Thanks, Max. I’m gonna have to ask you not to give me that for Christmas 
There was a show about mentally ill children telecast on or about Thanksgiving when I was 10. These kids were seriously messed up. I spent the next couple of years fearful that I would go off the rails.
There were a couple of T-Zones that scared the hell out of me. The main one was the one with the guy playing slots. The slot machine (which looked to my child mind like an evil robot) appears in the mirror, but when he looks around, it’s gone. Then when it’s gone in the mirror, he sees it in the doorway. Man, that was scary. I’ve seen it a couple times since, and think it’s a fairly dull episode, and even more preachy than usual. And a slot machine isn’t exactly something that evokes fear in me. But when I was a kid…whoa!
AGH! I remember that! “But I’m not your Boogeyman…” Scared the crap out of me for weeks! That and another Dark Shadows one, with the little albino creature that lived in a closet in the room of a girl who was boarding with a…professor? Something like that. Hell, just hearing the theme of Dark Shadows when I was lying upstairs in bed was enough to creep me out…my mother loved that show and watched it all the time.
Fraaaaaaaaaanklin!
The one that always get to me is where the starlet is in the hospital with a nervous breakdown and that creepy nurse keeps saying “room for one more, honey”.
I’ll throw in the severed cat head from Sybil, and raise you the devil (or alien that LOOKS like the devil) from the end of Quatermass & the Pit/ 5 Million Years to Earth.
Both creeped the hell out of me whe I saw them as a child.
Sorry…Tales from the Darkside, not Dark Shadows.
:eek: :eek: I had never heard of this. I may not sleep much tonight.
I believe it was an episode of Fantasy Island but I could be way off.
There’s this wax museum, and the big news story of the day is that all these famous actors and such are disappearing. And in this wax museum it’s very cold and there’s rules about how you aren’t supposed to turn the heat on, and someone does and the wax starts to melt and underneath it’s the skeletons of the famous people…
At least, that’s how the plot came across to my very young self.
I was scared for years, and of course I wasn’t supposed to be watching it in the first place so I couldn’t even ask my parents about it.
The Caligula story reminded me of Caligula from I Claudius. The scene where Caligula drugs and ties up his pregnant sister Drusilla (it’s implied, but I don’t think directly stated, that he’s the father), tells her the story of Jove eating his sister’s baby before it was born, then pulls out a knife. The scene changes to Claudius pounding on the door of the room while Drusilla screams - and there’s a very brief baby’s scream in there as well. Caligula walks out, with blood smeared around his mouth and dripping down his chin, and says “Don’t go in there.”
Pretty freaky for a 10 year old who was forced to watch the show by his mother because it would be “educational.”
You haven’t been scarred until you’ve seen what the comunists were offering up in the 70s … Das Singende Klingende Baumchen aka The Singing Ringing Tree is nasty nasty nasty !! the Prince being turned into a bear :eek: 
Also little Czech Mole getting trapped in the middle of an intersection in his little toy car with huge real cars all revving up angrily …
I aslo remember being upset by an episode of Lassie where she was trying to rescue some kittens one by one from a cave where the tide was coming in …
Nightmares ensued after watching Grizzly
This was actually a Twilight Zone show from the 80s, I think, and it was called the Shadowman. “But I’m the Shadowman who lives under someone else’s bed.”
Was that it?
I remember the movie Coma being on tv. I had snuck around to see what my mom and dad were watching and there were all these bodies hanging by weird gauzy structures. That freaked me out.
Ditto whoever said Sybil–that one is particularly freaky because a girl from indy named Sylvia Likens got abused like that, but she died.
Also, The Burning Bed–that was scary.
My book thread reminded me of one. *It * the book didn’t scare me but in the movie the clown had sharp, jagged, and above all *dirty * teeth. :shudders: That image stayed with me.
That sounds right. All of the anthology horror shows from the 80s start to run together for me: Twilight Zone, Tales from the Darkside, certain episodes of Amazing Stories, the new Outer Limits…
And of course, Dark Shadows wasn’t an anthology horrow show, it was a horror soap opera…
Did you say clowns? Pennywise from It…shiver…especially when he popped a balloon and blood splattered everywhere.
I can’t watch the Budd Dwyer suicide, but it’s all over the internet. I remember it made all the nightly news shows. He was the Pennsylvania State Treasurer accused of taking bribes, and in 1987 he called a press conference to proclaim his innocence and blew his head off with a .357 magnum as the cameras rolled.
I’m glad someone put a name to my scarring moment.
If I remember correctly (and my memory isn’t mixing two childhood movies), after the escape, the children end up with a bad guy’s heart in a jar on their classroom windowsill. Still makes me shudder.
Oh, I had almost excised Grizzly from my mind. Darn you, Cat Jones! Darn you all to heck! I don’t even remember that much of it, but the scene where the bear rips the little boy’s arm off had me hysterical. I was pretty young at the time and had just as little maternal instinct as I do now, but for some reason that just broke my heart.
THANK YOU!!! I was so hoping someone would pop up and give me the title of that movie. That definitely sounds like it. I didnt realize it was a true story. Off to google to get all the details.
Is this bigfoot smashing the front window and all you see is his arm and then the lady opens the front door and he is standing right there? That WAS scary as crap.
Horton Hears a WHO “Boil that Dust Speck” always freaked me totally out as a very youngling
As a 9-10 year old or so to 'tween: the first time I saw Christopher Pike in TOS. If we can include movies we saw on TV Luke losing his hand freaked me the hell out
As a teen I recall a movie where a girl was raped and the whole twon turned against her – it was really horrible. The Betty Broderick movies with Meridth Baxter Birney as murderess and mother who destroys her kids lives Betty Broderick kind of got me. If we can use movies we saw on TV Woddy Harrleson losing his hand in Kingpin and its effect on his life freaked me out
As an adult two from Six Feet Under got me, a bit. The woman who was riding with her friends and stuck her head out a limo and caught a cherry picker in the face and they showed it afterwards on the Fisher’s table. Nate’s wife who drowned and was in the Ocean a week or so. They showed her. Its harder to get me now but both stayed with me - a bit.