The sofa was the place to be when watching Dr Who.
I think it was the Dr Who story - Curse of Fu Manchu - that had a little doll (homunculous) which jumped up from behind a door and strangled a man. I must have been about 5 years old at the time - scariest thing I had seen my whole childhood.
King Soloman’s Mines gave me nightmares for years.
I would dream the scene of being in a huge cave, crossing a narrow natural bridge over a river of lava being chased by bad guys, who then fall into the lava.
The original movie The Blob. Yes, it was cheesy, corny, and totally stupid but I was terrified of that moving blob of jelly. I couldn’t even choke down a PB and J after I saw that.
Land of the Lost was one of my favorite shows, but at the end of the beginning credits I automatically ran behind the couch during the part when the dinosaur looks in the camera and roars. Every. Single. Time.
A little hijack here. This movie came out when I was around 18. I never saw it, nor did any of my immediate family. But it did lead to an incident that we all found highly amusing. Neither I nor any of my siblings were there to actually witness this, but this is what happened, according to my dad:
They were in the family van, driving along and chatting, when the subject of that movie came up. Both of them were somewhat creeped out by the idea of these nasty little creatures. My mom shuddered as she talked about those little pointy-eared, pointy-toothed furry little imps. Unbeknownst to either of my parents, however, one of our kittens had climbed into the van shortly before they left the house. As Mom and Dad continued to talk about Gremlins, Mom reached down to get her purse and laid her hand directly atop the kitten’s head. Terribly startled, she looked down and right into the eyes of a furry little pointy-eared, pointy-toothed animal. As Dad said to us later: “I have NEVER, in all the years we’ve been married, heard your mother actually scream!” Oh, how I wish I’d been there! 
The theme music to the soap opera “Dark Shadows.” Scared the liver out of me. I’d run in the other room and cower until it was over. I thought it was going to jump out of the tv and get me.
It give me goosebumps now just thinking about it…
Waaaaaaahhhhhhh!!!
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One that I remember really well is a little-known film from '78 called The Manitou about (I don’t know if a spoiler is necessary for a 20 year-old film, but…) a woman who has a growth on her back that turns out to be an evil Native American medicine man or spirit being reborn. The growth gets bigger and bigger until he finally tears his way out of her. Arrrgghh! I was 8 when I saw it and it still gives me the creeps just thinking about it.
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Holy shit, I remember that movie from seeing it as a kid. I am creeped out x 100 just thinking about it now. Now I want to see it again!!! SO AWFUL.
The Pit creeped me out big time, and as an extension of that, those God awful Snuggle comercials with the talking teddy bear creeped me out.
And here’s another vote for the NFB Cat Came Back film. It’s creeped me out too.
There’s a commercial running now–don’t even remember what for–that shows a talking lion. It’s a real lion with a human mouth syncrovoxed where the lion’s mouth should be. That creeps me out no end.
You know…taken out of context…
Someone mentioned the Jodie Foster film: “The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane.” My all-time favorite JF movie. But, yeah, creepy all over. Martin Sheen was wonderfully despicable in this movie.
How about this: an illustrated story by the venerable (not venereal, mind you) Dr. Seuss entitled “What was I Scared Of?” about a pair of disembodied green pants riding around at night on a bicycle and scaring the bejeebers out of the narrator?
Holy flurking schnitt, did that image freak me out as a kid!
Yes, that’s it! (And I knew it the minute I read the title in your post, without even looking at the IMDB link.)
We had a b&w TV, so that’s how I saw it.
[ul]
[li]The Pinocchio donkey scene[/li][li]The Willy Wonka boat ride, as well as the interception of Charlie by Slugsworth when he runs home.[/li][li]Newt’s little hidey hole in Aliens. Most of the film was alright, but I was always terrified of being in her position, stuck in a little air vent with a few trinkets while aliens are crawling around outside. I suppose I could identify with her as she was a child like I was, obviously. Also, when she falls down through the air vent into the water, the few seconds of general tension and uneasiness always gave me the extreme creeps. I think that might have inspired my fear of the sea and dark water.[/li][/ul]
I didn’t see the movie of The Other, but I read the book when I was in high school, and it scared the crap out of me – particularly the parts about the pitchfork in the hay loft and the baby in the wine cask.
