movies that freaked you out as a little kid. whether they were scary or not. whether you actually saw them or not.

more interested in non-scary movies answers though.

I had nightmares for over a year about the "Cauliflower Head Kids" segment of Really Weird Tales, which is a comedy from the SCTV people.

And looking at it now, that movie came out in 1987, so I was nine or ten! Not even that young! I'd been watching scary movies for a couple years already!

poltergeist, all i remember is the tv static and the little girl and the short woman with the weird voice.

At our infant school, 1970 or so, on our notice board (church school) was an advert for the film "The Magic Christian", with Ringo begging in a cardboard box.

Guess the powers that be hadn't seen the film.

Lady and the Tramp, because of the rat with glowing red eyes who is some not-fully-identified thread to the baby of the family. I think I had to sleep on the floor in my parents room for weeks in order not to be scared it would come and get me.

"thread" s/b "threat"

When I was about 10 my dad called me into the living room to show me the chest-bursting scene from Alien. I remember running out of the room.

i managed to watch Alien upto the point where she escaped in the ship, and the alien was hiding in the pipes. At which point i could take no more.

The original Haunting movie, i remember the banging sound freaking me out.

The witch in the cartoon version of Lion Witch and Wardrobe, she reall *really* freaked me out.

i think i discussed this before but i remember being really freaked out by anything where kids were turned into animals. when we lived in france there was this french tv show that i remember as being like twilight zone for kids. there were at least two episodes where kids were turned into animals and couldn't communicate with anyone that they were, in fact, children. same with the scene in pinocchio where they all turn into donkeys. basically just the concept of still being you but no one being able to recognize you and not being able to tell anyone was really frightening.

I was a huge horror film fan as a kid but there were a couple things that freaked me.

fantasia: the night on bald mountain section drove me from the theatre when I was 3.

the little girl who lives down the lane: when the landlady gets hit in the head by the cellar door. sudden freakish accidental death.

burnt offerings: that creepy ass chauffeur, goddamn!

magic trailer: for the anthony hopkins ventiloquist movie. didn't see this until I was much older cause the commercial weirded me out. apparently I wasn't the only one:
The trailer for this film was pulled from TV due to calls from angry parents who claimed that it gave their children nightmares and frightened them. The trailer in question is less than 30 seconds in length. It features Fats reciting the tagline, after which his eyeballs roll into the back of his head. This is followed by a cast reading, then Fats opens his eyes and gazes to his left.

bitter harvest: a tv movie about a farmer whose livestock and family get poisoned by pollution, starring ron howard. for some reason a scene where they put a cow down by electrocuting it sent me around the bend. most of these scenes scared me when I was 6 or 7, but I was 10 when I saw this, weird.

The Amityville Horror, The Blob, and a made-for-television movie called This House Possessed

The Blob was the worst; I still have occasional nightmares about it and I refuse to see the 1980s remake.

Also, I have never made it all the way through Poltergeist because it freaked me out, too.

Star Wars

Ditto the Blob, also Phantom of the Opera with Paul Williams

The rock people (gnomes?) from return to oz. and the wheelers.

Oh and the furry orange guys from Labyrinth who pulled their heads off and plucked their eyes out during a song

i remember this being totally terrifying.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3e/LongShadows.jpg

i've always been a bit of a freak for horror movies...but....

little kid horrors:
- terrified of Ursula in the Little Mermaid. my fear of large, tough, bull-dykey women has not abated since.
- scared silly by the girls in the Shining, but that's nothing new. still scared of them, too.

bigger kid horrors:
- COULD NOT WATCH most parts of Event Horizon. saw it recently and was sort of like, "eh, this is kinda freaky, but what was i so jumpy about?" i think it was mainly the scene with the Latin and all their decaying bloody bodies wandering about.
- got totally freaked out by God Told Me To, which i somehow managed to watch when i was eleven years old. i mean really, my parents must have been fucking crazy to let me watch such stuff. now that's one of my favorites of the genre.

by the way, i had never seen the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and i started it last night...and i had to turn it off. it was totally making me paranoid.

I remember they showed a "Damnation Alley" trailer before Star Wars that freaked me out for a long time. It was a post-nuclear-war plot, at the height of my fears about nuclear war. It apparently featured "hoards of killer cockroaches" according to IMDB.

Some TV movie about heroin addicts. I couldn't sleep that night out of terror that I would grow up to become one. Horror stuff has never particularly frightened me in anything but a mild, enjoyable way.

also, Poltergeist. Completely terrifying.

