Assuming that you are trying to correct me, no. Hell to Eternity (1960) is the story of Guy Gabaldon (played by Jeffrey Hunter), a Mexican-American who was raised by Japanese-American foster parents in California. When they were sent off to US concentration camps for the crime of having Japanese ancestors, he was angry, but nevertheless joined the USMC, and, at Saipan, managed to convince hundreds of Japanese there, perhaps more, to surrender, rather than commit suicide. (George Takei, who lived through the camps in real life, has a supporting role.)
From Here to Eternity (1953) is a drama and a romance, with the attack on Pearl Harbor at the climax.
The two have very little in common except for WW2 and some of the hottest sex of the Hayes-Code era.
I was 5 or 6 when I stumbled into the mid-section of The Tingler when they were trying to scare the deaf-mute woman to death. It was on in the afternoon!
I was fourteen so, while I had an inkling about the death camps, this cemented it for me. However, being fourteen my big takeaway was boobies! Having reached adolescence in the bullet bra era I had no idea they could move like that.
I also watched Beastmaster repeatedly on cable as a kid, and there’s only one thing I remember from that movie (or should I say two things, snicker).
A movie that warped my mind, but not in a bad or scary way, more in a Keanu in The Matrix ‘whoahh’ way, was a movie called “Twinkle Twinkle Killer Kane” (later renamed The Ninth Configuration).
I was maybe 13, rode my bike to the movie theater at the mall, back when malls had movie theaters. It sounded like an interesting movie. Here’s a capsule summary from IMDB:
A former marine arrives at a mental asylum housed in a remote castle to run it. There he attempts to rehabilitate the patients by letting them act out their craziest fantasies and desires.
It was a mix of dark humor and philosophical viewpoints that I hadn’t really been exposed to before, and I remember walking back through the mall to my bike feeling like my mind had been blown.
Many years later as a jaded adult I caught it on cable, and found it to be an embarrassingly bad mess of unfunny humor and half-baked, dumb Philosophy 101 ideas. The big plot twist was one of the hoariest old cliches ever:
I remember individual scenes that freaked me out but I don’t think they did permanent damage. Considering my mad love of horror films now, it takes a lot.
There was the bit in Joe Dante’s section of the Twilight Zone movie, with the slow reveal of the girl with the missing mouth. That did a number on me.
The first time I watched Pink Floyd The Wall, I was alone in the house on a cold afternoon, and the scene where the kids march into the meat grinder was an intense experience.
As an adult, seeing Martyrs (the original French version) at TIFF was super-upsetting. Wasn’t surprised that someone had yakked in the audience during the midnight screening.
However, being fourteen my big takeaway was boobies !
Yeah, I didn’t mention that, but me too. I was there with a friend and when that woman opened her blouse for Rod Steiger in the pawn shop our jaws hit the floor. Never had we seen that in a movie and it was completely unexpected.
That one fucked me up too. Also The Cyclops, when they throw the burning spear into his eye. I watched it at my friend’s house, and when I walked home I was certain the Cyclops was going to pop up from behind my house.
Silent Running. I cried hard at one of the scenes, I’m embarrassed to say.
THX 1138. I was too young to really understand it, but it made a big impression on me.
Haven’t seen either since then, and the only reason they’re stuck in my memory is because, many years later, I came to appreciate the work of Bruce Dern, Robert Duvall and Francis Ford Coppola.
In theaters (three times) shortly after release:
The Deer Hunter, mentioned upthread. I was in high school by then, and I’m pretty sure it sparked my interest in cinema during my adult life.
Hmmm, haven’t seen The Deer Hunter since then, either. I’m detecting a pattern here…
When I was eleven, I was no longer afraid of ghost stories, etc. I even watched a sci-fi show episode involving ghost hunters. (I don’t recall the TV show. Like Psi Factor, but that show hadn’t started when I was that age.)
They watched over a “haunted” house. There were three ghosts, which was enjoyable… until the third ghost turned out to be a demon. I wasn’t an atheist yet. The bed was dry the next morning, but I had that dream where your body starts floating away from the bed… It was like an alien abduction, except an extraplanar abduction. (Of course now I play D&D, watch supernatural horror, etc.)
I think I cried watching Bambi in the theatres. I was so young that I don’t really recall which movie, but it involved an animal suddenly dying (and was more graphic than The Lion King). It was some sort of special showing, since I got a transit vehicle toy, and apparently “A Streetcar Named Desire” was showing nearby, since I heard about that for the first time the same day.
Oh, boy. I sometimes wonder whether or not my parents loved me. The dates below are when I think I saw the movie not necessarily the year they were released.
Poltergeist (1982-83): I was six or seven years old when I first watched this on VHS.
The Thing (1982-83): I saw this on VHS but I don’t know if it was an official release or a bootleg.
