Movies and TV shows aimed at children are always a delicate mix of cutesy innocence and potentially weighty subject matter—kids might get bored of endless sunshine without any conflict, but go too dark and you risk mauling delicate sensibilities, Return to Oz-style. And kid-friendly SFF can be tricky to navigate for even the most well-meaning guardian, after all what harm could be lurking in a puppet-filled fantasy adventure? Of course, there are also the traumatic moments we inflicted upon ourselves, staying up late only to peep at the screen through our fingers. Even if you had a storybook childhood, the odds are low that you escaped without being emotionally sideswiped by an intense moment or two…
We’ve polled our extended Tor.com family, and gathered up the moments that shaped us into the warped creatures we are today.
The destruction of the Fourth Wall — The Neverending Story
Sure, you can probably blame Krull for why I’m drawn to giant spiders and obviously I wear all black because of the Skywalkers; yeah, the ear-eels from Wrath of Khan are objectively terrifying and the Wheelers are the very epitome of fear itself… but nothing tops The NeverEnding Story in terms of blunt psychic force. Most people immediately jump to the horse in the swamp, or the flickering of a wolf’s head, and I get that, but I find myself haunted by the Rock Biter’s strong hands and crumbling blue sphinxes. And underneath it all, the existential trauma of the Childlike Empress’ pleading eyes, begging to be named and saved while tearing through the Fourth Wall again and again.
—Mordicai Knode, Marketing Manager at Tordotcom Publishing
There is a moment in The Neverending Story (which I think I’ve written about before? But I’ll always be writing about this moment, so, whatever) when the Childlike Empress tells Atreyu that a boy named Bastian has been watching his adventures. I remember the thrill that shot through me in that moment, as I understood that the Childlike Empress knew about Bastian, and that she was going to bring these two worlds together. Bastian and Atreyu were going to meet! Bastian was going to escape his crappy, grief-struck life and go to Fantasia! But then the Empress continued. “As he was watching your adventures, others were watching his. They were with him in the bookstore. They were with him when he took the book.” And then a moment after that she looked straight into the camera. And my mind hopped a bit, and I realized that she was talking about ME. Me. I was watching Bastian. And if I was watching Bastian was someone watching me? Was I, in fact, a real little “girl” sitting on the floor in my house and watching this movie? Or was I just a story someone else was reading? What if they close the book????
What happens if they close the book.
—Leah Schnelbach, Senior Staff Writer at Tor.com
MONSTRO — Pinocchio
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89g6lJ6D64U
Whoever first decided Pinocchio would make a great children’s movie is someone I’d like to fight. This mother****** gave me my first nightmares at the tender age of three years old. LOOK AT IT. If that monster of the deep isn’t prime nightmare fuel, I don’t know what is.
—Emily Goldman, Short Fiction Coordinator at Tordotcom Publishing
The Ring WILL find you — Scary Movie 3
My whole generation of 12-year-olds was traumatized by The Ring, the biggest PG-13 movie to hit theaters just as we entered the gray area where our parents could be persuaded. I was not among them—a friend of mine had told me the concept, and just the idea of a mimetic death sentence kept my pre-teen weenie self far away from any screening. What got me was Scary Movie 3. I watched Scary Movie 3 for someone else’s birthday party, surrounded by peers I wished were friends. Scary Movie 3 isn’t a classic of cinema, but we were 12 and ready to laugh. I wasn’t ready for the section of the movie that parodied The Ring, and the horrific imagery from Samara’s video was no less devastating to me for being mashed together with gross-out humor and slapstick. For the rest of the movie I was a wreck.
—Carl Engle-Laird, Editor at Tordotcom Publishing
Sesame Street is here to make you think about death and get sad and stuff
There’s a Sesame Street special from the ’80s where Big Bird and pals spend a night largely unsupervised at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was definitely a cool thing I wanted to do as a kid. But in between cute songs about how delicious the paintings look and how the broken statues have a special beauty is an absolute existential nightmare: Big Bird and Snuffy come across a little boy who explains that he’s the spirit of an ancient Egyptian prince, cursed to be confined to his tomb (and now the museum where it’s located) until he can answer the riddle that will summon Osiris and let him pass into the afterlife to rejoin his family. This is awful! You are ruining my fun museum adventure with Bid Sad Thoughts about death and curses and personal responsibility! Big Bird naturally helps out, and together they manage to solve the riddle—but then Prince Sahu must pass the real test, where Osiris weighs his heart against the weight of a feather. And let me just cut to the chase here: THE KID FAILS. His heart sinks and Osiris is ready to peace out and leave the prince on earth forever until Big Bird intervenes and argues on Sahu’s behalf, reasoning that of course his heart is heavy after 4000 years alone, with no one to love him. YEAH, OSIRIS. The thing is, Osiris isn’t actually swayed—it is instead Big Bird’s act of love and friendship that lightens Sahu’s heart and allows him to pass the test. Which is great and all, but it left small-me with the distinct impression that ours is a cold and indifferent sort of universe. Thanks, Sesame Street!
—Sarah Tolf, Production Manager of Tor.com
Long live the droid revolution! — Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
When I was 6, I watched Star Wars IV. We’d recorded it during a two-week free sample of the sci-fi channel onto a VHS tape. It included an obscene amount of battery commercials and intros/outros with Billy Dee Williams. It was glorious. I was, naturally, transported.
A little too transported. I instantly identified with R2D2 and had a small freakout during the movie. From watery eyes, I interrogated: Why was R2 enslaved? If they wiped his memory as Uncle Owen (who small Renata thought deserved what he got) wanted, would that be the same as death? Weren’t restraining bolts just high-tech cages? How could he be bought and sold when he had feelings and goals and sentience? Why didn’t the droids rebel since they were smarter than humans and some had built in weaponry? If Luke was so great why hadn’t he freed C3PO who clearly did not want to be involved in all this mess?
My siblings glared, my sister pressed play, and I was left hiccupping in concern hoping that at least by movie 3 the heroes would have started a droid revolution.
—Renata Sweeney, Senior Marketing Manager at Tor Books
Long live the Lorge Ape revolution! — Mighty Joe Young
The beginning of this PG movie about a 15-foot, 2,000 pound gorilla consists of a double murder—of gorilla mom and primatologist mom—by poachers, in front of their respective children. If that wasn’t traumatizing enough for small Renata, Joe (the lorge gorilla boi) then chomps off the lead poacher’s thumb and pointer fingers, which sets him on a lifelong quest to avenge his inability to make finger guns.
(Then the rest of the movie is about whether or not the humans should euthanize Joe for being large and existing.)