ALTERED STATES

even just the poster creeped me out. I may have never even seen it back then but they ran commercials for it a lot on HBO.

superstition

a terrible movie about a house haunted by a witch that was burned and drowned in a pond. when a pastor and his family moves in all hell breaks loose and in the end every single person has died. it freaked 7th grade me out.

for several weeks after i just felt awful. i had no clue why i felt so bad. i wondered if the movie had possessed me! later in life i realized i had just had my first big depression episode.

the previews for dressed to kill really scared me.

and for some reason, the video for eminence front terrified me (not a movie, i know).

star trek the motion picture freaked me out too. saw it at the theater when it came out and just didn't get it and felt totally weird after. haven't seen it since. need to rewatch and see what i think now.

i had to be taken out of the theater during the wrath of khan. i barely remember it, but my father said that i kept getting more and more upset every time he appeared on screen to the point that he had to carry me outside and calm me down. i remember sitting in the lobby with him and refusing to go back in.

I remember they showed a "Damnation Alley" trailer before Star Wars that freaked me out for a long time. It was a post-nuclear-war plot, at the height of my fears about nuclear war. It apparently featured "hoards of killer cockroaches" according to IMDB.

-- schwantz, Friday, January 18, 2008 11:25 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

starring jan michael vincent! I saw it in the theatres. the cockroach attack scene is pretty memorable.

the banshees in darby o'gill and the little people oh my no. i had a proper attack and ahd to be dragged out from under a chair, aged 7.

Jaws.

the peanut butter solution really freaked me out! i think i saw it when i was about 11 and i found the whole hair-loss hair-gain thing terrifying

saw poltergeist in the theatre with my dad - freaked out dreams and paranoia abt closets for YEARS

that scared me, too. good lord. my mother gave me a lecture on the folk history of banshees, which was supposed convince me that they weren't real, but it didn't have the soothing effect she assumed it would.

xpost re: darby o'gill

The flying monkeys in The Wizard Of Oz freaked me out. I dislike that movie with a passion but the monkeys still fascinate.

omg the part in wrath of khan with the creatures that go in their helmets and into their ears and into their brains!!!

GUYS remember the BOAT RIDE in the orig WILLY WONKA movie!??

Alien, and I don't think I saw it for 8-10 years after it came out. I was always right about it, though.

original willy wonky is so great but has a lot of freaky parts for sure!

wizard of oz is pretty freaky in parts too

poltergeist, jaws

and that twilight zone where the girl turns around and she has no mouth!

And there was some late 60s - early 70s UK film about (and this is a cloudy memory) some old women who had their illegitimate kid brother living in their cellar. He had looong hair and nails and was v. dirty. Anyone know this one?

I wasn't allowed to see any of these movies when I was a kid, so apparently I was spared all this nightmares? I was also spared any exposure to pop culture, though, so YMMV.

The Invaders From Mars remake freaked me out too. There's a part where the kid sees his alien possessed teacher eat a frog and I lost my 5-year-old shit

omg the part in wrath of khan with the creatures that go in their helmets and into their ears and into their brains!!!

-- rrrobyn, Friday, January 18, 2008 4:47 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

i was gonna say

and haha
peanut butter solution!!!!

haha i think 'kids of degrassi street' freaked me out a little too when i first saw it! and sometimes even beachcombers!
i was a kid easily freaked out by canadian production values

ALTERED STATES

even just the poster creeped me out. I may have never even seen it back then but they ran commercials for it a lot on HBO.

-- dmr, Friday, January 18, 2008 10:28 AM (Friday, January 18, 2008 10:28 AM) Bookmark Link

Seconded. I remember that poster of William Hurt upside-down at the McCain Mall movie theater (now a Luby's), and thinking "not for me."

One of the neat coincidences of my wife's childhood and mine is that we were both freaked out by Piranha.

http://www.impawards.com/1978/posters/piranha.jpg

The movie poster looks like fun, though.

i think i mentioned on another thread sort of like this one that there was this movie called squirm that i saw when i was a kid and it was about mutant worm population that took over a town - i mostly remember the part where they ate a house and everything in it

what's weird is that it freaked me out but never caused me to ever be afraid of worms at all, just big old houses that had the potential to be eaten by a giant swarm of mutant worms

haha i think 'kids of degrassi street' freaked me out a little too when i first saw it! and sometimes even beachcombers!
i was a kid easily freaked out by canadian production values

-- rrrobyn, Friday, January 18, 2008 4:54 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

lol our collective national trauma

friendly giant - kinda creepy

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK totally fucked with my shit. Dad why the fuck would you let me watch that! I WAS ONLY FIVE!

dads are mostly to blame for this kinda thing, it's true

hahaha, so true about the Dads.

omg Piranha. How did I forget that for even a second?

Now that I'm thinking about it, there was some creepy movie about a guy using telephones to murder people that freaked me, too. The phone would ring, the person would answer it, and THEN A KILLER DIAL TONE WOULD MURDER THEM. (Yes, I realize how stupid that sounds now.)

