As a child of the 80s, I grew up watching a lot of weird stuff. My parents love movies, from glorious technicolor musicals (hi, mom!) and classic comedies to Westerns and all Kubrick films (hey, dad!), and as the oldest kid I was their pop culture guinea pig as they tried their best to figure out what kind of entertainment would fly with little ones, and what would just straight-up freak us out. But of course, they soon found that mileage tends to vary in a big way—spooky movies that amused me to no end gave my younger brother crazy nightmares, while other scenes that completely disturbed me had zero effect on him, and so on. Kids are fun like that.
Of course, having a strong emotional reaction to a movie or a particular scene isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and sometimes the moments we find most upsetting end up sticking with us long after we’ve processed those emotions. I’m sure everyone has a list of the movies that deeply affected them, growing up, and we’d love to hear your stories in the comments, if you care to share! In the meantime, here are my own personal top five trauma-inducing movie moments from childhood (mostly), in no particular order…
Artax Succumbs to the Swamps of Sadness—The NeverEnding Story
Oh, Artax. Other generations had Old Yeller or Bambi’s Mom or saintly Charlotte (of the titular Web) as their Spirit Animals of childhood trauma, ushering them gently into a precocious awareness of the harsh realities of mortality and loss. For better or worse, children of the 80s got the spectacle of a depressed horse sinking into the ghastly black depths of the Swamps of Despair, as his tearful, panicked human companion sobs and screams at him to fight against the sadness crushing in on him. It’s…pretty messed up.
Even knowing that Artax is restored to Atreyu at the end of the movie never did much to assuage my horror at this scene as a kid—I always broke around the point where Atreyu screams “Stupid horse!” as he pulls desperately on Artax’s bridle. It wasn’t just the sudden and tragic death of a beloved animal that was so upsetting (although I’ve never been good at handling that particular type of ordeal)—looking back, I think it was the idea that your emotions could be so overpowering that you couldn’t control yourself, or your actions, that disturbed me almost as much as the sinking horse. The idea of being so sad that you can’t fight to save yourself was just a horrific concept to me as a little kid who knew nothing about depression or mental illness, and frankly, it’s not the most comfortable scene to watch even now, almost three decades later.
But no matter how deeply (or not) Artax’s death affected you back in the day, at least I’m happy to report that all those morbid rumors that the horse used in the movie actually drowned during the scene are apparently completely false (there was an accident on set and Noah Hathaway, who played Atreyu, was injured, but the horse was unscathed.) And then probably went on to live the greatest horse life ever, eventually ascending directly into Equine Heaven alongside Secretariat, Fatty Lumpkin, and Li’l Sebastian, THE END.
A Child’s Guide to Conspiracy, Assassination, and Betrayal—The Secret of NIMH
As with The NeverEnding Story, I adored The Secret of NIMH when I was little, in spite of (or possibly because of) its stranger and darker aspects. The story throws its field mouse heroine, Mrs. Brisby (changed from “Frisby” in the book) into the path of a monstrous cat, a creepy owl, and all sorts of other dangers, all while she’s grieving the death of her husband, Jonathan, and attempting to save one of her children from a life-threatening illness.
While she encounters allies among the rats of NIMH (whose lifespans and intelligence have been expanded in a series of experiments), she also finds herself at the center of a power play by the film’s cunning and ruthless villain, Jenner. When Nicodemus, the wise, kindly leader of the rats, agrees to help move the Brisby home to safer ground, Jenner sees his opportunity to seize power and advance his own nefarious aims. He plots to murder Nicodemus by cutting the ropes during a critical point in the move, crushing the elder rat while conveniently making his death look like an accident.
Jenner’s slick façade quickly comes crumbling down when he attacks Mrs. Brisby in a frenzied attempt to silence her (and steal the magic stone Nicodemus entrusted to her earlier in the film). In the ensuing struggle, he wounds Justin, the Captain of the Guard, and slashes the neck of his former crony, Sullivan, when he attempts to intervene. Justin stabs Jenner and leaves him for dead, but Jenner manages to creep up behind Justin in order to deliver a killing blow. At the last second, the mortally wounded Sullivan hurls his dagger into Jenner’s back, redeeming himself and saving Justin’s life.
It’s an incredibly thrilling, beautifully animated couple of action scenes which reveal a level of villainy, betrayal, and violence that’s practically Shakespearean in its scope—Jenner is as calculating as he is merciless, and it certainly sets him apart from most other villains of children’s movies. The fact that he carefully plots (and successfully carries out) the cold-blooded murder of Nicodemus is still one of the more surprising aspects of the film, and that treachery certainly stuck with me over the years as an example of ruthless, pre-meditated evil.
George Lucas Loves An Orphan—Ewoks: The Battle For Endor
I might be one of the only people who vividly remembers the beginning of 1985’s sequel to The Ewok Adventure (aka: Caravan of Courage), but it was an oddly formative moment for me, and not in a particularly positive way. The made-for-TV movie focuses on Cindel Towani, the flaxen-haired moppet who had starred in the previous film, which saw Cindel and her brother happily reunited with their parents at the end, with the help of Wicket and the other Ewoks. As the sequel opens, their family is preparing to leave the forest moon of Endor when a savage band of marauders attacks—both parents are wounded, and Cindel is forced to escape with Wicket, leaving her family behind to their doom.
As a big fan of the earlier movie, I was already pretty invested in the Towani clan, since the whole first movie centers on getting Cindel and Mace safely back to their parents. More than that, I was basically the same age as Cindel, the main protagonist, and obviously identified with her to a certain point (I mean, what 80s kid didn’t want an awesome Ewok buddy to hang around with? All I really wanted was an Ewok, or maybe a Mogwai, and my six-year-old bucket list would have been beautifully complete.) So when the second installment started off by killing off Cindel’s parents, I completely and immediately rejected the first 15 minutes of the movie or so, because the idea was so utterly terrifying to me.