—Renata
Just say yes! — The Secret of NIHM 2: Timmy to the Rescue
My childhood movie trauma is The Secret of NIHM 2: Timmy to the Rescue, hands down, no question. Specifically, this clip gave me many incredibly vivid nightmares for a longgggg time. I was completely horrified by any scenario where someone’s will or choice was taken away from them when I was a kid, and the forced experimentation on Martin and his spiral into insanity REALLY traumatized me, to the point where watching this clip now still sends me into a bit of a tailspin. I don’t think this movie was very popular (or well received), so hopefully not many other people have experienced this particular movie trauma…but if someone else has, COMMISERATE WITH ME, PLEASE.
—Rachel Taylor, Marketing Manager at Tor Books
Ursula’s death — The Little Mermaid
I actually don’t fully remember the last couple of minutes of The Little Mermaid, despite having seen it a million times. This was the movie I asked my mother to replay over and over and over again, and I have fond memories of wrapping myself in a blanket to recreate a mermaid tail while I sang “Part of Your World” in the living room. But I was so terrified of giant Ursula that I used to hide in another room until it was over. Once Prince Eric sets out on the boat, bowsprit sharp and pointed at the sea witch’s belly, I was up off the couch with my hands over my eyes until my mother came to tell me it was over. The original fairy tale is quite different, with the sea witch less of a bad guy and more of a conduit for Ariel’s shitty decision (look, she knew what she was getting in to, she signed a contract), which works a bit better for me. As an adult, I’m thinking a lot about Ursula’s role as “the other woman” and the stories we tell about women fighting over a man, especially as she is almost definitely a Black woman and probably also a drag queen, and the way we set Ursula up as the nemesis to Ariel’s waifishness and naivete, and…. all right, I could go on forever about the implications of her being popped like a magic balloon by Mr. Hero. But that’s not the point. The point is that it’s a horrific visual and Ursula deserved better.
—Christina Orlando, Books Editor at Tor.com
The existential horror of the sea — Jaws
When I was…maybe 7?…my family and I took a vacation to Ocean City, Maryland. My dad was flipping through the channels on the hotel TV when he realized Jaws was on. An hour later, when he suggested going to the beach, there were a lot of terrified screams/refusals to swim from my brother and I.
—Amanda Melfi, Social Media at Tordotcom Publishing/Tor.com
Robert Picardo tries to eat Tom Cruise — Legend
I’ve documented my weird love of traumatic movie moments in a previous article (Artax! Ewoks! Watership Down, nooooo!), so I’ll try to keep this limited to just a couple of examples—both sudden, violent character deaths that had an intense impact on tiny, impressionable me back in the day.
First, there’s A LOT I could say about 1985’s Legend. There’s so much to love, but almost all of it is deeply weird, starting with Tim Curry as Darkness, the Magnificent Lobster-Bull(?) of Evil! Also violence against unicorns, which I did not enjoy as a tiny child, and a glittery goth makeover/interpretive dance sequence, which I absolutely did.
But let’s talk about the fate of Meg Mucklebones, who suddenly rears up out a particularly foul stretch of swamp to attack our heroes. Rejecting the “foul-tasting” fairies, she spies a tastier nugget in Jack (Tom Cruise), but he distracts her with lines like “Heavenly angels must envy your beauty”—which, ugh. (Her response, “What a fine meal you’ll make, be the rest of you as sweet as your tongue…” is some truly Hannibal-worthy repartee.) Playing on her vanity, Jack is able to dispatch Meg with his sword as she unleashes a hideous shriek and turns into a swampy nightmare-smoothie. The whole scene is nasty, brutish, and short at only about two and a half minutes long, but it’s a testament to the performance of Robert Picardo that it’s really stuck with me over the years. In just a few minutes we get a villain who is ravenous, ruthless, and vain but also sassy and surprisingly flirty, and then boom—nothing left but a slime-geyser: R.I.P. Meg Mucklebones may be a terrifying flesh-hungry, filth-covered, smack-talking predator, but she’s got personality, and part of me wouldn’t mind her taking a bite out of smirky golden boy Jack on her way out.
—Bridget McGovern, Managing Editor of Tor.com
Mommy Fortuna embraces her death — The Last Unicorn
I have loved The Last Unicorn (both book and movie) for as long as I can remember, but I’d be lying if I said that Mommy Fortuna and her violent end didn’t haunt my dreams for years. Voiced by Angela Lansbury, Mommy Fortuna is a threadbare witch dragging her “Midnight Carnival,” a collection of fabulous and mythical beasts from town to town. In reality, these attractions are simply sad, caged animals under an enchantment, with two exceptions: the Unicorn, and the Harpy, who are both very real, immortal, and desperate for freedom. With the help of Schmendrick the magician, the Unicorn escapes and frees all of her fellow creatures, including the Harpy, who immediately seeks to destroy the woman who has kept her caged for so long. Rather than running, Mommy Fortuna cackles madly, opening her arms to the Harpy’s attack from above, content in the knowledge that she’ll live on in the memory of an immortal being as the one who captured her. It’s chilling—the shrieking, and the mad laughter and then silence, as the Unicorn notes, “She chose her death long ago. It was the fate she wanted.” SO DARK. I want to give six-year-old me a hug now.
—Bridget
THE HAND — The Grudge
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyNN0DKkq4s
I saw The Grudge (2004, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar [a queen]) when I was 7 and I refused to shower without a parent present afterwards because of this scene, and I still think of it as one of the scariest movies even though I haven’t seen it since I was 7.
—Giselle Gonzalez, Publicity Assistant at Tor/Forge/Tor Teen/Starscape
THE HAND — Titanic
Growing up, Friday nights were sacred to me. Like most children, I resented the healthful nature of the lovingly prepared home cooked meals my mother made for us every other night—but on Fridays, my mother needed a break, and a way to occupy her two rambunctious daughters and her equally rambunctious husband—so it was dirty, delicious New York street pizza for dinner, and a selection of action movies curated by my father. Nicholas Cage and Harrison Ford were my idols, and there was no higher power in my home than James Bond. I was about 8 years old at the time Titanic came out, and my father desperately wanted to see it, so he bought a 2-VHS bootleg from a vendor outside our subway station, and brought it home for Friday movie night. Naturally, I thought this was going to be a movie about a giant boat getting into a fight with an iceberg. It was sure to be an absolutely epic buffet of kicks, punches, and high stakes world-saving. I shoved everyone’s discarded pizza crusts into my small mouth while dad fiddled with the VHS player and my mom yelled at him in French: “you’re going to scare the little one! So many people die! You can’t make her watch this!” Around a mouthful of greasy carbohydrates, hopped up on underage bravado, I said “You can’t stop me!”