Robocop, specifically the "shooting-murphy-in-the-balls" scene.

My dad would turn off "Three's Company" or the evening news if we came into the room. :-/

haha i think 'kids of degrassi street' freaked me out a little too when i first saw it!

I think there was one where they become blood brothers or sisters? That freaked me out

and that twilight zone where the girl turns around and she has no mouth!

NIGHTMARE, I had one.

I found that scarier than anything else in that.

oh oh oh LARGE MARGE!!!!

http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c143/sixteenbitlegend/Photo528.jpg

and for some reason, the video for eminence front terrified me (not a movie, i know).

The Who's best days are behind them and they're going through the motions! NOOOOOOoooooooooooooo!

Now that I'm thinking about it, there was some creepy movie about a guy using telephones to murder people that freaked me, too. The phone would ring, the person would answer it, and THEN A KILLER DIAL TONE WOULD MURDER THEM. (Yes, I realize how stupid that sounds now.)

telefon with charles bronson? I think I saw every bad movie made during the late 70s/early 80s.

http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/6/64/200px-Telefon_1977_movie_poster.jpg

Nickalicious so OTM. Also library ghost in Ghostbusters.

xpost I wish I knew if that was the telephone movie. I just know I was freaked about answering the phone for a week.

The Acid Queen sequence in Tommy, especially Robert Powell's face.

I was six, what where my parents thinking??

I was terrified of gremlins 2, edward scissorhands, and child's play 3 solely because of the commercials. I would run screaming out of the room whenever any of them came on. Also the spinal meningitis chick in Pet Sematary freaked me the fuck out when I was 10.

I didn't sleep well for 3 weeks after seeing SYBIL
Scariest movie ever

until was six, literally every live-action movie that came out scared the shit out of me

i started crying when my parents asked if i wanted to see home alone

ALTERED STATES

-- dmr, Friday, January 18, 2008 10:28 AM (Friday, January 18, 2008 10:28 AM) Bookmark Link

Seconded. I remember that poster of William Hurt upside-down at the McCain Mall movie theater (now a Luby's), and thinking "not for me."

eighteyedgoat.gif

Also library ghost in Ghostbusters

I started crying during that part and lasted about 10 mins before asking my Mom if we could go home. I've still never seen all of Ghostbusters.

Also, not a movie but I was TERRIFIED of Scooby Doo. I would scream whenever it came on the tv.

It was a mini-series, but seeing a dude get boiled alive in "Shogun" spazzed me out a bit.

seeing aliens in V eating reptiles/bugs/whatever freaked me out.

RATS!

The "Trumbo's Land" episode of MacGuyver, with all the ants. Not a movie, I know, but freaky nonetheless.

I thought this would be an Abbott thread.

Serpent and the Rainbow - the poster for the movie.

And episodes of Unsolved Mysteries with features about UFO's. Robert Stack is a pasty zombie-like motherfucker, which made it even worse.

The first half of Serpent and the Rainbow is pretty scary, it has a really disquieting atmosphere.

OLD YELLER. Dad rented it, i got halfway through the thing, to the 'dog gets mauled by boars' scene and had to shut it off. anybody wanna tell me how it ends?

In the German manner: "...and they're all there still, if they haven't died yet."

!

Actually, that inspires me to write a comedy about a guy with a pet zombie dog.

omg the part in wrath of khan with the creatures that go in their helmets and into their ears and into their brains!!!

ALWAYS freaked me out...

my older brother watched a ton of war movies

i sat through 'apocalypse now' when i was like 8

uhh.. not sure i recommend doing that

HOWARD THE DUCK

shudder just thinking about it

That did have a pretty scary ending.

Caddyshack II

the end of time bandits filled me with loneliness and dread. but i loved the movie.

I very clearly remember the opening scene of a film where some guy flushed a baby crocodile down a toilet; I remember nothing else about it, but it was disturbing.

Time Bandits - a great film to introduce children to bummer endings.

Oh, I hated that Time Bandits ending. Probably because my parents would've done the same thing if I yelled out "Don't touch that!"

I very clearly remember the opening scene of a film where some guy flushed a baby crocodile down a toilet; I remember nothing else about it, but it was disturbing.

-- nickalicious, Friday, January 18, 2008 2:28 PM (36 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

the john sayles-penned alligator?

http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/gallery/phpThumb.php?src=/gallery/images/65/poster.jpg

night of the hotlinker lol

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/alligator.jpg

http://www.kindertrauma.com/

that's my pal lance's website. i'm always hyping it. but it IS a website devoted to things that scared people as children. so, it fits here.

altered states

&

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSAmUDlUUhQ

surprised no one's mentioned don't be afraid of the dark.

