0.25. I know a guy who simply could not watch H.R. Pufnstuf when it was on the air. The very sight of Pufnstuf scared the bejesus out of him and reduced him to a weeping incoherent mess. He does report that he was perhaps four at the time, but still dislikes the character, and the show in general. He wasn’t crazy about Witchiepoo, either. Or the talking trees.
0.5. My daughter still refuses to watch Trilogy Of Terror, and everyone here could tell you why. She ain’t afraid of Karen Black, but that motherin’ horror doll with the steak knife was just too hardcore.
When I was a boy, my parents gave me the old TV when they finally got a bigger, better one (in color!) for the living room. This led to my use of earphones for staying up too late to watch things I wasn’t allowed to. And while I rather enjoyed things like Summer Of '42, the Hammer vampire movies did horrible things to my seven year old mind. I knew quite well that there were no such things as vampires, and that Christopher Lee was an English actor living thousands of miles away on the other side of the ocean, but I could not rid myself of the notion that the man was going to come to my house some night and climb in the window and eat me.
I was perhaps eight when my friend hosted a sleepover, and we stayed up late to watch a monster movie: Beware The Blob, the 1970’s sequel to the fifties Steve McQueen classic. I’d never heard of either. Afterwards, my friends went to bed. I did not. I sat up, literally all night, in the downstairs bathroom, with the light on, huddled atop the toilet seat, watching vigilantly for carnivorous red goop to come slithering under the door and eat me. Only when the sunlight began to trickle in the basement window did I begin to relax. One of the worst nights of my life, and I was all of eight years old.
At another sleepover with that same friend, guess what was on the late movie? Yup, the Steve McQueen version. I found it only marginally less terrifying, but fell asleep in spite of myself afterwards. For years afterwards, during times of stress, I had dreams about the Blob chasing me through empty city streets… often getting close enough that I’d get a shoe stuck in it, only narrowingly yanking my foot loose before it ate my leg. Last dream I had of that sort, I was in my thirties.
I was nineteen, and in college, living in the dorms. One Saturday afternoon, I happened to be wandering through the common room, and noticed that Beware The Blob was just starting on the big TV in there. Out of curiosity, I sat down and watched it. Wait, what, Larry Hagman directed this? The guy who played J.R. on Dallas, the I Dream Of Jeannie guy? Holy crap! What? Shelley Berman? Burgess Meredith? Cindy Williams? What the hell?
The movie isn’t all that well made, and most of it ranges from “incompetent comedy” to “so bad it’s good.” It’s great for spotting celebrities slumming in, though, and I laughed myself sick through the length of the film. I could barely believe this movie had scared me so badly I’d hidden in a bathroom all night, once upon a time… Del Close and Hagman himself reported that everyone on the set was more or less continuously high during the film’s production. It shows.
Although I continued to have stress dreams about the monster for more than a decade after that…
Still think Christopher Lee’s interpretation of Dracula remains one of the best movie versions, though. Dracula is not a human being; he is a predator who imitates a human long enough to get close and eat you. And he does NOT sparkle.
^^^^
I came into this thread to post about Caltiki (although I would have spelled it Kaltiki; I misremembered). 9 or 10 years old, and the thought of a mindless moster that stripped flesh from your bones kept me up all the following night.
Also, I do not remember seeing the movie, but I remember the nightmare I had, featuring the Indians’ War Dance scene from Disney’s “Peter Pan”.
Not a movie, but a song: cuts from J Hendrix’ “Electric Ladyland” got a lot of airplay in the early 70s. One song would scare me shitless whenever I heard it while “tripping”. The track was “1983… (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)”, a song about a group of scientists who, determined to escape a probable nuclear war, created a race of humans that could “live and breathe underwater.” It’s a slow guitar riff that begins after the word “forever”, and returns regularly to frighten me again and again.
Doctor Who was first broadcast in South Florida around 1974, when a young Maus Magill flipped it on just in time to see the end of the second Episode of Ark in Space. This made me avoid Doctor Who for another five years. It’s only green painted bubble wrap, but by golly, did he sell it.
