When I was 10 or so, my mother sent my younger sister & me to the local movie house. We watched Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, with Bette Davis & Joan Crawford. It was the typical southern plantation-based horror movie. In early days, one southern belle sister had a beau, which other sister coveted. Said beau was horribly murdered. Fast-forward to present time (early '60’s). Less-loved sister tries to drive other sister mad to inherit the plantation.
My sister thought it fun to sing, “Chop, chop sweet Charlotte, chop chop until he’s dead. Chop, chop sweet Charlotte, chopped off his hand & head.”
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.
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Hahaha! I think I remember that nostradamus special. I was pretty sure there would be nuclear war within a month of seeing it too.
At least your parents didn’t just laugh right in your face when calming you down. Mine did.
When I was a kid I remember there was a show called “Ghost story”. IIRC the host was Sebastian Cabot. There was an episode where a ghost lady was chasing another woman around a house moaning “give me the baby, give me the baby…”. For some reason that completely freaked me out. I was sure that the ghost woman was roaming around my house.
But the one thing that freaked me out the most and still affects me now is Decapitated Donna. The state fair, back in the 1970’s. cheap rides and side shows, the like of which you don’t really see as much anymore. There was an attraction called Decapitated Donna…pay a buck and see the miraculous headless woman! Of course it was an optical illusion. But the sides of the booth had these grisly paintings of a woman being beheaded in a car accident and wierd experiments being done to her bodiless but living head, etc. It was pretty gory, and it really freaked me out. After that every time I saw ketchup it made me think of blood and Decapitated Donna. the sight of Ketchup on french fries made me physically ill for awhile. It took me a long time to get over it, and even today, more than 30 years later, I can’t really stand ketchup. I don’t feel sick about it anymore but I don’t like to look at it. I can eat food with ketchup as long as I don’t think about it or see it. (like if its on a hamburger. Can’t do it with a hot dog because I can* see * it. Same with fries.).
Hmmph…until now my wife is the only other person that knows about the Decapited Donna connection and ketchup. The rest of my friends think I just don’t like ketchup.
[QUOTE=winterhawk11]
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.
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[QUOTE=TroubleAgain]
When I was about six and my uncle was sixteen, my mom and I went to stay with my grandmother and she and I slept in his room. He had this poster for the movie *Frogs * up on the wall.
God, I hate frogs.
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Funny that you should mention this movie–I’d never heard of it before a couple of days ago, when it popped up in an article about the worst movies ever. I think some of your fear will go away when you see this terrible trailer: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Dzl1RkBxNsY )
Wow, trailers were boring in 1972. It’s a wonder anybody went to movies.
BTW, thanks, Jolly Roger. Somebody upthread pointed it out too, and you’re both right. That’s the one.
Whoever made The Man Who Saw Tomorrow should be hung by his toenails. I still get nervous about “the man in the blue turban”
I *still *get freaked out by “technical difficulties” on TV. Whether it’s the standard title card, a blip in the broadcast, or even the satellite screen going to blocky squares when it loses the signal for a bit. If the screen goes black, and stays that way for more than 3 seconds, I become certain the bombs are on their way…
When I was 10 or so, I read a book about the Bermuda Triangle and one about the Utah radioactive clouds killing all those sheep. Creepy…
And, contrary to my mother’s strict instructions, I secretly watched the first broadcat of The Shining on TV. I couldn’t go to sleep, and eventually went downstarirs to tell my mom I had a bad dream.
Me: “About a monster…and he was chasing me… in a maze…”
Mom: “You watched The Shining didn’t you?”
[QUOTE=TroubleAgain]
When I was about six and my uncle was sixteen, my mom and I went to stay with my grandmother and she and I slept in his room. He had this poster for the movie *Frogs * up on the wall.
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Oh, gods, that reminds me. Until I was 12, my family went to visit my mother’s cousin every summer. Two incidents come from that one…
Their son loved horror movies. So I saw The Hills Have Eyes II (the original one) at WAY too young an age - 2 scenes got me really bad - someone’s head being split in two with a machete (still not happy being around machetes), and Pluto (IIRC) squeezing one of the hapless victims to death.