And episodes of Unsolved Mysteries with features about UFO's. Robert Stack is a pasty zombie-like motherfucker, which made it even worse.

otm. i think the ghost episodes scared me even more.

ghostbusters here too! the library ghost got things off to a bad start but the gargoyles really freaked the holy living crap out of me.
my parents were quite upset at the fuss i made.

yeah the end of time bandits totally freaked me out and haunted me for years. i didn't even realize what movie it had been until a couple years ago.

i remember being totally creeped out by the trailer for "child's play 3."

There is no reason they should have let a six year old in to see "Phantom of the Paradise". (Some friends and I went to see it on a double feature matinee with Young Frankinstein). Jezzis Fuggin Kryste, talk about a completely incomprehensible freak out. Etched in my mind eternally. Great flick.

i used to think ghostbusters was a straight-up horror movie!

i wish i had been more insistent on this thread being about non-intentionally-scary movies though.

it was for me!

xpost

The Fly! When he teleports the first baboon and it's bloody knuckle knocks on the window. then the pod opens up to reveal a jiggling inside out mess.

"Charlie & the Chocolate Factory" fostered an intense phobia of Gene Wilder in me that lasted at least a decade or so.

http://www.failuremag.com/images/wonka_wilder.jpg

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGHHH!

http://ak.buy.com/db_assets/prod_lrg_images/424/40099424.jpg

one of the many benefits of not being a little kid is that now I understand that most of the movies you mentioned on this thread are, in fact, completely awesome.

Cocoon - the bit where the alien girl 'peels off' and then sees Guttenberg peeping.

the peanut butter solution really freaked me out! i think i saw it when i was about 11 and i found the whole hair-loss hair-gain thing terrifying

Oh fuck YES, we got shown it in school and I couldn't fucking believe it was happening. I thought I made it up for years. Too bad this shit is out of print.

Willow and Princess Bride really scared me. Esp in Willow when someone gets turned into a pig!

Santa Claus: The Movie

when you see that bad dude floating up into space right at the end

I think everything on the TV scared me, tho. A Troll in fucking Central Park scared me, Darkwing Duck scared me (well, one episode did)...will think of more.

lynch's "elephant man"

quite a lot of E.T. - i couldn't watch it for years after

i loved E.T. it was the first movie ive seen in cinema i think

first pirate video i saw. maybe the fuzz made it worse.

The original Miracle on 34th Street scared me, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein fucking terrified me!

I couldn't sleep the night after I saw Nightmare Before Christmas. Pee-Wee's Big Adventure scared me, not because of Large Marge, but because of the prank gum (which I thought made his mouth bleed), and the scene with the devils dancing around his bike (devils = sure-fire scares).

The Wizard scared me, because the Nintendo prodigy kid seemed to be kind of half-developmentally delayed but in an 'uncanny valley' unrealistic way that really upset me. Also, the kids were all alone on the road without any grown-ups. Scary!

Care Bears Movie scared the shit out of me bcz there was some scary ghost-demon-something at the summer camp. Some Peanuts special with Uncle Spike gave me nightmares for years, but I think this was unrelated to the special, altho I don't remember. Little Monsters absolutely fucking TERRIFIED me: when they have to race against the sunrise to keep Kevin Arnold (can't remember his real name) from turning into a monster and especially when Martin Short's head explodes! This was a recurring element in my dreams for years, too, like up until high school.

But Little Shop of Horrors and Beetlejuice were my favorite movies at age 5 and I watched them whenever I could. !!!

the part in 'a christmas story' in the department store! when he's coming down the slide i think!

xpost - whoa christmas movie freakouts ahoy

Look at this blue guy, how creepily 'wacky' he is and esp. how possessive he is of Fred Savage!

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51P4KPTNJNL._AA280_.jpg
http://www.rvgfanatic.com/mediac/400_0/media/DIR_401101/LittleMonstersDVD.jpg

;_;

yea the wizard of oz scared me. i used to b really frightened by the witch

the part in 'a christmas story' in the department store! when he's coming down the slide i think!

That's gotta be one of the meanest looking Santa's in film history, Billy Bob Thornton included.

Beetlejuice was an important movie in acclimatising me to the grotesque

Bah HERE is Martin Shorts' head exploding scene!!!!

http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/7/75/Little_Monsters_Boy.jpg

When Maurice takes Brian to the monster equivalent of a party – a baby's room, where the monsters take turns attempting to frighten the child – he calls it cruelty and leaves, exposing the monsters to the light in the adjacent hallway in the process. While doing so, however, Brian learns that he is turning into a monster, as his arm begins to shrink when the light first hits it.

