There’s an article by slate.com writers discussing the movies or books that scared them when they were growing up. There choices didn’t seem particularly scary to me. But it made me think that I saw Jaws and The Amityville Horror when I was pretty young. I still learned to swim and sail, but I still don’t like quarter-circle windows much.
Did any movies or books freak you out when you were growing up?
Watership Down.
“Ahh here’s a nice cartoon about some bunnies-OMG what are they doing!? 
” The mass suffocation scene gave me nightmares.
All I can think of is the flying monkeys, but they traumatized everybody.
There was a (IIRC) Believe it or Not paperback compilation of the strips. One article had a illustration of a woman with the nose of a pig. It just gave me the creeps when I was a kid, but I kept going back to look at it.
Not a movie or a book, but a song, by James Taylor, of all people. When I was a child in single-digit age, in the early 1990s, my parents played James Taylor’s album New Moon Shine constantly, and it featured a song called “The Frozen Man”, which is about a sailor who is lost at sea in a shipwreck in the 1800s and somehow gets frozen in ice and preserved, and is thawed out and revived 100 years later. This scenario is not merely alluded to in the lyrics, it’s described in great detail. Now, I was not the smartest kid, but I was smart enough to understand what he was singing about and I found it utterly horrifying. Both the notion of being frozen and stuck in ice for a century, and the notion of discovering said individual. The mental picture in my mind was somewhat akin to the “white walkers” from Game of Thrones. My parents, of course, were oblivious to the dread this song caused in my mind, and I damn sure wasn’t going to admit to how disturbing I found it, so I guess I eventually just learned to accept the terrifying “frozen man” as the album played over and over and over again in the house and on car trips.
Psycho
We didn’t have a shower with a curtain, but a shower room that was pitch black if your turned off the single 18" florescent light and the door opened and closed with a “whoomp” because the only opening was for the light.
Oh…as I’ve posted in other threads. My Dad would strip me bare, whip me, turn on the water and leave me there for hours when I didn’t got to school. Which was a lot.
Hmmm…maybe it was Psycho that traumatized me.
I’ve never been able to find it, but I swear there was a Mondo Cane commercial with beating drums and the announcer saying Mondo Cane in between scenes. I think I’m mixing it up with another Mondo movie because listening to this trailer, the voice is right, but no drumbeats. I’m probably mixing up the voice with another Mondo movie trailer.
If you’re not familiar with the Mondo series of films that were all the rage in the 60’s, they weren’t horror films, but just clips of people doing weird 60’s things. Some of the movies have real human and animal deaths, but again nor horror.
Ironically, I’ve always loved horror films, even watched tons of gore films in the 80’s. But after I watched Mondo Cane 2 in my 20’s, I had a nightmare about it that night. Don’t remember what it was, but it was really bad. I’ve never watched Mondo Cane or Mondo Cane 2 since.
Yep. Lots of books which were compilations of the strips which only contained illustrations. I vaguely recall the picture of the woman, because at one time, I collected all the paperbacks.
“Mr Pines Mixed Up Signs” gave me fodder to traumatize my younger brother. He got paranoid when riding in the car that my Dad would go through an intersection he was supposed to stop at and would get into a bad accident.
Mean of me, yes. But then we got a little older, a little wiser, and a little sister. My brother did the same thing to her so I’m off the hook.
The death of Bambi’s mother…
Gene Wilder and the scary boat scene from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
The Large Marge scene from PeeWee’s Big Adventure absolutely terrified me as a kid.
The Exorcist hit the stands in 1971, and one of my mom’s friends dropped it off for my mom to read. My mom wasn’t home, but thirteen year old me accepted the books the woman dropped off.
I read the book before giving it to my mom. Holy shit. My mom realized I’d read it, then when she read it I wonder what went through her head.
My parents mistakenly took me to see the movie The Naked Prey at a drive-in when I was just a little kid. They thought it would be a movie about African animals, like Hatari. Instead, it was a movie about the capture and torture of white explorers by an African tribe. The torture scenes were graphic and imaginative. Eight year old me was horrified and sickened, so much so that I vomited in the car.
I wasn’t really a kid at the time, but reading Lord of the Flies when I was a tween also traumatized me with its brutality. I don’t think I can ever read it again.
Here are mine, mostly books as my mom encouraged me to read from a young age and let me read anything I wanted just about (which I’m glad for now):
Watership Down didn’t exactly traumatize me but it did influence my mentality forever. First read it at around 6 years old. Even when very young, I related more to animals than people, so I was totally immersed in the trauma of the early warren destruction, the dangers of the open field, the perverted mentality of the Efrafa warren, the growing leadership of Hazel and even understood at a deep level the Lapine things they said.
Read Flowers for Algernon at around 8, and was deeply disturbed that that. In hindsight, I wasn’t mature enough yet. Read it again as an adult and understood it and was less disturbed. I think that kind of shows how kids can intuitively understand something that’s disturbing even when they don’t really know why or what about it bothers them.
As an early teen, I read a “romance” fiction book that I wasn’t mature enough for. It was about a young woman who’s parents both die in an accident so she prostitutes herself to keep her spoiled sister fed and well-educated. It spared no punches in describing her hooking encounters and what they did to her emotional state and self image.
And of course, a few movies that I don’t need to go into detail on: The Blob, The Wax Museum, Poltergeist. I still hate the horror genre. I don’t enjoy being terrorized.
After seeing Mary Poppins, I was convinced that a bunch of dirty chimney sweeps were going to come down our chimney and make a mess of the place.
Of the movies on that list that I’ve seen, none of them traumatized me. I remember Return To Oz having some scary parts (namely the witch(?) with all the heads), but no lasting effects.
The only childhood movie I can think of that I had any real issues with was Howard The Duck. I remember turning on the TV to some certain part of it and being terrified of whatever was going on on the screen. I turned it off and put it out of my mind. A few weeks later, someone turned was watching it when I walked in the room and I can remember being absolutely terrified, like almost crying terrified.
That was 30+ years ago and I still haven’t seen any of it beyond those few minutes of it.
E.T., believe it or not.
I was 11 when it came out. My mom took my younger brother and I to see it. Something was creeping me out as the movie went along. I didn’t know what or why, specifically; still don’t. The creepiness factor kept building through the movie. The breaking point was the scene where E.T. was being operated on. I got up and left the theater, and waited in the lobby for my mom and brother.
To this day, I’ve never watched it again.
That was sad but for me two scenes in Snow White that did the trick. The first was when she went into her basement lair to make the poison apple and passes by a skeleton in a cell reaching through the bars for a water pot just out of reach. She kicks it into flinders a couple minutes later but the damage had already been done.
The second was when a lightning bolt makes her have the big fall into an abyss and the two vultures nod at each other, leap off of the branch they were on, and glide in circles into the chasm as it fades to black.