Hey, I remember seeing part of something on TV when I was a little kid; I knew the girl was Alice in Wonderland like in the Disney cartoon I had on VHS tape, but this was real life. And all I remember of the movie was that as she was looking in a mirror, this bizarre monster would appear and come after her. It scared the CRAP out of me – I couldn’t look in mirrors for a long time after that. And its name scared me too – “Jabberwocky.” Later, after I grew up and learned a bit more about Alice in Wonderland, I wondered if maybe I had just imagined all that. But now you’re making me think I didn’t… did the Jabberwocky in the TV miniseries you refer to appear when she was looking “through the looking glass,” so to speak?
Wow. Other people actually remember the live action Alice movie. I thought I was the only one. That Jabberwocky scared the daylights out of me, but I loved the rest of the movie. Thought it was great. Haven’t ever seen it again though.
Never ever watch Jaws while you are spending the week at the beach. Oh that was bad. That was also the year a small sandshark happened to wash up at low tide. That didn’t help at all.
The Webster episode where his house burnt down scarred me for life. I was deathly afraid of my house burning down like that and thought I saw smoke every night, when it was only my fuzzy vision. I still have issues with it.
Definitely the shooting of Bambi’s mother. My brother still tells the story to embarrass me. Apparently, I cried uncontrollably in the theatre.
Funny thing is, to this day, I hunt white tail deer. Every time I squeeze off a shot at a doe, my thought is ‘Mama…I hope your babies ain’t watchin’ this’.
One episode of a TV show (Simon & Simon? maybe…) featured a man knocking on a woman’s door holding while flowers. She looked out, saw the flowers, and opened the door. The man then starts to attack her. This freaked out my 5 year old head big time! You mean people could show up at the door with something nice and kill you when you open it? Gah!
My wife, to this day, cannot stand to have somebody breathing close to her face. She insists that they are “Stealing my air.” Ages ago, there was a movie (I think it was called Cat’s Eye) in which a small gnome creeps into this kid’s room, climbs up to his bed, and then magically sucks the air from the kid’s mouth. I was freaked out by this as a kid, too, but not to such an extreme. I just sort of have to accept the fact that she will turn away, gasping, if we kiss for too long.
(Insert joke at my expense here.)
When I would get afraid of the dark, I would hide under a sheet, hold perfectly still, and hope agains hope that if the Tusken Raiders came, they wouldn’t notice me.
I was traumatized merely by seeing a commercial for a movie! Sometime in the 1970s, there was a TV movie about killer bees. I think it was called, oh, The Killer Bees 
Anyway, all I saw was the commercial showing a scene of people being swarmed and killed by these angry bees. I didn’t actually get to see the movie because it was on after my bedtime.
So I went to bed, and at some point during the night I woke up. The very first thing I saw when I woke up was a balloon that I had hung from my ceiling by a string. And in the dim light, that balloon looked remarkably like one of those big wasp nests you see in trees. Scared me to death! It took a few minutes to realize that it was only my balloon, and when I figured it out I jumped out of bed and threw it in the closet. For years after that, I was terrified of bees. (Okay, I was afraid of wasps. I was too young to realize that killer bees were actually mutant honeybees.)
Then there was my baby sister and Poltergeist. The movie was being shown on the TV at our neighbor’s house. My sister must have been about four years old, and she was watching along with me and my other sister. She was okay with it, because mst of what she was seeing was pretty tame. But then the scene came on where the guy’s washing his face in the sink, and he looks in the mirror and starts tearing his face off. My baby sister’s eyes got as big as saucers and she hollered, “I’m getting out of here!” She took off like a shot, back home. For years after that, my other sister and I only had to say the world “poltergeist” to get Jessi all bent out of shape 
The first movie I ever saw on a VCR was Amityville 3D at a friend’s house. No particular scene but the whole thing freaked me out.
Although I was a little older and it didn’t scare me, I loved The Gate.
When I was a wee tyke back in the '50s, my older brother and his friend took me to see *The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. *It scared the bejeezus out of me, so much that I peed in my pants - not a good thing to do in a crowded movie theater.
