As a 6 year old, the movie “The Crawling Eye”. I lay there watching it and just shook with fear.
<adding to the mini-somewhat-related hijack>
My ex-bf snoozed through it. The only people in the very small audience who enjoyed it were some guys who had smuggled in beer and were rolling their bottles down the aisle. It starred two cast members of “Twin Peaks” Wendy Robie and Everett McGill as the bad guys. One reviewer wasn’t paying attention and wrote that it was two men thinking that Wendy Robie was a guy in drag.
</hijack>
OP reply I screamed in absolute mortal terror the first time my parents took me through a car wash. (This was back in the days of the big spinny brushes and stuff.) I thought the car would be crushed – giant whirring things coming at us!
The first time my mother took me to the emergency room and had me lie about how I got hurt, I was convinced the guy in the radio knew the truth and was going to tell everyone that my mother really did it.
That terrified me.
[ul]
[li]under the bed[/li][li]open closets[/li][li]the basement[/li][li]clowns (still scared of that today)[/li][li]pool drains[/li][li]ghosts[/li][/ul]
The movie ‘Hound of the Baskervilles’ - the English version made decades ago - gave me nightmares for years, particularly that scene where ‘it’ puts its big paws up on the window. Did Basil Rathbone play some part in that movie?
I used to hide behind the couch when my parents watched “Planet of the Apes.”
Also in whichever version of Christmas Carol where the doorknocker comes to life and goes: “SCROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOGE!!!” Holy cows, that scared the crap out of me.
Dragonstar you are not alone! When I was a small child, my mother put Wizard of Oz on for me to watch and when Dorothy melted the Wicked Witch with a bucket of water, I literally pooped my pants!
I still cannot watch that scene to this day without being scared to death.
IDBB
Two things that really freaked me out when I was younger:
First, was Judge Doom at the end of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Creepy guy.
Then there was the Humpty Dumpty puppet from Sesame Street. Aaaah! Evil thing! Evil! Creepycreepycreepy!
I had this weird childhood fear-of-the-supernatural thing going on. When I was in bed, I would always keep my eyes shut and wouldn’t either look at the wall adjacent to the bed (where a ghost was always ready to slither up and scare the bewhatsit out of me) nor out to the floor of my bedroom proper (where a triceratops [stop laughing] was always waiting to devour me.) I was also always paranoid of vampires, so I’d keep my covers bundled up around my neck (because covers are the perfect anti-monster aegis.)
When I saw the “Earwig” episode of The Night Gallery at a young age, I then became dreadfully concerned that carnivorous bugs would crawl in my ear and eat my brain, so I then slept with the covers bundled around my ears, thus blocking both arthropodal invaders and parasitic undead. Perfect system.
M y parents always referred to me as a “sensitive” child, although I’d be more likely to self identify as “weird” at this point.
I have, of course, outgrown all that (except the Depression era kid who stares at me with horrible, dead eyes through the shower curtain whenever I have my eyes closed while shampooing, who reaches with her dead, pallid fingers toward my defenseless back, only to instantly disappear when I open my eyes to see her. She doesn’t fool me, though.)
The Unsolved Mysteries theme music.
Any documentary or somesuch about aliens or the extraterrestrial.
And not much else.
The 1950s version of War of the Worlds! Especially the one closeup scene of a guy getting hit by a martian disintegrator ray and dissolving, first his skin melted away and then his skelaton. (shiver) I was so absolutely sure the Martians were going to attack!
Tornados scared the hell out of me. (Still do, actually.) Although I’ve never experienced one in real life, I was always terrified that there would be a tornado during bad weather. I’d even pack up my belongings so I could cart them down in the basement in a hurry.
And I saw the movie CHUD as a child, and for a good amount of time I was afraid to go near sewers.
I read the Amityville Horror book as a child and was terrified by it. The “pig” entity scared the hell out of me and for a portion of time after reading the book, I was afraid I would see that thing in the darkness.
I went through a short period of excessive worrying about fire. Our fire alarm was loud, and located in the hallway where I could see it from my bed. I used to stare at it quite a while and worry it would sound.
I worried about nuclear war and nuclear meltdowns.
Snakes. My brother used to keep me out of his room by laying a rubber snake in his doorway. I wouldn’t even go down the hall.
Return of the Living Dead. I have no idea why I was watching this at five, but I spent the entire movie crying into my mom’s neck, completely unsoothed by “It’s a comedy.”
When I was really little, I loved the story of Dracula, or least the story that my grandfather told me, which I found out years later bore little resemblence to Stoker’s version. That last until one day in the grocery store, I saw the tabloid headline “AIDS virus killing off the world’s vampires.” Crap, they were real!
Mannequins. When I was really little, I was shopping wth my mom and she wanted me to come on and leave, so she told me that if you’re in a store at closing, you turn into a mannequin. She promptly forgot about it, until the next time we heard a “The store will be closing in ten minutes” and I freaked out.
The first time I realized that, if there was a nuclear war, my mother & father couldn’t possibly protect me.
I was 5.
When I was a kid growing up in the Pacific Northwest, there was a LOT of talk about bigfoot. That terrified me. I remember laying in bed thinking about bigfoot, getting myself all freaked out…I went out to the living room and asked my mom, “Mom, where do you think bigfoot is right now?” Mom, kind of pissed off that I was still awake said, “Christ, I don’t know! He could be walking up and down our street, for all I know. Now get to bed!” :eek: Didn’t sleep a wink that night!
Funny thing is, you always heard about how tall bigfoot was. But as a child, I didn’t have a very good concept of that, and was imagining King Kong type tall. I never understood how come they couldn’t find him out there in the forest, towering over all the trees.
This is going to really embarass me, but…
Bill Cosby Show.
Let’s just say that black people weren’t a common sight in late-eighties/early-nineties Finland.
One of the first times I ever used the SMDB was to find out the name of the movie that scared the crap out of me when I was 4 or so. Thanks to the execellent people here, I found out it was Captain Sinbad.
There was a scene where one of Sinbad’s crew fell into this strange swamp and resurfaced as a skeleton… nightmare city.
At a bit of an older age I read something about the Bermuda Triangle and became convinced that aliens were going to come and get me.
Roly Poly Pudding. Where Tom Kitten gets caught by the rats or mice and they roll him up in pastry and smear him with butter and tie him up with string. I had a little picture book of it, and I could never even finish it, because the picture of poor Tom all wrapped in dough and looking so scared while the rodents prepared to bake him just freaked the hell out of me. I still don’t know if they ever made him into a pudding (anyone who wants to tell me the end can, I think I can handle it now.)
Yes, there is a movie called People Under The Stairs, but the scene Shana described in her post was certainly from a different movie called Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark.
I should have been clearer in my first post.
Oh, god those alien documentary specials were the worst. Especially when I was visiting my dad (who lived in an isolated, rural area, you see where this is going, don’t you?). I still can’t watch Sightings (is that still on?) or anything like that without getting a serious case of the heebie jeebies.