Obviously, kids then and now encounter plenty of absent/missing/dead parents in the world of children’s entertainment, but something about seeing Cindel go from part of happy nuclear family to orphan-on-the-run in a few abrupt minutes really messed with my head. Not that I stopped watching The Battle for Endor—instead, I’d always ask my parents to fast-forward past the unpleasantness, and would repeatedly reassured them and my brother that “Cindel’s family probably got away” from the bad guys. I mean, we don’t actually see them die, even though Cindel seems pretty definite that she’s an orphan, and is quickly paired up with certified consolation grandpa Wilford Brimley, who presumably helps to fill the family-shaped void in her psyche with his excellent mustache and random curmudgeonly mutterings.
Sigh. Damn you, George Lucas.
So. Much. Animated Rabbit Blood—Watership Down
I’m not going to choose a particular scene, because I think it’s safe to say that very young viewers might find themselves fairly traumatized by the film as a whole, without pointing out any particular moment of climactic violence. If you’re not prepared to see a bunch of grisly rabbit injuries and deaths (no matter how subtly or artfully the surrounding story is presented), then you may want to hold off on Watership Down.
The movie starts off with a rabbit creation myth in which an act of rabbit hubris results in a divine smackdown, as the predators of the world are unleashed upon rabbitkind and begin gleefully (and graphically) slaughtering the peaceful and unsuspecting bunnies. The movie then switches to the more realistically-animated tale of Hazel, Fiver, and their quest to survive in the face of these ancient enemies and more modern, man-made dangers.
Don’t get me wrong—Watership Down is a beautiful film, but it’s also a brutal portrayal of the fear and desperation of these creatures at the bottom of the food chain, and the violence that stalks their every move. It does not shy away from disturbing images, which include (but aren’t limited to): trippy visions of blood-soaked fields, a rabbit choking to death in a snare, a sequence in which an entire rabbit warren is gassed and destroyed using farm equipment, Fiver Hazel getting shot and chasing the Black Rabbit of Death, some intensely bloody rabbit-on-rabbit violence, and a horrifying encounter with a vicious dog. I was captivated by the movie, as a kid, but I was also deeply disturbed by it—as I got older, I read and loved the novel it was based on, but if I had to do it over, I would have preferred to watch the movie after reading the book, when I was a bit older and better able to contextualize the images and experiences being represented, and the emotional reactions they produced.
You Are Who You Choose To Be—The Iron Giant
All of the previous movies on this list I’d seen by the time I was six or seven years old; when The Iron Giant came out, I was in college, and probably thought of myself as being pretty jaded at the time (I mean, kids raised on Watership Down have seen some stuff, you know?)
I hadn’t cried at a movie in years, and certainly wasn’t prepared to be knocked off my emotional high horse by the likes of Hogarth Hughes and his goofy metal-chomping mega-robot, but the retro design looked amazing and I’d heard good things, and so I pressed play one day and completely fell in love in almost no time. And when I came to the scene in which (*spoilers*) the Iron Giant sacrifices himself to save Hogarth and the rest of the town by intercepting an incoming missile, I was absolutely gutted. To this day, I can’t watch the scene, with the Giant smiling to himself and murmuring “Superman” as he slowly closes his eyes, without crying buckets. I’ve tried—it doesn’t matter how many times I’ve seen it, it just destroys me with its perfect combination of inexorable sadness and sheer, triumphant, heroic joy.
And while I’m always delighted when the scattered bits of the Giant begin to reassemble themselves at the end, it doesn’t make that one brilliant moment of self-sacrifice any less beautiful or devastating to me. That moment is everything, and even though the older I get, the more I tend to tear up over movies (and TV, and occasionally books and articles…and sometimes the odd commercial, if we’re being totally honest), I’m always grateful for the emotional touchstone that it’s become for me, over time.
Looking back at this list, it’s probably telling that all but one of the movies I’ve mentioned here were adapted (with varying degrees of faithfulness) from books—although I wasn’t aware of that fact, as a child. Perhaps a separate reckoning of similarly memorable moments in fiction might be in order, somewhere down the line. In the meantime, though, I’d love to hear about all the striking, shocking, sad, or trauma-inducing movie moments that have stuck with you over the years, for better or worse…
Bridget McGovern is the managing editor of Tor.com, and clearly watched way too many potentially disturbing movies as a kid. She regrets nothing.
Although i’m of that generation, I don’t remember any film particularly bothering me ( I do remember thinking Atreyu was kind of cute, so possibly I was a little older when I saw it *g*). What I do remember very clearly is sobbing my little eyes out reading “Bridge to Terabithia”.
My son was, however, traumatized by one of the Winnie the Pooh movies. I forget what it’s called, but in it Rabbit has a little bird friend named Cassie but Cassie has to migrate and leaves Rabbit behind. And it is admittedly pretty sad, but my little boy was watching this with tears pouring down his face, because he felt so sorry for Rabbit. And even to this day, the knowledge that Cassie returns in the spring doesn’t really help him, he still gets very sad. This is also the boy who stopped watching Thomas the Tank Engine once he realized that there were people on all coaches that crash in that show (it is kind of terrible how many accidents there are, if you start thinking about it). The irony being, that he wasn’t bothered by “Bridge to Terabithia” at all when he read it. So you just never know.
Yep, yep, and yep. I’ve never seen Watership Down though.
I would add
– When Ariel loses her voice
-“I know now why you cry. It is something I can never do.”
I know I saw The Neverending Story, and Secret of NIHM – but don’t remember much about them. I am a child of the ’80s (born in 1973). My sister (born in ’76) may have fonder memories of these. I do however remember Watership Down – even had the book that went with the movie! I don’t really remember being terrified or bothered by it though.
I think I had a freakout watching Raiders of the Lost Ark – there is a scene with ghost or something swirling around maybe????