Years later, I rented the video, and was amazed at how lame it was.
The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and I wasn’t a kid!
(Oops, I mistakenly posted this first on the “Brief scenes in films that FREAKED YOU OUT” thread. It properly belongs on this thread. Please forgive the redundancy.)
When I was young I took great bloodthirsty glee from films like *Gunga Din * (1939) in which the bad guys get mowed down by the score. In this I do not believe I was different from any other child.
But then, when I was still quite young, I watched *Sergeant * York (1941). In the climactic battle Gary Cooper’s unit charges headlong into heavy German machinegun fire. Now I was watching the *good guys * get mowed down. That was no fun at all. I was so upset I started to sniffle. There may be a lesson here, somewhere.
Also, like NoClueBoy, I was badly frightened by the “Id Monster” in *Forbidden Planet * (1956). The fact that it was invisible (but manifesting itself through clever special effects) made it that much more terrifying.
And finally, I was scared half out of my wits by an episode of “The Twilight Zone.” When William Shatner pulls the window curtain back and that goddamn gremlin has its face jammed right up against the glass…
My heart practically hammered its way out of my chest.
I refer, of course, to the classic Episode 123 (Season 5), “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”, written by Richard Matheson. Shatner never had a better moment.
As an adult, I have not experienced any true “shock moments” like those, but I get very weepy watching things like Schindler’s List, The Passion of the Christ, and *LOTR: The Return of the King * (so beautiful it hurts to watch it).
I went to the movie theater with my mom once, and I must have been only five or six. We were watching something about cowboys (City Slickers?) where there was a guy standing by a fence, and someone threw a knife at him, and it hit his crotch. It didn’t cut him, just went through the fabric of his pants, but I started freaking out. My mom tried to calm me down (“See, it didn’t hurt him!”) but she had to take me home.
Oh, man, if games count too, well, I still can’t bring myself to re-play the old NES game “Ghosts 'N Goblins.” I used to find it enjoyable; it would give me chills every time a zombie came up out of the ground – every single time, by golly! – and the music was a bit creepy, but I still enjoyed playing it.
Then one night, about this time of year, just a few days before Halloween, when I always start feeling a wonderfully delicious sense of foreboding in the world, which is probably why Halloween is my favorite holiday … anyway, one night, my grandma took me, my best friend Shane, and my younger brother and sister to stay overnight at her condominium in the city. We looked forward to it because that meant we could go out to eat, swim in the giant pool, play in the weight room and the pool hall, and just generally have a good time. In the afternoon we went swimming, then went to eat in the evening, and finally came back to go to bed. But of course we weren’t tired, being kids and all, so we went downstairs to play in the weight room.
We played in the weight room.
After a while that got boring, so we decided to find something else to do. Stepping out of the weight room brought us into the pool room, where my siblings had decided to sit on the couch and watch some TV. That didn’t hold much interest for Shane and me, so we went out into the lobby. It was already dark outside, so we didn’t want to go out. We looked up the big staircase and discussed going back up to the room and going to sleep … and then we spotted it. Next to the staircase on one side was a narrow hallway that we had missed before because it had no lights in it – just a dim light glowing out of a doorway down near the end.
We weren’t sure if we were supposed to go back there; it might have been some kind of manager’s office or something. But we decided to check it out anyway, so we cautiously went down the hallway and peeked around the doorway that the dim light was coming from.
Eureka! It was a small arcade room, about the size of a broom closet. Not much to work with, but they had managed to cram five machines into that tiny space. A change machine, a pinball machine, a racing game that didn’t interest me, some generic fighting game, and, hey, Ghosts 'N Goblins! Wow! The machine was a bit worn out and the sound didn’t work; the only machine with sound that did work was, evidently, the pinball machine, which beeped and whirred and made all kinds of clinking noises at random. Ah well, the lack of spooky music would just make Ghosts 'N Goblins less frightening. My grandma had given me $10 to spend and I still had it, so I fed one of the $5 bills into the change machine, collected my twenty quarters, and popped one of them into the Ghosts 'N Goblins machine to begin my righteous crusade against evil spirits. Shane decided to try his hand at pinball.
