I could go on and on about being surprised by Wait Until Dark and viscerally creeped out by The Exorcist, but I saw those as a teenager… so I have to go with the first movie to scare the shit out of me when my “friends” dragged me to it as a fourth grader: Dracula, Prince of Darkness with Christopher Lee.
I thought “I’ve seen Dracula and the Mummy, how bad can it be?” Well, from the first scene where a man is murdered, suspended over an open coffin and his throat slit so that the blood pours down and a hand suddenly reaches out from inside the coffin, I spent a lot of that movie looking elsewhere, like under my seat (for gum?)…
ETA: I found it on VHS at a garage sale years ago, and thought “Hey, cool, I can watch it and laugh at how I used to be scared!”
Wellll, I still haven’t watched it (just because I’ve been busy, of course…)
I think this is right on spot. I’ve been watching horror movies for as long as I can remember, obviously starting with TV, and there are very few that can come close to scaring me the way the cheesy movies of the '70s do.
Apologies, as I’ve mentioned this so many times, but the schlock fest that is Joe D’Amato’s Death Smiles on a Murderer is so freaking traumatic to me, 30+ years later, that I can never bring myself to watch it again. I actually purchased a VHS tape of it and never took it out of its wrap. I remember how overall, even as a kid, I knew it was crap, but it was so profoundly horrifying to me that I shudder to even think about it lest I have nightmares.
As an adult, I’d say The Ring actually scared me beyond all reason. I swear I saw the face of the girl in the closet for months. Though the movie in general was kind of crap, the last scene in The Blair Witch Project stayed with me for quite awhile as well.
I have four -
Towering inferno and The posoidon adventure. Both seen as a young child and left me scarred.
Pet Semitary - no problem reading the book but I could not watch it the whole way through. In fact I got so stressed I ended up with a nosebleed.
I don’t know the name of the last but it was a late night feature on a New Years eve sometime in the early eighties. Something along the line of folks being trapped in the mountains by a snow storm and an native american feeding them one buy one to a monster (a wendigo I think). I still see a graphic scene of a woman getting her throat cut before becoming monster chow in my nightmares. The final man goes insane and is running naked through the snow like he has now become the monster. Ick
Hehe nosebleeds = stress is almost totally a comics and/or media stereotype. Most nosebleeds are caused by fingers with poorly trimmed nails. If you have a nosebleed where the blood is coming frome somewhere besides your nasal passages, that would be newsworthy, actually.
I think for me “The Exorcist” would be my pick. But “Phantasm” is definitely up there.
One of the first times I spoke with Reggie Bannister, who’s at Comic Con every year, I told him about how scary “Phantasm” was for me. He asked me how old I was when I first saw it. I was in college and either 19 or 20 at the time. He then told me that it was because I was that age that it was so powerful. He said that unlike many horror films, the director took deliberate steps to film the movie through the hero’s (the younger brother) eyes. And that kid is only like 15 or 16. He said that if you were around the age of the protagonist the first time you saw the movie, it really “sucked you in”, and therefore was that much more scary and intense. I happen to agree with him.
When I was a kid, I had the living crap scared out of me by The House on Haunted Hill. Saw it again about 20 years later and was deeply disappointed by the fact that it was a sucky Vincent Price comedy/horror movie.
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, in which the final scene was the hero fighting a duel with a live skeleton. The villain told the skeleton “Kill him!” in the most chilling voice. I was about nine then, and it gave me nightmares.
The Fall of the House of Usher, with Vincent Price. Really scary because of a coffin that was thrown open, showing a skeleton. I was eleven.
Mill of the Stone Women, somewhat modeled on House of Wax. Really morbid–in color! Haunting music playing while carousel turned, displaying “wax” figures that were really corpses–long story. I was twelve.
I was probably 10 or so when I saw it. My mom was watching it on TV and I guess she didn’t think it was that bad, but Robert Mitchum hunting those kids haunted me for years.
this is interesting to me, and i’m not sure whether this supports your theory, because i find that i actually have less of a tolerance for stuff that scared me as a kid now. me and my brother rented poltergeist just about every weekend as kids. i remember watching the exorcist for the first time at a pretty young age, i want to say i was 11 or so. on another occasion, in high school, i watched it alone in my darkened room at 1 am. (i didn’t sleep well that night)
both of those movies scared me back then, but these days i can’t even sit through them because i get too freaked out. me and a friend decided to have a scary movie night a few halloweens ago and poltergeist was first up. we made it about halfway through before we had to turn it off. i think we ended up putting on a disney movie instead, heh.
i haven’t seen pet sematary all the way through in years, and the stuff with the killer baby is actually hilarious to me now (“first i played with mommy, now i’m gonna play with youuu”. hee.) but the stuff with the bedridden sister still freaks my shit out. cannot watch.
one movie i’ve never seen mentioned in similar threads is a movie called “lady in white” from 1988. i have not seen it in probably 20 years and don’t remember a ton about it except that it scared me.
on to movies i saw the for the first time as an adult:
the shining. it doesn’t quite get under my skin like the previously mentioned films, but it’s unsettling as fuck, and i was surprised at how effective it was. it’s one of those movies that’s so immersed in pop culture that everyone knows the famous moments(particularly the twins/hallway scene), so i didn’t expect them to affect me that strongly, but the scares still work quite well.
paranormal activity doesn’t do it for everyone, but it does for me. the third one in particular actually gave me nightmares. i think because it took place in the 80s (when i grew up) and kind of paid homage to some classic horror from that era, so i think it tapped into some of those childhood fears.
the descent, yeah. i’m claustrophobic, so it freaked me out way before the gollums showed up. i still don’t know why the fuck people go caving.
Repulsion. I first saw it following the aforementioned The Changeling on a double bill and I don’t think I slept for weeks!
P.S. Just double-checked: It was The Other, which is about a changeling!
This scared me but mostly because afterwards my black cat decided to hide in one of my cabinets and scare the crap out of me. Thankfully, there were no creepy Japanese boys in there with him.
For me, it was Alien. I slept with my lights on and my closet doors open for about a week.