Let’s say… pre-1960. What B&W movie completely unnerved you? Nightmares, etc.
For me, it was two flicks.
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The Mummy. As a child, I was a mess over that film.
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The Snake Pit. :eek: Ohhhhhhh man.
Yours?
Cartooniverse
Not pre-1960, but the original “The Haunting” from 1963 scared the piss out of me.
The 1945 British film Dead of Night scared the bejabbers out of me when I was a little girl. I had nightmares for weeks.
Psycho, no doubt about it. Spooked me away from showers for a while.
When I was 5 years old I had nightmares about the Creature From the Black Lagoon coming out of the television like Samara in The Ring.
Rebecca is pretty creepy. It’s not horror, but something about the character of Mrs. Danvers is so evil and scary, that it sticks with me even now when I watch it.
Ditto.
I don’t remember the title.
Atomic brains with horns that sucked victims brains out and made them one of their Evil Minions. Oh yeah, they were invisible for a while until somebody Did Something.
Scared the snot out of me.
I was just a pup. 
Not movies but a lot of the original Twilight Zones scared the crap out of me.
I used to have dreams of the Mummy grabbing me
and tickling me to death!! :eek:
Definitely Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte. I saw it when I was nine and saw heads rolling down stairs everywhere I looked.
Seance on a Wet Afternoon, with Richard Attenborough and Kim Stanley - I found it to be really scary in a psychological, rather than a horror, kind of way.
Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens I believe it was made in the twenties, but, màn! that vampire was creepy.
M Also old and German. Peter Lorre with his lisping voice and strange eyes scared me so, I was afraid of my dolls.
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? with Bette Davis was sad, sometimes funny, but mainly creepy.
Seconding Revtim’s the original The Haunting :eek:
This sounds like Fiend Without a Face–a movie I also remember from childhood. There are few things more alarming to an impressionable young mind than seeing a disembodied brain leaping around on its spinal column, brandishing a hammer.
I’ll also second, or third, The Haunting and some of the sequences in Dead of Night.
When I was five, I watched William Castle’s 13 Ghosts on TV. That one scared the hell out of me! Mond you, I slept in a bunk bed. Remember the canopy bed? My sister had moved into her own room, so I was alone in the dark with a ‘canopy’ above me. Now, of course, it’s just a campy spook show. But when you’re five…
I think I was also frightened as a child when The Haunting came on TV. The bedroom scene with the hand held too tight, and the door that bowed in…
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), the awakening scene
Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922), Satan’s first appearance
Island of Lost Souls (1933), overall creepiness of the manimals
Cat People (1942), the famous bus scene
Isle of the Dead (1944), in the tomb
Eyes Without a Face (1959), the whole concept
Psycho (1960)
The Innocents (1961), any time the ghosts appeared, especially the scene at the French windows
. . . and numerous Outer Limits episodes, including The Galaxy Being where an alien is teleported through a radio transmitter.
It misses the deadline by a year, and I’m pretty sure it was black and white, but Roger Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum freaked me right on out, especially the final scene. Huh. I only just now learned that it was a Roger Corman flick. Maybe that explains why it’s stuck with me all these years.
Daniel
The original “Cape Fear.” When Robert Mitchum makes it to the boat. I wanted to cry.
The Pit and the Pendulum was in garish Pathé Color.