her face up to it and simply stared at the poor kid!

Of course the teenager knew that she was Melissa's next target so her parents enlisted the help of a local witch who, among other things, flogs the kid with thorny bushes! She also makes the kid wear a ring of barbed wire around her torso to ward off Melissa. The doctor who was sent to town to investigate the suicides finds this out and thinks it's crazy. He removes the barbed wire from the girl and assumes that it is all superstition and that the girl will be alright. WRONG!!! The next night the girl is woken from her sleep and she sees Melissa by the window again. Melissa puts the girl in a trance and she forces her to impale herself with a piece of metal that's sticking out of a wall mounted candle holder. There is another scene where the doctor goes to the Baroness's castle and he runs into the ghost who announces her presence by throwing a bouncing ball down the hallway.

Melissa then tells the doctor her name and runs off giggling down a spiral staircase. The kid has this sadistic look in her eyes. This is seen when she shows up in the closet of the town burgermiester as he's about to give the doctor's new found assistant, a local med student played by ERIKA BLANC of THE DEVIL'S NIGHTMARE fame, a birth certificate showing her who her true parents were (ERIKA is apparently tied in to the killer kid's history).

O.K., I don't want to give much more away, but near the end the doctor and ERIKA go to the Baroness's place and she takes him to Melissa's bedroom which is full of dolls. Well guess who is sitting on the floor with the dolls!

(That repeating room sequence HAD to have inspired DAVID LYNCH when he did that Red Room sequence in the last episode of TWIN PEAKS!)

Creepy kid eh? So there she is. Melissa Graps, creepy killer child who could fit in with all the other Kindertrauma kids who kill!

Traumafessions :: Reader TickleMeCthulhu on Sssssss

Posted on By unkle lancifer

Does anybody remember the 1973 movie, Sssssss in which a young DIRK BENEDICT undertakes a position as lab assistant and is slowly transformed into a cobra? I believe I first saw this film at a drive-in theater in New Jersey, though I remember also seeing it on T.V. I'm not sure. I would have been 3 in 1973, so I'm not sure if we saw it that early, but it's possible (maybe '74-'85).

Before seeing it again on DVD in the past couple of years, my memory of the film was sketchy, at best. I remember key scenes: the freak half-snake, half-man hybrid at the carnival; the snake eating the man after choosing to select a key to his locked room from a coral snake or a milk snake; DIRK BENEDICT peeling his shedding skin off in the bathroom; but mostly I remember "Snakeman." In fact, that's what I used to call the movie- I didn't know it was Sssssss until much later. My memory of the Snakeman was a phase in DIRK BENEDICT's transformation in which he turned pale and hairless, his folded arms fused to his body, and his mouth became wide and speechless (with the exception of pained "mmmmm-mmm!" sounds). He was locked in the lab by the professor character and his scenes involved him clumsily stumbling around the lab, bumping into things and going "mmmm-mmmm!" In actuality, this memory is actually a fusion of various scenes in the movie: the carnival freak; the discovery of the previous lab assistant; the final transformation; and the actual scene (shown below).

After seeing this, my nighttime fears became an obsession with Snakeman. Snakeman was under the bed, Snakeman was in the closet, Snakeman was looking in the window, my brothers' suggestions as to Snakeman's whereabouts and intentions didn't help.

Well, as I mentioned before, I watched it again on the no-frills DVD my brother lent me. It's a terribly insipid movie. The Snakeman scenes are only a few minutes of screen time and hardly the stuff of horror legend. I cannot overstate the inevitable let down you're setting yourself up for when re-viewing movies that effected you as a child. It's best just to let these things remain what they were to you. Most of my childhood terrors were comprised of the bits and pieces of horror films I had seen (until my parents told me to close my eyes or go upstairs to bed) and the creative continuations and reconstructions of those scenes. This was one movie where I fixated on one scene and just blew it out of horror proportion.

NOTE: Even more Sssssss induced trauma can be found HERE.

My Bloody Valentine 3-D

Posted on By unkle lancifer


Last night your Unkle Lancifer was lucky enough to catch MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3-D. To tell you the truth, I cannot remember the last time I had so much fun seeing a movie in the theater. It is an absolutely straightforward funhouse ride with likable characters, a great use of location and a highly contagious mischievous spirit. We're talking simple, absolute fun. This movie actually has the rare wisdom to trust the validity of its predecessor and the slasher genre itself while adding its own clever spin. Frankly, I felt like a teenager again sitting in a room full of total strangers screaming, laughing and in this case, ducking from flying body parts. I think that if you go see this movie and you don't have a good time than you should just grab a shovel, walk into your backyard, dig a hole and then just lie down and call it a life. Not being able to find joy here means that there is something so broken and twisted in your soul that you are clearly beyond any type of repair and that you should really think seriously about taking your negative energy out of the universe. If you have any love for your eyeballs at all, you will go see this movie immediately and in 3-D. (No, I do not own stock in this fine film.)

