What creeped you out as a kid?

Cafe Society
1

(In books, movies, and TV, obviously. Not the dotty cat lady with one tooth who lived down the street.)

The inspiration for the thread came from the list mentioned here:

  1. The number one book on that list is Scary Stories by Alvin Schwartz. I was babysitting a kid once, and I idly took this off his bookshelf to read after he went to sleep. Big, big, big mistake–the stories themselves are really tame, but the illustrations by Stephen Gammell are creepy as hell. Nightmare fuel unleaded for years.

  2. Hexadecimal, on ReBoot. Especially when she merged with that black parasite thing–I didn’t know about Venom back then, and it was terrifying.

  3. There was this one episode of Sabrina where they put this girl under a spell, and to do this they had to make her body stiff and straight, like a corpse, and float her horizontally out of the room. To this day I have no idea why that scared me so much.
    What’re yours? Make me feel better about my irrational childhood fears, please. :slight_smile:

2

Hmm. Okay, here’s one:

I used to watch The Littles. One episode featured a scene with an evil-looking boat in an underground lake, while drums set an ominous beat to the scene. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but later I would be lying in bed and hear my own heartbeat in my ear (laying on your side, ear against the pillow or bed, there’s a steady thump-thump-thump in my ear. Dunno if that’s normal or weird, but whatever). I didn’t know what it was at the time, though, and my parents were treated to a young boy incoherently screaming about The Littles and a boat and and and…

3

I just realized that wasn’t written too well. I thought the sound of my heartbeat was the same as the backbeat for the boat in the cartoon, hence the freaking out. :stuck_out_tongue:

4

I loved Scary Stories ; in fact I had a little crush on the girl in The Haunted House. The Pin-Cushion Man really creeped me out when I was really young, though.

The Pin-Cushion Man on youtube

5

Without a doubt, the thing that most dislturbed me was the death of the elephant king in Babar the Elephant. The king eats a mushroom, turns GREEN, and dies. He dies! After turning GREEN! From a mushroom :eek: My mother put mushrooms in our food. And made us eat them.

It still creeps me out, actually.

6

Er…not the one with no eyes and long hair, right?

7

A few movies that scared the hell out of me as a kid (and an adult):
“The Thing” (With James Arness)
“The Tingler” (Vincent Price)
“House on Haunted Hill”
All gave me nightmares!

8

I remember Hexidecimal… she was one scary bitch, ok. So was Mumm-ra from thundercats, but being a cartoon, he didnt freak me that much.
What got me the most was The Banshee from Darby O’Gill and The Little people. I mean, that really did a number on me. She was flourescent green and blue, and screamed the most ghastly scream. I was the sterotypical kid hiding behind the sofa; I mean I really hid behind the flippin’ sofa, shaking. Years later, while watching The Lord Of The Rings; The Fellowship of the Ring, there’s a scene where Galadrial gets tempted by the ring and does this transformation, you know her “Queen of Infinite Beauty” speech. It reminded me so much of the banshee that, at twenty-two years old, I covered my face with my hands.

9

The original movie “Invaders From Mars” was on TV (this was back in the 60’s). We had some neighbors visiting with their older boys who insisted on watching it, so I had no choice. I was just a little girl. I had nightmares for weeks.

10

The Incredible Hulk tv show scared the crap out of me. Just that music at the end of the show would do it to me.

DO do do DOOOOO…

Didn’t help that my sister loved the show so much she even had a Hulk saucer sled.

11

There was some TV movie about tarantulas in the 70s that freaked me out. Especially one scene where a guy opens a panel in the ceiling and tons of tarantulas fall out onto his face.

Stayed with me a long time, it did.

12

Oh, cripes, I’d forgotten all about Scary Stories. Man, that book freaked me the hell out when I was a kid! The picture of the eyeless girl, in particular, scared the hell out of me, but I couldn’t not look at it.

The other day, I rewatched Big Trouble in Little China. It’s been one of my favorite movies since I first saw it. But when I was a little kid, the one scene I couldn’t stand to watch was when one of the Three Storms comes in and sees that Lo Pan is dead, and he gets so outraged he literally explodes. I’d always have to cover my eyes while he was expanding. For some reason, the shot of his foot bursting out of his shoe was especially disturbing. Watching in now, it just looks cheesy.

