Sock monkeys. I hate those things.
My younger but more boistrous/evil cousins had one when I was younger, and tended to use it as a weapon. When I visited them, they’d assault me with it. Separately I could handle them, but the two of them working in tandem to stuff it in my face after dark took its toll.
My quest to eliminate sock monkeys wherever I find them continues slowly, but it does continue.
evil bastards…
When I was 10 or so, I saw Vincent Price’s House On Haunted Hill. It scared the living shit out of me. I had bad dreams and heebie-jeebies for weeks afterwards.
When I was in my 30s, I saw it come up on some late night creature-feature channel. I got my popcorn and soft drinks and settled in, all ready to be scared again.
It was one of Vincent’s horror/comedy films. :eek: I could not believe how utterly cheezy it was. And to this day, I wonder what was going on in my life that caused me to be so terrified by it.
Ooh, me too! That skeleton coming across the room scared the stuffing out of me! Also, the dead bride corpse skeleton in Twice Told Tales, another Vincent Price classic.
Also, that episode of Gumby with the Kachina Dolls. That fucking freaked me out. The chanting and how they rose up in the dark night sky was so terrifying.
Apparently, “Spiders and their Kin” has a really big fan club. Remember that really horrible one that looked like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?!?!
When I was four, I cried because I wasn’t allowed to climb Stone Mountain in Georgia with the rest of my family. My dad said we’d ride the train instead, which brightened my spirits. Then the effing Indians attacked the train, scalped my dad (he was bald- they gave him a wig so he could be scalped) and I cried like a fiend again. I really don’t remember the wig and scalping, but I definitely recall crying during the attack. I also remember watching them carving the Confederate graffiti on the mountainside and getting a slide whistle from the souvenir shop which made up a little bit for the terror.
Donald Duck.
When I was a kid some well-meaning relative gave me a stuffed Donald Duck doll. I kept him on a shelf in my bedroom. One night I woke up in the middle of the night, and some combination of shadows and moonlight/streetlights coming in my window made Donald look completely evil. I freaked and started screaming. Mom comes running in and all I can do is point and Donald and shriek. Donald was removed, never to be seen again.
I don’t know what happened to that doll but to this day I really don’t like Donald much.
Thanks for the flashback 
Exactly the same kind of thing happend to me walking home from church. Though I was holding my mothers hand, looked up into the face of a complete (to me*) stranger - the memory of flinch/recoil/look around in panic for parents is still vivid.
*Mum & dad were just behind us & the woman who’s hand I was holding was a friend of theirs, they thought I was just being cute.
Also the Seeds of Doom series from Doctor Who scared the bejeesus out of me when I was little. Not that it stopped me from watching the Doc (at least while it was Tom Baker)
Oh. My. God.
To hell with stupid things that scarred me emotionally as a child. These just scared me as an adult.
I cannot believe these were shown on television.
Them wacky Canux. No wonder Alex Trebeck had a heart attack - he was probly watching a ‘greatest hits’ dvd of these PSAs.
Yeah, those were pretty creepy. The one that got me the worst was the chef woman upending the pot of boiling water on her face.
Reminds me of this article I saw on Cracked the other day. That last one (#1, The Finishing Line) was…yeah. I think the Canucks got it from the Brits. I could see this one scarring a few kids.
Remember…gentle pressure.
OK. I just looked at that. I am waaay old, and that freaked me out. If I’d seen it when I was a kid…holy crap!
Sesame Street and the letter “H”. Ominous black and white, flashing the letter “H” and a deep commanding voice repeating, well, “H” over and over freaked out a lot of folks.
When I was about 11 or 12 the other kids at school were into reading horror comics/graphic novels. I borrowed some and read them and they freaked me out completely. Many of them featured scenes with vampires sucking blood from the wrists of sleeping victims so I started sleeping on my stomach with my hands tucked under the pillow so the vampires couldn’t get me. Only stopped doing that when I was 30 and pregnant and my pregnant tummy made it too uncomfortable to sleep that way!
Also around that time we lived in NSW for a while after Cyclone Tracy. Growing up in Darwin meant that I wasn’t exposed to trains all that much as there weren’t any up there and even now they are not a part of the regular public transport. We stayed with my grandparents and at the end of their street was the train line. I had a friend in the next street over who lived in a house on the hill overlooking the cutting that the train line ran through. Her house could be accessed from our street by a footpath that ran up the side of the hill parallel to the line, with the start of the path being a couple of feet from the rails. I had been told not to go too close to the line when a train was coming as it would suck me under the wheels. So I used to hang back and look and listen for a train and then run like the clappers until I was at least halfway up the hill so I couldn’t be sucked under. To this day if I have to catch a train I stand as far back as possible from the edge of the platform.
The Gmork. The fucking Gmork.
I have showed clips of the Gmork (from Youtube) to friends from other countries who did NOT grow up with The Neverending Story, and universally their reaction (as adults) is “holy shit that’s in a children’s movie??” and shutting the clip off before it finishes because the Gmork is GODDAMN SCARY.
I own the DVD and have never watched it.
I have a dim memory of a movie that had a human head that would appear in unexpected places. This was in the 1940s so i was still very young. I had nightmares about it for a very long time.
I saw the original The Thing (from outer space) when I was about ten or eleven; scared the living hell out of me.
That reminds me of another one! My Dad loved Star Trek and got me started on it fairly young. You know in the movie The Wrath of Khan, when they get those mind-controlling space bugs dumped into their ears? Thanks to that, I always sleep with a blanket over my head. It can be a zillion degrees out, and I’ll still have a small blanket on my head just to be sure my ears are safe from bugs, earthly or alien.
The Mouse And His Child movie has a scene that didn’t scare me but blew my mind at age 5, the infinity in a label on a can of dog food scene.
Tweety Bird, when he was transformed into the monster version, OMG the Horror!! when I was seven.
http://www.animationartgallery.com/WBC/WBC52.html
I should stop reading this thread.
I was in the room while my grandpa was watching a movie. Maybe one of the Terminator films? I was probably about 4 or 5. Anyway, a character’s leg got ripped off somehow and there was a bunch of blinking lights and circuit boards and stuff, and I was absolutely horrified. What if that happened to me??? Or what if lots of adults were secretly robots and they had that stuff inside them? I couldn’t shake that image for years.
These ones are tame compared to the metal-splinter-in-the-eye one I remember from the '70s. That one was truly horrifying. The agony of having a piece of metal driven into one’s eyeball was very graphically depicted. Or at least, that’s my memory of it.
Not only were they shown on TV, for some reason they liked to show them during kid’s programs after school.