P.S.: Did I mention it stars TOM ATKINS?

Traumafessions :: Reader djalicat on The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T.

Posted on By aunt john

I am writing to you about the weirdest musical ever…and the only movie written by Dr. Seuss himself! THE 5,000 FINGERS OF DR. T.! This is a classic Kindertrauma film. Imagine a live action version of Dr. Seuss's drawings but way before RON HOWARD's HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS and MIKE MYERS' CAT IN THE HAT.

Dr. Seuss wrote the script and the lyrics and designed the sets (of course). This is an amazingly weird, wonderful film that will creep the crap out of you. There's a dungeon for all non-piano players who then perform an extend dance sequence. There are doors in floors and stairs that lead to nowhere and hands coming out of the wall. There are Siamese twin guards, connected by their beard, on roller skates. Oh yeah, the main kid Bart and all the other boys forced to play piano, wear a hat with a hand coming out of the top!

The best part is that the adults in the film learn to, "Always listen to kids, even when they lie."

Name That Truama :: Reader Eric on a Handy Hitchhiker

Posted on By aunt john

I saw this movie on Showtime late night when I was a kid, around the early ‘80s. Family in a car driving down a road in the rain; They stop and pick up a hitchhiker wearing one of those hooded yellow rain slickers, can't see his face or anything. Hitchhiker gets in, the family says something like, "Where you headed, etc?" Hitchhiker says nothing, and the family starts looking at each other nervously. Suddenly the hitchhiker grabs the father's face, and his hand is some weird looking claw. The car goes off the road. The mother wakes up in the hospital and they tell her that she and the hitchhiker were the only survivors. She says, "His hand…his left hand..??" and the nurse says, "The left hand was severed in the crash".

That's as far as I got. Any idea what this is? Nobody seems to ever have heard of it.

UNK SEZ: This sounds like a good one but I don't recall it. You know the drill kids, send us an email or leave a comment if you know what this is!!!

UPDATE: Jeff Allard of the incredibly great blog DINNER WITH MAX JENKE knew right away that this trauma was made possible by the anthology series HAMMER HOUSE OF HORROR. He even gave us the episode's title, "The Two Faces Of Evil"!Thanks also go to Reader PhantomWolf who pointed us toward the clip below….

Official Traumatizer :: Mr. Roarke (In Memoriam Ricardo Montalban)

Posted on By unkle lancifer

I used to think death meant that God just wasn't that into you, but I am now beginning to believe the un-killable rumor that it happens to everybody. Today Kindertrauma idol RICARDO MONTALBAN passed away at age 88. Mr. MONTALBAN had already established himself as a Hollywood Legend when he stepped into the signature white suite that belonged to FANTASY ISLAND's beloved and highly mysterious MR. ROARKE. I think I can speak for all of our readers (especially die-hard fans AMANDA BY NIGHT and THE MICKSTER) when I say that FANTASY ISLAND was a big influence and effected our generation's lives more than it is often given credit for, plus that show could be damn scary when it wanted to be!

Besides just being the coolest guy around, MONTABON was a forerunner in changing the image of Latinos in film and spent much of his life breaking down barriers when he was not schooling us all on the of the advantages of "soft, Corinthian leather." This man owned Saturday night from 1978 to 1984 and I, for one, thank God he was there.

P.S.: You can watch FANTASY ISLAND on Hulu for free HERE. (I highly recommend the ventriloquist dummy spit personality revenge episode with MAREN JENSEN entitled "Mary Ann and Miss Sophisticate").

Kinder-News:: Harry Warden's Return

Posted on By unkle lancifer

Yesterday saw the release of a special edition DVD of the 1981 slasher favorite MY BLOODY VALENTINE. Included on the disc are two versions of the film, the theatrical release you know and love and an unedited version complete with bloody graphic scenes that were previously edited out. My first encounter with VALENTINE was in the pages of FAMOUS MONSTERS magazine around the time of its initial release. The impressive stills I first viewed had me jumping at the bit as I waited in anticipation for its release. Not being of age to see R-rated movies in the theater quite yet, I was doomed to wait for its VHS release to finally catch up with it. As impressed with the movie as I was at the time, I do remember being equally disappointed that several scenes that I had spied in FAMOUS MONSTERS were nowhere to be found. It turned out that the original cut of the film had received an X-rating due to a strong anti-violence backlash that was sweeping through the M.P.A.A. at the time. For years (nearly three decades) I had dreamt of getting to see this underrated gem in its full gory glory and yesterday those dreams came true.