One thing for sure from this era though is my sister was left to tears watching Puff the Magic Dragon cartoon at the end when the child grows up and no longer needs Puff….again, my memories of this are kind of foggy.
Well, there’s the bit where Luke loses a hand…
…to his father. (I was 7 when I saw it in the theatre.)
Watership Down as a movie was traumatizing to me. I probably saw it when I was a little too young. The scene I remember most vividly was the trippy floating bunny heads during, I think, the gassing/flushing of a warren. I’m not sure as I think I’ve tried to block a lot of that movie out of my head, even though I loved the book.
I’d have to add that The Last Unicorn movie had a pretty profound affect on me as well. When the Harpy gets her revenge, when the last unicorn gets stuffed into a body that is dying, always, when they show her glen and she’s not there because she can’t be, man that movie. I was so scared by the red bull but I would watch this movie on repeat when I could get my parents to rent it for me.
Oh gods yes, Artax. I am still traumatized. I watched that movie with my 8 year old the other day, and I think he had more or less the same reaction as I did, a few decades earlier.
My number 1 SF movie trauma is the Star Wars scene where Han Solo gets cryogenized (or carbonized or whatever they call it). Yep, that scene. Didn’t mind the hand-chopping or the scary emperor or any of the other stuff — but frozen Han Solo was a part of my youthful nightmares for a long long time.
I don’t remember any movies traumatizing me due to sadness, but when I was 7 I was terrified of Gollum in the Bass & Rankin Hobbit cartoon — to the point of avoiding the book a few years later when I was old enough to enjoy it and was voraciously reading Narnia and Prydain. I actually didn’t read Hobbit or LOTR until I was in my 20s after seeing Fellowship.
Books, on the other hand…Beth’s death in Little Women gutted me. I used to reread it just to make myself cry (yeah, that’s weird).
I watched A.I. Artificial Intelligence at a very young age. It’s the first thing I remember getting much emotional response from me. I’m not one to get too choked up over movies, but that one is just so melancholy.
I would definitely second a lot of these (including others that you link to like Dark Crystal and The Last Unicorn), but I remember loving every one that upset me. Return to Oz was another big one — with the head-swapping witch, deadly desert, and Dorothy getting shock treatment back in Kansas.
As a very young child, Gremlins gave me such bad nightmares that it took me a long time to appreciate what a great darkly-funny movie it is.
I remember being initially creeped by E.T., then after I’d grown to love the little weirdo over the course of a few beers and a bike ride, Spielberg has him lying in the river, all pale and dying. That was hard to watch for a little kid, and the happy ending didn’t totally override those feelings for me.
Seeing E.T. in that goddamn bathtub! The death of the unicorn in Legend. The death of Spock. I saw Alien for the first time in the ’80s: even knowing about the exploding chest scene in advance, I wasn’t prepared. The first exploding head in Scanners. The dogs being assimilated in The Thing. All the old people in Cocoon were kind of scary.
I recall the loss of Artax to be notable from the movie, but it just never really stuck with me.
The Secret of NIMH really annoyed me, because it was soo different to the book, which I still love.
Watership Down is a sobering reminder that Animation does not equal Children. I’ve only ever seen it twice.
Grave of the Fireflies was a film I saw at university, and that broke me good and proper.
For the SFF movies I saw a lot as a kid, hmm. Most I only saw on TV when they came around in the schedule, and most of the TV movies were tame rubbish. Notable ones though, well.
Footrot Flats: The Dog’s Tale, tenuously fantasy from New Zealand which has some of the most terrifying pigs you will ever see. They scared the heck out of all of us.
The Wrath of Khan – when Khan puts the insect things into the ears – horrifying. Fun movie though, especially a few years later.
How about Judge Doom, from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? He was profoundly terrifying to my younger self, but I loved the rest of the movie.
Aliens, Predator, Mad Max, all the other action movie of that ilk … my friends all saw them as young teens, but I only ever saw bits when the adults had hired a video – the skinned people from Predator haunted my dreams as a child, and as for Pennywise … he put me off Horror forever.
Mental note if I ever become a parent – keep a close eye on kids if the scary adult movies are going to come on!
Considering I loved horses and thought Atreyu was awesome and cute…yeah that scene messed me up as a kid. Still does. None of the others on the list bothered me, but I didn’t see Watership Down until high school and I thought it was well and truly insane for a “kid’s movie!”
I do remember having nightmares about the Red Bull in TLU, but I loved the hell out of it and wouldn’t let my parents rent anything else for me every week. I thought the kid in ET was insane to leave a trail of food to himself at night, outside, for a freaking alien…also the containment scenes are visually scary. I didn’t have nightmares, but my little brother couldn’t watch it at all. My father also made me watch Gremlins when I was still in diapers, so THAT WAS FUN, but definitely not a kid’s film, haha.
Pretty much everything that happened in Poltergeist scared the crap out of me.
When younger I found Blade Runner, particularly the brilliant “tears in rain” sequence, overpowering. It’s still one of the few SF films I love.
Molly Grue encountering the unicorn in The Last Unicorn. “How dare you come to me now? When I am this.” The voice actress’s delivery is astonishing: furious, anguished, betrayed, and transcendently sad.
It traumatized me as a kid. It traumatizes me even more as an adult.
I was at a convention in Laconia, NH for the opening day of THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK that had booked a reserved section at the local theater. During that scene where the Enterprise blows up, the sobbing was audible even over the explosions.
As emotional as the ending of WRATH OF KHAN may have been, we all “knew” Spock was coming back, even then, but we knew that this was final: the ship that we’d vicariously ridden on for 79 TV episodes and three movies, whose bridge and sick-bay and briefing-room and engineering deck and corridors we knew as well as we knew those of our own homes, was gone for good.