My dad was inordinately pleased with me, and my mother threw her hands up in surrender and left. We started the movie. It seemed like a bit of a long set up, but that boat was ENORMOUS—I was willing to believe there would be some kind of epic showdown. Soon though, my interest in the romance between Jack and Rose started to wane—but the petty stubbornness was strong in me even at that age. I couldn’t prove my mom right. So I sat and watched. The living room was in the center of our house, and my mom would periodically walk by. Clearly, the benevolent gaze of James Bond was not upon me on this night; mom walked by just as I had my eyes covered, and was peeking at the screen through my interlaced fingers. “I TOLD YOU SHE WAS TOO YOUNG! THE POOR GIRL IS TRAUMATIZED!”
My household was not prudish about the human body, which is important to note. Dad rolled his eyes and gestured expansively at the TV screen. “She’s being ridiculous.” Mom looked at the screen and saw that Rose and Jack were locked in a sweaty, carnal embrace, in the backseat of a car. They were naked. I knew they were having sex—I just didn’t fully understand what that entailed. This was in fact the closest I’d ever come to understanding what sex was—and it terrified me, because all I could think about was…The Hand. Jack or Rose, in the throes of titanic passion, slaps a hand against the inside of the backseat car window—now fully fogged up—and drags it down the pane of glass, leaving a smeared handprint. Like in a zombie movie. In that moment, I truly thought that the “little death” was actually no different from…actual death. Of course, I absolutely never think about that anymore, and you’ll be happy to know that I grew into a normal and well-adjusted person.
—Caroline Perny, Publicity Manager at Tor Books
AAAAAHHHHHHH LEECHES!!! — Rambo: First Blood Part II
The first place I ever lived in the US was a cramped grad student apartment. My parents were new immigrants, still wide-eyed and figuring out the edges of a new country, working long hours and decompressing by watching American movies late at night. The place wasn’t big enough for me to have my own room, so I’d pretend to turn around on the couch and fall asleep while sneakily watching entirely inappropriate media. (This clearly turned out fine, and I am very normal and well-adjusted.) The first movie I ever remember seeing was Rambo, at age five. My parents dutifully worked through the sequels too, and I still have frozen in my brain a scene where Rambo is strung up in a muddy pond about to be interrogated by villains who looked very much like us (no time to unpack that one here). My mother, normally quiet and reserved, always on my case about being less of a chaotic little gremlin, just deadpanned, “the leeches will get him.” I didn’t really know what a leech was, in Chinese or English, but this focused my tiny brain into a pinpoint of dread. Get him? What was going to get him? I was also supposed to be asleep, and couldn’t ask any follow-up questions without snitching on myself, so I just laid there, curled up like a shrimp, dreaming of leeches. You see, my mother came of age during the Cultural Revolution, and she did her government-ordained time working rice paddies in the countryside, a city girl figuring what lurked in country waters. The idea—not the reality—of leeches terrified me for years growing up (even after I figured what they were), but now, sometimes I’ll look at an action hero in a summer movie—all muscles and a very specific brand of masculinity—shrug, and think, whatever, the leeches will get him.
—Ruoxi Chen, Associate Editor at Tordotcom Publishing
Child’s Play (The Whole Damn Thing)
I have been scarred by plenty of viewing experiences, some more lasting than others. An early childhood showing of Arachnaphobia? Not a great idea. The opening scene of The Nightmare Before Christmas? Terrifying in the moment, but something I was over very quickly. (There’s a story there, about how my parents assumed it was safe because I’d adored Jurassic Park, and obviously that was more scary because it was more real. Reader, I posit to you that my child brain understood full well that dinosaurs were extinct and thus nowhere in my room at night, but all the terrors that sang “This is Halloween” definitely were, so how did my parents miss that crucial difference?)
But the truly warping experience of my life came at the hands of the wrong babysitter. When I was roughly four years old, my parents would sometimes ask our next-door neighbor to look after me at night. (They were musicians, and often worked in the same band, so nighttime babysitters were essential.) This neighbor was a divorced mother with an eight-year-old daughter, who found me quite irritating for being smaller, I think. One night, the neighbor got called off to work last-minute and her ex-husband stepped in to take care of us. I’d never met the guy before, but he came with movies from Blockbuster. Before he put the tape into the VCR, I recall with perfect clarity asking him “Is it scary?” And he looked me, a four-year-old child, in the face and said “No.”
However hilarious the movie might be to a full grown adult, Child’s Play is confined to the horror section of video store because it is a horror movie—but by the time I realized that I had been lied to, it was far too late. I asked if we could stop the film, but his daughter was enjoying it, so their solution was to tell me I should go to sleep on my own. Which is not what you tell a four-year-old you’ve just traumatized. So I watched the entirety of Child’s Play at age four, and it messed me up for years. I had to sleep with closets open, I would lie awake each night convinced I was about to be murdered by an angry doll. A few years ago at NYCC, a couple dressed their toddler up as Chucky for the film’s anniversary panel, and I am entirely serious when I say that these people are lucky that I didn’t dropkick their child on reflex. Moral of the story is DO NOT DO EVER DO THIS.
—Emmet Asher-Perrin, News & Entertainment Editor at Tor.com
THAT GODDAMN CLIFF SCENE — Mac & Me
This is dumb, but the famous clip from Mac & Me was actually a traumatizing moment when I first saw the movie. (In…daycare? I want to say? They also showed us the first Batman movie. And some of the kids stole my Mickey Mouse underwear and the whole class had to apologize to me and oh god I’m r e m E M b E R I n G)
Anyway, I had a very similar high-cliffed pond in my neighborhood and watching, uh, Me, get inexorably pulled into it from a great height repeatedly plucked at that shaky twang you get in your stomach when you’re on a precipice and anything can happen.
Everything goes wrong so fast. His speed is too much. His wheel-lock breaks. He’s falling from too high. He’s drowning. No one knows where he went. A slimy puppet is stalking him. I miss my parents.
Of course, now the moment is hilarious, but it was traumatizing at the time. I never actually finished the movie until Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffed on it in its latest Netflix season and apparently I saved myself further trauma because wow is it not afraid to continually torture its characters. But time heals. And Paul Rudd helps.
The nuclear dream from Terminator 2 is still too much, though.
—Chris Lough, Director of Tor.com
We’ve shared our most traumatic moments, but how about you, gentle readers? Gather around and tell us about the movies and television moments that haunt your dreams!
The Tau Ceti Eel scene in The Wrath of Khan. I was in third or fourth grade and I happened to walk into the TV room where Dad was watching the movie right at that scene and when Khan put the thing in Chekov’s ear, I IMMEDIATELY nope’d right out, turned around, and walked away. That scene put me off Star Trek for at least another three or four years, before I finally realized that it was in no way truly representative of the series as a whole.
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, with the boat ride through the tunnel!