As far as I'm concerned, this is the horror DVD release of the year bar none. I might be an obsessive fanatic but I know what I like. In some ways MY BLOODY VALENTINE perfectly epitomizes the slasher trends popular at the time, but no matter how faithfully it might follow the trail of those then current trends it has a spirit and an atmosphere unquestionably its own. Taking on romantic situations where nobody wins and focusing on dead end jobs in a town whose best days are in the rearview mirror, M.B.V., when compared to many of its peers, comes off as sullenly thoughtful. There are some glimpses of levity but the constant cold, gray sky most definitely has the final word. Harry Warden, the legendary killer who haunts the town of Valentine's Bluff might be a maniac, but he's a rather tragic figure too. In a way I think Harry has a right to be disgruntled considering all that he has endured due to his crappy job. Maybe he's correct in pointing out to the rest of the going nowhere locals that they have absolutely no reason to be throwing parties. (Of course one should find more productive ways of expressing oneself than with a pickaxe.)

The vicious mayhem revealed in the extended cut is pretty damn amazing. Not only is it a lot of fun for fans of gore, but the added bits help the movie move forward in a way that makes more sense. Some of the scenes were rendered so choppy in the theatrical release that it obscured important elements and, thankfully, that is no longer an issue. A couple of these kills, merely serviceable before, I would now count among the best in slasher history. The film quality of some of the reinserted scenes is less than pristine, but frankly, to me, that is like complaining about ED McMAHON's penmanship on a Publisher's Clearing House check.

There is no question in my mind that if this version were the one to have been released in 1981, MY BLOODY VALENTINE would be called simply a classic rather than a "cult" classic by now. I plan to be first in line to see the 3-D remake on opening day. Honestly I would be there anyway, but at this point I'd also just like to thank LIONSGATE with my hardly earned cash for making this special edition DVD possible. Rather than simply robbing this classic of its title and dumping a mall turd into theaters, they went that extra mile and did genre fan's a real solid. No matter the quality of Harry's new incarnation I gotta give thanks to LIONSGATE for having such heart. I don't care how many times you have seen this movie before, if you have not seen the special edition get thee to Amazon at once. Until you have witnessed the infamous shower head scene in all its brutality, you have not yet met the real Harry Warden.

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Official Traumatizer :: Freddy Krueger

Posted on By unkle lancifer

I'm sure I do not have to bend over backwards to convince any of you of Freddy Krueger's rightful place within the ranks of Kindertrauma's official TRAUMATIZERS. As portrayed by ROBERT ENGLUND, Freddy is one of the world's most recognizable horror icons and over the last couple decades, has slashed himself a permanent position in to the public's consciousness. His persona, a trickster ghoul who haunts dreams, perfectly captures the fears of every child who ever suffered a sleepless night. It almost seems as if he always existed in some form or another and was just waiting for NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET creator WES CRAVEN to give him a name. (CRAVEN admits his own childhood fears were the seeds that developed into KRUEGER).

Out of all the genre's recognizable monsters, killers and demons, Freddy meshes seamlessly with childhood fears in a way that cannot be ignored. In fact, his origin story includes a history of terrorizing and murdering children specifically. Over exposure and his penchant for campy zingers in the franchise's sequels may have weakened his sting, but lest we forget at the heart of Krueger is the spirit of true Kindertrauma.

This is the type of guy that as a kid you whisper about in hushed tones before bedtime and imagine is lurking within the shadows of your closet. As much as the series showcased the slasher deaths of teenagers by Freddy's signature bladed glove, lost children, his original victims, would often appear singing jump rope warnings of his impending arrival. Regardless of his victims various ages throughout the series he invariably stood as a blunt dividing line between parent and child who sadistically relished pointing out the lie of presumed safety in the suburban American dream. Although his identity as child killer softened through the course of the series, his every cinematic incarnation included at least one visual reference to lost or snuffed out innocence and childhood vulnerability.

Because he is such an obvious choice we seem to have neglected to tip our fedoras properly to Freddy thus far, but Mr. Krueger's status as an official TRAUMATIZER cannot be avoided any longer.

Below are some Kindertrauma spirited screenshots from all eight films in which FREDDY KRUEGER appeared. Can you identify from which film each has been taken?