This changes Brian's mind about Maurice and he saws the legs off all the beds in the house. Although originally motivated by a desire to win over a "convert" (all monsters are former children), Maurice did believe Brian to be his only real friend. But Boy, the ruler of the monster universe, wanted Brian as a playmate, and Snik, his thug, assaults Maurice for failing when Brian came so close to becoming a monster. Snik then uses the couch bed in Brian's living room to enter the real world and kidnap Brian's brother, Eric...

They manage to escape by turning Maurice into a pile of clothes, via an improvised light created by Kiersten (Amber Barretto), Brian's science-savvy semi-girlfriend, and leave to gather more supplies. Meanwhile, Maurice enlists the help of Ronnie Coleman (Devin Ratray), the school bully. Fully armed, the group of kids confronts Boy and Snik with "enough firepower to light up Yankee Stadium". When they fire, Boy dissolves (a la the Nazi leader in Raiders of the Lost Ark) and the remaining clothes burst into flames, while Snik explodes; however, they rescue Eric only to be trapped and confronted by a grotesque-looking Snik who has literally pulled himself together.

not a movie but an episode of the twilight zone from the 80's where this housewife finds an old watch while out in her back garden and discovers that she can stop time with it. hence all family squabbles can be stopped to give her head peace but then oh noes! nuclear war is about to break out. theres the bit that totally freaked me out (i was unusually worried about nuclear war for an 11 year old) at the end, she stops time and theres all these people who were running for their lives frozen like statues and a nuclear missle hanging in mid-air! brrrr. i remember my mum having to talk me down after that.

ET freaked me out too, as a tot. i remember they showed it to my kindergarten class and i did so not enjoy it in the least!

Michael B., that episode freaked a lot of people out, yours truly included.

I loved horror movies as a kid. When I was four, Poltergeist was my favorite movie. I looked just like Carol Anne, too.

Peanut Butter Solution is on Google video!

oh for sure that twilight zone episode played out in my imagination for YEARS

The Wonder Years where the parents get mad at their newly-hippied-out daughter scared me, too, but I had a big fear of hippies.

ET in the river all white and creepy and dead and shit.

Willy Wonka boat scene

Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure was fucking terrifying. There's a good summary of it here.

http://www.badmovieplanet.com/unknownmovies/pictures/raggedy3.jpg
This scene with the gender-bending, amorphous blob of singing taffy was the worst.

oh man so much of this stuff and stuff i'm remembering right now was pretty freaky - i mean i wasn't a particularly easily frightened kid or anything but whoa. i'm just going to figure that part of being a kid is being freaked out about a lot things.

and ok so i'm not going to feel guilty right now about just having sent my best friend's kids 'my neighbour totoro'

and 'where the wild things are'

my subconscious logic is probably something like 'harness your fear, children, grow strong with it' etc lol?

Fairy tales are fucking weird and scary. Kids like the weird and scary, esp if it is clear they are not and cannot be real. Helps 'em deal. (Bad summary of Uses of ENchantment here.)

I have to admit that some of those Walt Disney rides scared the fucking shit out of me, including the Snow White one where you go right up to the fucking witch.

I remember being terrified of the movie Ghoulies, especially one scene where a demon comes up out of the toilet. My fear was probably not made any better by my dad telling me to watch out for "ghoulies" when I went into the bathroom.

surprised no one's mentioned don't be afraid of the dark.

uh, this. it was made for tv in 1973, i think i first saw it when i was 8 or 9, maybe on cable. evil demon monkeys locked behind a mysterious little door... i really, really want to see it again but i'm kind of afraid it'd start the decades-worth of nightmares over again.

otm re ghoulies

oh god yes Starman. Bridges being all stern faced and rigid was the freakiest thing ever.

I know people who can't watch any more of his movies because of his alien ways in Starman.

Killer Klowns From Outer Space was pretty traumatizing iirc

My mother who is both way cool and extremely evil used to find it hilarious that both Alien and The Thing absolutely scared the living shit out of me as a child - to the point that I would actually leave the room if one of them came on tv.

The thing that gave me nightmares as a kid wasn't a movie. It was a nature show. It about the South American rainforest and they described the lifecycle of a particular fungus whose spores are inhaled by ants; it then proceeds to eat their brains before then making their body climb a tree so that it can eat the rest of their body and sprout a new fruitingbody to spread its brain-eating death even further abroad. I spent months freaking out about that one...

The poster for the movie "Frogs" freaked me out. http://www.impawards.com/1972/frogs.html. The movie itself wasn't that scary, though. False advertising!

When the Wind Blows, still freaks me out.

