BabaBooey, I agree that people who make children’s movies are on something, but I don’t think you should exclude children’s books, either. For me, the scary thing is rereading things like Winnie-the-Pooh and remembering that it made sense to me when I was a kid!!! Children’s minds must work in a completely different way…
I want to nominate a different part or Watership Down- when Bigwig gets caught in the snare, and almost strangles. Oh, and anything with General Woundwort the Evil Demonic Rabbit. Sorry if I’ve given anyone else nightmares…
I like ewoks too, but I admit, i have a stuffed animal obsession.
(hijack) Did anyone else read John Bellairs kiddie-horror when they were little? I used to avoid the bookshelves that his books were on, convinced that something would grab me if I got too close. To this day, I’m afraid of things (pieces of paper etc.) blowing toward me at night, because of a scene from… I think it’s The Lamp From The Warlock’s Tomb where the main character is walking alone at night, and sees something white blowing toward him on the wind, along the road, which turns out to be a death mask…
(end hijack, and Lissla goes to hide under her blankets, clutching a teddy bear. Oh no, I have one of his books IN MY ROOM!!..)
Ugh, ET was the worst movie ever made. It was one of the first movies (if not the first) that I saw in a theater and my mom said I started screaming or something when ET got sick. To this day I cannot stand to look at that ugly alien thing, and especially the part where it turns all white and looks like it’s covered in chalk. I HATE that movie.
I was pretty shaken up by the scene of the horse dying in Never Ending Story. It seemed like they dragged it on forever. Dark Crystal, Labryinth, and the Secret of Nimh were always some of my favourite movies. Though SoN will make me cry on occassion. Willy Wonka never scared or bothered me at all.
I remember the orange things in the subway in The Wiz. As a matter of fact, I saw it on cable awhile back and was watching it just to see if I remembered them correctly. I do recall being a bit creeped out, but not terrified.
I’ve always thought the Wizard of Oz was kind of stupid, so nothing in it bothered me as much as actually having to sit through it.
I did cry in the theater when Simba’s dad died… and I was in my teens when I saw that movie.
I think the sequels to the Neverending Story and Return to Oz were more dumb and less scary.
Does anyone remember these dolls they used to have, I’m guessing at some point in the late 80s? They were similar to Cabbage Patch Dolls, and I very distinctly remember Taco Bell (?) doing a promotion involving them where they gave out small ones. They made a movie with these dolls walking around, I remember a very long sidewalk thing kind of through a field, and a queen-person that came through a mirror, and she had these things (red berries?) that she ate to keep looking young.
Now I’m going to be on a mission all night to find out the name of this movie.
Ok, a number of these have been mentioned perhaps all.
I agree many times over on Return to Oz. The first movie had nothing on this incredibly dark, twisted sequel. It was very strange, and very disturbing for me to see this movie.
The Dark Crystal. Another movie that is just dark and scary the whole way through. Fortunately, I saw it when I was between 10 and 12, so I could handle it. It’s interesting, as I recall - but a bit messed up.
E.T. I hated this movie. The whole astronaut/biohazard suit and lab thing scared the piss out of me. I don’t think it’s a great movie anyway, but the damn thing was so freaky! Did not like! Did not like!
No, not the Count, the little bats-on-sticks that sort of flutter about his head like those Star Trek creatures that stuck to Spock’s back. The Count was annoying, but his bats were creepy!
I don’t know as how Star Wars is a children’s movie per se, but since Return of the Jedi has already been cited…
The scene in the original Star Wars where Princess Leia is being interrogated by Darth Vader and the little floating sphere with the hypodermic needle comes into the room ::shiver::
Jinwicked…
You are most probably thinking of the Garbage Pail Kids. Yes, the cards, toys and movie were intended for kids, and yes, they were pretty goddamned terrifying (not to mention creepily disgusting). Oh Lordy. I think I still have some of the cards lying around somewhere. I guess they were meant to appeal to kids with their gross-out humour and morbid fascination.
No, I know what Garbage Pail kids are. These were little baby-type soft-body dolls dressed in pastel colours, not directly affiliated with Cabbage Patch kids at all. There was nothing gross about them, other than maybe being overly cute. I’m pretty sure the movie was made for TV. They were always dressed in one pastel colour at a time, there were green and blue and pink ones, etc. They were a very short-lived fad, I think.