Actually also Roger Rabbit
This one: http://www.thegeektwins.com/2018/01/the-moment-in-superman-iii-that-scarred.html
The Monstro part of Pinocchio is so totally Jungian it almost hurts: child braves the deep and a dragon to save his father, and in the process becomes a man (though, the entire film viewed through Jung’s lens is definitely a trip).
WRT The Ring: when it came out, I was a manager at a movie theater (remember those?). To make sure that we had built the 35mm films properly (remember those?), we had to preview them after hours. So, that meant that Thursday nights, we managers and a handful of the more responsible employees got to preview all the hot (and not) films a day before the release. However, since there were several films that came out, each of us had to preview a different film, alone.
So, I got The Ring. Sitting alone in a stadium theater with nothing but a Pepsi Blue (remember those?) and a bag of Reese’s Pieces to keep me company. I don’t think I slept for a week.
I’m there with Monstro trauma. I grew up in southern California, so I went to Disneyland fairly often. The Storybook Land Canal Boats ride starts off by sailing into Monstro’s mouth and, even though I knew the boats come out the other end after just a few feet, I refused to go on the ride until I was in my teens.
For me, it was the Don Knotts comedy, “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken.” Knotts, an aspiring reporter for a small-town newspaper, takes on the assignment of spending the night in an allegedly haunted house where a young woman was stabbed in the throat with garden shears while playing the organ. He makes his way into the deserted house, passing an oil portrait of the woman, and climbs into the organ loft, where the keys are covered with what appear to be bloodstains. Suddenly, the organ starts playing, and he dashes downstairs, only to see the the portrait has been altered with a bloody throat pierced by garden shears. It took me several hours to get to sleep for the next few nights.
Enterprise, what we got back didn’t live long… fortunately.
Another vote for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory but it was the girl turning into a blueberry that freaked me right out. So much so that I wouldn’t even touch blueberries as a child.
The Willy Wonka tunnel scene has to be the creepiest and most out-of-place scene ever in a kid’s movie.
The movie of Don’t Eat the Pictures was one of my favorites as a child, but what traumatized me was the demon face that appeared to ask Sahu his riddle. Sahu says that midnight is here, and everything goes all swirly as they wail in terror, and then this face appears and says in reverb that IT’S TIME.
My brother and I did a nostalgia rewatch last year, and the movie held up surprisingly well to our adult selves– but this time I cracked up at the low-budget 80’s CGI of my childhood terror. And the makeup. It looked like the floating head of Palpatine in drag.
@@@@@ Renata Sweeney: You may enjoy the Double Agent Vader series by Fialleril, who reacted in a similar way to both the treatment of droids in the OT and the casual use of slavery as background color in the prequels.
Here’s the series: https://archiveofourown.org/series/286908
And here’s what you might call Fialleril’s “Back of the Book,” i.e., loads of world-building: https://fialleril.tumblr.com/tagged/tatooine-slave-culture
@@@@@necessary_eagle
For me the anticipation of the demon — Sahu mentions it constantly in the lead-up to midnight — was always way worse than his actual appearance. He’s also strangely subdued and sarcastic, so even though he’s a jerk it bothered me way less than the judgment of Osiris.
Two Star Trek ones: the salt vampire from “The Man Trap” and the big green glowy fat guy from “And the Children Shall Lead.” Both those visuals gave me nightmares. (The latter still does, but now for more aesthetic reasons….)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I got into the little Edward Gorey books in the library at an art school my Dad worked at. I loved them, they were well-done and funny (particularly The Doubtful Guest).
One (which I have never since rediscovered) was about the Earth’s crust, I suppose. It said that the world we know about is as thin as an orange peel stretched over empty darkness. This was incredible Nightmare Fuel to me, whatever age I discovered it at.
The Invisible Monster episode of Jonny Quest. I wasn’t bothered by much as a pretty casual consumer of tv as a child but I still vividly remember trying to force my way between the sofa and the wall to hide from that thing. I still find invisible monsters the scariest. The only other time I really remember being scared by tv as a child was the flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz, but I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone without a story of being scared of the flying monkeys.
Hands down, the original 1980 Watcher in the Woods. (My youngest brother, who, to be fair, would have been like five or six at the time, had to leave the theater midway through the film.) Most especially scene where Jan has fallen into the river and is tangled under some tree roots.
Close runner-up: The tree-stump monster from 1980’s Flash Gordon.
Some of these really have me cracking up (because they are well written).
I can’t really think of anything too affecting, but I do know my parents had to take me out of Edward Scissorhands because I am pretty sure the scene where the bully gets pushed off the tower was the first/most graphic onscreen death I’d ever seen and it freaked me the heck out.
So MANY to name!
1 – Optimus Prime dying in the Transformers movie. In what universe is it ok that the leader of the good guys, the nicest space robot ever (better than Bumblebee, I said it) can die? Not only that but freaking Megatron gets a second lease on life? I spent the whole first viewing of that movie waiting, praying for Prime to come back to life and IT. NEVER. HAPPENED.
2- The scene in Return to Oz where Dorothy is making her way through Mombi’s castle to escape and the ENTIRE hallway of heads comes alive and starts screaming at her????? Good lord did that give me nightmares.
3 – My father’s parenting fail of the century was letting 7 or 8 year old me watch Predator along with him and a couple uncles as some family gathering. Yeah, let that sink in a minute. Yes I was captivated by the typical 80s red meat action stuff (still am if I’m honest) but what I remember most about that as a kid were two things. One was being terrified that the Predator was going to get me in my bed so I would sleep with the covers over my head because 7 year old me worked really hard to convince himself that blankets were as good as mud for hiding body heat. The second was the scene where Arnie’s band of soldiers come across the previous group that was sent in and they are all skinned and hanging from the trees. One of the characters makes a comment about guerrillas having killed those men. Which of course my child brain translated to GORILLAS. So I was also terrified of the primate house at the zoo until I figured out what a “guerrilla” was.
PS – The only movies I ever rented from the video store as a kid were Transformers and Return to Oz so I clearly enjoyed making myself scared/miserable.
For me it was the episode of Punky Brewster in the cave (The Perils of Punky). It scared the shit out of me for YEAAARRS.
My parents let us see Alien and Aliens when I was about 8 but the worst was when they took us to see Leviathan on the big screen. I had to leave half way through because my stomach hurt from fear. I also hated ET – the alien creeped me out so bad, the boy getting sick… Brr. I have only watched it once because I disliked it so much.
My sister snuck into the living room when she was about 5 and watched the whole original Night of the Living Dead. I noped out at the first scene with the zombie shambling across the yard. To this day, she refuses to walk on top of graves at cemeteries.
I know the columists and commentors skew young here, but no one mentions the death of Bambi’s mom? My dad gave up bow hunting for the table because my sister and I were so freaked out about that movie.
The flying monkeys from THE WIZARD OF OZ. The term “flying monkey” is now used for the people who back up narcissists and other nasty people by attacking their chosen targets.
