Shadow Of The Hawk, starring Jan Michael Vincent. It has a really freaky Indian spirit haunting him in the woods.
The network broadcast of Carrie. When her hand came out of the grave at the end, I about lost my nine-year old mind.
How’d you like the end of The Kingdom? 
Oh, “V” terrified me when it was on. We didn’t have a TV, but my grandparents did and insisted on watching it when we were at their house.
But the one movie that scarred me for life was a movie set in the dust bowl during the Depression. It was about a farm family that was trying to hold on, but their farm was blowing away. One night, the oldest son spent the night at a friend’s house and while he was away, the mother went nuts because of the wind and murdered the rest of the kids with a butcher knife. I was spending the night at my grandparent’s house and the wind kept howling and I kept waiting for the crazy woman with the butcher knife…
That sounds like it was from “The Storm,” an episode of the 1978 miniseries Centennial – it was a very effective scene, made all the more scary by the camerawork showing the man discovering his wife against the wall, knife still in her hand. Centennial, based on the James Michener book, was a great miniseries, but that scene scared the bejesus out of me, too.
Me, too. I was a teen when it aired (I think) but it was terrible. Not the acting etc, but the whole subject–it was very moving and awful.
This wasn’t a scarring,but The Dick Van Dyke show really warped my sense of parenthood. Kids don’t just go away until needed for a plot device. Who would have thought?
When I was about 8, I was watching MAS*H in re-runs and saw the nightmare episode. By the time Hawkey couldn’t operate because he had to pull his own arms off, I was hiding behind my dad’s lazy chair.
There was some episode on Outer Limits about which I remember very little except that crablike alien creatures would chase people, and when the person fell down, the crab-things would get on his back and do something horrible to him while the victim screamed and thrashed around. It freaked me out tremendously.
Then, when I saw Alien in the late '70s and the face-hugger crab jumped out, it all came flashing back.
I don’t know what it was, but it was on the TV and I was a kid. I wasn’t supposed to be watching it–I had walked down the hall and was just outside the room where the grownups were watching… all I saw was two men standing in a river, struggling. One of them pulls out a knife and scalps the other one. I freaked out and ran back down the hall… but it haunted me for years and years and years. I wonder what it was? It would have been late '70s or early '80s.
Wow. And all these years I thought the one that traumatized me was a fluke!
In retrospect, this one wasn’t nearly as bad as watching a woman get burned alive at a window (have to say I missed that one). But, * this seriously, seriously fcked with my scaredy-cat six-year-old brain.
I think it was a Halloween episode; Laura has a dream that Mr. Olson kills Mrs. Olson and chops off her head, I think? You see her head sitting there on a table and then her eyes SHOOT open. *That * was freaky enough, but then they cut to Mr. Olson all monstered out with freaky makeup and, possibly, fangs?
I know- the description is comedic today. But those brief glimpses haunted my sleep like oh you have no idea. And I wasn’t even watching the episode proper–what I saw was in the scenes for the following week!
The actual episode would have rendered me catatonic, I’m sure.
Mine is kinda a weird one, an old episode of Space 1999. The moon base meets some space travelers use suspended animation and they’re heading earth’s way. Rhey agree to take one of the moon base people with them and customize a suspended animation unit. Another moon guy forces his way onto the space ship to take the place of the person who was supposed to go (who was one of the regulars and therefore, it was probably obvious they wouldn’t wind up going).
After a short sleep, he wakes up, sealing in the stasis unit which doesn’t work for him as it was tuned to the other person. It sounds tame but the whole idea of being trapped in a glass box with no way out completely freaked me out for weeks.
This might be mine, too. I remember when I was young (8ish), I snuck out of bed after bedtime, and hid behind the sofa while my mother watched a scary TV show about dolls coming to life, and I’m pretty sure it was a Twilight Zone. It scared me so much that from that point on, I had to keep my baby dolls locked in the closet at night, and when we moved out of that house a few months later, I got rid of all of them. Never had another baby doll again–I couldn’t even buy one for my own daughter.
I remember when I was about 5 or 6 my parents and I were at our vacation cottage out in the country. As was our saturday night vacation tradition we stayed up to watch SNL. We had the local news on while waiting and they did one of those “we have 5 minutes to kill, what should we air?” things about aliens and alien abductions, complete with actors in grey alien costumes and people showing their drawings of aliens. At this age I figured News=true and real no joking. I mean it was the news, on the teevee. Scared the crap out of me.
