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!

"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.