For me, it was a scene from the first live-action Lord of the Rings movie (long before Peter Jackson’s version). I had not yet read the books, and the fight on Weathertop freaked me out. I actually didn’t know what movie it was at the time, but I figured it out a couple years later after I read the books.
The real tragedy in the Neverending Story was when Artax died. That scene is still hard to watch all these years later.
ARTAX DIES IN THE SWAMP OF SADNESS
So when I was…six?…my parents were watching “The Incredible Shrinking Woman”. Which was apparently meant to be a parody of some kind, or a commentary on consumerism? All I knew was, this woman got tiny, and then she fell into the garbage disposal and almost got ground up and then her family thought she really had gotten ground up and had a sad and tiny funeral for her in the rain while she was lost and alone and still getting smaller…
I measured myself every night for the next month, convinced I was going to shrink away into nothingness.
Hah. For vorarephile me, Monstro’s ilk were always the stuff of sweetest dreams.
My peculiarities also informed my movie traumas. I had and have a phobia of dead flowers, so I got a little traumatized by a Sesame Street episode about the letter F, where cartoon flowers abruptly drop their petals. I had a phobia of things leaking or overflowing, so the leaking (?) tank in Free Willy freaked me out. Spirited Away is a borderline case for this post because I was 15 or 16 when I first watched it, but I can’t stand to see or hear people vomit, so being stuck in a room with That Scene was the most horrific movie-watching experience I had yet endured at that point.
Oh, and Hexxus in FernGully. Just…Hexxus. Biggest NOPE ever. NOPE on top of NOPE on top of NOPE, as Mark Oshiro once said about something similar.
The whale scene in Pinocchio also terrified me in the theater as a child. But the most traumatic scene by far for me was in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I saw with a bunch of other kids at our local library. All I can remember is a scene where a fat kid gets sucked through a tube. It sickened and distressed me. After more than 40 years, I still haven’t shaken the image.
@19, seconded 1000%! That episode of Punky, and her friend’s weird zombified face in the wall, blew my little 6-yr-old brains right out the back of my skull, especially since I never watched scary stuff as a child.
Return to Oz was also a source of fascination, but the one I still can barely watch today in sympathy with how I felt back then is the Large Marge sequence from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. My adult mind literally tells myself over and over in the lead up to the scene that this is just a goofy Tim Burton stop-motion animation, and yet the memory of how it frightened me as a kid still makes me tense up and have to squint at the screen!
I would never let a 4 year old watch Chucky. I thought it was hilarious when I watched it but I was about 14. My childhood traumas are The Birds when I was 5 . I watched that movie one Sunday afternoon on tv and spent the rest of the day watching the crows sitting on the telephone lines out our picture window waiting to be attacked by them or a random sea gull. I also still can’t watch the 1st half hour or so of Jaws because I know the boy gets eaten. I still have not watched the 80’s Poltergeist movie all the way through from beginning to end. 12 year old me and a couple of cousins tried to sneak and watch it but, when it got to the part with guy ripping his face off my cousin screamed out loud and I was hiding behind the couch with my eyes clamped shut and my hands over my ears. Watership Down is a cartoon; it’s a kids movie right? No It Is Not! Thanks a lot Blockbuster.
I was a super sensitive kid, so I knew to stay away from intentionally scary movies/TV shows, but a few still caught me unprepared.
I’m in my 40s and still can’t bring myself to search for an image of this to post. The scene in The Last Starfighter where the growing replicant bot throws off the blanket and does that awful pulsing breathing thing? GAH. Sheer terror. I had a clothes dresser next to my bedroom door, and I kept seeing that thing peering around the edge at me. Also, the jump scare where the alien pops up in the car by the lake? So. Much. Trauma.
Totally fine with the garthim in The Dark Crystal, slightly wigged by The Secret of NIMH, but survived, and no lingering trauma from Artax dying, but show me a creepy robot, and I’m scarred for life.
Here 5 that come to mind in no particular order:
1: The Labyrinth – David Bowie and that Crystal Ball
2: Raiders of the Lost Ark – Melting Faces
3: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – The Child Catcher Guy, wtf
4: Willow – The Pigs, dear God the Pigs
5: Pee Wee’s Big Adventure – Too many to list, but the bike clowns, the black mouth gum, and large Marge come to mind.
Also, many of the ones mentioned. The Neverending Story is rich well of trauma for me.
I saw the last half of TNG’s Skin of Evil when I was about six, because my father was watching it. Put me off Star Trek for something like a decade.
Yes on Big Bird. Anyone else remember the evil kid in the Care Bears Movie? The episode of Punky Brewster where they get stuck in the cave with the skeletons and the clawed monster? The Grither from Tales From The Darkside? The THEME from Tales From The Darkside??
Even Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers! SS had a weird episode where the letter H is being shouted from Bert and Ernie’s TV, and Mr. Rogers had one where the magic kingdom goes all purple.
Anyone remember the Skeksis from The Dark Crystal movie? That whole scene where they sucked the essence out of the girl? So so many nightmares. There was also a movie direct to video called Magic Island where there’s a mermaid, sand sharks and a tree that grows pizza. That whole scene sticks with me in the weirdest moments.
I try to block it out of my memory, but the image of a woman’s head on a chihuahua’s body from Mars Attacks! gave me nightmares. I remember absolutely nothing about the plot or characters, but those freaky aliens and the human/chihuahua hybrids still creep me out to this day! I had a friend in college that tried to get me to watch it as an adult. He described it as Independence Day meets Men in Black, but I have no plans to ever revisit it.
Honorable mention goes to the pile of dismembered Borg bodies in the Voyager episode “Scorpion”.
As a child, Gremlins scared the you $&it out of me. I was not expecting that to be scary.
Thanks for reading my musings.
AndrewHB
• ET lying dead – DOWN BY THE RIVER! Or maybe he was just half-dead at that point. Anyhow, it disturbed me to no end seeing that poor little alien all pale and blotchy.
• The Jabberwocky scene from the 80’s TV version of Alice in Wonderland. Surreal disturbing stuff when you’re a kid.
• The lady in Superman III who gets pulled into a machine and turned into a robot. Or something.
An episode of some Alvin and the Chipmunks cartoon I saw as a kid. All I remember is something about lobster monsters from the moon. That episode scared me so much that for decades I was terrified of being awake when the moon was full, and would try to fall asleep as fast as I could so I’d be asleep when the lobster monsters came to eat me.
Alien – that fight in the escape ship at the end.
Star Trek The Wrath Of Khan – when Scotty carries his nephew’s corpse onto the bridge.
I second the Jabberwocky scene in the Alice in Wonderland movie. As a kid, I was NOT prepared when it jumped out of the present and chased Alice through the mirror. That thing was terrifying. I haven’t seen it in a very long time, but I’m sure I’d still have issues with it.
