I wasn’t always a fan of horror movies. In fact, for most of my childhood I was terrified of stepping into the scary movie section of my local video store. Evil Dead, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Child’s Play; the VHS covers alone were enough to give me nightmares. It took family friendly fare like The Monster Squad or Gremlins to ease me into the genre and see there was a sense of fun going on inside those tapes.
This need to ease into the genre brings me to the notion of “kinder trauma”- that moment when, as a child, you experience something in media that haunts you for life. Usually kinder traumas are mundane things, unintentionally scary characters, movies or shows. Whatever they are, kinder traumas are always fascinating and don’t always relate to the horror genre specifically.
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For me, three moments stand out: meeting Lady Elaine Fairchilde (pictured above), the red-nosed, elderly puppet that haunted Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, the 1985 adaptation of The Peanut Butter Solution, and watching Return of the Killer Tomatoes at a birthday party sleepover. I’m not proud of the latter, particularly having seen the film later in life and understanding the satire, but to this day I still remember being too scared to walk to the bathroom in the middle of the night for fear of a tomato attack.
We all have kinder traumas buried deep inside our brains somewhere. What were yours?