Would that be the 1973 UFO Flap?
THAT was indeed an odd year!
Just remembered another one. Lady and The Tramp was the first movie I saw in a theater. I was 4. I was gonna be a big girl and sit still and not throw popcorn and ask quietly to go to the bathroom. I didn’t like the dark much, but I was fine since I was between my parents. The movie started and all was well; I was great, I was sophisticated, and there were cartoon dogs with spaghetti (me: I like spaghetti!). I had this whole movie theater thing down.
Then the siamese cats showed up.
Oh. No.
They were the scariest things known to man, and they were going to come out the screen and eat my face right off. I don’t remember how I reacted–I think I sat really still, and told my mom they were scary or something. I don’t remember flipping out, but it’s possible.
we are siameeeeeeiiize if you pleeeeeeeeeeeiiize… shudder Just look at how sinister and horrifying they are: (YouTube video) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxpN2XrYDLM&feature=related
I still don’t like real siamese cats much.
That oil monster from Ferngully scared the shee-yit outta me when I was six. Still gives me the willies, at the much more emotionally-level age of 22.
Hell, just about everything in that movie freaked me out to some extent. The fairies, that logging machine, everything.
<shudder>
I think it was called “Spider Kingdom.” That movie gave me the creeps for years. Even now I remember the ending where the whole town was covered in a web (although I knew it was silly for tarantulas).
And I didn’t like sacks of things because that’s how the spiders came…in sacks of coffee, if I remember correctly.
Yeah, I still hate that movie.
Damn spiders.
Was that the one with the VW Beetle decorated to look like a giant spider?
Missed the edit window…
That’s the MST3K favorite, Giant Spider Invasion
I remember a picture of a particularly evil-looking Eurypterid in a book of prehistoric creatures. They’re like Giant Alien Sea Scorpions of Doom. I would always turn that page as quickly as possible.
That’s odd. Usually, the blood gets off at the second floor.
I’ve posted about this one before.
There was a Sesame Street skit in which Harry (the big, blue hairy monster, hence the name) roars into the camera, fogging up the lens. His eyes show through the “fog” (they just whited out the rest of the screen). As a four-year-old, this scared the hell out of me. Every time this skit came on I would run out of the room and listen to the TV audio from a safe distance and wait for the skit to end before returning to the TV.
Ha! In RL, dear ol’ dad is the most laid back guy ever (has to be, to live with my mother).
Oh, another one. Dolls. I have this complete THING. Especially after seeing the ads for Child’s Play as a tiny child. EVIL KILLER DOLLS!
And what was that book about a lonely girl who discovers dolls living behind the walls? That book was in the YA section of the library, but… :eek: Especially the ending. :eek: :eek:
Speaking of Sesame Street, my son was freaked out by the skit where Smokey Robinson sings “You Really Got a Hold on Me”, while being squeezed by a giant plush “U”.
Twenty years later, he still doesn’t like the song.
Something that always freaked me out (and still does) in movies and tv are scenes are childhood abandonment scenes. I don’t know why they upset me so much, but they do.
Yeah, stories about orphans used to really bother me. Especially abused orphans. I could never stand to watch The Rescuers, for example. Conversely, as an adult, stories about orphans don’t bother me any more, but stories involving reuniting families make me tear up.
The maggot scene in Poltergeist. And then the guy is in the bathroom and looks up at the light, then looks back at the mirror and rips off his face! (Just watched it on YouTube. I’m not nearly as sensitive as I was then). As a kid, I was convinced that it could happen to anyone, and that if it ever started happening to me, I would stop removing my face. I think I had a conversation with my brother about how it must have itched really bad for him to keep tearing at it.
I remember watching Friday the 13th (hey, that’s today!) Part 4? I remember it was “The Final Chapter,” which was followed by several more. I had to watch it with my older siblings and cousin. There’s a scene where Jason takes a hit across the face and his mask slides across the floor. I knew he was going to turn around and it would be awful, but I couldn’t look away. When he turned around, I almost barfed into the popcorn bowl. Years later, I nervously re-watched that scene and the make-up effects were hilarious. I was able to recognize why it freaked me out as a kid, though.
The melting nazi in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The fact that you could see blood when he melted made it so real! I knew that a real melting nazi would look just like that.
Ghostbusters did get to me in the first few viewings. The library ghost made me jump (now it’s just funny), but the other one was during the escaped from the storage facility sequence where the pink mist goes into the taxi tailpipe and camera reveals that the driver is a rotting skeleton. I always assumed that the ghost turned the driver into that and possessed him. “I’m in a hurry, so let’s not dawdle,” is a phrase that I hope no one ever says to me. But that film did something else for me, it gave me security that someone would show up and kick the ass of anything creepy and supernatural. I used to crank up the song to shoo the ghosts out of my bedroom. Still the best film of all time, IMO.
Ooh! Ooh! I just had a memory burst!
The one show that never failed to creep me out was “In Search Of…” with Leonard Nimoy. I’d hear that theme music and I’d get chills. But I’d still watch the damn thing with my dad…
Oh, me too, me too! I have always been a big fan of horror, but oh sweet Lord! That episode really got to me (I was like nine, ten at the time). My ma threatened to never let me watch any scary movies again and take away all my Eerie Publications gore-comics if I didn’t “stop acting like a big baby” about two days afterward, when I was still scared to go out in the dark (she would’ve, too --and as a punishment, not as “therapy”, the bitch),so I just had to suck it up, and the unease would recur when I thought about it occasionally for years afterward.
Recently I looked up a picture of that damned doll online and she still rattled me something fierce. So did the male one at the end of the episode, especially when it opened its eyes andsmiled… AAAAAIIIIEEEEEEE! I had to be pried out from behind the couch.
For me it was, “Killer Clowns from Outer Space”.
Whenever my younger sister wanted to watch it, I would have a fit. Something about their faces freak me out.
The “Mr. Yuk” poison awareness ads scared me, especially the end where he’d growl out, “Mr. Yuk is mean… Mr. Yuk is GREEEEEN! laughter” Scared the hell out of me. For those who aren’t familiar with it, this was a Poison Control Center campaign to teach kids to avoid household chemicals - parents could get decals with this green cartoon face with a tongue sticking out to put on anything harmful, and so if the kid got into the forbidden cabinet and saw the Mr. Yuk stickers, hopefully they’d realize the stuff was “yucky” and leave it alone.
Oh god, YouTube has it. I still think that would have been creepy for kids to watch, but it scared me away from paying attention to the commercial, rather than from the decals per se.
I had a John Bellairs book that nearly killed me from terror. I refused to go near the bookshelf it was on for months. I think it was The Mummy, The Will, and The Crypt. All his books were terrifying when I was a kid. Some of the images still haunt me, like the kid walking through a windy moonlight night, with leaves blowing, and he sees something blowing across the ground towards him. It’s a death mask. Argh.
Scary Stories, too. Damn, the illustrations were horrible.