Scenes that traumatized you as a child

Cafe Society
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Anybody here ever see the 1966 movie The Naked Prey? My parents, thinking it was a film about African animals, took me to the drive-in to see it when I was ten years old. This film had graphic (for 1966) scenes of elaborate and imaginative torture as perpetrated on white explorers by an African tribe.

I was extremely sickened and horrified, and ended up barfing in the back of the station wagon. I recently saw this film again, and was surprised to find it still sickened and horrified me. What could my parents have been thinking?

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I can’t believe nobody mentioned mine. (I guess I’m old… :smiley: )

Towards the end of Psycho, when they turn Mother around. God, I had to sleep with the light on for a looong time after that. I must have been 6 or 7, and it was late at night, with the lights off.

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Oh, yeah, but it wasn’t the fangs that skeeved me, it was the was she was . . . handling . . . the knife.

DD

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This thread got me thinking about the 100 scariest movie scenes and I remembered another one that really, really freaked me out. The man faced dog from Invasion of The Body Snatchers(1978) scared the living shit out of me at the time. That’s got to be the creepiest part-man/part-animal creature that I’ve ever seen in a movie.

That site also confirms that Boggey Creek was the movie I was thinking of earlier.

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This sounds kind of like the end of “X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes,” starring Ray Milland: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0057693/

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MilliCal, our seven year old daughter, wants to post what was the scariest movie moment for her:
The Blob – There were two things that scared me – when the dog got lost (and you think it was going to be eaten by the blob) and when they were in the cold room, and the blob was oozing under the door.

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Hmmm, I did see the movie on TV in the seventies and remember it was kinda trippy but reading the synopsis, I don’t think that’s it. In the movie I remember, the characters are all at an isolated mansion and weird things happen. The film had that kinda washed out seventies sepia-ish tone. In the scene that freaked me out, the guy is talking to a girl who’s complaining about something in her room (like maybe something’s missing?) and the guy says that he did it and he’s been “bad”. And then when he says “perhaps, I should take out my eyes” she laughs and says “perhaps, you should” as if it’s all a big joke. When he does, she starts screaming. I’d love it if this strikes a bell with any Doper, I can vividly picture the scene to this day but I wonder if maybe the memory has been embellished with time…

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Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty” witch and the kid vampire floating 3 floors up in the original “'Salem’s Lot” both scared the bejeezus out of me. Actually, that vampire kid still creeps me out.

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Another vote for Dr. Who, still scary when repeated in the early Eighties, though I wasn’t worried by Daleks or Cybermen so much as by some alien thingy that made the veins in peoples’ necks kind of glow up and then they died. No idea what episode, though it was definetely a Tom Baker one. That theme tune did nothing to reassure me either.

More embarrassing is that I got completely freaked by Back to the Future. :o
I was running a fever at the time, but had begged my parents to make good on their promise of a cinema trip despite that. Got as far as the bit where there’s lightning all around the car and I squeeked in a small voice: I’m scared, so we went off home again. I blame the fever.

Having said that, I have to agree with Sleel that no film ever scared me nearly as much as the books plus imagination combo.

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I didn’t because I wasn’t a child. I was 18 and watched the thing in broad daylight, and I’m not sure I’ve ever been so shocked by a movie.

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Another movie scene that traumatized me was the part at the beginning of Star Trek: First Contact when Picard is looking at himself in the mirror and he notices something odd and suddenly WHAM, a spider-like Borg implant races around under his cheek, rips up through the skin, and spreads its leggy spikes out in an orgy of hideousness.

Oh, and there was a movie on TV I saw when I was about twelve or so, with my two-years-younger-than-me sister, while my mom was outside or something. I think it was called “The Evil Men Do” or something like that. The first scene involved a guy being tortured with electricity while hanging from some kind of bars and chains contraption as they interrogated him. Then they killed him. Then somebody was telling somebody else the story of … some kind of interrogation, I guess, where a woman was raped with a bottle and killed, and the man had nails driven through his testicles repeatedly. Then they killed him by slowly cutting him apart.

I turned it off at that point, but my sister and I were just sitting there staring at the TV for ten minutes after that, in shock. Then I said “Okay, let’s never speak of this again,” and she said “I don’t want to think of it again either.”

