I was 10 when we finally moved to a town with cable. My dad and I stayed up and watched HBO all night - Blazing Saddles and then Alien. Alien scared the crap out of both of us.
Then going upstairs to bed, the cat jumped out at us. We about tripped over each other running back down the stairs.
The first movies that really scared me;
Wild, Wild Planet Reading about it now, it sounds campy and ridiculous but something in it scared the 8yo me. Don’t remember what it was exactly.
Hitchcock’s The Birds
I was staying with my cousins (early-mid sixties) and we went to the drive-in and saw some cheesy biker movie where a woman got set on fire and ran around screaming. That scene bothered me for a LONG time.
“Rear Window.” I guess I was 5. It was scary, but I probably didn’t understand a lot of it.
The next one I remember was watching “The Thing From Another World.” Scared the hell out of me. If I’d have known it was just Matt Dillon, I probably would have slept better afterwards.
The Darby O’Gill banshee got to me too.
Another one here for the It’s Alive commercial. Also, the commercial for Beyond the Door terrified me. Theatrically, it was Jaws when I was 6 and Mysterious Monsters “documentary” on Bigfoot, Loch Ness and the Yeti. On TV, it was the Universal Monsters and this Canadian comedy House of Frightenstein. I even dresses as Dracula for Halloween in Kindergarten and I recall the costume being based upon Dracula vs Frankenstein.