The scene in ET where Eliot first sees ET in the cornfield scared the hell out of me as a kid.
Every part of Return to Oz is pure nightmare fuel, but the Hall of Heads was what did it for me. I’m not sure I’ve ever actually seen that movie from beginning to end.
Definitely founds the the aliens and their experiments in Mars Attack, Gremlins, the child catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang rather creepy.
It wasn’t until I was older that I happened upon a movie that really kept me up at night – The Butterfly Effect. **SPOILER ALERT** if you haven’t seen this but would like to!
The protagonist discovers he has the ability to travel back in time to points in his life when he had blackouts as a child and doesn’t remember what happened to him. However, the more instances he travels back, the more drastically his present life changes, and though he tries to make it better, it gets progressively worse. He eventually finds himself at rock bottom – and worse, unable to change things at all – or almost unable. In desperation, he finds a way to go back to make one final change – to end his own life on the day of his birth.
**SPOILERS END***
I’ve found it to be one of the most depressing and horrifying endings I’ve ever encountered, and the idea of it kept me up for many nights.
The Emperor frying Luke in ROTJ gave me terrors. The Semi in Spielberg’s ‘Duel’ and Gene Simmons evil robot spiders in ‘Runaway’.
Emily!!! I 100% agree about Pinocchio. I used to have to hide behind a pillow when they were being chased. Went straight from that to Jurassic Park.
I was around the same age when I saw Child’s Play. I had night terrors for the next whole week, having the same hellish scenario of walking through an empty house corridor and being followed by a knife-wielding doll over and over each night. The mere sound of Chucky’s maniacal laugh brings me to tears. I am almost 30 and I have not – and will not – watch another Chucky movie. No one can convince me otherwise. And also, F*** YOU CHUCKY.
Kevin Costner finding someone’s body (his fathers?) hanging in a cage when he first gets back to his family home in Prince of Thieves. That gave me nightmares.
I nope-d out of Robocop the first time I saw it after the random executive gets killed by the malfunctioning “you have ten seconds to comply” robot.
And I’d forgotten the Superman 3 robot lady, so thanks for reminding me about THAT!
I must’ve been about 11, and we watched Ernest Scared Stupid in class one day. I now can think of that movie with fondness, but at the time, I actually lost a lot of sleep because of a strange recurring nightmare I had that night of being chased through the woods around my house by gross, slimy Trolls. Still gives me a squicky feeling, though, whenever I think of the movie.
I also recall being chased by my sisters with a Playmobile flashlight with the red filter on acting as the Red Bull from the Last Unicorn, but I had rewatched a couple of those scenes since and wasn’t terribly bothered.
@32 – YES! That evil kid from the Carebears movie! I
My kindergarten arranged a double-bill of Old Yeller and The Red Balloon. The second is a French fantasy film about a boy who has a magic balloon as a friend. For a time….
@47: Somehow I’ve managed to avoid Old Yeller, but I did see The Red Balloon in elementary school.
This movie poster freaked me out as a kid
I can remember being terrified while riding down the freeway with my mom for months after watching the semi trucks killing everyone in Maximum Overdrive. I just knew any second they would crush me
About Osiris, I think I heard elsewhere that not many people pass the feather test. And if you lose, a crocodile-thing eats your soul, or one of them, I think you have two… Anyway, fair enough to set a high standard of virtuous living, but I want to say still that I think the game is rigged. I mean, you’re just slightly less virtuous than required? Crocodile-thing. I suppose they don’t have to deal with complaints…
Of course ‘Ole Yeller’. Tom Selleck ‘Runaway’. And does anyone remember “I am the shadowman from under someone else’s bed.”/ Get the heebee geebess just thinking about it.
I was maybe 5 or 6 when Papillon was released and my parents took me with them to see it in the theater. There’s scene where a prisoner gets executed with a guillotine…
@50: That’s probably why a large part of the so-called Book of the Dead is concerned with making sure that your soul(s) is/are OK in the afterlife no matter what you may have done or neglected to do in this life.
IANA Egyptologist, so this is a very rough nutshell: It isn’t a singular book, but a selection of shorter texts ordered off a menu, so to speak, by the person who paid for the copy; they didn’t call it The Book of the Dead back in the day; you could call some of the texts spells, prayers, or declarations and be right no matter what you chose; the metaphysics of body and soul were very different from those familiar to Westerners.
I walked into my parents and older brother watching Invasion of the Body Snatchers and saw the dog with the man’s head and The Howling was another case being at the wrong place in at the wrong age. I remember worrying that my dad was going to turn into a werewolf and kill us all.
My Dad would take us to double features, that were highly inappropriate for a 7 year old, to excape the summer heat. I remember being very unnerved by Time Bandits and the giant boulder chasing Harrison Ford, in that famous film, became a recurring nightmare where I was chased by a giant ball of petrified hair (I blame my cats hair balls for that creepy detail).
@51: I was in college when I saw the Shadow man episode of the New TZ so it didn’t bother me much. I do remember it though.
Oh! And the Dragon’s Domain episode of Space: 1999 where they find a graveyard of lost spaceships, and in one of them is a scary door with tentacles not unlike the big flappy things in an automatic carwash.
I recall being afraid of puppets as small child. I don’t remember what gave me the phobia but I remember the nightmare. My big childhood trauma didn’t come from the media but from a well meaning teacher who introduced our class to a real dead human skeleton. He was named Sam and I was terrified. Of course to be fair many of the other kids were totally thrilled.
I think I was about eight years old, when my whole family watched clash of the Titans. The scene in Medusa’s lare where the soldier falls into the acid pool absolutely horrified me. (Shudder)
And it was maybe two or three years later that I saw Krull. The quicksand; and the spikes!
Also, the torture scene in Beast Master.
And the essence-sucking sequence in the Dark Crystal always freaked me out, no matter how often I watched it.
I am blind; so for me, it’s the acting, the sounds, and/or my all-too-vivid imagination of what’s happening to someone. What I imagined was probably worse than what was happening onscreen. Or maybe not.
I watched Krull again with my husband just a few years ago and was surprised, not to say shocked, at just how long that quicksand sequence is. Talk about long drawn-out suffering! Aaarghhh!!! But I loved seeing the movie agin after all these years.
Still, I really, really wish someone would bring out an audio-described version of Krull. I would love a detailed description of the fire mares. That just sounds so incredibly beautiful!
I was 9 when Star Wars: A New Hope came out. I may have been out of college before I could make it through the trash compactor scene without closing my eyes or looking away.
Not long after I had to leave the theater during the destruction of Krypton in Superman. Lois getting buried alive in her car was pretty traumatizing too, though I didn’t flee for that part.
