I saw The Beastmaster with Marc Singer when I was 8 years old.
There were these man-bat creatures that wrap their wings around people and dissolve them.
Then was a scene where priests inserted a small worm into a man’s ear which causes him to go nutz
Or the scene where a witch is shown magically transferring a baby from a pregnant woman into a cow whose own belly becomes distended.
I thought that was Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan 
Yeah, a few.
The shot where the Wicked Witch of The East’s legs curl up under the house in " The Wizard of Oz " deeply frightened me as a child. To this day I have to look away.
The book " Go Ask Alice " upset me pretty badly at the age of 12. Yes yes, I’ve learned that it is not true at all. Irrelevant. At that age, it was overwhelmingly distressing.
I completely forgot about Island of the Blue Dolphin. I cried for hours. No book I had ever read had something that tragic, and I was just stunned by it.
I was seriously traumatized by Dr. Seuss’ “Ooblick,” the green gluey goop that rained from the sky and glued everything together, especially the one guy who actually ate some of it. OMG. It still causes me stress and anxiety remembering it today!
It’s really hard to predict what’ll scare a child.
This I don’t remember, but my mother told me about it: there was a picture in a nursery rhyme book of a bird asleep with its head hidden under its wing. I was afraid to go to sleep. She eventually managed to figure out that I thought the bird’s head had come off when it went to sleep, and was afraid that the same thing would happen to me.
Some years later, but still while I was fairly young, I read an article in Reader’s Digest about the theory that because mammoths had been found frozen in glaciers with buttercups still in their mouths, the glaciers must have formed almost instantaneously, the weather in a given spot going from ‘warm enough to grow flowers’ to ‘cold enough to freeze you solid in a block of ice’ without enough warning to swallow the flowers first. I worried about that one for quite a while, though I don’t think I ever told my parents about it. (I believe they eventually decided that soil deposits thick enough to grow plants had formed over some remaining large blocks of ice, and mammoths grazing there had sometimes fallen into crevasses as the ice gradually finished thawing.)
The movie came out last year. (That article you linked to is almost 5 years old.) It was pretty lame. The books were definitely scary and disturbing but the film was too far towards the PG side of PG-13.
TIna Turner’s The Acid Queen, from the movie Tommy.
I live nowhere near an ocean, and only have been to the ocean twice, but Jaws creeped me out more than and Jason, Freddy, or Leatherface ever has. I wasn’t even THAT young first time I saw it. Maybe 5th grade at the youngest. Still get a little chill when entering a natural body of water, even one a Great White would never be in (fresh water).
In the 1965 animated film Pinocchio in Outer Space, there’s a scene near the end where Pinocchio somehow ends up being thrown out of his space ship and (apparently) dies. I completely lost it at that point.
I was completely freaked out by the 1933 version of The Invisible Man, despite first seeing it on my parents’ barely functional Admiral B & W TV.
It never happened to me, but I know two instances of it. My mother was born in 1913, so this would have happened before 1920. Her mother took her to see the silent “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” and it scared the bejebus out of her to the extent that she had nightmares about it all her life. I saw it in an art theater when I was around 21 and didn’t see what was so scary about it.
When my brother was about 10 we saw an early horror movie called “The Thing” and it scared him to the point that for a couple years he would not open a closet door. It was a scary movie and the thing was in a closet but his reaction was extreme.
While I’ve never cared for horror movies, anything that’s fanstastical/mystical/magical has never really bothered me because it’s all beyond the scope of reality. Depictions of stuff that could actually happen IRL, though? Oh yeah.
One really awful thing I remember from my youth was being given Tess of the D’Urbervilles to read when I was about 13.
All of us at my school in grade 7 were sent to a reading tutor, who assessed our reading skills. Those of us who didn’t need any remedial help were assigned books to read. That one was mine. For anyone who hasn’t read that book and thinks they might want to someday, I’ll spoiler the rest:
It starts off with the protagonist (Tess) accidently causing the death of her impoverished family’s only horse and her attempt to secure paying work to replace him results in a) massive amounts of sexual harassment, b) her rape and subsequent pregnancy and stillbirth, c) her husband’s rejection of her when he finds out her history, d) her rapist’s continued pursuit of her, who she ends up subjugating herself to because she thinks it will help her house her family, and e) her execution for finally murdering him.
It took reading The Grapes of Wrath to horrify me that much again.
As a kid, I recall watching a version of A Christmas Carol in a revival theater where Scrooge and the ghost of Christmas-to-be are in a cemetery and the latter is suddenly revealed as a skeleton, with Scrooge subsequently falling into his own grave. That was terrifying to me. I could have sworn this was the 1951 version with Alastair Sim, but I just watched that part of it and the scene was not there. Regardless, I will never forget it.
Mine is mundane and long-lasting: on a cross-country road trip when I was 7, I had a stack of books to read, and one of them was the thoroughly mediocre The TV Kid, by Betsy Byars. It’s an afterschool special of a book about a boy who watches too much TV, until at some point a rattlesnake bites him and his leg swells up like a sausage and he’s crawling for help–
–and I don’t know what happens next, because I made my dad pull the car over and I threw up by the side of the road. And ever since reading that description of a snake-bite, I’ve had a debilitating phobia of injections.
I’m fine with snakes, though. Brains are weird.
(Disney’s Pinocchio) Lampwick changing into a donkey was terrifying to me.
When I was maybe five in the 1950s I saw The Wolf Man with Lon Chaney Jr. on TV. That night I dreamed I saw the Wolf Mans’s face materializing out of fog at the foot of my bed (Of course, I believed I was awake and was really seeing this). I screamed and my father ran in to see what was wrong. To this day, that may be as scared as I have ever been in my life.
I forgot all about those goddamn Siamese cats from Lady and the Tramp (if you please). I saw it in the theater for my birthday, either 5 or 6 years old. Thanks, mom and dad.
I am not at all sure Disney liked kids.
Aged about 5, circa 1973 my mother read a bedtime story to me. A doughnut fell off a bakers van while being delivered to a shop. It lands next to a puddle of rain on the ground. The doughnut and the puddle are both anthropomorphic, living things. They are both very sad. The doughnut wanted someone to eat him, while the puddle wanted to be drunk. Lying there on the ground, neither would fulfill their purpose.
But there’s a happy ending. Along came a duck and her ducklings. They eat the doughnut, and drink the puddle. The two friends are very happy, and say “goodbye, goodbye” to each other as they die.
One of the Lassie movies from the 1940s. It was a rerelease being shown at a local movie theater. A bunch of us went - I was 4 or 5 - and at some point I burst into tears and tried to run sobbing from the theater. The father of a friend who had taken us had to comfort me. He must have had fun explaining to my folks why I returned home looking like hell because I am such an ugly cryer it’s immediately obvious that I have been crying.