I was scared of the Elephant Man’s face. I remember I was watching the Oscars with my Mom and it was nominated so they showed a clip where he is walking with his hood through a train station and someone pulls it off and people form a mob. I was very young, eight or nine, and his face freaked me out and I was convinced he would blame me for how badly he was treated. For a couple of years it still scared me when he would show up on cable.
There was cartoon on HBO called The Mouse and his Child about toy Mice that are alive. The bad guys were rats and there was a scene where a stuffed donkey was being threatened by one of the rats. It pathetically tries to crawl away and the rat pounces on it with a wrench and you see a silhouette of the rat pulling the donkey apart, laughing. As a kid that anthropomorphized his toys anyway that got me. I can still see the scene in my head and that was probably 35 years ago that I saw it.
Gotta be Trilogy of Terror - the final ep w/ the doll. I was a big fan of Night Gallery, Creature Features, and such, but at the time that impressed me as an entirely different category of creepy than anything else I’d seen.
I saw Fantasia when I was about six or seven, so 73 or 74. The Night on Bald Mountain scene scared me speechless. The demon hands reaching out across the town just freaked my little brain out. I slept with the nightlight on for months after that.
There was a Tom & Jerry episode where a white mouse escapes from a lab. At the end, Tom catches the mouse and hits it, causing it to explode destroying the whole house. From the rubble, the radio announces “We have reports that the white mouse is NOT dangerous” and Tom’s head rises out of the debris and he proclaims in some sepulchral voice “Dooooooon’t yooooou belieeeeeeve iiiiiiiittt…”
Always spooked me and I’d turn the cartoon off before that ending.
When I was six, my dad had a day off of work so he took me to see Devil Doll, a movie about a murderous ventriloquist’s dummy. I have no idea what he was thinking, but it freaked me the hell out.
A couple years later I had some money in my pocket during one summer day, so I went to see Todd Browning’s Freaks. It was the first day for the movie at the local theater and they pulled it the very next day.
Salem’s Lot Goddamn that Danny Glick!!! I still remember walking around in the sunlight all week hoping to absorb sunlight or some shit! I’m damn near fifty now and that movie still gives me the creeps. Halloween, Friday the 13th, et al… didn’t even cause me to shiver.
Yeah - forgot about that. And now that I did, it reminded me that I could never watch the part of Wizard of Oz when the good guys first approach the witch’s castle and see the bad guys were marching around and chanting in front of it. Not sure why that scared me so much, but I would cover my eyes.
Oh yeah, when they dump the paint on it and you see it for the first time…scared the heck out of me, too.
Well…nah, too easy, way too easy.
I can remember as a very young kid running out of the room when the original King Kong appeared on-screen, and while I still think the opening sequence to “The Outer Limits” is one of the all-time best in TV history, I sledom could make it all the way through the show.
I was six or seven and came in late one afternoon to Vincent Price’s “The Tingler.” The scene where they’re trying to scare the mute woman to death. It Was On In The Afternoon! :eek:
The beginning of “The Honeymooners” when the moon turns into Jackie Gleason’s face used to scare the hell out of me.
Also the theme music for “Tales from the Darkside.”
We used to watch cheesy horror movies all the time and laugh, but the only scene in a movie that scared the living crap out of me was when Indiana Jones fell into a pit and all these zombies came out of the walls to get him.
I’ve shared this before somewhere on these boards, but what the heck … I haven’t been humiliated in several hours, so I’ll share it again.
Kolchak: The Night Stalker is widely considered to be one of the cheesiest shows in television history. And of that cheesy show, one episode is almost universally agreed to be the worst, the stupidest, the least-imaginative of them all … Chopper.
I would have been eight or nine years old when this aired. For whatever reason, it scared the living daylights out of me. I can remember my sister and one of her friends, both of whom were ten years older than me, laughing their heads off (sorry, pun wasn’t intended, but I’m not gonna change it now) at this episode. I laughed too, but it was fake laughter, hollow laughter, the laughter of a young boy who desperately wants to stop watching, but who knows if he does he’ll be teased unmercifully by his sister, the laughter of a boy who also knows that he won’t sleep for at least the next 79 hours lest he dream of the horrifying headless motorcycle rider.
I also remember that Jonny Quest episode mentioned above. That one freaked me right out as well.
This commercial (Suspiria). The first time I saw it I was not expecting it and holy cow did it freak me out. Every time it would come on after that I would leave the room with my hands over my ears.
The opening music for Night Gallery was every bit as creepy as the episodes themselves. I was home alone a lot as a child and this scared the hell out of me yet I kept watching it :smack:
But I was a real chicken as a child so the list of movies or TV that frightened me then is pathetically long. Actually, it might explain why I love horror movies and only horror movies, now. Probably a reverse psychology thing.
“Something Evil.” It came on a local channel one Saturday afternoon when I was probably 9 or 10. All I remember about it was a woman kept hearing a crying baby out in her barn. When she went to investigate, there was a glowing jar of fetus guts or red goo or something. Scared the ever-loving shit out of me.
Many years ago, a child psychologist published a book called MOMMY, I’M SCARED, about the sorts of things that frighten young children. Of course, I bought a copy immediately so that I could warp my kids for life.
Supposedly, what fucks little kids up is TRANSFORMATIONS. Of nice people into bad people. Like Bill Bixby turning into the Hulk, or like Daddy having several drinks and then hitting Mommy.