Now fastforward a few hours, SNL is over, and as a bonus I got to stay up and watch the late night movie. The movie was Communion http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097100/
, I had seen the book in a store and remembered how it said “true story” on it.
I didn’t sleep for weeks after that night.
I won’t even get into the night at the same cabin my dad and I watched fire in the sky during a thunderstorm in which a tree was struck by lightning and set the top on fire.
Childhood is fun.
My worst “scarred by TV” has already been mentioned … I didn’t know the title, but it was the gremlin-under-the stairs one. Dragging her beneath them, forevermore … Gah!
Another was an episode of “Kolchak - The Night Stalker.” I don’t remember any particulars of the episode, just that there are these reaching, writhing hands coming up from underground. A grave? An unmarked grave? Who knows? It seems it was at night, with fog. I vividly recall, weeks after glimpsing this, sprinting down the street after getting dropped off by a neighbor after evening choir practice. The dark! The hands! Arrggggghhh!
The daddy of them all, though, was Dark Shadows. Totally. Any time I saw this show I was petrified for weeks. There was the disembodied hand. Fangs on Barnabas Collins. God knows what else. But that crawling hand plagued me until I got married and had a husband to guard me at night, I swear.
Childhood:
I forget the name of it now. But it was these weird goblin things that kept invading everyone’s houses. Started with a G. Anyway, there’s a scene where one pops up in the toilet. That freaked me out for years and years…I mean, just imagine it, popping up while you were doing your stuff, and biting your most sensitive parts and ripping you up…
Poltergeist - not the clown part, tho that was scary. The one that stuck in my head the most was the giant mouth opening in the bedroom. Only I didn’t see it in the bedroom, but on the shower wall. Made me afraid to take showers, and I usually hurried through them and kept my eyes open, even at the cost of getting soap in my eyes.
Saw a few moments of a movie once, where this glove was alive and was strangling people . That one freaked me a bit.
Oh, and Twilight Zone? Liked the show, but in the beginning during the credits, they used to show a large picture of a fetus. Now it seems silly, but my friend and me were scared to death of this. The TV was four rooms away in her house, and her mom made us go back and turn it off. We went hand-in-hand, and then raced all the way back, shrieking.
I’m sure there’s more, I had a horribly vivid imagination as a child. That’ susually a good thing, except I had no control over it at all.
Adult:
Saw Aliens when I was 19 or 20 and it scared the shit out of me. Didn’t help that my then-boyfriend spent the next few weeks hissing at odd times.
Ghoulies (warning: click on link at your own peril, Anaamika, as the IMDB page has a picture of the theater poster, which features said weird goblin thing popping out of said toilet.
Ghoulies! That’s it! I was thinking Goonies but I knew that wasn’t it. God, that looks horrible, doesn’t it? The graphics I mean. Not scary at all.
Slightly amusing story about it, though. Ghoulies was my first moment of sarcasm that I can remember. I was watching it with some other, older girls, like 8-10 years older than me. I was probably 10 or so. Anyway, there’s a scene where the guy and girl are making out, and he’s kissing all over her chest, and a ghoulie pops up from somewhere.
And I said, “Nice timing.”
All the girls were shocked, since I was quite innocent and naive mostly.
One of the local stations played the film The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus/Eyes without a Face/Les Yeux sans Visage on TV, obviously without previewing it. It’s about a somewhat insane doctor who tries to restore his daughter’s ravaged face by essentially stealing the skin from the faces of his boarders. The high point of the film shows such an operation in clinical glee. You see the outline of the “mask” made in marker on the victim’s face – marker lines around the outside of the face, the eyes, and the mouth. A scalpel cuts along those lines, bloodlessly. Then they insert forceps under the cut edges and pull the “mask” away from the head, toward the camera. It looked surprising real to me young eyes. You could see through the “eyeholes” and the “mouth”, but the mask itself pretty much blocked any view of the underlying musculature. today i might catch a view of its imperfections, but it looked perfectly lifelike to me then.
I’m defintely scarred for life afte seeing the clip linked to in this thread. :eek:
Scary pop-up bathtub arrythmic dancers!
Puh-LEEZE! That’s horrible. :smack: :rolleyes:
I don’t remember anything else about the show (movie?) but when I was really young I saw it on TV. A guy (or maybe a woman) is unconcious in the woods and a witch (?) casts a spell or something on this unconcious person and turns thier face into something like putty or clay and then molds thier face to look totally different and it stayed that way after they woke up! For some reason this was extremely disturbing to me at the time.
Rich Man, Poor Man when that guy gets his kneecaps smashed with a hammer. I could FEEL it!