Ditto on Darby O’Gill’s banshee. I haven’t seen that movie in…um…50 years? Might be fun to watch it again.
The John Tenniel illustrations for Alice in Wonderland always struck me as disturbing. Hated them then…still not fond of them.
And vampires. I didn’t mind being dead; but being *undead *freaked me out.
Medusa. Just the concept of someone with snakes growing out of their head made me scream and cry.
Odd, since I’m stongly attracted to reptiles and amphibians…as long as they’re not attached to human skulls.
There was this commercial for a cheap crappy movie in the 70’s “In search of Bigfoot” or something like that ( May have Legend of Boggy Creek). The end of the commercial always had the sound of the creature roaring. It had me wetting my pants… it got so that everytime it came on I would plug my ears when I knew the commercial would end. I’m not sure why I didn’t leave the room…
I was also frightened of:
Alfred E Newman
The Planet of the Apes
Eagle eye GI JOE
I have no Idea why, just that they all freaked the piss out of me.
One time when I was little, I checked out some book about ghosts from the library. I was in one of those phases where I was obsessed with the paranormal, so this book came after several others about Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, UFOs, etc. I used to stare at those books for hours, and I was fascinated by the grainy, blurry, black and white photos that were supposedly of the Monster or UFOs or whatever.
This book had a bunch of those stupid “ghost photos” in it, where people pass double exposures or whatever off as ghosts. There was one grainy, black and white picture in it, that I still remember, where it was just the window of a house with a “ghost” standing in it, staring at the camera with these big glowing eyes.
Holy crap. My parents tried to explain to me that there was no such thing as ghosts, that it was just a photographic trick, that even if there were ghosts this was a very old picture and the house was nowhere near us, etc. etc… I still don’t think I slept that night, and they took the book back to the library immediately.
Around the same time (maybe a year earlier or later), I watched one of those goofy “Nostradamus predicts the end of the world” specials on TV with my mom. I was convinced that the world was going to come to an end in about a week. I mean, how could it not? Look at all that evidence! He predicted Hitler!
Sometimes I’m not sure how my parents managed to calm me down without breaking out in laughter.
When I was about five I used to be terrified of “the operator” (actually the recorded voice that came on if you left the phone off the hook). “If you’d like to make a call…”
Oh, and the two little girls in the hotel hallway in The Shining.
I used to use a napkin or towel to pick up the Scary Stories books, because I didn’t want to touch them. Then I would wash my hands afterwards. Yes, my OCD is under control, thank you.
Large Marge from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure scared me as a kid. So did parts of Beetlejuice and the baby Penguin from the second Batman. Tim Burton owes me money for therapy bills.
Okay, I was just about to edit my post to include this. The Penguin in Batman Returns terrified me when I first saw the movie in the theater (the day it opened, as I recally). When I eventually got the movie on VHS, I’d skip the opening sequence where the Penguin’s parents send him away in that basket, and I’d have to close my eyes during a lot of his scenes.
One of my favorite movies now, but I wasn’t really prepared for that at 7, particularly since I was Batman-obsessed at that point and everything I knew about the Penguin came from the Adam West show.
Another vote for the original Invaders From Mars. I saw it as a kid in the 50s and the images stayed with me for ages. The fact that the first part of the movie is seen from the perspective of the young kid makes it all the more effective.
Great film. (They remade it in the 80s, the less said about that one the better).
Yep. Her.
The theme song to Perry Mason used to freak me out as a kid. I would watch I Love Lucy and then turn the TV off as fast as possible to prevent having to listen to the Perry Mason music.
The theme music from Dr. Who. When I was a child in the late '60’s/early '70’s, I could watch anything on that show, but my parents said I wouldn’t sit through the theme for love or money – I used to run out of the room until it was over.
No! No! ::covers ears and eyes and hums::
The Kid Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
The British horror anthology film Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors. One of the segments involved Christopher Lee being relentlessly pursued by a disembodied hand. The scenes of the hand slowly pulling itself across the floor scared the crap out of me. I was terrified of the hand, even though it was the “hero”. IIRC Lee was a complete dick of an art critic that caused an artist to lose his hand, and the hand came back for revenge. Last year my 5-year-old wanted to buy a hand just like it from the Halloween shop. If he only knew.
3 words: Zuni Fetish Doll
Return to Oz.
Some sick person showed this movie to us in *school * when I was in third grade. There was a scene with a desert where if you stepped into it, you would turn into sand. Freaked.me.out!
I was terrified to go to the beach for years afterwards…
Now, after writing that, I am kind of curious to see the movie again.
Marching bands. Or at least the sound of them. My big brother told me they were “martians landing”. I’m sure he reinforced that with stories about what martians did to little girls. Anyway, sometimes I could hear the local high school band playing, and I’d be terrified!
StG
Flying monkeys.
I got creeped out by the dead King in the Babar stories too. Never associated it with mushrooms (I loved mushrooms) but just the fact that he’d turned green and died was so different from anything I’d ever seen in a book before that it was creepy.
The other thing was a movie that had teenagers eating stuff that looked like slices of canned cranberry sauce and then turning into something scary or creepy. I thought it was “Land of the Giants,” but a Google search makes me wonder now. Anyone know what it might have been? This would have been sometime from the late 60s to early 70s, and it’s quite possible the movie wasn’t new at that point since it was on TV. The only clear memory I have of it was the stuff they ate–it was either dark red/purple or maybe a lighter shade of the same color, but it was definitely sliced from a cylinder like cranberry sauce.
Hey, I actually teach marching band and they scare the heck out of me. Sometimes they act like martians landing. 
There is an episode of Little House on the Prairie that scared me to death as a kid. It was a Halloween episode and Laura (I think) was having nightmares about Mrs. Olsen. At one point, someone removes the cover from a serving dish and there is Harriet’s head on a platter. And it turned around!!! I just about died. :eek:
H.R. Pufnstuf.
Never made it past the theme/intro. That alone had me running and screaming all over the house.
Wow…Netflix has it. It’s now on my queue…I’m anxious to see what is actually is.
