There may be a few more in this thread.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=744761&highlight=unsee
I think this is the episode of Space: 1999 that a lot of people remember. I’ve seen other people discuss how much it scared them as a kid.
https://www.blackgate.com/2013/04/29/the-scariest-hour-in-tv-history-space-1999-dragons-domain/
When my wife was about 6 her older brother let her watch Nightmare on Elm Street. She still talks about how much that movie scared her at that age.
As a Brit, naturally Crimewatch.
This is a show where they do reconstructions of real crimes in the hope of jogging someone’s memory and helping catch the perp.
That was the idea anyway, but the reconstructions were pretty scary: they started by showing the victim in a typical situation you or I might find ourselves in in real life (e.g. walking alone at night), and then the worst thing always happens.
And of course anyone that’s seen it knows the scariest thing was the photofits (images of the perp generated by compositing from a library of eyes, mouths etc…I can’t remember what the term for this is).
It’s like they designed them to be scary, and they appeared on your TV, fullscreen, usually without any verbal cues.
They actually had to finish the show by saying (paraphrasing): “These kinds of crime are very rare, please don’t have nightmares, do sleep well”.
Another Brit show: The New Statesman had an episode that disturbed me as a youngling. It was basically a late 80s / early 90s version of House of Cards. But cruder: it was meant to be a black comedy.
The main character was evil and call B’stard I think.
He had a grovelling but decent assistant, who is normally dealt a very bad hand in life, and by B’stard. But in this episode the assistant has somehow managed to date and get engaged to a beautiful woman.
He invites B’stard to his engagement party at some kind of posh manor.
Well, B’stard puts poison in the food so everyone at the party either passes out, or is rolling about in pain clutching their stomach. Everyone except evil guy and the beautiful woman, that is (their food wasn’t poisoned). He propositions her, and they end up having sex right on the dining table where everyone is still gathered (but in no position to stop them).
That was way too dark an ending for someone of my age at the time (probably 10 or 11…we were allowed to watch a lot of stuff).
There’s a children show, mid-1970s though it might be slightly older, that featured cartoon characters (anthropomorphic animals, probably) that I think interacted with live actors. The detail that’s stayed with me for some 40 years is the very end of each broadcast, with the animated characters fading away to be replaced by static versions of themselves painted on a wooden fence (by a circus? a fair?) , i.e. the animated cartoons reduced to static regular cartoons.
I only have vague memories, and I can’t even summon that haunting final image clearly, but it’s stayed with me and if anyone knows what I’m talking about and can help me view it as an adult, perhaps the intermittent feelings of unease will be banished.
Do you remember whether that (white) glove had some weird, cultish thing going on? Being used to heal people but also demanding another person to be killed? Because that sounds like some early work of David Cronenberg for the Friday the 13th series…some cheap, but quite queasy body horror stuff for sure.
When I was about 10-11ish, our regional TV station started to broadcast a program of mostly old and/or lighthearted horror movies, hosted by a guy named Bloody Boris and his pet skull Sunny Sammy. I fondly remember Love at first Bite, The fearless Vampire Killers, Dr. Phibes, The Raven, Mark of the Vampire, the MGM and Hammer classics…fun for the whole family, nothing too gruesome. So, when Black Sunday started without credits, it looked really good, beautiful even: Hooded monks in the woods, their sharp angles a stark contrast to the fog behind them, lit by a comfy fire. Voiceover narration about early efforts of justice, lovingly demonstrated by a branding iron on a woman’s back. Eww, but she’s taking it remarkably well, pure disdain and hatred in her eyes when she hears what more that pompous papist has in for her. I rooted for her, expecting her not to go down without a fight…and then that brute picks up that iron mask with fingerlong spikes inside, slooowly carrying it towards…ME! :eek:
Of course the monk got his earful, but when that hammer swung down on Barbara Steele’s face, we shrieked in unison! First time a movie gave me the chills and I was really grateful for the placing of the opening credits. It’s now one of my favourites, but man, that terrified look on her face…just whoa. Enjoy!
I’ve never been comfortable around department store mannequins.
There was an episode of Twilight Zone where a girl is trapped in a department store and can’t find her way out. Eventually, the store closes and the lights go out. The mannequins start calling her name, and the camera shows a close-up of each mannequin face in a split-second, all with frozen expressions, and her name echoes all throughout the store. The girl goes crazy and can’t escape, and eventually all the mannequins surround her. One of them asks, “Do you remember now?”
She does. She’s actually a mannequin herself. Each of them gets to have one night as a living person, and her time was up. The final scene is of her as a mannequin, with oblivious shoppers walking by, as Rod Sterling speculates what secret lives we all lead… in the Twilight Zone.
Animated dummies do not scar me for life. Finding out I’m one of them would.
That was one of Gordon Jump’s creepier roles.
