Really? In the UK it was Saturday tea-time viewing. Kiddie prime time, custom designed to terrify children.
For anyone who doesn’t know what a Dalek is, this is what we were hiding from.
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Back then it was a very niche show in the US, with probabaly a similar audience size to other PBS imports like *Are You Being Served? *and Yes, Minister. It was being dumped in that timeslot because they didn’t want to waste a better one on it.
Skylab - I was convinced it would fall on me.
Killer bees
When the dinosaur roared and looked at the camera in the opening credits of Land of the Lost. He could see me through the TV!
The intros to:
In Search Of… (original run with Leonard Nimoy) - The theme music start was creepy, but later turns into some space age disco. Something about the images of Stonehenge, Amelia Earhart, skulls, etc. was unsettling.
Ripley’s Believe It or Not! (original run with Jack Palance) - Got the same feeling watching the graphics of this show while the theme played. I loved Palance in this show, though.
Saved the creepiest for last:
Mysteries of the Unknown book series commercials (the first group) - The music, the narration, the stories, the quick scenes… they all freaked me OUT especially if I was alone at home (high school age) and/or at night. Silly me, I ended up buying the whole set! (Note: I hated the second and third groups of commercials featuring people discussing the books.)
Down here, it was on at 6.30, right before the 7pm news. I don’t remember anyone being scared of daleks, we’d play them at school, “exterminate! exterminate!”. Maybe really little kids were frightened by it?
The Venus Probe from The Six Thousand Dollar Man. It scared the living hell out of me.
Even worse was the Disney LP Three Little Pigs. I actually had three separate nightmares in my childhood from that and I remember each one vividly. They were horrible.
Sam Peckinpah’s Salad Days from Monty Python’s Flying Circus. I saw it when I was about 4 years old and it gave me nightmares for months afterwards.
It totally was literally true for me, in New Zealand in the 70s. Especially the maggots scene from The Green Death episode.
Susan Oliver. “Vina” in the first pilot.
Yvonne Craig was painted green much later, in the third season.
The actress who was painted green for the original screen tests, BTW, was Majel Barrett (“Nurse Chapel”).
The scenes in Chumps at Oxford where Laurel and Hardy are being stalked in the maze. I saw this late at night when I was left home alone at age 5. It scared the bejeezus out of me! :eek:
As I’ve said before, IIRC, the 1981-87 opening of NBC’s classic daytime serial Another World, wherein I thought that what I was seeing was some kind of frilly-edged monstrosity at first, which subsequently had me scared to death. What I did not realize until much later, however, when I revisited it through the long-defunct World of Soap Themes, was that this was really AW’s trademark wreath of interlocking rings, 80s style; I also recall how the AW title swung in like the hinges on a door and came together.
Here’s an example of that from 1982, with sponsorship for Ivory dishwashing liquid by Proctor and Gamble; Bill Wolff is the announcer:
The psychedelic, frenzied boat ride in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. Brrr.
The same thing happened to meeeeee!
We had a Dr. Suess record when I was a kid and one side had Bartholomew and the Oobleck. That story creeped me the F out. The magicians chanting creeped me out and the oobleck gumming everything up in the kingdom creeped me out until finally the king says he’s sorry and the oobleck goes away, which seemed like a bit of a trite way to end it.
You’re off by three orders of magnitude there. 
And if we account for inflation[sup]1[/sup], he would be the 27 Million Dollar Man in today’s dollars. 
[sup]1[/sup]January 1976 to July 2018.
kayaker, how old are you? Freaks came out in 1932. I’m 61, and the original Dracula (Bela Lugosi) still scares the crap out of me as does Psycho. I was about 5, watching The Wizard of Oz by myself. I was convinced I was being poisoned, so every few minutes spit on my shirt sleeve. My mother was very puzzled by the wet sleeve but not sympathetic. I don’t know what scared me, but I got over it.
The squeaky door is indeed from Inner Sanctum (according to my mother). I call any squeaking door “The Inner Sanctum door.”
I’m 60. The movie theater featured old movies and tickets were cheap, especially matinee shows.
I wasn’t a kid then, but The Trilogy of Terror Doll was pretty freaking scary.
From a very particular episode of Land of the Lost, Fred freaked me right the hell out. Clanking, screeching, light-eyed monstrosity. shudder.
Honorable mentions should be extended to the Autons (plastic shop dummies come to life), and the robotic Cybermen, especially when marching in formation.
Different show: I recall being uneasy about the Cylons in the original Battlestar Galactica. The red light moving back and forth, and the noise it made, was somewhat disturbing… but not enough to make me stop watching.