Large Marge freaked me out, too. I re-watched it a few years ago, and while unsettling, it’s not nearly as freaky as it seemed at the time, mostly because it’s Claymation.
Not so much the theme from Unsolved Mysteries, but the stories on Bigfoot, ghosts and UFOs scared the crap out of me. Ridiculous now, but Robert Stack in a trench coat made that shit legit.
This one’s kind of a gimme, but that damn clown doll from Poltergeist. A neighbor kid had one similar to it and loved to terrify me with it.
The letter ‘H’. Ominous voice booming “AIICH! AAAIIICH!” And my little girl just absolutely freaked out over a stop-motion Mr. Potatohead-type orange. An orange. A singing orange. Scared the bejesus out of her.
The insert in the Who’s Tommy, an ominous blue building with dark windows at night. It looked like the kind of place the secret police would drag you into and you would never get out.
The insert in a Ringo Starr album. An alien woman with a horrible triangular head. I literally could not look at that picture for years.
There is a Tom & Jerry episode where a white mouse escapes from a lab and… blah, blah hijinks ensue… until the end when Tom hits the mouse and it explodes. In the rubble of the house, the radio says “It turns out the white mouse is NOT dangerous” and Tom pops his head up from the debris and intones in some deep echo-y voice “Doooon’t yooooooouu beliiiiiieeeeveeee iiiiiiitt…”
That voice used to make me feel deeply unsettled when I was a kid and I always tried to change the channel before the end of that episode.
Oh man, that reminds me of the Tom & Jerry episode that massively freaked me out when I was a kid. It was the one where Tom dies and he’s ascending this giant staircase to Heaven, but then it turns out that he can’t get in because he was mean to Jerry, and he can only get into Heaven if he gets Jerry to sign this forgiveness letter; otherwise he goes to Hell. The whole thing was creepy and scary and surreal.
Oh Hell yes! I only ever see Star Trek once in a blue moon and I still dread that stupid face (yet I always stay tuned and watch it through my fingers).
In the same vein, there was a scary movie series in the '70s called Chiller. I’ve looked it up many times and it isn’t the one with the many listings on the internet, but anyway, it was that same type of series and before the commercial break there would be a still photo of a shrunken head, fanged, evil looking face with the Chiller logo. Holy crap, that thing horrified me. I don’t even remember any of the movies from the series, just that evil, grinning face. Does anyone else remember that? This would have been mid to late '70s on(in SoCal) channel 11 or 13. I’d love to see it just to get it out of my system.
I have to 2nd Thriller. Saw it when I was 4. That was some scary stuff, especially Michaels mid-transformation when his eyes are yellow, fangs are protruding from his mouth and he yells “Get AWAY!!”
Koffy Channel 20. In between shows a clip was shown of a small room (at night?) with a small TV showing the Koffy 20 logo, and a white couch with a small dog sitting on it. For some reason I thought that was very strange. It didn’t help that during the day strange shows aired like one about a family that had a robotic daughter, and at night Freddy’s Nightmares, and Tales From The Darkside.
Two Christian shows scared me the most: Davey and Goliath (which I swear inspired both the Son of Sam and Wilfred [though I quite like Wilfred) and an animated Christian dot drawing called Jot (which I just watched for the first time in decades and can totally understand why it freaked me out- it’s like the personality changing music from freaking SIBYL).
Of the non-Christian variety, the Gossamer from Bugs Bunny cartoons and Charles Nelson Reilly’s Hoodoo from Lidsville, who was the main character in the first nightmare I can remember.
For my fellow five-year-old Beatles-fan friend and I, it was “Here, There, and Everywhere,” off Revolver. Fast forward 35 years, I read recording engineer Geoff Emerick’s book, and I realize it’s because he “broke the rules” by close-miking Paul’s voice so much that it sounds like he’s in the room with you. No wonder it scared my friend and I (though we played the rest of the album over and over until it wore out).
I am part of the traumatised by Mr Yuk/A Current Affair/Unsolved Mysteries/Tales from the Darkside generation. The musical cues were just easy ways to identify programming that was nightmare fuel. So eventually the terror was transferred onto the music itself. I didn’t need to hear about the sextuple rape/murder- I was already screaming two bars into the theme song.
