Kolchak: The Night Stalker anyone? I was just an impressionable kid and my parents (wisely) forbade me to watch. Of course, I saw a few moments here and there. On moment seared into my memory had some hands reaching out from an open grave, or something. Some hidous hole in the ground. And the hands were hideous, too, as I recall.
Therefore, I was fully prepared, much of my young life, to suddenly come upon hands reaching out of the ground any any moment I was outside alone in the dark. And sometimes, still today.
Vincent Price’s House on Haunted Hill gave me the screaming heebie-jeebies as a kid. I saw it in the theater and didn’t sleep for a week. I saw it on TV again about 20 years later, got all settled in and ready to be scared again, and was kinda disappointed to find out it was a comedy. I never could figure out why it scared me so badly the first time.
Boris Karloff’s THRILLER had an episode called “Pigeons from Hell”, based on Robert E. Howard’s short story of the same name. Exceedingly well done and spooky as hell. The scene where the brother comes walking back down the stairs…woof, it still sends shivers down my spine.
The episode from Voyager, with some of the crew and several aliens trapped in a virtual reality with a sadistic, evil clown; he was some sort of projection of their subconscious. He had access to their memories, and could recreate their worst fears, and did so.The way he terrorized Ensign Kim was especially creepy.
Also from Voyager, the end of the episode where Janeway has a near death experience, and sees her dead father, who keeps trying to get her to “step into the light”. Eventually she figures out he’s an evil alien of some sort, not her father, and refuses. “Sooner or later you will go into my matrix, Captain - and you will nourish me for a long, long time.” The part I found truly creepy was the mentioned possibility that that’s what all NDEs are, and that they’ve been “eating our souls” or whatever they do for millenia.
All of the Buffy moments mentioned so far have creeped me out (I must have jumped about three feet the first time I saw the Gentlemen glide past Giles’ window in “Hush”), but for me one of the creepiest/scariest moments is Warren’s death at the end of season 6.
“Bored now.” SHHRRRIIIIPPPPPP!! :eek:
Horrifying not only because of the gruesome scene, but because of what it meant for Willow.
One of the creepiest things I’ve ever seen on TV happened in anime. The episode of Fullmetal Alchemist with
Chimera Nina
made me physically ill. Even now that episode makes me a bit queasy.
I have almost effectively blocked this episode of X-files from my brain since I can’t remember many details. I only saw it once because I refused to watch repeats of it. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the War of the Coprophages, which was creepy, but this one was much worse. I want to say that it involved some large bug-type creature that was mostly invisible. I don’t think I want to try to remember anything more about it.
Except that Willow was already evil. She had been evil for a long time–and I don’t just mean that season, either. That was just the night that the Scoobies saw it.
I guess that could be it. The scene that sticks with me was one where someone was sitting in their living room and this big bug-like thing was creeping up on him.
Miami Vice had lots of episodes like that, but are you sure you aren’t thinking of a third-season Magnum P.I. episode (“Faith and Begorrah”) where the secondary plot involved Rick and TC getting snookered into taking one of Magnum’s sordid divorce cases and following a woman and her boyfriend all over Hawaii, taking pictures? Throughout the episode, Rick and TC have scenes of complaining about Magnum while the distant couple they watch through binoculars and telephoto lenses starts out loving but gradually gets more and more argumentative; the episode ending with Rick watching, shocked into silence, while the boyfriend picks the woman up and pitches her off a lighthouse.
Not quite as creepy as “Ivan, did you see the sunrise?” though.
In the first season of the British drama “Spooks,” one of the characters is killed in a graphic scene in which her face is plunged into a deep-fryer. That was probably the first time a scene in a television show really disturbed me.