@56 – Agreed, that episode was tough for me too.
Another vote for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, though for me, it was the girl turning into a blueberry that was worst part. I wouldn’t touch blueberries from that moment on. I also was scared of ET, that one Smurfs episode where they all turn into zombies, and probably a whole bunch of stuff that will come back to mind right when I start to fall asleep tonight.
My son (now 27) told me the scariest memory from his childhood was the boar-spirit scene with all the worms from Princess Mononoke. Mine was an old Twilight Zone where a mannequin takes over his owner. Still don’t trust mannequins.
Yeah, the twilight zone was a bottomless well of nightmare fuel.
I got through watching “A New Hope” with only mild fear of the trash compactor monster. It was the toy version of the Death Star when it became a problem. There was triangular space printed with images of the slimy walls, and all the garbage printed across its cardboard floor. And, unnoticed by me until my dad pointed it out amid the garbage (thanks dad), an eyeball on the end of a tentacle to represent the monster. Hours of childhood fun in store! I taped the compactor shut and no adventures took place there with my action figures, since NOBODY was permitted to remove the tape. Until my dad (yup, dad again) removed the tape when I wasn’t in the room, and even helpfully spun the death star so the open compactor would be facing me as I entered the room. So hilarious, ha ha. Hope you enjoyed that reaction, dad. I got over it mostly, but to this day I’m not crazy about eyeball stuff. Gawd help me if I ever need laser surgery, I might choose blindness. And keep “Clockwork Orange” away from me, I will never never never watch that.
>59, high five up top
The scene from John Carpenter’s The Thing where the possessed dog was put into the cage with the other sled dogs traumatized me so badly back in the early eighties that I still haven’t been able to watch that scene again.
Watership Down scarred me for life. I’ve still got no idea how that ever got released as a children’s film. It’s a horror movie, pure and simple. I challenge anyone to watch it now and disagree!
@15, that episode of Johnny Quest scarred me. I just wanted to let you know you weren’t alone.
I’ll add on my other: The end of The Creature from the Black Lagoon when he gets shot and dies, falling through the water. I sobbed. All he wanted was love and a companion. He didn’t understand how to get them and so they freaking kill him. That’s what you get when you’re different and alone and don’t know how to talk to people. At least, that was the message I took away from it when I was a tot. I keep a little picture of him taped to my monitor to this day.
I’m definitely dating myself, but “Darby O’Gill And the Little People” had several sequences which sent 5 year-oldme out of the room: the shrieking of the Banshee, the rearing Pookah, and scariest of all, the Death Coach with its headless driver.
I was maybe five or six, tops, and Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast was playing on TV.
That first, sudden appearance of the Beast, made more lion-like by his wide ruff, and Jean Marais’ rasping voice has stayed with me after all these years.
There was something in Dune that scared me so much I would quietly exit any conversation where the name came up. After decades I finally have forgotten what it was. I’m not going back to find out. I also had serious problems with the blender threat in Goonies and could never understand why anyone liked it after that.
For me, it was that damn Zuni fetish doll from Karen Black’s “Trilogy of Terror.” For some reason, my parents thought it was a good idea to allow 5 year old me to watch that masterpiece one Saturday night, and my life was never the same again. I spent most of my childhood afraid that freaky doll was hiding under my bed, waiting to stab me repeatedly in the foot with his tiny spear.
As an adult, I had suppressed the memory of “He Who Kills” until my wife found a VHS copy of “Trilogy of Terror II” and brought it home…That damn doll was back! And so were the nightmares!
The only other instance that traumatized me as a child was a trip to the movies as a kindergartner. Our teacher took us to see “Bambi,” but it wasn’t that movie that screwed me up. There was a live-action short that played before the movie that featured a black cat on skis. I have searched for years to find this short or at least the name of it, in the hopes that facing my fears might put this trauma to rest, but, to this day, that cat on the skis was for some reason one of the freakiest images to ever be seared into my mind.
Okay, I was not expecting to see Grudge, Ring, Rambo, or Child’s Play in a list of movies people watched as children.
Also how is Rambo an SFF movie?
The original Invaders from Mars, told from a kid’s perspective. Tough call which scenes caused the most nightmares: getting suddenly sucked under the sand, the tentacled alien head in a globe, or the alien probe descending slowly into the surrogate mom’s neck.
Winnie the Pooh. Heffalumps and Woozles…that shit was freaky. Also, basically all of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory disturbed me.
The flower dying in ET. I was 3 years old when I saw it, but still understood the meaning.
Goose dying in Top Gun. I can recite the movie, but it still gets me.
Snow White
Here’s a classic: Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The sequence with the creepy trees in the dark forest after she’s left alone by the Huntsman is spooky, but the scene that really terrified me was when the vengeful dwarfs hunt the Wicked Witch to her death amid the lightning and the crumbling crags. Scary stuff!
That scene in Pan’s Labyrinth with the pale monster with no eyes on its face but an eyeball in the palm of each hand…nope, nope, nope!!
My biggest was probably the tornado in Wizard of Oz. I was SO scared of tornadoes for a while that even having a tornado watch symbol on a video recorded off TV during a storm watch would freak me out, regardless of the actual weather outside. That one has mellowed over the years but I distinctly remember having a nightmare where I was running down a suburban street away from a tornado that was basically “chasing” me and ducking into a house, where I ran down into their basement — to discover that the scene from Wizard of Oz was playing on their TV. That amused me enough when I woke up that I think it helped me get over the phobia. :)
For me it was the death of Ben Dixon in Robotech when if first was shown on TV. It was really the first times that a character that I was heavily invested in died. I still don’t like it when characters are killed off.
Ben Dixon’s Death
Titanic made me pee my pants when the ship sank, but what really made a lasting impression on me as a child was Spirited Away, when Chihiro’s parents are turned into pigs.
Any 1950’s nuclear B&W GIANT BUG movie!!! I loved the original War of the Worlds, but giant ants/praying mantis, etc. living in a subway…nope right outta there!!!
also 2 episodes of the Night Gallery really stuck with me, 1st being the trash monster and the 2nd being Roddy McDowell killing his nagging wife and then waking up to find that he ‘finer things’d’ himself to death and is now in his personal hell, having his wife nag him for eternity. Which seems to have been her heaven, and just reward for being murdered… : /
Mine isn’t so conventionally scary I guess, but the Warner Bros cartoon where Marvin the Martian rehydrates those bird-like aliens — As a very young child, I had nightmares about those aliens for a long, long, loooooooooong time after watching the cartoon on Saturday morning.
I am truly dating myself but I was about 5 years old when the original The Day The Earth Stood Still was on NBC’s “Saturday Night at the Movies.” I got to the where Gort disintegrated the tanks and I went and hid under my bed. I didn’t see the full movie for like 20 years!