The thing that gave me nightmares as a kid wasn't a movie. It was a nature show. It about the South American rainforest and they described the lifecycle of a particular fungus whose spores are inhaled by ants; it then proceeds to eat their brains before then making their body climb a tree so that it can eat the rest of their body and sprout a new fruitingbody to spread its brain-eating death even further abroad. I spent months freaking out about that one...

That's the Tomentella fungus. What adds to the unpleasantness of that story is the fact that the particular species of ant (the stink ant) can produce screams audible to the human ear, which it frequently does while under the fungus' control.

As a kid I loved "Big Truble in Little China", but I really wasn't fond of that scene where the thunder guy blows up.

x-post

On an animated note, Watership Down scared the piss out of me as a six year old.

the Wiz freaked me out when I saw it on TV. There is some scene in there that didn't make any sense at all (maybe there are several)

Wizard of Oz.
Return to Oz.

Aaaaaaaaaah!
Frank Baum is fucked up.

"The Poseidon Adventure" scared the shit out of me and my sister when we were younger (it was total after-school viewing before my parents got home from work). She recently watched it again and proclaimed it was "totally lame."

i think Rigsby from Rising Damp used to scare me sometimes, it was the cardigan and wispy stringy hair that did it.

Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure

YES!!!
Actually, I was prettty well primed to take a bunch of LSD after seeing this.

evil demon monkeys locked behind a mysterious little door... i really, really want to see it again but i'm kind of afraid it'd start the decades-worth of nightmares over again.

Not the same thing, but similar - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wimPmoT7XoU

i love that sketch.

the wheelers and all the heads in Return To Oz

the climax of Raiders of the Lost Ark with the spirits

i second the alien thing in the bed in Starman

1 also second the banshees in Darby O'Gil & the Little People

large marge in Peewee's Big Adventure

the vhs cover of Critters

the vhs cover of Scanners

1 = i duh

the climax of Raiders of the Lost Ark with the spirits

can't believe i didn't mention this myself. creepiest shit in a PG ever.

i wonder how many kids were freaked out by Burning Amputee Anakin and the Vader helmet descending. think i was would've been.

when i watched return of the jedi at the cinema i was too young to be noticing 'gurls' and i remember being a bit 'urgh' by leia's nakedness in jabba's hutt.

the woman getting turned into a robot in Superman 3

seconded

haven't actually seen that since i was a kid. TOO AFRAID.

i seem to vaguely remember it had something to do with her teeth and lots of metal coming out. aaargh

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuSsSwg9MXs

ah, not a tooth in site. Perhaps I'm getting mixed up with Poltergeist 2.

Still, that Superman scene always unnerved me.

"sight" duh

OTM!

nightmare on elm st.
there was this one movie *ad* where the camera came up behind this girl brushing her hair at a desk, then she turns around and, of course, she's a skull and has no face. that scared the fuck out of me.

I saw Airplane! when I was three or four, and to this day it is the single most terrifying movie viewing experience I've ever had. I haven't seen it since, but I can still remember the scene where eggs are coming out of the woman's mouth vividly (and one of them hatches! AUGH!). I remember describing the movie to a friend years later, and when he said something like "Oh, you mean Airplane!, that movie was hilarious!" I went "That was a comedy!?!"

I need to add the original Amityville Horror to this list. The final scenes really got me.

I saw it again while I was in college and was more disturbed by the weird costuming choices placed on Margot Kidder.

the opening ghost from Ghostbusters fucked with me the first time.

Glad to see I wasn't the only one on that Superman 3 scene...had no idea it affected so many people!

"equus"

You saw fucking EQUUS as a kid????

The Rabbit Spirit thing from Watership Down. Completely freaked the fuck out of me.

The bit in Dot & the Kangaroo where the aboriginal drawings come alive and you see them on the riverbottom and AGH AGH AGH.

The ending of Time Bandits and the kid losing his parents and being all alone.

The banshee from Darby Ogill, we watched that shit in class once.

Parts of Pete's Dragpon where he gets taken away.

Some late 70s/early 80s british tv movie about homeless kids living like peter pan, and with a scary-ass peter pan statue.

Oh yeah, and the terror at 30,000 feet section of the twilight zone movie. But that's meant to be scary, i guess.

Bah the people in the bar, or whoever those dirty hillbilly old people were in Pete's Dragon: TERROR! I had a book with a photo of them and I was transfixed by it. Chills.

xposts:

Abbott, I wasn't allowed or encouraged to see it, but my Mom and some of her friends watched it and I woke up and saw...some important parts.

Some important parts, you see.

A guy stabbing a horse in the eye.

That is one of my two earliest memories.

SHIT roxy! I was scared enough when I accidentally saw parts of "The Lawnmower Man." Fucking Equus!

NAKED guy stabbing horse in eye. Fuck!