After he moved out, I usually slept in his room while visiting. He loved Iron Maiden and his walls were positively plastered with IM posters. Having Ed the Head looking over me while I slept - or, rather, tried to - was less than conducive to a good night’s sleep.
[QUOTE=shy guy]
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.
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I came here to post about a book just like this. I wonder if we are talking about the same book? I think it was called “Ghosts” and had all these creepy black and white pictures in it. I was both intrigued and scared to death of that damn book! The picture that without a doubt scared me the most and caused several sleepless nights was this one
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For some reason, I don’t think that was it. The thing I remember about the movie is that the tarantulas came in with a cargo shipment on a plane.
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You know, I remember a cargo shipment too, of coffee beans (or something) from a plane (and I think I said that in my original post), but the plot summary of “Kingdom of the Spider” says nothing about that.
I think it’s been left out of that summary. I mean, come on! How many spider movies can there be where the town ends up in a web cocoon?
I had terrible dreams and was nearly physically ill from reading a comic book at about age 6. It was a story about people killing other people, obviously about the Holocaust in hindsight. The people in power tortured the people who were not. Experimented on them, killled them, made them into lampshades and soap and gloves. Gloves. The dead came back to haunt the living who had killed them. There were drawings of crowds of these dead people holding up their peeled skinless hands and chasing their tormentors. My parents told me that I was being silly, it was just a made-up story. It took a long time for the dreams to stop.
The other thing that used to creep me out was the bare lightbulb on my bedroom ceiling. At night, the screws on the outlet looked like eyes to me and the bulb was a great big nose, like some monster watching me.
[QUOTE=phil417]
When I was 10 or so, my mother sent my younger sister & me to the local movie house. We watched Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, with Bette Davis & Joan Crawford.
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Bette Davis & Olivia de Havilland played cousins in that movie. Davis & Crawford were sisters in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
The Monster From The Id in Forbidden Planet gave me nightmares as a kid.
These bone sucking critters that looked like tortoise shells with tentacles coming out of one end from Island of Terror ( IIRC ).
The Blob really got to me as a kid; I did things like check under lampshades before I turned lights on to make sure there wasn’t a Blob hiding there, waiting for me to reach under the shade where it could get me. And I checked under the sheets of my bed too, down to the foot of the bed.
The reason I don’t like to have the bedroom closet door open at night is mere esthetics. It has nothing to do with the blubbery, multi-eyed, tentacled creature that lives in there, awaiting its chance to shuffle out and grab human limbs hanging over the edge of the bed.
The opening credits for the NBC Mystery Movie program in the early 1970s. This was a serial program where the original Columbo episodes played along with a rotating McCloud, Macmillan & Wife and others.
The credits had eerie music as a shadowed man in the background kept walking toward you with a flashlight beaming and sweeping around as if he was looking for you. As he approached ever closed you had the feeling the boogey man was looking for you and he was going to get you. Shudder.
My dad used to read me stories from ‘Struwwelpeter’ on a regular basis, when I was about five. The stories didn’t upset me but the illustrations were damn creepy. I still have slight feelings of repulsion toward anyone with excessively long fingernails or big hair.
Dad also used to take me to a bizarre place called the ‘Curiosity Museum’, which was filled with mutant stuffed animals - two headed lambs, kittens with five legs, and that kind of thing. And he wonders why I turned out the way I did…
Oddly, I have carried on the Struwwlepeter tradition and now read it to my daughter, who isn’t bothered by it in the slightest.
I found this on TV Tropes again, as I had forgotten about it. Anyone remember Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, a William Steig story? Sylvester, a donkey, finds a magic wish granting pebble, that grants wishes if you are holding it. Eventually, he sees something scary (I think a wolf?) and he becomes frightened and wishes he were…a rock. The pebble falls next to him and he can’t wish he were a donkey again. So months go by…he’s a rock…till finally his parents come and coincidentally have a picnic lunch on him, putting the pebble on top of him, where he can make his wish. Quite horrifying to a youngster.
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