I asked my mom about it and she had no clue what they were. Of course, she doesn’t remember all the names she called me when I was 15 either, so I didn’t expect much. I’ve been searching on the 'net, but so far I haven’t found anything.
I can still recall, at about age 4, sneaking in the lounge room to watch Babes in Toyland on TV very late at night. When the boogie men attacked I freaked and when the wooden soldiers were animated in response I, somehow, found that even scarier.
Something Wicked This Way Comes is to this day the scariest movie I’ve ever seen. I first saw it when I was about 8/9. I love scary movies, and I think this one is why.
My disney scare was Cruella De Ville from 101 Dalmations. I was only 4 when my mum took me to see it and I hid under the seat whenever she came on the screen.
Most of the the movies listed so far are my childhood favs- The Neverending Story, The Dark Crystal, NiMH etc.
Movies these days are scary to children. My 4 year old will not watch Toy Story 2 because Al toynapping Woody is too scary. A Bug’s Life is also on the no list because of Hopper. OTOH, her favs at the moment are Chicken Run, Scooby-Doo, and Godzilla (the cheesy G-rated ones) so I see in her future lots of scary movies in the dark with mom.
After watching E.T. again a few weeks ago, what I found most disturbing was the inordinate amout of time devoted to Peter Coyote’s crotch.
Seriously, we see his face for the first time about an hour into the film, but before that his crotch gets about 40 seconds of screen time over five separate scenes. They even spotlight it during the opening chase!
This isn’t from a movie, but since people mentioned Watership Down…
I love horror movies, always have, and the only thing to ever give me nightmares was the Black Rabbit of Inle from Watership Down, the book. What creeped me out so much was the idea of the rabbits having their own version of anthropomorphizing (ok so I didn’t know the word when I was a kid, I knew the concept) concepts/forces of nature.
I saw a TV version of Bellairs’ “The House With The Clock In Its Walls” years ago. There was a scene in which Uncle Jonathan and Lewis meet up with the woman Lewis raised from the dead and she’s bearing a Hand of Glory (a hand-shaped candle) and freezes Uncle Jonathan with it. And then the whole concept of a doomsday clock - connected to all the world’s capitals and if someone sets it off…
Eeeeee… Love Bellairs! Creepier than a lot of adult fare.
I know I’m insane for admitting this, but do y’all remember a Smurfs episode wherein Smurfette found a sick baby mouse that she nursed back to health while periodically going into sickening raptures over how cute this little rodent was and how much she loved him, and was subsequently heartbroken and slightly unhinged when little Squeaky went to that big glue trap in the sky?
Flash Gordon was full of immensely freaky incidents. The nasty, hopelessly Freudian Peter Duncan putting hand in tree stump incident for one. But what particularly freaked me out was when the professor had all his memory wiped. Shiver.
All Dogs go to Heaven - I don’t remember it too well, but I remember the very beginning where some bad guys kill (or do they only try to kill?) the dogs, and they put them in a car and run it into a lake and the dogs are chained in the car or something - Good Lord, that was terrible!
Yes, yes, and yes. The backwards-in-time carousel. The lightning rods. When the kids are hiding under the grate, and the carnival guy has the tattoos of them on his palm, and he knows the kids are under the grate, and he squeezes his hand shut, and blood runs out and drips down . . .
Yaaaaahhhh! It was a Disney movie too, wasn’t it? I always thought Malificent in Disney’s ** Sleeping Beauty** was creepy, too.
Okay, Watership Down is NOT a kids’ story! No no no! I caught about thirty seconds of it when I was a tyke, all teeth and fur and blood and death, and it scarred me for years. Now, however, the book is one of my favorite books ever. Incredible stuff.
And I get to mention one that no one else has mentioned – mostly because the movie is so rare that I sometimes suspect that I hallucinated the whole thing. Ever heard of The 5,000 fingers of Dr. Terwilliger?
It’s a Dr. Seuss movie, live action but with the warped unstable geometry of his drawings. The villain is planning on enslaving 500 kids to make them play the biggest piano ever. There’s Oedipal complexes galore running through the movie. And about two-thirds of the way through it is the scariest tap-dancing fight scene set to silly music that I’ve ever seen. The film is like a two hour acid trip hosted by Dick van Dyke.