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My childhood trauma came from a made-for-tv movie called Ghosts That Still Walk. It was made in 1977, so I was 4 when it first aired. For years, the name alone was enough to make me sick with dread. Nowadays, all I remember of it were withered corpses–mummies–that were somehow talking to or controlling the living. The first comment gives a good description of the action. The scenes of the mummies laying around the woman’s home, riding in the RV, and laying in a cave (IIRC), and their hold over the living scared the crap out of me and haunted my nightmares for years.

I haven’t seen it since, but I see it’s available on VHS. Eh, I don’t think it’s worth spending fifteen bucks just so I can say, “I was scared of that??”

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In one of the Tails of the Unexpected someone died from a scorpion sting caused by a scorpion in their boot. I would shake out my shoes just to be sure there was no scorpion in them for years afterwards. (Despite their being almost no scorpions, and definately no dangerous scorpions in England).

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I must be a freak, because I laughed at Large Marge. 'Course, I was 15 at the time.

I was definitely too young for Time Bandits the first time I saw it, though. Let’s just leave it at that.

What freaked me out most as a child was a scene not meant to be even remotely scary. I was about four years old, watching it on TV: one of those slapsticky, color-saturated mid-sixties comedies. A husband and wife were having an argument, at the end of which the husband stormed out, intending to drive away. Instead, he drove his car neatly into the in-ground swimming pool.

It traumatized me because my own parents were always having big, loud scary arguments, so that scene had been bad enough, but in this case, I thought the husband was going to die. I absolutely freaked, crying and screaming hysterically. My mom switched over to Mr. Rogers, and that even took a few minutes to calm me down. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I saw the same film on AMC(?) and had the classic “That freaked me out?” moment.

Then there was a movie called Avalanche, which I saw on TV with my dad when I was 8 or so. When the avalanche hit, it had the same impact as an earthquake, and there was a scene in the kitchen of the ski resort, where a pot of boiling tomatoes falls off a stove and scalds one of the chefs. Jeez, the way he screamed…

My dad: What’s wrong?

Me: This is awful! What? Did you see what happened to that guy?

Dad: Ah, they try to scare ya…

Nice parental guidance there, dad. :rolleyes:

Not a movie, but it sure traumatized me: A planetarium show which ended with a description of what life on earth will be like when the sun becomes a red giant. My reaction was very much like that of ~8-year-old Alvy in Annie Hall, when his mom takes him to a psychiatrist because he’s upset at the idea of the universe expanding. That was totally me! Sure, the red giant and the expansion of the universe are millennia away, but tell that to a kid! All you hear is DOOOOOOOOOM.

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I wouldn’t say ‘traumatized’, but the entire film ‘Watership Down’ Deeply affected me as a child. I have rarely experienced deep sadness as I did when watching that film.

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Transformers: The Movie. Up to this movie, the television series never showed anyone actually dieing or for that matter the vast majority if not all of afternoon cartoons. They would get shot, get repaired and everything would be alright. The sight of seeing all those dead and torn up autobots was too much for me at the tender age of 8. I mourned when I saw Wheeljack’s tattered remains. Or Ironhides valiant effort to stop Megatron, despite being seriously wounded, only to receive a point blank headshot is disturbing. The death of Optimus Prime was truely a sad thing to see.

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Wizard of Oz scene where the cowardly lion jumps through a glass window because he is so frightened of the thought of meeting the Great and Imperious Oz scared me silly for years. To be so afraid of something that you would rather jump through a glass window…
Willy Wonka the boat in the tunnel scene. All the spirals and things. Just to physcadelic for my little brain at the time.

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You know, you’re exactly right. I was telling my kids how the sun would expand and turn into a red giant, and they both started crying and told me to tell them “happy things” and not “scary things.” That it won’t happen for billions of years doesn’t seem to comfort them – maybe it’s that “billions” is too big to comprehend, or that they don’t understand their own mortality so “billions of years from now” just means “when I’m a grown-up” to them.

I tried to calm my kids down by saying “It won’t happen for long enough that, if people are still around, we’ll know how to move the earth far enough out that the expanded sun won’t fry us. Maybe by using the Uranus-with-giant-fusion-motor-tugging-earth-away-with-its-gravity method from Larry Niven’s A World Out of Time,” but for some reason they didn’t find that comforting.

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shudder That traumatized me, too, and I wasn’t a kid when that came out.

That was me, too! I thought I was the only kid who worried about such things.

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It’s The Evil that Men Do

It was a charles Bronson flick where he was some sort of an agent trying to kill the “torture doctor”.

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