“Who Framed Roger Rabbit”, is by far and away the one that hit me the hardest. To think that my folks worried more about the sexual innuendos, but didn’t find anything wrong with the following still baffles me. The scene where Judge Doom brutally dips a sentient, squeaking cartoon shoe into the acid “dip”, it shrieks, freaks out, and tries to save itself, only to die a horrible and obviously painful death. For me, at five, it was the most sadistic thing I had ever witnessed. Still to this day I think of it and it equates to setting a kitten on fire. Everything from the bystanders doing absolutely zero to help and the red blood-like substance covering Doom’s hand after the fact . . . just a horrifying scene. I still cannot watch it to this day. It’s just so very wrong.
The scene from The Fellowship of the Ring where Gollum screams “Shire! Baggins!” scarred me when I first saw it.
As a child in the ’60s, there were not many movies for me to see except for Disney releases and re-releases. I did watch a lot of Twilight Zone and Outer Limits on TV and still remember them today. I could never watch Lassie as I knew something bad was always going to happen. Part of me knew the resolution made everything alright, I just hated having my emotions jerked around like that. Twilight Zone was always fun. I imagined (as a 7 year old) that the storey existed just around the corner or in the imaginary house connected to mine through a hole in the wall or a chink in the stone in the cellar.
Oh… I work to forget this fact because of the high creepy factor: Twilight Zone taught me to forever fear China doll heads.
Land Before Time.
That bit at the beginning where Littlefoot’s mother dies? Ya, killed me.
I remember watching that at my best friend’s house on VHS when it first came out, and there were the two of us crying so hard that her grandparents were worried someone got hurt. To this day I still cannot watch the movie because I can’t get past the opening.
But I would also like to add All Dogs Go To Heaven and The Long Journey Home. I still haven’t seen the entirety of the latter. My dad took me to see it in theatres and we left at the scene where the cat is in the milk crate and is about to go over the waterfall. To this day I still don’t know if the cat was okay or if the animals ever made it home (I chose to assume that they did. That they ALL did).
I can handle people being killed graphically on film, but hurt an animal, real or animated, and I’m a mess.
ALIEN III. Remember the adorable child, and the cute Marine from the last movie? They’re all dead. Sucks to be you, Sigourney!
Pennywise form IT. Clowns still are kinda freaky decades later.
Oh! Bambi! How could I forget?
And Dumbo!
#22
I second that emotion. Has to be one of the worst openings in film history. I like to think there’s a way to edit that movie where Ripley’s pod is the only one to be ejected, and the ship continues to Earth. Killing the little girl, the character everyone was trying to save in the previous movie, was an awful idea.
Or as Michael Biehn so eloquently put it: “F–k Alien 3!”
I don’t remember the same Battle for Endor you did.
Cyndil is watching Mace shoot his gun and then he drags their wounded mother back into a hut. The hut then explodes and she looks down to see two of the three lights on her wrist band go out. She then runs and sees her dad get point blank executed as he sees her and does not want her to reveal her position. Again she looks down and sees a light go out. There is absolutely no doubt her entire family is killed off within the first ten minutes of the movie.
I think it’s important to distinguish the topics of ” 80’s Movies I saw as a kid that were emotionally charged/shocking” and “Childrens films that I saw as a child in the 80’s that were emotionally impactful.” I mean, some of the stuff I saw as a kid wasn’t the greatest idea.
For instance, the drowning of Artax still makes me tear up a bit and Watership Down was and still is downright disturbing.
My sneakiness as a child exposed me to certain movies I should not have seen at an early age that creeped me out like Gremlins, Howard the Duck (don’t judge me), and the beginning of Terminator where the human skull is crushed by the advancing war bots.
What still makes me laugh a bit as a parent was my parent’s avoidance of R rated movies, yet their insistence that I see Glory at an early age due to it’s historical and ethical value. I can still see the distance cannon puff from an elevated firing position, the officer wave his sword forward delivering the line “For God’s sake, come on!” and then his head exploding. Good times.
I forgot to add the Little Old Lady ghost in the Library, from Ghostbusters.
She scared seven hells out of me. The rest of the movie is far far more enjoyable.
One of the funniest things I’ve ever seen at a con was a guy dressed as a traditional bridge troll with a series of placards with which he ‘trolled’ the passers-by. One of them read: Artax was a quitter”.
Oh wow, pretty much every movie you’ve said I can remember with those saddening scenes. But I have to mention others such as Bambi, The Lion King, The Plague Dogs, The Last Unicorn, The Yearling, Old Yeller, Where the Red Fern Grows, Lassie Come Home, and Black Beauty. On the human side there’s Les Miserables, Wuthering Heights, and Forrest Gump. Most deaths and/or animals in anguish always makes me feel utterly sorrowful.
*Plague Dog Spoilers* The conclusion of The Plague Dogs (versus the novel’s ending) is with the dogs swimming into the fog, leaving it ambiguous as to whether they survived or not, even though an island is shown during the credits. It made me so question if they made it to safety or were holding onto false hope. After all the poor dogs go through you just want them to find some solace.
*The Last Unicorn Spoilers* I love this story in both its novel and movie formats. I always feel it so melancholic at the end when she is returned to her immortal form, yet her love in Sir Lir is now separated. She remembers those feelings, but no longer can reciprocate them. And it leaves Sir Lir with taking care of a kingdom, but forever without his true love. I always just wished Schmendrick could have given one of the lovers the option of taking on a new form to be with each other. But true magic will do as it will.
Oddly though ghostly horror, sci-fi, dark fantasy moments meant to fear induce left me unscathed after the age of five. I built up an immunity to the creatures I knew didn’t exist in this world. I had watched a lot of them as rentals, and those cinematic boogeymen didn’t scare me anymore. Psychological horror and slashers still give me shivers though. Humans are often the more frightening monsters.
