My lead paramedic instructor was a former combat medic and a current military PA. He used the same slides and films they used to train military medics for our class, all real life images from combat/MASH units/and rear hospitals. Absolutely horrifying.
Was this class for paramedic adults?
Yup… still scared the living crap out of me. Made us all feel very fragile.
On Nickelodeon a few months ago they were showing an anti-smoking commercial. An anti-smoking commercial which for reasons I am unable to fathom included a woman repeatedly stabbing a stuffed rabbit with a butcher knife.
Who the F*** do they hire to make these frickin PSAs?
I once, at about age 7 or so, was half watching a TV show that talked about nerve gas. I remember them saying that detectors emitted a beeping sound when they detected nerve gas.
For several years, I was terrified of any kind of electronic-sounding beep.
I can remember when I was 6 or 7, my mother bought me a shirt. I don’t remember a lot about the shirt except for the color which was sort of a dull, pea-soup/baby-shit yellowish-green. The color made me gag. I can’t explain it, but I would just look at that color and I would start to retch.
She never made me where the shirt, but that color still throws me for a bit of a loop if I run across it. Especially if it’s made of actual pea-soup/baby-shit.
The frost giant in Rudolph the Red Nosed Raindeer and the frost wizard in the other Rankin Bass Christmas special, and the Wizard of Oz wicked witch.
Huh - no baby-shit shirts here, but Catholic school uniforms. To this day, I swear the Vatican must mandate ugly plaid jumpers, because that’s all I’ve ever heard of or seen, and they’re still worn.
Ours consisted of a pleated skirt which zipped at the left side of the waist. The top back was plain fabric, the top front was open from neck to waist (we wore a white turtleneck underneath it). As the year went by, that special-order jumper started separating at the waist, and periodically I’d grab whatever ugly thick thread - of whatever color was at the top of the sewing box - and crudely tack it down.
At the end of the school year, I decided that burning it would be a bad idea (though oh boy did I want to!!) - it being polyester, it would just have melted and smelled awful. Instead, I took a seam ripper and pulled out the garish stitches - at which time the top COMPLETELY separated from the skirt. Yeesh. So not only did I have to wait for the damn thing to arrive, it was amazingly poorly made.
tl/dr version: Had to wear ugly plaid for 8 years of grade school. To this day, I STILL do not buy plaid clothing of any kind.
“This is a test of the Emergency Broadcasting System. This is only a test. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!” Now it only scares the cat.
My parents had a hardcover anthology of Poe stories, the cover illustration was the hounds (of the Baskervilles) that scared the bejeebus out of me. As a kid, I had to have the book’s spine turned away from the front of the bookshelf.
Masterpiece Theatre’s *Sherlock’s *last ep of the season was an updated version of H of B; the big black hounds with red eyes looked just like the book cover that scared me as a kid and I had to turn it off.
When I was four I had a nightmare involved Spaghetti-O’s (!); I awoke in tears and ran to my parent’s room just as a car went by on the road outside and its headlights made giant O-like lights on the wall – I became hysterical. And I have never eaten S-O’s again!
Jane Eyre scared the crap out of me when I was eight or nine years-old. I read it at night in bed and was certain that the Madwoman in the Attic was coming after me. (Then I got scared by her again in grad school, thanks Gilbert and Gubar ;))
Oh, I forgot a scarring viewing experience that seems to be a common one: Darby O’Gill and the Little People. Screaming banshees? Flying funeral coaches? What sadist promoted this frightfest as a great kid’s movie?!!
- 2 million on the (original) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It was the first film I saw in a theatre and it frightened me deeply.
The Science Center here has a few different sections, one connected by a bridge over the highway and one connected by a tunnel. Now, the tunnel is not so bad- it’s really just a hallway with some space stuff in it. It’s got bright lights and some boring plaques and pictures and such.
When I was a kid, though, it was made up to look like a mine tunnel. It was very dark and enclosed. I think at one place, there was a cart that would sort of jump out at you. They played mine noises, which I found terrifying. And then the canary- I honestly don’t remember if the canary they had was “alive” or “dead” but my dad told me the significance of the canary and that freaked me out even more. I really, really hated that mine tunnel. Even now, I’m glad they don’t have that exhibit anymore. The idea of having to go through it still scares me.