I’ve never seen Trilogy of Terror, but this whole thread has convinced me that I must!
I originally heard The Cat Came Back on The Muppet Show. Rolf the Dog sang it and the cat with the eye patch was the cat.
I thought it was hilarious.
I think I remember this episode from Nick at Nite, if the toddler was a little girl whose parents were so stoned they forgot she was in the bathtub.
When I was about 5 or so, I happened across some sketch show on Showtime that featured a guy being killed by a gas station bathroom. Various scary things happened, including a snake coming out of the hand-dryer, until finally the floor turned to red liquid and swallowed him entirely, all the while a song played about the horrors of a gas station washroom. I was scared of bathrooms in gas stations for months, which complicated a road trip from Houston to Florida.
I was a very sheltered child. I missed out on most horror movies. But there were a few cartoon scenes, and the child catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang… what a creep!
The Boogey man mentioned by bouv also scared me. That last picture, specifically. I slept with my closet door open for years because of that. I figured if my closet door was open, he couldn’t materialize in there. Now, looking at the Boogey Man again… I can’t help but laugh at his odd looking crotch. The pose reminds me of David Bowie. Haha
Additionally, there was a video by the Christian singer Carmen called Witch’s Invitation. There’s a demon scene in the music video that had me freaked out for years. I had an ultra-realistic nightmare where the demon was hovering in my bedroom doorway and talking to me.
On that note, the Christian related stuff was what frightened me the most. My parents would watch a lot of Jack Van Impe’s 700 club show. They always talked about the book of Revelations and the end times. I grew up terrified of those events.
I don’t recall them showing a floating toddler (but I also realize memory is a funny thing), just the looks of disgust on Friday’s and Gannon’s faces. Then Gannon rushes out of the bathroom, saying, “I think I’m gonna be sick.”
Every friend of mine who grew up in that sort of environment has told me the same thing… they were much more frightened by the stories and things they heard at church or via Christian entertainment than any horror stuff they saw. I think the 70s had a lot of “scared straight” Christian movies aimed at teenagers or something.
Exactly what I was thinking, sometimes titled Mask of the Demon or Mask of Satan.
It may have been a 2-3 second shot, but they really did show it originally. I also remember them editing it out in later episodes (censor pressure?) I was extremely young, up past my bedtime, and that bath-tub looked like ours! Its one of those moments that you may never see twice, but you’ll never forget it.
(Like the instant blood circle around Jor Theismann’s ankle after LT tackled him for the last time, where the bone poked through. Shown fully only once, implied in the re-runs.)
It’s a cool video. It would have scared me as a child too.
I was scared by Lurch’s voice. Nickelodeon would show commercials for The Addam’s Family and I’d have to leave the room until it was over because his moaning scared me. I guess some of that still lingers because there’s a character in the game Neverwinter Nights 2 who has a really deep voice and I didn’t like clicking on him.
I liked scary things, so I read books about ghosts and monsters and vampires. Some of the stories in them scared me, but none that I can specifically remember. One of them did have something that really creeped me out. There was a section that talked about being buried alive and how people were scared of it and why. It included a picture with a caption that said something like, “this picture shows the agony of being buried alive”. It terrified me. I don’t remember it too well, but I thought it looked like someone in a bathtub. A corpselike person in a bathtub. It was probably a coffin in a tomb.
I was scared to go in the bathroom because I didn’t want to find a dead person in the bathtub. I never watched The Shining, so that’s not where I got the fear. It was from a commercial for either The Seventh Guest or The Eleventh Hour, and one part had someone draw back a shower curtain and seeing someone dead in there.
I got into Edgar Allen Poe when I was nine or ten, and the story The Black Cat really disturbed me.
I don’t know if I saw that, but things like that creeped me out. I found the song “Rockabye Baby” a little morbid. I pictured the baby falling through a bottomless pit.