Infinity freaked me out, so any movie where someone fell into a bottomless pit (one of the Raiders movies, for one, I think?), and **The Black Hole **which I saw when it first came out.
The Star Trek movie where the bugs disappear into the guys’ ears.
Excalibur when the crow pulls out the corpse’s eyeball.
But **The Shining **was the worst. My brother and I both slept through the night from birth and never disturbed our parents. I went to that thing (I would have been 12) and I had to wake up my mom to come stay with me.
In the early '80s where I lived, the Canadian children’s show “Polka Dot Door” was immediately followed by “Dr. Who” with that creepy intro. Turns out I wasn’t the only one who was terrified as a kid by that transition:
Oh, thanks for revisiting that trauma for me. It wasn’t her getting sucked in, it was her eyes opening in the bottle. Made “Do, doo, doo-doo de doo doo” as creepy as “Night On Bald Mountain” for me. Brrr.
I can’t remember how old I was - old enough to be allowed to see movies on my own, anyway - when some friends of mine took me to see Damnation Alley.* The name was apt. I spent most of the movie with my eyes closed, but I was able to see and be traumatized by the scene of the man being attacked by mutant flesh-eating cockroach. He tries to flee, but instead locks himself in a car. Guess what’s waiting in the car? Scared me to death.
I also still remember the terror of a trailer for a TV movie called “The Dark Secret of Harvest Home”. It’s about a small community in rural New Jersey (of all places) that worshipped a fertility god. Every seven years, they would choose a Harvest King and a Harvest Queen. At the end of the time, they would get the Harvest King drunk, and send him to chase the Queen through the woods. When he caught her, they would have sex. He didn’t get much time to enjoy the afterglow, though - the villagers sacrificed him immediately afterwards.
If an outsider happened to see these mysteries, they would gouge his eyes out, and that was the scene in the trailer that had me soiling myself - a man takes off his sunglasses to reveal eyesockets stuffed with cotton. Cheezus, that scared the crap out of me.
Wizard of Oz also got me, but not the flying monkeys - it was the angry, apple-throwing trees. They had faces!
*Well, it came out in 1977, so…nine. Interesting trivia, courtesy of IMDB - it was supposed to be 20th Century Fox’s big sci-fi hit of that summer. It would certainly do better that their other modest sci-fi project - a silly little film called Star Wars.
Mom & Dad told me that when I was a toddler, I would freak out when Senor’ Wences woudl come on the Ed Sullivan show & do his ventriloquist routine with the head in the box. The earliest nightmare I remember was that my family had turned into an evil version of the Munsters (yet I LOVED watching the Munsters at that time!)
Then there was the Night Gallery episode “The Doll”- a British Major’s niece/ward is sent a cursed porcelain girl doll by the brother of a rebel leader the Major had executed back in India. The doll’s appearance gradually degenerates from cute & innocent to malevolent until it completes the revenge. Now, Grandmom kept cute dolls, so….
All through my childhood, shows about Frankenstein, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, zombies, etc. never bothered me. Nor did up-front evil dolls. But innocent-looking ones that harbored or turned evil…. oh yeah.
The secret no man can witness nor woman tell. An Aussie Internet friend & I were discussing the original Wicker Man. She said that her Mom told her about a similar movie made for American TV. I knew immediately that Harvest Home was it.
Never issued completely on video (only as half-abridged edit) & is only available by questionable DVD sellers.
YouTube has it broken into 13 segments of about 14-15 minutes. Comments indicate it is edited down. And I found two DVD sources- the going price is $15.
I never did, actually - it was a commercial that summoned nightmares for me for a few years. I read the book, which was by Thomas Tryon. As I said, well-written.
When I was five years old, my parents decided to take the kids to see Forbidden Planet. You remember the movie, with the gorgeous Anne Francis and the comical Robby the Robot.
At least that’s what they knew about it when they decided to let me come along, and I got a full blast ofMONSTERS FROM THE ID!!!
Well the flying monkeys in The Wizard Of Oz of course but there was an episode of, I think, The Twilight Zone where a little girl fell into another world under the headboard of her bed. I slept at the foot of my bed for years and to this day freak out if I realize my arm has fallen down there.
And like you, the fact that he was a real person was what really got to me.