Yep! The first male nakedness I ever saw. Second: Brian in Monty Python's The Life Of Brian.

Sorry, spoiler alerts.

I saw Equus only a few years ago so the horse-eye-stabbing was like Dirk Diggler's dick: they keep on talking about it constantly and it's like, "God, will I ever just SEE it so I don't have to keep hearing about it?" But then you see it and kind of wish you hadn't.

beetlejuice!!! They die and can never come back :(

The scene where he's forcing Lydia to marry her....glah!

Actually ALL DOGS GO TO HEAVEN gave me horrible nightmares for years. "Once you've gone...you can never come back..." Secret of Nimh was scary, too. Don Bluth...

Death has never freaked me out. Only pain.

YES @ all dogs go to heaven

http://animated-views.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/richadams-03.jpg

GAAHH kill it kill it kill it

Picture this......

Fall of 1968, around Halloween, I was 9.

My Grandfather took my cousin(10) and I to the drive in movie.

Way out in the boonies drive in movie.

HE HAS NO IDEA AT ALL WHAT IS SHOWING THAT NIGHT.

Saw a couple Woody Woodpecker cartoons, then it started..............

Night of the Living Dead

((((((( OMG ))))))))

That night since it was so late getting home we had to sleep in the guest room off the garage, which was not attached to the house and terrifying in its own right.

It took half a bottle of Vicks cough syrup with codeine to make us sleep.

Had nightmares for more than a year over that one.

For something NOT supposed to be scary.... Ronald McDonald.

Not the Super Dee Duper happy guy today, the OLD RM in black and white with the food tray hat and cup for a nose.

They had to promise me that he was at a different McDonalds that day to get me to go there to eat.......

i bet bunches of kids are scared for life by the bog scene with the dead people in lord of the rings. and a whole bunch of other stuff in lord of the rings.
haha kids i am glad i am not you right now!

though uh i guess we had animated version of lord of the rings which was scary in its own right :/

the Wiz freaked me out when I saw it on TV. There is some scene in there that didn't make any sense at all (maybe there are several)
-- akm, Tuesday, 22 January 2008 14:36 (6 days ago)

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Pzc3M0_4NH0

Actually, both those scenes sort of come out of nowhere.

haha the wiz
that scene is so much less freaky than i remember it but still freaky
'get on down the road' was like my favourite song when i was 10

There's an assassination scene in, I think, The Lady in White that I saw out of context on a "Stephen King's World of Horror" special that sort of ruined me as a 7-year-old for awhile. Most of the goblins and shit that would show up on those specials didn't particularly frighten me, but that one moment of realist death was way beyond what I could handle.

There was an extended commercial for America's Most Wanted that did the same thing to me. It involved a man killing a brother and sister home alone. It ran during the Tracey Ullman show, which I was only just watching for the Simpsons bumpers and then I had to go and see THAT!

Oh, and the mother/daughter episode in the cellar of the original Night of the Living Dead takes the cake for stuff I watched years, hell, decades before I should've.

I don't know which of the Living Dead movies I saw, but it was at one of the first post-musical cast parties I ever went to in high school. I was in 9th grade, so it maybe shouldn't have bothered me so much, but nooooooo, it completely freaked me out.

Jaws is an obvious answer. I saw that way too young & was afraid of swimming pools, not to mention oceans, as a result. I also recall seeing Psycho (with my parents ?!) and The Shining on television in single-digit years & being freaked the fuck out.

But what scared me the most was In Cold Blood. Not the movie, but the book: One of my sisters (age 19 when I was 5) was reading it while home on summer break from college. I remember asking her what it was about and being very curious about the whole thing, and she explained to me in detail the nature of the murders & how random the whole thing was, and also that it was a true story. I had it in my mind from then on that, on any given (usualy stormy) night, my house might be invaded by sadistic killers. Thanks sis!

One more thing: I don't what implanted this in my imagination (probably Scoobee Doo), but I was petrified of nighttime thunderstorms for the longest time because I was always afraid that the silhouette of a (bad/evil) man would appear outside my window during a lighting flash.

When I was a kid the Hayes Office still lived and breathed its malodorous censorship upon the face of Hollywood, so:

"And your little dog, too." Flying monkeys in bellboy jackets and caps. The great and powerful Oz, wheezing like a steam engine and as big as a barn. All too scary for words.

Death has never freaked me out. Only pain.

-- roxymuzak, Thursday, January 24, 2008 7:40 AM (4 days ago) Bookmark Link

that's a pretty hardcore statement. album title or something.

everything freaked me out when i was a kid. I was scared of the fuckin Grinch.

I wasn't allowed to watch MTV as a little kid because according to my parents I saw some courtesy of my babysitter at 3 and it gave me nightmares. Years later I realized that this one recurring dream about a goblin pumping his fist at tme in a cobwebbed cathedral was totally based on "White Wedding."

