"Childhood Traumas" Tag | HALLOWEEN THREAD!

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Hi guys! I had a fun OOC thread idea as we're coming up on Halloween ...

Do you remember last year, on youtube, when a lot of the movie reviewers (YMS, I Hate Everything, Ralph the Movie Maker, etc) where doing the tag of 'Childhood Trauma'? The idea was to share the strange things you saw as a kind in movies, television or video games that really freaked you out. Things that took on some bizarre, sinister meaning for you.

I'll link to the playlist here with IHE's video at the front right here in the spoiler. Associated videos might have cursing but I think IHE's is relatively friendly:

Spoiler: Show





I'll start as an example! Keep it SFW!


I grew up with horror movies. They never had much of an effect on me. However one movie did, and it was one that didn't make sense. The movie 'It' didn't scare me - I knew Tim Curry as that dude from Rocky Horror (which I was raised on, having first seen it when I was six), so clowns weren't inherently spooky to me.

What was, though? Popcorn monsters.

Killer Klowns From Outer Space is an 80s B horror movie that's kid-friendly, with weird imagery but no real gore or scares. It has a fun punk-rocky opening theme song and even has a scare zone at this year's Universal Studose Orlando Halloween Horror Nights (which is amazing!!!). It's become kind of a cult classic.

This scene, though, of the female lead Debbie after taking a shower scared the living daylights out of me. I wasn't extremely young, either - I must have been 10 or 11. She was shot by this popcorn gun, and once getting back took a shower. The popcorn fell into the toilet and into the hamper when she changed, and turned into the beasties that attack her after she's changed.

They're not inherently scary. It's not gory.

I'll be damned if any time spent in the bathroom for MANY YEARS didn't end up with the hamper closed or covered and the toilet lid down and secured. No joke. For many many years I had major anxiety and paranoia about it. I was so scared. OF COURSE popcorn jack in the box monsters weren't gonna fly out and try to eat me after a shower.

...but can you prove it...?
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I never enjoyed Horror movies.. not due to being afraid but simply I never had an interest. I enjoy stories for different reasons than what people typically see horror movies for, which is not to say it is bad, just not my cup of tea.

So my point there is that I don't have examples from something like that. Of course I had things that scared me as a kid. I used to be pretty logical in my fears, I was afraid of things that could hurt me... various dangerous animals, lightning/thunder (I've overcome that one), etc. So often scary for me was something either visually wrong in my mind or to my mind was categorized as something just not right.. gave me feelings of "this doesn't belong here."

For a more direct example, of all places, the often poorly remembered Lost in Space movie from the turn of the century. It starred Gary Oldman as Dr. Smith. I always liked it for what it was but nowadays I can objectively admit it is not the best piece of cinema even if I can enjoy it. I first saw it when I was quite young though in theaters with my parents. The scene near the end when Dr. Smith of a future timeline has mutated due to a spider-alien scratch from earlier in the film tosses off his cloak to fully reveal himself in all his alien-spider-human eldritch horror glory really got to me as a kid. I remember literally covering my eyes because the sight of it just freaked me out. Nowadays, it doesn't, not at all... in fact I can even chuckle at the late 90s/early 2000s CGI used for the creature which doesn't look very convincing... but as a kid, that image was nightmare inducing for a few days. It took a long time to be able to look at the screen during that part.

A less than clear example... this one is pretty abstract and factors into some psychological stuff... but there is this program called Celestia.. it was an older precursor to a lot of 3D star atlas type programs around now such as Space Engine and so forth. It's still around but not updated much. It existed so you could zoom around the universe and look at celestial objects up close. The less real image data there was on an object, especially for far away things, the more the program sort of guessed or used a basic model to represent it. I really enjoyed flying around the universe and getting glimpses of real stars, planets, and galaxies. I especially loved noting the location of far away galaxies that were not in the local group that I could use for stories I was imagining. There was this weird thing though when I set the program to a dot in the sky and zoomed farther away to more distant objects. The program did the normal thing it always did.. but as the distance counter from Earth went up into Mega-light years and higher... I often would feel increasing amounts of unease.. like it was just not right for me to be going this far away and seeing things. Like if I didn't snap back to Sol really quick I'd never see it again. Nothing about it is logical, it was all in a computer program, and really kinda just weird. It wasn't so much fear as it was just an odd feeling.. but I felt like sharing it.
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I don't remember exactly which movie it was, but there was only one movie that actually gave me nightmares and a life long fear of clowns (It wasn't It). It involved a bunch of kids being rounded up into a wagon by a group of clowns. I almost want to say it was the movie Madeline, but I don't know for sure.
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My mother was watching an action romance akin to Romancing the Stone and the heroes were being chased through an exotic jungle greenhouse. While fighting the goons they knock one from the raised walkway and he falls into a pool a water, where he is engulfed by tiny black shapes and eventually a skeleton sinks to the bottom.

Confused, 5-6 year old me turns to me mother and go: "Mommy, what ate that man."

She just looks at me (in retrospect momentarily distracted from her movie and wanting to get back to it) and goes, "Fish."

To a 6 year, old Piranha and Bluegill look a lot alike (Same family actually). Took me a long time to look at fishing the same way again...
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I still remember one very vivid dream of "waking up" in the middle of the night, feeling uneasy... and then a snake (viper-ish, but python-sized) rose up over the foot of my bed, and started to move forward. And then I really woke up.

Growing up in the last years of the old Cold War, something that gave me a few nights worth of 'mares was an image from Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" - a typical American family, preserved as blast shadows:
Quote:
The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down.

The five spots of paint - the man, the woman, the children, the ball - remained. The rest was a thin charcoaled layer.
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