*there was a scene from Baron Munchausen that still gives me nightmares even though I can barely remember what happened
*LARGE MARGE from Peewee’s Big Adventure caused the desired effect
*I totally agree with the above comment about the poor shoe in Roger Rabbit
Great article! Secrets of NIHM was one of my favorites. Except for Miyazaki, cartoons these days just don’t have that certain gravitas found in these special ones from the 80s. Although I did cry duri ng WallE
And no one had any nightmares from the scene in ‘Hook’, when Dustin Hoffman throws the kid in the lockbox with scorpians? I mean, Rain Man as a pirate, cmon…while I am on the subject: RUFIO RUFIO RUFIO!
Great list — though I would add The Last Unicorn for the same reasons as others have, and also the Smrgol vs Ogre battle in The Flight of Dragons.
I don’t recall Fiver being shot inWatership Down, though. Hazel yes, definitely, but Fiver not so much — unless I’m mistaken?
As a child, I also found ET to be scary — for years I coming even look at a photo of him, let alone watch the film. Conversely, things like Ghostbusters or Poltergeist, though, not a problem. Yeah, I was a weird kid. ;)
At the end of the Monster Squad, when the little girl tosses her stuffed animal to Frankenstein’s Monster as he’s being sucked into the vortex always tore me up. And ditto on Large Marge.
Fantasia, the freaking dinosaurs (i think it was the Rite of Spring?) freaked me out so much as a kid and still as an adult.
For non fear emotions, Second-Hand Lions makes me cry every single time and it isn’t even sad.
The Brave Little Toaster. There’s a melancholic, lonely undertone throughout the film because of the misfortunes that befall a set of courageous, noble characters who embark on a journey that leads them through a strange world, bereft of their innocence and sheltered existence. They find themselves combatting nature, storms, the cruelty of the human spirit. There are several depictions of death and injury. I never got a sense of a wholesome, reconciliatory ending, just a strange sense of death and loneliness.
I’m somewhat older than you, so I was in college when most of these came out – but I would never, ever, EVER show “Watership Down” to young children. It’s not a children’s story! I used to tell the clerks at the video store that just because it was animated did not make it a kid’s movie.
But yeah. Most of these.
Dammit yes, I don’t remember it that much but I got traumatised by the Gremmlins. I also remember being very spooked by Mars Attack. Howard the duck was weird but funny, just like Joe’s apartment.
The first Jurassic park left me on the fence between terrified and fascinated.
The real horror of my youth was The Fly. Never saw the whole movie, but the simple extracts I was exposed to left me scared of the ceilings and the dark for months.
The villain in The Care Bears Movie scared me as a child, like satan on the television. My wife and I were discussing scary movies from our childhoods and she said the same thing about the villain.
I’ve never seen The Last Unicorn but after reading these comments… and at my wife’s insistence, I’m going to have to watch that now
heathwitch@34: You’re right, re: Hazel! I got my bunnies mixed up–just updated the post, thanks :)
So many excellent comments–just to respond quickly, you guys are bringing up so many scenes that I think I may have repressed for the last couple decades: Gremlins (particularly the story Phoebe Cates’ character tells about her father…), Howard the Duck (no judgments!), Large Marge, The Monster Squad. Clowns…ugh. Clowns are evil. That’s just science.
Matt Showers@18: YES. That shoe haunts me to this day–I found that scene so upsetting. Yikes.
Ellie@21: I’m right there with you with the animal thing, animated or otherwise. I was banned from watching nature specials as a kid–I just couldn’t quite hack the whole “circle of life” thing. Shockingly, Charlotte’s Web and Bambi were never huge favorites of mine…
Ashley@36: I was just talking about Fantasia with a friend the other day–I loved almost the entire movie as a kid, and “Night On Bald Mountain” was my favorite, but I always found the dinosaur/Rite of Spring section to be pretty unpleasant. It was his favorite part, though–and I know it was directed by animation pioneer John Hubley and is an amazing piece of art, but while I appreciate it much more as an adult, it’s still my least favorite section of the movie.
As a 30 something adult, I still can’t watch All Dogs Go To Heaven. “You can never come back, Charlie… You can never come baaaaaack…” FREAKY.
Did you ever see Plague Dogs? It’s based on the book by the author of Watership Down. The dogs were animated to look like real dogs, not Disney-style cartoons, which made it worse. Dogs who had been horribly experimented on, escaped, and were pursued by the government, who told everyone they had a disease so any humans chased them away. One dog is horribly brain damaged. In the end, [spoilers] they swim out so sea hoping to find their dog utopia, only it’s very ambiguous that it exists, if it’s the afterlife, of if they even make it to that shore. IIt was how the author intended to end the book, but his editor wouldn’t let him. But he Went There in the film. (Skinny Puppy sampled the movie on one of their songs.)
I cried for an hour after that. Never could watch it again.
Poor Artax. What freaked me most as a child was the fact that I didn’t understand, how can someone feel so… so… depressed. It was just so scary. Anyway few years back I had a bad year and when I decided to rewatch Neverending story, it freaked me out in completely different way – because I totally understood, how Artax felt. I actually think it helped me a lot – when I realized it is so bad I can get Artax, I knew I have to do something about it.
All dogs go to heaven – my first time in cinema. Definitely the first time a movie made me cry. I still remember I felt a bit ashamed about it, but then mom said it is ok. Next time, when we went to see The Lion king, I cried a lot…
Oh, and the first Star Trek movie freaked me out – there’s this transporter malfunction at the begining, and it is not so important to the plot, but it scared the hell out of me. It was, I think, the only time a movie gave me nightmares.
If we’re talking books – Day of the Triffids. I love that book. But reading it at age of 10 probably wasn’t the best idea ever.
Jumanji. Really? Robin Williams’ character goes missing as a kid and people say he got chopped up and hidden in the walls of the house?
I watched a lot of stuff when I was younger (The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, Watership Down, The Secret of NIMH, The Mouse and his Child, and so on) but seriously the only thing I ever remember leaving me an emotional wreck was the ending of Ringing Bell. I literally couldn’t watch it again for over a decade, and I rewatched the crap out of stuff like Unico (which had some pretty dang disturbing parts) and Watership Down (it freaking FASCINATED me when I was little). Chirin’s fate at the end of the story just hit me like a total emotional gut punch.