The other movie that messed me up for years was The Believers. There was a lot of disturbing shit in that movie, including a scene where spider eggs hatch out of a woman’s face. That didn’t bother me. What I couldn’t handle was the scene right at the very beginning, where a family is having breakfast, and everything’s nice and normal. The husband drops a quart of milk on the floor, and goes to get a towel to clean it up. Mom’s standing in the puddle of milk, when the little kid at the table points out that there’s coffee leaking out of the base of the coffee maker. Mom puts her finger over the leak to stop it from spreading, and gets electrocuted to death, while her family stands there watching her and screaming. Jesus, that scene just crawled into my head and set up housekeeping. I still haven’t ever seen that movie again to this day, because of that scene.

The last one I remember was from a Choose-Your-Own Adventure. (Actually, one of the lesser knock-off brands, not the original CYOA series.) I don’t remember the name, or much of the plot, except that it involved an evil circus. One of the bad endings had you captured by the carnival master, and sewn into the body of a miniature crocodile, where, presumably, you lived out the rest of your life as a sideshow exhibit. Typing it out, it sounds dumb, but the picture that accompanied it was a POV shot of the carnival master leaning over you with a needle and thread, with the edges of the crocodile skin closing over you. I can’t imagine that the same scene would be anything other than lame and contrived if I saw it today, but it scared the hell out of me when I was a kid.

13

The Secret of NIHM - There was a lot of creepy stuff in this movie: the old owl, Nichodemus (sp?). The scene I remember most though is one with the rats receiving injections and then writing in pain while a DNA helix zooms in from the background.

It’s like they were trying to mess us up for life.

14

The ads for the horror movie “It’s Alive!” The movie came out when I was something like 7 or 8 years old. It showed this white bassinet, and tinkly baby music (might have been Mary Had A Little Lamb or something like that), that slowly turned echoey and dark as the bassinet revolves…and you see this CLAW projecting over the side! God, that ad just haunted me for months.

15

My Mama Says There Aren’t Any Zombies, Ghosts, Vampires, Demons, Monsters, Fiends, Monsters, or Things, by Judith Viorst. This book, or rather, the illustrations by Kay Chorao, scared me most righteously. In fact, I wouldn’t sit and flip through it now if I were all alone. There are bad things in it. shudder

For movies, it would have to be The Devil and Daniel Mouse. It was a cartoon movie about a mouse who sold her soul to the Devil, and the Devil was just terrifying. When he spoke, he would morph into different things or his face would crawl around on his head. Besides, I was a religious kid, and I completely believed that someone could thoughtlessly consign themselves to eternal flames just like that. I’m sure Grandma thought I would just love to stay up that night and watch a cartoon on TV, but that movie cast a lingering shadow over my little life.

16

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Although the tunnel ride was cool. What freaked me out was that these kids got turned into blueberries and dropped down chutes and everyone thought this was cool. I used to have nightmares about those bastard Oompa-Loompas pushing me on the scale to find out if I was good or bad.

(I loved Hexadecimal. She is my favorite character from ReBoot and I was so happy when she eventually switched sides.)

17

I used to always get freaked out when we were watching TV and those “Technical Difficulties Please Stand By” graphics would come on. It was especially troubling when it would be on more than one channel (that was back in the days where we had like 4 channels). Must have been because of some monster or alien movie where I saw that happen and the next scene would be monsters/aliens attacking and destroying transmitters, stomping on buses, etc.

I’m still a bit spooked anytime it happens. After all, you never know when the monsters will attack, and anyway they go after all the TV transmitters first–everyone knows that…right???

18

My “little” brother (he’s 45 now) didn’t want to go see Willy Wonka, because, when we saw the trailer for it, he thought the chocolate river looked like blood.

I used to have a slight feeling of dread whenever I watched Bugs Bunny in the late 60’s, in case it turned out to be the Jekyll/Hyde one:

http–www.kevinmccorrytv.com-fleeinghyde.jpg

19

I saw an adaptation of Poe’s story “The Cask of Amontillado” on late night TV when I was small. Too small. The experience made me shaky scared and the story can still make me physically ill.

Moviewise, I saw some Vincent Price horror (also when I was obviously too little) wherein some man in a hospital kept getting healthy limbs amputated. Took a long time to get over that, if indeed I did…

BTW - also far too many Twilight Zone and Outer Limits episodes to list. I was quite a wimp, wasn’t I?

20

All those really old cartoons with the characters with rubbery arms and the nasty critter who’s face suddenly gets really BIG. I still think they’re creepy.