I didn’t see that until 10 years after it came out. (I was 8 when it originally played) It STILL disturbed me for months!
I went to the movies with a friend and his family when I was 10 or 11. His mom lied to my mom and said we were seeing The bad news bears. What a cool Mom he had, right? :rolleyes:
The ACTUAL movie we saw… The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
I had to walk (run!) home about 2 blocks… in the dark. If I’d heard a chainsaw I’d have stroked out right then and there. I think I was scared of the dark woods well into my late teens and I was an Avid camper!
It probably didn’t help that my brother thought this was all great fun. After The Exorcist he would wait until my light was out and make a guttural whispering sound and say “Reaaaaa-gan” though the air vent leading into my room. After Carrie he hid under my bed and reached and grabbed my arm as I was falling asleep. After* Don’t Look In The Basement* he locked me in the basement and turned the lights off. I’ve pretty much been terrified of the dark ever since.
I think it HAD to be seeing the Omega Man (the Charleton Heston version) when I was 4 when my older sisters were baby sitting me. For months everytime I went to bed I thought the mutants were after me.
Tripolar, is it like a nightmare where you’re in school and the whole class is pointing and laughing at you, and then you look down and find out you’re wearing curtains?
My parents took my sister and I to the drive-in when I was about 5 to see Poltergeist. Now, this was not their smartest idea, and it wasn’t for us to watch the movie, and they learned not to do this again, but whatever. We were to stay squarely in the back of the station wagon either sleeping or playing games. We were told that we should absolutely NOT peek over the back because we’d be really scared.
I did a very good job and then decided to peek over the back EXACTLY at the moment the guy tears his face off in the bathroom. I screamed my head off and a highly realistic vision of that has stayed with me forever (with occasional little nightmares about it). I just watched the scene for the first time since that night, on YouTube, and while my memory of it was certainly quite good, it’s far less scary now as an adult, mainly because you can see the swap to the fake face, and it’s really far less realistic than my mind had made it out to be, but it’s still a nasty scene. To be honest I’m a little unsettled right now, simple because it’s bringing back that night.
My parents took me for a vacation to the Cayman Islands when I was 5, then left me in the hotel lobby all night while they went out partying. I sat through the first three Child’s Play movies. I was terrified, but too morbidly engrossed to change the channel. I had this fear that Chucky would show up under my bed and stab my legs for a really long time.
Also, I was afraid that E.T. would show up in my room and do…something. I was just really weirded out by his appearance.
Tell her “You were WRONG! Honey is bee PUKE! So there! raspberry”
When I was five or six, one of my parents showed a story in the newspaper that included a head shot of a Neanderthal, not the prime minister but a cave-man Neanderthal (no worse than that U.S. insurance company’s TV-ad caveman) drawn to look like a photograph.
“I wanna see it! I wanna see it!”
“No. It’ll scare you.”
“Whine, whine, whine.”
“Oh, all right.”
That night I woke up screaming from a nightmare about it.
Those PSAs with the ominous music warning about the dangers of high voltage wires (shudder). And add me to the list of those traumatized by Rescue 911. I remember being terrified watching kids catch on fire or almost drown and my mom would always cry during that show. I also remember being freaked by an episode of *3-2-1 Contact *that involved a ghost, someone drowning in quicksand in The Electric Company, and some cartoon episode on PBS where a troll or something make a guy carry him on his back and won’t get off. Weird.
There was a deeply traumatizing safety commercial that aired in Ontario, about the necessity of wearing eye protection while working. It featured a guy pounding with a hammer on some sort of metal spike (not wearing safety glasses), and finally the pounding detatches a mental splinter that flies through the air in slow-motion straight at the screen (with ominous soundtrack) … and then you see the worker writhing in agony and clutching his eye - the agony of having a metal splinter shot into the guy’s eye was very graphically displayed.
The commercial was certainly effective. It gave me nightmares for years - but I always wore safety glasses when working!
Ultraman scared the bejeezus out of me. Soemthign to do with the psychedelic swirling colors int he opening sequence. And his resemblance to a Sleestak.
I have to say I survived childhood without lighting myself on fire and never chased a soccer ball into a fenced-off electrical area, so yeah, I guess they worked.
The thought of being shrunken down to a teeny, helpless size was very disturbing to me. Such as when Paul accidentally gets injected with the shrinking potion in Help and wriggles out of his own gigantic pantleg and is scrambling around in a gum wrapper, or, even better, the entire concept and premise of Fantastic Voyage. Shudder. Great nightmare fodder, that.
I also harbored some dread that some unknown person would come into my room and put drugs in my mouth when I was asleep, and would very carefully pull and fold the sheet up over my mouth at night. I don’t know where I got that idea, but it must have come from some late 60’s PSA warning about LSD and everything else.
My younger brother and I voluntarily traumatized each other with the reference book “Spiders and their Kin”. We’d sit side by side on the couch and would take turns flipping the pages and having to put your hand on the next picture of the grossest, most hideous, hairy, disgusting, horrible spider. I’m sure I’ll come up with some others.