The John Hurt version of the movie 1984 which came out in late 80s. The rats in cage placed on face scene – good god!
Ah,Bridget, you are my spirit twin! I loved the Ewok movies when I was little, though I remember nothing about them now.
Big Hero 6, with Baymax’s sacrifice to save Hiro, ranks up there with Iron Giant, though to some people feel that sacrifice is cheapened with Baymax’s resurrection. I don’t care though. I know he’s coming back, but every time during that scene, I am Hiro.
Artax is my go to when discussing most traumatizing movie moments. The best recent example for me is the first ten minutes or so of Up, that kills me, I refuse to watch that movie again.
Artax isn’t even the saddest thing in The Neverending Story, at least not when I look back on it as an adult. I mean, the whole movie is pretty much a giant gutpunch centered around Bastion’s inability to cope with the passing of his mother, but for me at least the worst is the Rock Biter’s line toward the end.
“They look like big, good, strong hands, don’t they? I always thought that’s what they were.”
That line is ROUGH. A massive stone titan, and he was powerless to stop his friends from falling to The Nothing, just like no one in the story could save Bastion’s mom. At least, that’s the spin I put on it some 30-odd years after seeing it for the first time.
When I was in elementary school, “The Three Lives of Thomasina” was in heavy rotation on “The Wonderful World of Disney.” Every time it was on, the next day in school there’d be lots of red-eyed kids who’d been crying all night over the cat’s funeral scene.
I would seriously appreciate sources on that comment about the horse who played Artax not actually dying, that has prevented me from watching the movie again for years, and I loved it.
As an aside to Disney specifically and all screenwriters in general, f^&* you. Horrible sadness is not a requirement to make a good movie, stop it!
I was in my thirties when Iron Giant came out and I watched it with my daughter. I was and still am always gutted by that scene. I can tear up just from thinking about it. I’m so glad the film has lived on despite being a box office disappointment when it was released.
I know, right? It’s getting kind of obnoxious. (I had to grab some kleenex just reading about The Iron Giant above…)
2 scenes. One not technically science fiction/fantasy, but I mean the shark is giant and mutanty, the other definitely science fiction.
First: Sitting in the movie theater first day in 1975, I was 7. The movie: Jaws. When Hooper is underwater checking out the disabled boat at night and the big hole that had been smashed into it. Yeah, I still jump straight in the air out of my chair when the body pops up out of the hold and I’ve seen Jaws a couple hundred times.
Alien: 1979. I was 11. Even before going to the movie theater (I saw it at the Egyptian in Hollywood) my uncle had bought me the graphic novel. AND I had read it and re-read it – staring at the awesomeness of the chest-burster scene in the graphic novel over and over and over again. So I KNEW it was coming. I still freaked out and ran up the aisle and into the lobby. My uncle asked what was wrong with me, I’ve seen a million things worse in movies, heck if it was rated R and scared the snot out of me, I had seen it – starting at 7 years old I was one of those kids. And when Kane is on the table screaming and that alien burst out – I was out of my seat and running towards the exit. Oh I went back inside after my uncle bought me a hot dog and popcorn and I loved every second of the rest of the movie and saw it a ton of times afterward. But that first time, wowzers.
Okay I lied there was one more. I went to see the original Rollerball with James Caan, but it was in a double feature with the just released Carrie, the 1976 Stephen King movie. But we only went to see Rollerball, so we walked in, my uncle and I, and watched the ending of Carrie, the slaughter and the scene at the house. Bye bye Carrie. Phew, made it! That wasn’t so bad! Nice sweet ending music, awww isn’t that sweet that the friend is going to put the flowers on Carrie’s grave…I remember one of the ushers (yes they still had ushers back then) said that Carrie might be too intense, that I should just wait until Rollerball starts. Ha! My uncle laughed…yeah back to Carrie. I always always expect in real life when I see people place flowers on graves to see a hand rip out of the ground and grab that flower placing arm. And when it finally does happen, and it will, I’ll point and say, “See? See? That’s why I never bring flowers to a funeral.”
@21: The animals DO in fact make it home at the end of The Long Journey Home. The cat DOES survive the waterfall and manages to reunite with the two dogs. Just last summer we watched that film with my young children. WITH them, so that we could address any questions or end it if it got too scary for them.
I watched Watership Down many times as a child. I also read the book several times during 5th and 6th grade. It is one of those books that I try to read at least every other year. I am currently rereading it and loving every page!
I remember be traumitized by a scene from Pet Semetary at a friend’s birthday party when I was young (11 maybe?). Later that night when they went to watch another slasher flick that I didn’t want to see, my friend’s mother put on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds for me. Thus began my love of animal based scary movies!
Loved the Iron Giant, that scene in particular, but in contrast I fondly remember the lake scene https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKJOugkhtUY
BTW Pixar’s latest, Inside Out, has a very similar moment. “Take her to the moon for me!”
OMG….The Thing!!!! We had Siberian huskies when this sucker came out and I could not be around them AT ALL for like a year. My brother, father and I all stood in the kitchen behind the kitchen door peaking out into the living room every couple of seconds to see what new horror was upon us while my mom laughed at us.
In terms of tears…the Last Unicorn. I must have watched that thing a thousand times. I had all the songs memorized and sobbed my eyes out every time I saw it.
@54 For me, there are also movies I saw when I was a kid that didn’t affect me like that then as they do now.
One of these is MARY POPPINS. When I saw it when it first came out, I was like 6 years old, and thought it was all great fun and thrills. But a few years ago, I was watching it with my young nieces and nephews, and one scene suddenly got me choked up.