My siblings (all older than me by a decade or more) mostly made it their mission in life to scare me to death. Well, two if them. The one never did and the other was okay except for one really horrifying instance when he faked his own death.
Anyway, I can think of a few specific instances - one where someone was under my bed - but mostly I have a sort of collaged memory of staring down a dark hallway and knowing something was going to grab me.
As an adult, I still anything jumping out at me or touching me unexpectedly really upsetting, and I startle waaaay too easily. My husband has taken up the habit of narrating his progress around the house. “I’m coming down the hall now,” - if I’m taking a shower, he sings while he comes into the bathroom. He finds it odd but better than hearing me shriek. Apparently I’m quite loud.
Holyshit, this one’s awful; scenes that make a Wes Craven movie look like Disney:
this driving one not too particularly graphic, just haunting
Wow, did everyone have a copy of “Spiders and their Kin”? Even the cover creeped me out, and I used to keep pet jumping spiders. Jumping spiders are cute. The horrors in that book were not.
What really freaked me out was Mister Yuck. There was a Mister Yuck sticker on the fire extinguisher that hung on the wall outside my bedroom, and I was scared spitless to walk down that hallway at night because of it. Good thing there was never a fire, I wouldn’t have been able to use the extinguisher!
“Trilogy of Terror” aged 11.
That fucking Zuni fetish doll scrambling around under furniture and stabbing at Karen Black’s ankles with a carving knife had me too petrified to sit on a couch with my feet on the ground for months.
For years if I wanted to freak myself out, I’d just think of that.
I find this thread very interesting. Can’t think of any, maybe the villain from Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
The movie Orca, specifically the scene in which the female whale, having been shot/mutilated/strung up, miscarries. The image of the grayish-pink fetus being pushed out of the whales body and plopping down onto the deck of the boat haunted me for a long, long time and ushered in an extended period of sleep disturbance (probably coincidental).
I had nightmares for years after watching the 1990 version of Night of the Living Dead. I was in the 1st grade. Night after night I thought zombies were going to start banging on the house. For some reason, the part that freaked me out the most was when they went back to get Ben (played by Tony Todd) and he had those dead zombie eyes. I guess I was so sure that he was going to survive that it freaked me out.
The interesting thing it, I saw the Exorcist only a few weeks before this and it didn’t really scare me that much.
The year I was in grade primary (kindergarten to Americans) was some anniversary or other of the Halifax Explosion (1917, munitions ship exploded in the Halifax harbour after colliding with another boat and burned/flattened most of the city) and, IIRC, also some anniversary or other of the Titanic. After months of being taught about it in a relatively age-appropriate way we went to some museum or other that I remember being full of very age-appropriate exhibits.
On field trips a lot of the parents who volunteered as chaperones used to habitually let me wander off, because I was really well-behaved and always showed up right beside them at just the moment you’d naturally start wondering where a kid went. But on that one trip, the chaperone got too complacent and took the group around a corner or something without me. I sat down and waited for them to realize I was missing and come back for me, and on the other side of the wall they were showing some documentary or other that I think was about the events aboard the burning munitions ship before it blew.
There was this one really traumatized interviewee going on about the burns on one guy’s legs, in graphic detail, for several minutes. And the narrator was doing that ominous voice they do in documentaries to make history seem more interesting, and every ten minutes or so there was more about this one guy’s legs!
I must not’ve been left alone for more than 40 minutes or so total, but it felt like hours. I of course had no idea what was even going on at that age, I couldn’t figure out what this terrifying movie I was overhearing must be about but since we were in a museum I figured it must have happened. For years after I was terrified of fire, stoves, old or damaged electrical appliances, even the damn toaster.
Of course, than at the age of 11 we did a school play about the bomb dropped on Hiroshima (Sadako and the One Thousand Paper Cranes, I think) and I was introduced to the concept of a radiation burn. Saw pictures of radiation burns from Hiroshima on the internet, in fact. Pictures taken within hours of them being inflicted. I was one of those kids who looked up anything they were curious about on Google and so I read a lot of interviews of survivors too, almost all of them mentioned wondering why their shirt hung loose and burned off them and then later realizing it was their skin. One of them said something like, “The river became a sea of fire. The people who fell into the sea of fire died”. Oh gods.
Wait… Remind me again why the hell I’m going to paramedic school?
At least it ain’t firefighting school.