Alien (1981-1982): We were at the drive-in-theater to watch Clash of the Titans but I kept staring at the screen showing Alien.
Porky’s (1982-1983): Another movie I watched as a wee lad on VHS.
Deathstalker (1983-1984): A terrible Conan imitation where our protagonist tries to sexually assault the woman he saves from being sexually assaulted at the beginning of the movie.
D.C. Cab (1983-1984): I don’t think this one is too bad. I just like to bring it up so this movie is never forgotten.
I suppose I could keep listing more, but I think you get the idea. I don’t have children, but I probably wouldn’t let them watch a lot of the movies my parents let me watch. It has skewed my perception of violence in movies and entertainment though. Some friends of mine talked about how violent a scene was in the 1st season of Netflix’s Daredevil series but it hardly made an impact on me. When watching Alien: Covenant, I didn’t think it was a particularly gory movie but a lot of people I know disagreed with me.
There’s a movie that freaked me the frick out when I was very young, like 5 or 6. Kudos to anyone who can name the movie for me, which I know is a long shot since I only remember two scenes before I fled in terror.
My parents warned me they were watching a scary movie, but I guess I thought I was ready to handle it, so I sat down on the couch with them to watch this movie past my bedtime. It was an old B&W movie.
The first scene I remember was of an old woman in a long white nightgown with long white hair, lying on a bed, having just died. Someone was getting her ready for burial or something- I remember the person running their hands over the dead woman’s face(?) maybe they were applying makeup or brushing her hair or something. Anyway, it was a tense scene, with the implication that the dead woman was going to come back to life and maybe, I don’t know, bite the hand, zombie-style.
I started getting scared, sensing a scary scene was coming, but still refused to leave, so I closed my eyes and covered them with my hands. My parents said they’d tell me when it was safe to open them again.
I got tired of keeping my eyes shut though, and snuck a look. And that’s when I saw the old dead woman in the long white gown floating down the hall toward the camera, long white hair flying, arms outstretched, horrible grimace on her face. And I lost my shit (fortunately, not literally) and probably dived under my bedcovers for the rest of the night. Most terrifying scene I had seen at that point in my young life.
The boat ride was child’s play for me; although I will say that Gene Wilder was especially creepy in that scene considering I had only seen him in The Producers previously.
The first two shocks I from movies I remember are from Fritz Lang’s post-war German epics “Der Tiger von Eschnapur” and “Das indische Grabmal”. I don’t remember which scene was in which, it was a series.
The story plays in India, and one scene has a magician performing the saber trick where a woman is crouched into a big basket and the magician sticks several sabers through the basket. And of course, after the last saber, there’s blood flooding out of the basket. Nothing too graphic, only blood, but enough to warp my 6 oder 7 year old mind.
The second scene is a hunt through the dark dungeons of the palace, and at one time the hero accidentally opens the entrance to the cave/dungeon of the lepers. He stares in a gaze of combined horror/sympathy at the poor lepers, torch in hand, while the lepers slowly climb up the stairs up to him, moaning miserably . Gave me the shivers.
If it’s possible you were watching on a B&W TV, you were probably seeing the first segment of Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath. Segment two isn’t that scary, but the third stars Boris Karloff (who also hosts the other ones) as a vampire patriarch back to fix the rest of his family. That first segment still gives me the creeps; Bava will do that to you.
Eyes Without a Face, a 1960 French film ( Les yeux sans visage ) dubbed into English, which showed up on, I believe WWOR’s Supernatural Theater one Friday or Saturday night. It was trimmed and released in the US in 1962 as The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus. I suspect the nice folks at WOR didn’t preview this, or didn’t pay close attention.
It’s about a plastic surgeon trying to restore his daughter’s ruined face. To this end he lures young women to his lab and removes the skin from their faces, grafting it onto his daughter.
What I didn’t know was that there is a very graphic scene showing the ungood doctor carefully cutting the skin if the victim’s face carefully around the mouth, eyes, and the periphery of her face. He then grasps this mask-like piece of flesh with tongs on both sides and pulls it off, directly into the camera.
My parents divorced when I was six, and for some reason after that, the time they’d spend with me often involved going to movies, and with no attention to rating. So I saw a ton of R movies in my pre-teens & teens, but of all the things that stuck with me, there’s a scene in “The Longest Yard” where the actor James Hampton goes into a cell with a sabotaged light bulb, and when he pulls the chain it explodes in fire and he burns to death as the cell door is locked on him.
Boy did that mess with me/give my 11-year-old brain nightmares.
Oh! Just thought of another: the eco-terror film “Frogs”, which I saw in the theater when I was 9. There’s a scene where tarantulas kill a guy and one crawls into his mouth. Yeah, that one was bad for me too.