It was near the end, when Mary Poppins and Bert and the children are on the rooftops at dusk; the music swells as night falls and the lights of London come on. It just occurred to me then–I’m watching the sun set on the British Empire. Early in the film, we’re told that it’s set in 1910 and “King Edward’s on the throne.” But later that year, Edward will die, and in four years, the Great War will break out and sweep away all the complacencies and hopes and optimism of that golden era.
I could see Mr. Banks in a captain’s uniform, standing at the foot of a trench ladder, whistle at his lips, with Bert and his pals lined up around him, waiting to go over the top on July 1, 1916 at the Somme.
Yes, that scene where Artax sinks into the swamp was pretty heavy for me, especially seeing it as a child who loved that horse.
As for the others, not so much.
@31 Kate M.
I always took it that the utopia they were swimming towards was the afterlife and that they drowned in the end. It made it even sadder knowing that the one dog was terrified of water thanks to the drowning experiments done to it. I had to go off by myself for a while and just sob.
@61. tormz
On The Plague Dogs, I always hoped they found some solace in a canine afterlife or found peace in the wilderness of the island at the end. The book has a softened ending, that’s very likely due to the story editors breathing down Richard Adam’s neck.
I should mention on the form of unnerving animal-centric movies, Felidae. That’s Cats plus The Secret of NIMH on steroids! The story centers on a domestic house cat, Francis, and the grisly feline murders taking place in his new neighborhood. Despite showing intellect, they still act like cats whether domesticated or savagely feral. The cat nightmare puppet scene is beyond creepy!
I forgot to add there are quite a few of anime that I viewed in my middle and high school years that actually hit me in the “feels”. Cowboy Bebop’s character build-up, history, and eventual climax left me so teary-eyed when Spike has to face his former best friend, Vicious. Wolf’s Rain had so many characters that you start to develop connections to, and they all fall in their attempts to find their versions of the land known as Paradise. Albeit the written manga does end differently and slightly lighter tone. The end credit’s song with the wolf running is so bittersweet. I always wonder if the wolves will forever be in pursuit of that dream. Another song came from the anime movie version of Metropolis. The climax ends with the character trying to save his beloved, despite the destruction falling around them. The jazz and blues tone of the movie is summed up emotively with Ray Charles’s song, “I Can’t Stop Loving You”, there as cruel decisions are made. Not the best movie, but a perfect moment in art and music selection there. And don’t get me started with Grave of the Fireflies! Brutal!
The “Let’s Stick Our Hand in the Stump” sequence in Flash Gordon still squicks me out to this day.
(And relatedly: “Not the Bore Worms!”)
@58 Helen: OMG, The Thing! That one really messed with me even though I was a teenager when I saw it, not a little kid. I hope little kids don’t watch that one. Granted I’m not much for gore and horror is not my shtick, but that was one example of “oh you like sci-fi? Sure, this is sci-fi” from my horror-movie-loving-teenage-friend that I still wish I could un-see.
@18 – You are not the only one, Matt. The shoe-dipping scene in Roger Rabbit still affects me. That movie had a lot of memorable and horrifying scenes. The scene were Eddie looks for Jessica in Toon Town and the Jessica lookalike he finds morphs into this horrifying, huge-lipped, kissing creature that chases him. Judge Doom’s face and high-pitched voice when he removes the mask. The deaths of all the weasels. You could go on …
I adored Watership Down (it is still one of my favourite films of all time) because it was not afraid to go places other films might have cut-camera to avoid. The fight between Woundwort and Bigwig while Hazel, Dandelion and Blackberry are running like the wind to fetch the dog is epic. And then when Woundwort says, “Why throw your life away?” and Bigwig (who had never before acknowledged the physically weaker Hazel as leader) replies, “My chief rabbit has told me to defend this run.” Bam! Right in the feels.
The Secret of Nimh had the most beautiful music and song. The scene where Mrs Brisby first enters the rat’s nest and is chased by Brutus was terrifying for me as a kid – incredible light effects and animation.The same with the scenes inside the owl’s tree.
Don Bluth doesn’t seem to get the kudos deserved. Many of my favourite, moving scenes from childhood were from Bluth films – Fievel giving up on finding his family (just before he reunites with them) in American Tail, as well as the hope of the “There are No Cats in America” song on the boat. I cry at the end of All Dogs Go to Heaven every darn time – when Charlie’s ghost visits Anne-Marie and tells her to take care of Itchy for him. I also love the song in the puppy orphanage, where Charlie is teaching the pups to share. The death of Little Foot’s mother in Land Before Time.
A bit off-topic but does anybody know which movie the picture on top (of a “crying childlike empress”) is from?
Thanks!
@66 – That is a picture of Moonchild, the Empress of Fantasia in The Neverending Story.
THE ADVENTURES OF MARK TWAIN.
If you watched this as a kid, you know the trauma.
Poltergeist (1982). That fucking tree. To this day (I am 41 now), I can’t, under any circumstances, sleep in a room with a tree outside the window. I still have recurring nightmares about that tree once or twice a year. Thirty-three years of nightmares about a tree. What the hell.
Speaking of Poltergeist, that “guy claws his face off” scene was pretty memorable.
Having said that, I think the most frightened I’ve ever been of a movie was Disney’s Watcher in the Woods.
@62, Kate M.
On Plague Dogs, I always took it that there wasn’t really an island and that it was just a belief the one dog had. I took it that the one dog knew at the end but insisted on it to keep his friend swimming so they would finally find peace at the end rather than being recaptured and put back into the hell they escaped from. I think if there was a chance of there really being an island (or I believed at the time there was one) it wouldn’t have hit me so hard.
I’ve also found a lot of anime/manga that really has affected me emotionally. Wolf’s Rain’s first ending at episode 26 was much more emotionally impacting than what they added afterwards; at least at the final end you’re left with some hope as they are still searching. The most recent anime is probably the Mother’s Rosario arc in Sword Art Online’s second season.