As usual, I got chills up my back every time a zombie clawed its way up the ground … but this time it was a little spookier than usual. I was in a tiny dimly-lit room under some stairs in the back of a large building in a bad part of town, and right outside the door was … nothing, as far as my eyes could tell. The dark hallway might as well have been a black hole. Of course, intellectually I knew there was a narrow hallway there, leading to the lobby, but that was little comfort – the lobby opened right to the outside, and the lobby doors didn’t lock or anything; they apparently counted on the crappy waist-level motorized gate that opened to let cars in to keep Bad Things out of the complex. And hey, it was almost Halloween, a time of year when Bad Things were supposed to be out in abundance.
Ah well. I kept playing and ignored my fears – was all fine, because I wasn’t alone; I could hear Shane playing pinball behind me. It was fine. Nothing wrong; everything fine. I looked at my watch and saw that it was almost eleven o’clock. We should probably get back up to the condo and go to bed soon.
That, of course, was when the sound on the machine decided to come back on. All of a sudden. Not all that loud, but since things had been perfectly quiet except for the faint pinball noises behind me, and since I already associated the Ghosts 'N Goblins music with scariness, it was enough to cause me to jump back from the machine and shriek. The room was small enough that I ran right into Shane, who was standing at the pinball machine behind me.
Only I didn’t, because nobody was there. I’d hit the pinball machine itself, not Shane.
It took me a second to realize that I was all alone in this little room at the end of the hall under the stairs, and I swear, my heart was pounding and my palms were sweating and I felt like I was about to pass out. I turned around and, yep, nobody was in the room with me. The noises the pinball machine was making were just its normal noises, not playing noises; I had been so involved in my game that I hadn’t noticed Shane walk out the door, even though it was closer to me than it was to him (although while playing Ghosts 'N Goblins I was still facing away from it).
And right then, two things happened. I heard a creaking noise, which years of horror movies and scary stories had conditioned me to interpret as a hideous demon or vengeful ghost or murderous maniac sneaking up on me, and the lights and machines went out, leaving me in inky blackness and silence.
Naturally, I panicked and ran right out the door – now that it was completely dark in here, I could barely see a faint glow from the lights in the lobby, so I made it through the door instead of smacking into the wall at top speed. And instead, I smacked right into a person in the hallway at top speed. A VENGEFUL GHOST! A MURDEROUS MANIAC! A HIDEOUS DEMON!
Actually, it was Shane coming back to tell me that they were sending us all upstairs because they turned the power off to the arcade and pool hall and weight room at eleven. According to him, when I ran into him, I “screamed like a girl.” And apparently he thought my suffering was “funny.”
But to this day I still can’t play Ghosts 'N Goblins; I can’t even look at screenshots without getting a little nervous. It brings up those memories of how I was, you know, nearly killed by a hideous vengeful murderous maniacal demonic ghost.
I am really enjoying this thread, for all kinds of reasons. It is interesting, of course, to hear about films that scared people when they were kids. It is also funny (and a little sad) to hear that, as adults, they now find those same films to be rather lame - not scary at all.
The innocence of childhood is a wonderful thing. Everything seems fresh and you respond to all stimulus with maximum emotion. Sometimes I wish I could relive the days when I watched moldy old grade-z horror movies and thought they were really, really scary. The goosebumps are long gone. <sigh>
Still, I think it is fair to say that the bit with the evil clown doll from Poltergeist (1982) is enough to scare anyone, regardless of age.
And *Trilogy of Terror * (1975) is one of the creepiest things I ever saw on TV - particularly the third part where Karen Black battles the African fetish doll. Not surprisingly, this was written by Richard Matheson and directed by Dan “Dark Shadows” Curtis. Thanks to rolandgunslinger for reminding me of it.
A special thanks to Wile E for his reference to *Darby O’Gill and the Little People * (1959). This is a shockingly under-rated film (when it is remembered at all). For a Disney movie it is pretty strong stuff. The scenes with the Banshee and the Black Coach of Death are genuinely horrific. This film deserves a lot more attention, if only for the chance to watch an earnest Sean Connery in a pre-007 role.