As a kid, I was freaked out by Binkley and Doinkel, two creepy-looking alien puppets who taught kids about the dangers of drinking poison , electrocution and sticking one’s hand in a bucket of acid.
There was a Buck Rogers episode where Buck Rogers was imprisoned on some secluded desert planet with a bunch of other prisoners. They escape, and as they are running away from the prison, across the sand, they realize that there are octopuses living under the sand. They are undetectable, but when you run over them, they reach up with their tentacles and pull you down under the sand and eat you. My brother and I watched a lot of Buck Rogers growing up, but that is one of the very few scenes I even remember, and it causes me to pause to this day when I see a long expanse of sand in front of me.
YES! How could I forget about Fortress?
I remember a friend and I watching this movie one summer afternoon, and it has stuck with me ever since. I was Australian, and it was about a bus of school children and chaperones that get kidnapped by…I think escaped convicts… that held them captive for several days. They were kept in a cave, and plotted different ways to escape.
Not only was there the underwater scene where the student gets lost and can’t find her way out, but do you also remember:
[ul]
[li]They made lanterns by dipping their shoelaces into oil.[/li][li]A couple of the children escaped and made it to a nearby house where an elderly couple lived. Their captors found them, burst into the house, and shot the old man with a shotgun right in the chest. He fell and knocked over the fish tank. The children were so hungry that they started picking up the fish and eating them alive?[/li][li]They made booby traps to attack their captors. Outside the cave they put up stakes and attached school supplies to the tips to make them more dangerous. One of the captors fell onto the stakes, and I remember them showing the blade of a pencil sharpener puncturing through him.[/li][/ul]
Heh. Have you ever seen “Tremors”?
I read the book and couldn’t watch the movie. What so profoundly struck me as so tragic about Sybil was how long it took her to just partially recover. Nearly her entire life was lost due to the abuse she endured.
A long time ago while watching live news from China, IIRC, I saw a man skewered. He was spread eagle on the ground and suddenly he had a pole thrust into him between his legs. It was horrible. The program let the scene cycle through once more before removing it from the broadcast loop. I wasn’t sure of what happened until I saw it the second time. It is still hard to think of even after all this time.
The whole “Sybil” story is pretty much a work of fiction. Her real name was Shirley Mason, and her psychiatrist was her main abuser.
The story was an incredibly grotesque breach of medical and journalistic ethics.
Was this in the B&W original from the 30s? Or the cheesy Gil Gerard remake from the early 80s? I watched the latter as a kid and don’t remember an episode like that.
In regards to Sybil, even treating it as fiction the TV movie was pretty disturbing for me. I was only about 10 and shouldn’t have been allowed to watch it to begin with, but my parents worked nights and my older brothers & sisters didn’t care what I watched. Worse still, they thought it was hilarious and laughed & joked while watching it, something that confused me a tad more! 
Few other TV things from that time period that I have bad memories about:
[ul]
[li]There was a TV movie about a possessed twin called The Other which freaked me out.[/li][li]We had HBO early on and the revisionist and tackily gory film Soldier Blue was disturbing (again, my brothers found it funny!)[/li][li]There was a PBS documentary (early NOVA episode maybe) that featured a reenactment of a live, pre-anesthesia leg amputation. No gore but they showed the knife nearing his leg, and then the guy screaming terribly.[/li][li]Someone mentioned the movie J.T. I saw that on a projector in grade school in the early 70s and it must have upset me so much that I have probably blocked my then reaction out, cause being a cat person I sob watching it now![/li][li]Although seeing it later it seems an incredibly stupid, cheesy, terribly acted, neo-hippie film, but again as a little kid the movie Bless the Beasts and Children upset me because of the buffalo shooting scenes (and some of the domestic abuse flashbacks).[/li][/ul]Needless to say I was a somewhat ‘sensitive’ kid.
I realize this is a nine year old post, but FWIW?..it is out on DVD now and it is as scary as you think…at least to me. Almost unwatchable.
The commercial for Dario Dargento’s Suspiria.mit begins with a woman slowly brushing her hair in front of a mirror singing, Roses are Red, violets are blue…then she spins around, revealing a skeleton face and screams, “and I’m going to kill you,”. Saw it my grandmas house at about one Am…the same night I accidentally watched the broadcast version of “The Exorcist”. Not a good night. Still vivid forty years later…only thing that made it worse was the long walk down a narrow tenement hallway to use the bathroom. No light switches and I couldn’t yet reach the pull chins to turn on the light…
I was quite young and somehow was allowed to watch the movie The Pit And The Pendulum, with Vincent Price, on afternoon television. That swinging blade and the helpless victim haunted me for years afterwards. It’s probably the source of my aversion for torture scenes in movies to this day.
I’ve tried to watch the movie as an older woman and it’s so stuffy and boring that I can’t stick it out.