kindertrauma

Name That Trauma :: Reader Freaked on a Homebound Headless Mannequin With a Heartbeat

Posted on By aunt john

 

 

Dear Kindertrauma:

Please help me. I found your site by accident; it reawakened horrors deep in my mind. One that still puzzles me- a T.V. show or made-for-T.V. movie (I guess). It involves a dress mannequin (without a head, armless torso, and conical bottom skirt portion) that moves. The only sound is that of a loud heartbeat. I believe there is some kid trapped in the house with this thing as it slowly moves around.

What was this?

I have spent most of my life wondering what it was.

Must have seen it in the mid-to-late seventies.

Please, please help me.

Sincerely,

Freaked

Dear Freaked:

I have no freaking idea.

Respectfully yours,

Aunt John

PS: I am confident though that one our readers will know the answer and either leave it in the comments, or email it to us.

UPDATE: NAME THAT TRAUMA solved. It's the 1974 made-for-T.V. movie THE STRANGE AND DEADLY OCCURRENCES starring ROBERT STACK and VERA MILES. Special thanks to reader Propagatrix for solving this one!

Traumafessions :: Reader Toby B. on NutCracker Fantasy

Posted on By aunt john

Hey all, long time reader, first time submitter.

While I suffered many, many traumatic events (THE PEANUT BUTTER SOLUTION, SALEM'S LOT, etc.) the worst and most pervasive for me was the 1979 film NUTCRACKER FANTASY released by Rankin/Bass. Granted, from what I understand it was originally released in theatres, but I caught it for the first time on television (it's a tad older than I am, so I missed it in theatres) and so I probably didn't suffer quite the level of trauma that those children whose parents took them to see what would probably have been touted as a "family film" in the day, but it is still absolutely terrifying for me.

I personally have to say this movie's the the worst traumatizer for me because of the (in)famous Rag Man character that literally had the complete opposite effect on me than what was obviously (in retrospect) intended.  My parents probably wondered why I couldn't sleep for three days afterward my viewing without having terrible nightmares compounded by the fact I was terrified of being awake to keep from having those nightmares.  The rest of the movie was extremely trippy, and as such I cannot really tell you too much more about the film, aside from the fact that the finale song "Dance of the Dolls" (or something of the sort) has been constantly kicking around in the back of my head for the last 20-odd years, surpassing the annoyance caused by "It's a Small World" by far.

Lucky for me (or unlucky, depending on your opinion), the film has never been commercially released on DVD, so I can avoid it as a part of the usual Christmas deluge of Rankin/Bass films.  Unfortunately for me, though, the fact that I cannot watch it again means that I can't exorcise the horrors of my childhood by watching it again and seeing how foolish my fear is.

It is foolish, right?  Right?

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Nope Toby, there's nothing foolish about the way you feel. Based on the introductory footage we were able to unearth below, I'd be hesitant to sit through the whole special, save for the fact that it does star two of my personal heroes JO ANNE WORLEY and EVA GABOR (as Queens Morphia and Time, respectively). I would like to add though, RANKIN & BASS (per my crack sources) did not actually have a hand in this holiday nightmare. Director TAKEO NAKAMURA did work as an animator on the R&B special SANTA CLAUS IS COMIN' TO TOWN, but that is where the connection ends.

Name That Trauma :: A Very Special Little Matchstick Girl Edition

Posted on By aunt john

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Today's NAME THAT TRAUMA, courtesy of kinderpal Ratsawgod, is unique in that he knows the name of his trauma, he just can't place the version of it. Please bust out your Kleenex, and leave your guesses in the comments section (or email 'em to us).

Take it away Ratsawgod:

It's Christmas and, as usual, my mind returns to one of my very first Kindertraumas ever.

It was the mid-1970's and my parents had just left me in the care of relatives to attended an adults-only Christmas party. I was planted in the game room set up in their attic and, left to fend for myself for a few hours, I innocently turned on the television. Then it happened: I was exposed the story of THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL, by Hans Christian Andersen.

I remember that it was an animated version. I remember there were these narrative bookends used in the telling of the story; a boy is sitting on the steps of a city building (possibly a library) and he begins telling the tale to a lone dog (possibly a stray.) We are then dropped into the story as Hans Christian Andersen wrote it, in all of its heartbreaking humanity and horror. At the end of the cartoon, we cut back to the boy on the steps as he concludes the story. The dog is still there, and now has been joined by many, many other passer-bys, who have stopped their daily activity and are standing there, agog, intently listening to the boy's story as he speaks the final lines. The camera pulls back as we see the boy, the dog, the mass of people. All listening. All thinking. All feeling. Snow falls, wind blows, and it is quiet. The city is still.

Even as I type this, I cannot help but weep. It was the first time, the first time EVER as a small boy I fully understood that bad things can happen to good people, that children CAN be alone in the world, and are absolutely vulnerable to anything. As small boy I was unspeakably stunned by THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL's rags and bare feet in the hard winters night, by the ripping harsh wind, by the fact no body would buy her matches, and by the fact the sheer apathy of the city folk caused her to die.

