I remember being at my cousin’s house and all of us kids watched The Other. It probably wasn’t the first scary movie I watched but it’s the earliest one I can distinctly remember watching.
My parents though it would be ok for 8yr old me to watch *night of the lepus *- it had cute bunnies how scary could it be. Cute giant man eating bunnies. They laughed through the whole thing while I was terrified.
I got over it
Not from the sound of your username…
*The Changeling *with George C. Scott.
I watched it again for the first time in approximately thirty years. It’s funny–it’s an almost unbearably boring movie, with a long scene about escrow or mortgages or interest rates or something equally dull, and yet there’s about a two-second scene of pure terror that stayed with me for thirty years. I only wish I could still be scared like that. What a delightful thrill.
Child’s Play scarred my young mind.
Pet Cemetery, the scene were Pascow transports from the dorrway to right beside the fathers head also permanently damaged my brain.
I don’t doubt I would find it pretty bad now, but the first movie I remember really scaring me was the TV movie version of *The Fall of the House of Usher*, with Martin Landau, Ray Walston, Robert Hays, and Charlene Tilton. I can’t say I recall much of, probably because i watched most of it behind my Dad’s recliner.
I still get creeped out by this.
When I was a kid my Mom would sign me up for stuff at the library; book readings, crafts, etc. It helped that I thought the library was about the coolest place in the world.
Anyway, when I was maybe 6 or 7, she dropped me off for a movie night and they showed the short film version of Tell-Tale Heart… scared me to death. I couldn’t get that thumping out of my head for weeks.
The first “scary” movie I can remember seeing was “Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein”.
The first scary movie that actually gave me nightmares was “Caltiki, The Immortal Monster”. When that scuba diver came up with his face eaten away…that scared the bejeebus outta me.
The Wizard of Oz. That part with the flying monkeys going after Dorothy scared the bejesus out of me.
I went to see “the Thing” in 1951 when I was 8. It scared the crap out of me and turned me into a scary movie fan since. Those were the good old days. UFOs and radioactive monsters every week.
I don’t know what the movie was, only it was black and white. But this was in the mid-60’s, so maybe my friend’s family didn’t have color yet.
There was a hulking monster that captured folks and wrapped them up like spiders do, to snack on them at it’s leisure. I remember one scene where some of the actors finds a person who is still alive and in agony. Whatever that film was it creeped me out for days. I had dreams about it.
I saw Frankenstein (1931) on summer day when I was about ten years old, with a roomful of other children, at my local library. I sat on the floor near the 16mm projector and the speaker, and was very impressed with the thunder and lighting during the creation scene. There were plenty of gasps in the audience when the creature stumbled into the room backward, and then turned around to a series of ever-closer close-ups.
The first movie I remember being terrified of is Poltergeist. I even had a freakin’ tree outside my bedroom window which for abou the next 5 years had free reign to terrorize me.
God damn tree… 
Besides The Wizard of Oz? (Damned flying monkeys giving me nightmares!) The first movie that I saw that was supposed to be scary was Jaws. My older cousin was babysitting that night, and happened to have a date also, so he just took me and my older brother with him on the date. My cousin was the fairly responsible sort, so every time the scary “something bad is going to happen” music came on, our little heads would get shoved behind the seats of his Volkswagon Beetle. Thus, the soundtrack to Jaws makes me a little claustrophobic, instead of scared.
A couple of years after that, another cousin took my 9-year-old scaredy-cat self to see The Amityville Horror. Scared the bejesus out of me, even though the only thing I really recall about the movie was hiding under my cousin’s jacket every time bad things happened onscreen.
Frogs. We saw it at the drive-in in the early 1970s. It scared my brother, sister and me half to death.
That was a pretty creepy movie in its time, and the twist was unexpected.
My first scary movie was Village of the Damned (1960). I saw this at the drive-in when I was about 4. I was probably supposed to be sleeping in the back seat. Those scary blonde kids with their giant craniums and freaky bangs, who could hypnotize the villagers with their glowing eyes… really creeped me out. But I LOVED it!
I vividly remember going to preschool the following day, convinced that if I squinched my eyes muscles hard enough, I would be able to control my playmates. I squinched repeatedly, and fully believed my own eyes were glowing, but eventually realized that no one was falling under my control. Thanks to the short attention span of a 4-year-old, I moved back into my normal playground routine as Lois Lane by the next day.
I can’t believe I still remember that. GAWD, I was a weird little tot!
The Blob, the first one with Steve McQueen. Scared the bejeezus out of me.
Nightmare on Elm Street, on late night television, probably when I was 15 (about 2004-2005).
The only other scary movie I REMEMBER seeing is the newer I Am Legend adaptation.
Okay, I probably saw a couple more, I remember seeing some Stephen King stuff on TV, but do they really count? I find them hilarious. (And I don’t even count those Z-list Sci-Fi, err… SyFy Channel ones)
I think I’m more scared of being unable to handle them than I ACTUALLY am unable to handle them. Leading me to never go out and seek them, so yeah, I saw my first one pretty late.
Me too! First movie I remember seeing in a theater. Probably not the first I actually saw, but it’s the one the stuck in my head.