I just remembered a scene from a movie that freaked me out. I saw it on HBO at my grandmother's, circa. 1980.

These two navy guys were in this room on a sinking ship or submarine. The water started coming in, and the only one to plug it was to close the portal door (with one of those spinning wheels that you sometimes see on "The Price Is Right".)

However, the door could only be closed from the inside, so the younger navy guy sacrifices his life to get the higher-ranked officer out. The guy goes out, and the water floods the room as the younger guy closes the portal door.

After escaping, the officer looks through a peep hole (??) and sees the younger guy's body floating in the water, with his mouth all wide open and eyes rolling back.

The scene's imagery, as well as its plot line, FREAKED ME OUT.

i watched all of rat race. at the end, smashmouth plays "all star" at a big concert and cuba gooding jr. breakdances

-- n/a, Thursday, January 31, 2008 2:40 PM (Thursday, January 31, 2008 2:40 PM) Bookmark Link

Hahaha

return to oz was the scariest movie ever made when I was five and it still is.

-The Hand That Rocked The Cradle poster.
-Some horror movie box with a girl drenched in a pool of blood or plasma?
-Tales From The Hood commercial
http://i61.photobucket.com/albums/h56/inyourdreams_krueger/lilnigglets.jpg

oh, and on TBS, at the end of one of the freddy movies they showed a compilation of all the kills.

Top Five:

1) Magic trailer sooooo OTM! If it came on while I was watching TV (alone, in the basement), I'd have to flee the room and run upstairs in a wild, "na-na-na-na-I-can't-hear-you" panic.

2) Dark Night of the Scarecrow. Creepy TV movie about this murdered Forrest Gump guy who comes back to life as a scarecrow and takes gruesome-for-a-TV-movie revenge. Last scene (bloody zombie scarecrow hands flower to little girl) fucked me up but good.

3) Saw The Wiz in NYC when I was very small (6 or so?), and the Cyclone lady scared me so bad I had to hide behind the theater seat in front of me until she was gone. I think this embarassed my aunt and uncle, who had brought their backward relative as a treat.

4) Radio ad for Dawn of the Dead: chanting zombie voices saying "dawn of the dead, Dawn of the Dead, DAWN OF THE DEAD..." over and over, rising slowly from almost inaudible to super damn loud. Freaky shit.

5) A couple years later, I saw this omnibus show on TV about old horror movies. At first I thought I'd be cool with it, but then there was this lady with a skull for a head, and I got so scared I had to run half up the stairs, to where I could just barely see a sliver of the TV screen. From there, I waited, ears covered, until an ad came on. Then I ran down and shut the TV off (I'd left the remote behind).

also, FORTRESS, an Australian TV movie from 1986 (no christopher lambert) in which a bunch of gun-toting psychopaths wearing terrifying rubber masks (a Santa mask and a rabbit mask come to mind) kidnap and terrorize a bunch of school children in a forest. They escape and I think all the kids wind up killing the bad guys. For some reason, KTLA thought it was a good movie to show at 3 o clock on a Saturday afternoon. According to the IMDB, I am not alone in being scarred for life by this shitbomb of fuckedupitude.

one time I was at my friends in 1st or 2nd grade and the tv turned on, or changed channels on its own or something, and big bird came on the screen. Big Bird had a blood curling stare...as evil as you can think. I wish I new more about this story. I was reminded recently when my mom brought it up, but that's all I can remember. Whatever happened, it was very peculiar and supernatural.

did anyone mention Scrooged yet? that section at the beginning where they preview the messed-up Christmas show used to really upset me, especially the 'acid rain' bit. actually that whole movie is a real bummer for kids.

that movie rocked

yes i like it now!

After escaping, the officer looks through a peep hole (??) and sees the younger guy's body floating in the water, with his mouth all wide open and eyes rolling back.

The scene's imagery, as well as its plot line, FREAKED ME OUT.

i am certain i saw this too!!
i know there are similar scenes in other movies but this ones is sparking fear memories

cocoon's been mentioned but i was pretty scared of the cocoons themselves and had a lot of awake nightmares while in swimming pools abt swimming near one and touching it and it being really gross/'alive'

i remembered another weird one. i think it's Black Narcissus - with the nuns in the mountains? is there a bit where one of the nuns falls off a cliff, but she's hanging off it first trying to climb back up? FREAKED ME OUT.

depending on how old b eing a kid is, i watched 'Nowhere' (gregg araki) when it came out. in theaters. don't know why/how they let me in.

the memory of it came to me when i was watching 'mysterious skin.' which just...reeked of bad gus van sant.