Right then, right there, as a boy of six or so, I was never, ever the same again. I suddenly understood life was ruthless and hard and that scared me down to the very core of my being.

I doubt if I mentioned this experience to my parents when they returned to pick me up that night, but I bet I hugged them a little harder and said a little prayer to be safely back in their arms again.

I'm guessing this aired sometime between 1975 and 1977. It's a short story, and I think it was also a short cartoon. BUT it may have been a small tale inserted within a larger animated feature. This is all I remember.

Does anyone out there remember this specific version of THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL? I'd love to see it again. It ultimately became such a formative piece of who I am, and even to this very day I still draw upon that early viewing experience. And ponder. And ache. And reflect.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. The mystery of the animated tale has haunted me for decades.

Traumafessions :: Kinderpal FilmFather on Dying With Your Eyes Open

Posted on By aunt john

Personally, I believe it's a milestone in the loss of one's innocence: learning that you can die with your eyes open.

Up to a certain point in childhood, any death you see on-screen ends with a dramatic last gasp and closing of the eyes, like the person died by some form of lethal exhaustion. But eventually, you watch that "grown-up" movie or show where it doesn't happen that way: somebody dies with their eyes open, and it traumatizes you in a landmark sort of way.

For me, this revelation came as a one-two punch in the form of two lesser-known films from the '70s — neither one a horror film and both, strangely enough, starring BURT REYNOLDS.

One is 1976's GATOR, where JERRY REED (in an underrated bad-guy performance) blows a hole in JACK WESTON with his sawed-off shotgun. We catch a fleeting glimpse of WESTON's lifeless body, eyes and mouth open, as REED douses the room with gasoline and sets it on fire.

The other is 1975's LUCKY LADY about rum-runners during the Prohibition era. In a scene where are heroes (REYNOLDS and JAMES CAAN) are ambushed on a cargo boat, bad guy JOHN HILLERMAN (no, not MAGNUM PI's beloved Higgins!) machine-guns down REYNOLDS and CAAN's protege, a very young ROBBY BENSON. As REYNOLDS and CAAN lay wounded as well, they roll over to see BENSON slumped on his side, his pretty-boy eyes wide open and glazed over in death.

Lancifer and John, I put the question to your readers:

What was the first movie or T.V. show that showed you that you can die with your eyes open?

AUNT JOHN SEZ: That's a really good question FilmFather. As a kid, I was of the school of thought that when you died, you ended up with your legs in the air, like a recently deceased horse in a cartoon. In hindsight, it makes no sense, but I really thought a pair of legs at a ninety degree angle was a sure sign of death. As for the eyes wide open approach, I am drawing a complete blank. Readers, please sound off in the comments or shoot us an email.

Name That Trauma :: Reader Melissa on a Plague Ravaged, Burnt Baby

Posted on By aunt john

Hi!  Long time lurker with a request that has plagued me my whole life:

I'm looking for a movie that I saw the tail end of back when I was a little girl, probably in the late 1970s, on network television.

I walked over to my childhood friends' house and found their older teenage brother Ritchie sitting on the couch watching a movie that he said was about to go over any minute.

I remember a scene of devastation, a never-ending field of treeless wilderness and a woman — perhaps with long dark hair and ragged peasant clothes, carrying a baby in a bundle close to her chest as she trudges across the scorched Earth. There may be bunkers… maybe even bodies littered along the countryside; something that indicated an incredible tragedy. Her silent walking while dramatic music swelled in the background made me ask Ritchie what was the movie about.

His explanation to this day is barely recalled. Although I do faintly remember something about a natural disaster, and him telling me that, "The world became very sick," and everyone died except for a very few people.

The next scene has the woman finally kneeling on the ground as if she can trudge no more, cradling her baby closer and weeping. A man approaches her — he perhaps with shoulder-length dark hair and a beard — and asks her if she is okay.

The woman looks sadly up at the man and, with a vague accent, states, "My baby… is dead."

Next scene we see is the man and the woman standing next to a grave that they had dug for the baby. Or perhaps it was a pyre to burn the infected little body. Either way I remember them standing side by side, both now silently grieving for the lost little life. And it broke my child-like heart.

I've been searching for this movie for years, but have never run across it in all my movie-watching habits. Googling movies about "plague" and the film METEOR came up that sounds as if it might have been a similar premise. But METEOR came out in 1979, which would have probably made it too late to air on television for me to see it as a child. Doing a plot search on several other disaster films from the ‘70s also came up unhelpful.

Then again it might not have been a natural disaster that caused the plague, although a part of me wants to remember that it was. I was really terrified of the whole out-of-control concept of natural disasters as a kid, and it had to have been something like that to have frightened and saddened me so much at the time.

AUNT JOHN SEZ: If anyone knows the title, please leave a comment or shoot us an email.

UPDATE: It sounds to me like reader Tychoanomaly may have hit the nail right on the head with Arch Oboler's FIVE (1951)….