Thanks as well to Zsofia, Chorpler and carimwc for bringing *Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass * (TV-1985) to my attention. It has an incredible cast with dozens of stars, including Telly Savalas as the Cheshire Cat (!?). (“Who loves ya, Alice?”) This one, I must see.
Finally, Baker, Silenus and flodnak all referred to the flying monkeys from *The Wizard of Oz * (1939). I was not particularly frightened by them as a child, but I was riveted by the scene where the witch orders her winged simians to attack Dorothy and the others. As the witch stands on the parapet of her castle, shrieking “Now, fly! Fly! Bring me that girl and her slippers! Fly! Fly! Fly!”, scores of monkeys dive past her in the background. To this day I still believe it is beautifully composed - one of the most powerful scenes ever filmed. Worthy of Peter Jackson!
There was a scene like that in City Slickers, when the two trailhands were drunk and were giving the girl (Bonnie?) a hard time, and then Curly lassoes one of them to the ground and tells them to give her an apology, and the guy on the ground yells something back at him of a “Screw you!” nature. Then Curly’s eyes flash anger and he whips his knife out and throws it at the guy’s crotch.
But in that scene, the knife blade doesn’t go through the pants fabric – it just buries itself in the dirt in front of his delicate bits.
According to my mother, the scene where Dorothy throws **water on the witch ** & melts her had me in sobbing hysterics. Leave it to me to empathize with the witch!
Okay, all you Poltergeist people: The clown bothers you more than the guy who looks in the mirror and peels off his own face!!!
**The Andromeda Strain ** fascinated me as a child, too. That town with all the people frozen in it, their blood turned to dust…freaky! The funny thing is, I knew I was too young to understand the movie and desperately tried to remember the name (not an easy name!) so I could look for it again when I was older!
But mostly I remember a documentary-type show with a kid my age in the hospital who had been burned and was screaming as they treated him. Horrible.
Then a few weeks later my cousin was badly burned in a boating accident. My mom really should have sent me to a shrink after that - I was having nightmares that whole school year.
My traumatizing childhood movie is IT. After watching it one night in TV, I was terrified of the shower drain and would stare at it while taking a shower after that. I’m sure I was also scared of sewer drains and other places where the evil clown might be hiding (at least that’s what I think the plot was… it was awhile ago, and I’m over it now).
I haven’t watched it since, but I’m sure it’s really not very scary at all. Maybe one day I’ll actually watch it to find out what it’s really like…
I just wrote a really long reply about the lizard baby birthscene in V, and it got eaten because of my sausage fingers. Lizard baby = no sleep for an 8 year old Paul. Ta, Mum & Dad.
Jellyblue,
Hell, yes.
To this day I still find that puppet extremely unsettling.
The face-scraping scene was just gory, but that puppet… :eek:
I got scared by Sherlock Holmes TV episodes. The Speckled Band - hard to sleep after that one. And The Devil’s Root, because of the idea that three people could have been sent stark staring mad by something they saw through the window at night.
Also, the scene in Psycho where the detective is climbing the stairs, and you don’t see what he’s seeing. I had trouble climbing stairs in a quiet house for a while after that. No problems showering though.
When I was about 5 years old, I stayed up late one Saturday night and watched The Tingler on Chiller Theater. I couldn’t get the deaf mute woman’s death out my mind for months. If you’ve never seen it, The Tingler is certainly an unusual movie.
Her, and yeah it is a rather scary movie. It may have scared me more if I had been younger when I first saw it, I think I was in my early teens when I saw it on TV. I may have been more intrigued by the strange glimpse into my Irish heritage. My boyfriend was younger when he saw it and the creepiest thing to him was the leprechaun king, especially the scene where he’s riding on some animal (cat, dog, pig?) and screaming like a maniac.
Maybe whomever was behind the Leprechaun horror films was similarly affected by that movie? I don’t find them that scary though, I can’t watch a Leprechaun movie on TV without thinking “Willow!”.