Childhood Trauma

El Spurioso · 13 November, 2002, 03:02:46 AM

I vaguely remember a Channel 4 short where this bloke wakes-up one morning to find a zip down the front of his chest. He spends all day getting more and more paranoid and everywhere he looks there's people opening zips, doing zips up, etc etc. At night he unzips it slightly and a human hand shoots out. He pushes it back and zips himself up. Some other stuff happens, his life falls apart, and he ends up in a sports-club changing room. He opens the zip fully and out crawls another version of himself, looking much fresher and happier, who neatly folds-up the discarded skin and walks off to get on with his life. Veeeeeery odd. Put me off zipping up my trousers for quiet a while, as a nipper.

paulvonscott · 13 November, 2002, 03:11:04 AM

I uused to watch the hammer house of horror, but only have vague recollections. One had peter cushing who trapped people in his house for some study or other, I'm sure there was a werewolf one at some point.

Bizarrely the thing that disturbed me most from my first watching of AWiLondon, was the flash cut of a gruesome clown face (those demn clowns).

JimBob · 13 November, 2002, 03:11:33 AM

A lot of older films are scary when your a kid, the black and white Thing, Creature from the black lagoon and it came from out of space are all classics but sadly dont turn up much now as terrestial TV has a B & W phobia.
Also spooked by the original Invaders from Mars which particularly plays on kids fears.
Great stuff, didnt go near a sand pit or beach fo rages after seeing Invaders from...

McNulty · 13 November, 2002, 04:48:16 AM

Am I crazy or did they change the ending to that film? I seem to recall that the film ended with the good looking woman, the ruggedly handsome man and the everso cute lad all together after seeing off the bad ole Martians. The woman tells the lad that his parents are having surgery to remove the things in the back of their necks and they will be okay.
Then I seem to recall that the ending changed. It was all a dream and the lad wakes up in his bed, safe and well.
Am I crazy, or was there two endings to the film?

Link: http://www.users.totalise.co.uk/~rjamieson/Cal-Hab/index.html" target="_blank">The A-Z of Cal-Hab

almighty mat · 13 November, 2002, 02:43:38 PM

++Ooooh! Channel Four shorts... Saw one once where a guy in a secluded country road gets his foot trapped in a rabbit hole or something. His whole day gets worse and worse as he attempts to get out of the hole (the worst bit being when some people turn up and you think that they're going to help- only to find that they mug him instead). Eventually, when he's in the absolute depths of despair and you expect something good to happen to him- the ground opens up and swallows him whole instead. Nice++

Similar thing happened to a friend of a friend who lived in the middle of nowhere. He was riding his motorbike in the woods near his house, crashed, and broke his leg when he landed. He broke it a couple of inches above the ankle, but the way he landed caused the bone to rip out of the flesh of his leg and impale itself in the ground up to a couple of inches below his knee. he was stuck there like that, legbone stuck impaled , rest of his leg just lying/flopping on the ground, for about five hours before they found him.

But he didn't get mugged.

mat

Matt Timson · 13 November, 2002, 05:10:51 PM

Unlucky!

Mk13 · 13 November, 2002, 05:39:43 PM

>Also spooked by the original Invaders from Mars which particularly plays on kids fears.

Dunno, it didn't really do it for me, though I do fondly remember the strange loping furry martians and the kid's cry of 'Myooo-tants!'.

The problem I had with the film was that I really despised the horrible all-American brat, so I felt quite sorry for the Martians by the end.

Does that make me a commie or something?

Another one, in a similar vein, that used to scare me was the Invaders series, poarticularly the opening credits...

JimBob · 13 November, 2002, 06:51:07 PM

Tobe Hooper did a remake.
It's pants.

Tiplodocus · 13 November, 2002, 07:25:03 PM

There was also a thing called THE NAKED RUNNER or something where some people are captured by some mad african tribe and tortured in different ways - one gets baked in mud etc. That made me shit my pants.

And there was a thing, also set in a jungle, about a horde of ants eating everything in their path. At the time, I didn't notice the terrible excuses that people had for not seeing a mile wide column of ants approaching. This scared me so much that I shat someone else's pants.

Mudcrab · 13 November, 2002, 07:33:46 PM

Ooooh, Grud yes, Charlie Boy. That was well spooky. Voodo things. More of a gory than scary one that though, bloke landing on the plough etc.

The hitchhiker one though, that was scary.

There was one with a bloke who'd been shot in the face and got buried, then the guy started coming back to life, it all turned out it was a plan by the wife and some other bloke to scare the guy to death or something. Got an irrational fear of WHITE RANGE ROVERS from that one :o)

The Werewolf one had Diana Dors in it as far as I remember.

Mudcrab · 13 November, 2002, 07:37:14 PM

Hmm, yeah, that was a bit of a classic that one. Peter Cuching was keeping animals in cages and training them to open certain doors etc. The protagonist ends up trapped in one of these things, spends the whole episode trying to get out, I THINK he tricks a dog into letting him out or something, finally escapes, gets home, closes the door and TA TA DA, the whole house has been rigged up as a trap. Very scary indeed when you're not very old.

CraveNoir · 22 April, 2003, 06:53:07 PM

Sorry to dig up an old thread but I stumbled onto it and felt I had to put Matt out of his misery...

The first program you're referring to was a BBC adaption of E. Nesbit's children's classic 'The Enchanted Castle'. It was broadcast twice, and managed to disturb me both times with the scene you mention. By the way, the children named the animated clothes 'Ugly-Wuglies'.

The second program sounds like it might be the first Sapphire & Steel story which concerns time slips in a country house, but I wouldn't swear to it.

And to add to the (dead) thread:

As a child I used to stay up late at weekends to watch the horror films which always seemed to be on in the 70s. I was unfortunate to see an obscure TV movie called 'Don't Be Afraid of the Dark,' about these scary little goblins things that live in an old house. A young woman moves into the house and... I looked under my bed every night for the next ten years!

http://us.imdb.com/CommentsShow?0069992

Check the URL above to see how others were deeply affected in a similar way. The movie is currently being re-made for release in 2004.

Oh, and The Quiet Nun... one of those Armchair Thriller type things. All I remember is a nun in a creepy rocking chair and the camera moves around and there's just this black void in her where her face should be. Freaked me out!

Link: http://arthurwendover.com/arthurs/child/enchnt10.html" target="_blank">The Enchanted Castle on-line novel

Smiley · 22 April, 2003, 07:06:14 PM

Heh! I remember that film. The blighters lived behind a brick wall, and she went to join them in the end. One of the midgets went on to be Twiki in Buck Rogers.

Jim_Campbell · 22 April, 2003, 07:06:38 PM

"Anyone with clown issues aught to follow this link..."

Wobbling off at a slight tangent - does anyone where one might procure a copy of Killer Klowns from Outer Space ...?

Sheer class, I tell ya - "In space, no-one can eat ice cream ..."

Cheers

Jim

CraveNoir · 22 April, 2003, 07:08:12 PM

Oops! So there's pages 3 and 4 to this thread eh? How fiendish!

I see Smiley remembers the faceless Nun too!

Adrian Bamforth, the Hammer House of Horror story about the possessed house was called 'The House That Bled to Death". I can still hear the little girl calling for her cat... "Timmy!"

And I too remember the curtains in the Werewolf episode. That, and the scene from Salem's Lot, made me nervous about going near first floor windows at night.