I have to agree with Watership Down, Cowboy Bebop, and the Iron Giant. I would add Mulan, James and the Giant Peach, and (in books) the Hyperion trilogy, Charlottes Web and Enders Game. I loved the movie, but the book to me was more powerful. Strangely, the thing I remember weirding me out the most as a child was the dancing raisins from the California raisins commercial . . . I did (and still do) see them as dried up little old people, and who would want to eat dried up old people?
Dark Crystal. The good and bad guys freaked me out.
And for whatever reason I was allowed to watch Poltergeist when I was about the son’s age. Way to traumatize me for life.
And the day they showed Old Yeller in school? Curse you!!!
Oh yes a lot of things come back reading this….Even if i went a lot to theater also, watching musicals (with an actor family it’s a given !
The films i saw and wich where amazing ( not all for Children) :
1. Momo (1983) : from the same author (Michael Ende) of the Neverending Stor) : an German/ Italian Film : Absolutly Beautiful ans Intelligent tale about a little girl living in under an AMphitheater : it was like magic, and has done a lot for my passion for Fantasy / SF : (Spoilers) : The moment where she has to walk backward seeingthe grey men coming closer and closer was one of the most terrifying moments for me. And the moment her friend is frozen, was a real traumatic moment, and the men in grey gave me some Nightmares : I watched it years later as an adult, and i was astonished at the intelligence of the social critic in this film.
2. Blade Runner ! My father took me to the Directors cut when it was in the theaters, i was overhelmed of the whole atmosphere in this film and quite frightened ! (a was only 11 or so)
3. The Last Unicorn : The End is beautiful, and tearsome even now, and gave me a love of not so happy endings and endings in films where you can make your mind up …
4. Fantasia : The Music, the scène with the Water and Mickey : as child in Austria, we had to learn the poem on wich this scène is based (Goethe), and seeing the deperation in the end was quite a traumatic experiènce for a very young child…
5. Dumbo : The Dancing Elephants where absolutly terrifying for me !!
And three musicals, wich had the same effects : Cats (The eyes in the beginning), The Phantom of the Opera (The Phantom) , and an Austrian musical called Gremlins abour people being transformed into Monsters by thouching the Gremlins ( best described as brains on feet) – the only things wich transforms them back is music !!! It terrified me !
A few gutting scenes from childhood to tweens: so many moments in Dark Crystal, I can’t count, though the one that probably affected me most was when the Landstrider is overtaken by the Garthim (the screaming!). Luke going home to find it destroyed (the charred skeletons were nicely gruesome). When Barry’s taken by the extraterrestrials in Close Encounters. And, oddly, the “Now That We’ve Made It” scene in Animalympics, though I guess that was more empathy than shock. Along with most of those moments already mentioned. I didn’t see Brave Little Toaster until I was in my thirties and the “Worthless” song still made me cry. [spoiler] Same goes for Iron Giant and the Superman moment.
@18 That shoe! That poor shoe! I’m so glad someone else was upset by that and it wasn’t just me like I thought (freaked me out so bad the first time my parents tried to show me the movie I lost it and they stopped the film–didn’t try again for another 2 years at which point it became my favorite movie to put on repeat).
@68 YES. Ahem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USZGm9GR7ak
The Mouse and His Child! Highly impactful on me as a kid, but I never found out about the book until I was in my 20s. When I read it I was floored and wished for a time machine so I could give it to my younger self to read. (Have been hunting for a copy of the movie for years if anyone has any leads–I’d like to send it to my niece.) The scene with the can of dog food that’s a picture in a picture in a picture, and so on, was burned into my brain.
Everything in District 9…and I was 21.
@7: Beth’s death in the film version of Little Women is the only movie scene that has ever made me weep with grief (as opposed to envy or horror).
@41: Yeah, the “Rite of Spring” segment had some chilling bits, especially the giant volcano and the dinosaurs all starving to death. I still loved it.
Personally? Hm. I seriously hate the vomiting scene in Spirited Away, and howled with envy at the end of My Neighbor Totoro (“You see them only when you’re very young” — and I’m going to grow up and lose all chance of that!) But as a kid, certain books traumatized me more than any movie. Bartholemew and the Ooblek, for example. Or, worse of all, the look on Papa Bear’s face after his nightmare in The Berenstein Bears Don’t Pollute (Anymore). *shudder*
My nine year old sister watched all of the Harry Potter movies for the first time. She hadn’t read the books yet (though now she is working her way through!). At the end of Order of the Phoenix she started sobbing over Sirius, saying, “He was the only family Harry had left!” Then she turned to our other sister and said, “At least he still has Dumbledore.”
Oh dear.
Gmork in the Neverending story affected me more than the loss of Artax. Gmork scared me, an agent of the nothing, a horrifying creature that willingly gave itself over to be it’s agent, working for annihilation. This was not evil, as I knew it from Disney films, this was destruction for its own sake. Also, the way it looked was frightening as well.
I had fun traumatizing a friend of mine (in her 30s) with Watership Down. I don’t know if there is an appropriate age for that film.
I know that Gremlins scared me, although I don’t know what it was, looking back.
I was preschool with Bambi. My mom missed the last of the movie consoling me.
I was in grade school when the Wizard of Oz was shown annually on TV. The flying monkeys sent me out of the room. For about 5 years, I got up and left the room when they were getting to the monkey encounter. Since then, I’ve had a chance to see Oz in all its technicolor hand colored glory on a big screen.
My main reason for commenting is the Color Purple. I got very emotional at the end of the movie, tearing up and getting my tissue ready. Suddenly, the woman next to me laid her head on the seat back in front of her and wailed. I still tear up from the ending of the movie, and smile at the same time from that memory of the loud wail in my ear.
Oh no! How could I forget recently there was Wolf Children! I felt so saddened for Papa Ookami, and then Ame’s decisions.
The BFG!!! The giants at the end were terrifying. Refused to watch it for years!