I have several: in The Wizard of Oz, it wasn’t the flying monkeys that terrified me, it was the angry, sentient apple trees. Pretty much all of Watership Down. I read the book as an adult and how anyone thought that story should have been translated into a “children’s” movie, I will never understand. Probably the most traumatizing though, was from the Twilight Zone movie. There’s an evil little boy who watches cartoons all day and can make anything happen by wishing it and HE TAKES HIS SISTER’S MOUTH AWAY! It’s horrifying.
As somebody whose sell-by date is definitely in the past, the death of Bambi’s mother was completely traumatic for me (my father died before I was born, so my mother was my whole world at that age).
But I’m surprised that no one has mentioned Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. The early scenes where the Huntsman is about to cut out Snow White’s heart followed by her flight through the woods with the terrifying trees. Almost as bad were the scenes near the end where the Wicked Queen (disguised as the old hag) flees after feeding Snow White the poisoned apple and falls to her death had me so upset, I had to be taken out of the theater.
I saw a lot of the other movies mentioned here as an adult, so I had no problem coping with them. However, two that really did scare me were Jaws and the first two Alien movies.
I saw Jaws on the day it opened. Because of the massive demand, the movie theater near me added a special midnight showing. During the scene where Richard Dreyfuss is diving, exploring the sunk fishing boat at night and the face of the drowned fisherman appears in the hole at the bottom of the boat, I screamed like a five-year-old. As I calmed down, I suddenly realized that I was clutching the woman next to me (and she was clutching me in the same way). We turned to look at each other and immediately disengaged with more than a bit of embarrassment on both our parts. Did I mention that we were total strangers?
When I saw Alien for the first time, I thought it was the scariest movie I’d ever seen, and my opinion has not changed after all these years.
SPOILER AHEAD
The scene where the whole crew sits down for a meal and the alien emerges from John Hurt’s stomach is undoubtedly one of the best crafted and most frighteningly filmed scenes ever IMHO. For those of you who don’t know it, except for Hurt, the other actors weren’t told what was going to happen. And back in those days, the effects were mechanical, rather than CGI, so the reactions you are seeing in the actors are relatively genuine. Aliens always reminded me of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None except that there was no doubt about WHO the murderer was. I have to admit that my biggest fear through much of the movie was that it was going to eat the cat.
And I must say I agree with some of the others who are shocked that parents would have allowed children to see some of those movies at very young ages. I remember that, after Snow White, my mother never trusted Disney again. Her decision to take me to Bambi was deliberate because she wanted to open up a conversation about death with me because another family member was very ill and that was something we were going to encounter very soon. I don’t think she expected that my reaction would be as intense as it was.
But as an adult, I have to admit I really love a good (emphasis on the word “good”) scary movie.
As an adult now, and an avid, lifelong horror fan, I have a pretty good stomach for scary stuff and gore, and always laugh at people when they cover their eyes “because it’s too scary.”
THEN I watched Annihilation, and the bear scene happened. And I was so thankful afterwards that I was alone.
Because I was covering my eyes, and my feet were off the floor, and I was screeching, “NO NO NO NO NO NO NOOOOOOOO!!!!”
@76 Our comments crossed in the posting. Great Minds …
where’s the death of optimus prime and all the original transformers?
How is Watership Down not on here
Oh and Arachnaphobia and The Gremlins
But Chucky was the worst one for me, even though I was like 12 or 13 already
I feel incredibly vindicated that not only f**king Monstro is on here, but The Last Unicorn and Secret of NIMH 2!!
Pinocchio made me terrified of everything when I was little. To this day, I refuse to watch it and Monstro is still something I hate with all my being lol
For The Last Unicorn, I was more terrified by the Red Bull, who’s only goal seemed to be to kill the unicorn? I barely remember the film aside from being terrified of the bull and the ending that was horribly sad to a 6-year-old me.
I’m surprised The Neverending Story scene wasn’t the one of Atreyu and his horse in that bog or whatever. I actually do not remember anything about that movie but that part and I hate it.
The movie that traumatized me as a kid was Jawbreaker. I know that probably sounds funny, but I saw it when I was probably, like, seven? And that scene where she’s in the trunk and she’s dead? Horrifying imagery. Also, for some reason, I didn’t actually know what a Jawbreaker was at the time, so I couldn’t hear about them later without flashing back to that scene.
The Secret of NIMH 2 is so dark despite being a more colorful and musical version of its predecessor. I enjoyed watching it more than the original NIMH, because I could understand it. But the whole experimentation and Martin’s madness were really, really sad. I’m more happy people know this movie exists lol
The goblins in the animated version of The Hobbit TRAUMATIZED me as a child. Someone also gave me the read along book and record for the book, and when tinkerbell’s chime told me to turn the page, I just about gave up the ghost, right there, when I saw the goblins, with their mouths open wide to eat Bilbo and his companions. I started imagining goblins coming out of my closet at night. I even made my dad burn the book in the fireplace and to this day, the music from that scene makes me clench up!
I was new to the military when Top Gun came out, and shortly thereafter had the opportunity to talk to a Navy pilot (he flew helicopters, but even so). He said that, yes, under the circumstances of that accident (a flat spin), the canopy could have hung there like that. So the accident was realistic.
I didn’t realize how realistic until several years later – Art Scholl, a noted stunt pilot, died filming that scene when the plane he was flying crashed.
Those of a certain age may remember when local “kiddie TV shows” regularly aired old theatrical cartoons from the 1930’s from Terrytoons or Fleischer or Van Beuren, and some of the scary-bad craziness that used to show up in them. One thing that always freaked me out was how many of them seemed to work in a scene with a skeleton coming out of a closet and walking around. And don’t get me started on those old Betty Boop and pre-Betty Boop cartoons from Fleischer where all sorts of inanimate objects would suddenly grow faces and start yelling.
I’ve never liked the idea of ameboid monsters that dissolve you. This meant sitting watching Grease at Primary School at the end of term one year turned out to be terrifying, due to the inclusion of the trailer for “The Blob” in it. I still won’t watch it. I also had a love-hate relationship with Pirates of Dark Water, which I loved but had to try to avoid seeing when the actual dark water was on the screen.
Also, my Dad sat me down to watch Dune with him when I was 6 or so. It’s my favourite film now, as it happens, but at the time it was another love-hate admixture, as my brain didn’t understand Paul’s vision when he sees Duke Leto dead from the poison capsule and has green smoke coming from a hole in his cheek. Some how I thought that the Baron had acid spit.
In general, I don’t think it’s so bad for children to see stuff like this every now and again. The monsters in the real world are always what actually mess people up.
A couple I haven’t seen mentioned yet….the movie The Incredible Shrinking Man from 1957 COMPLETELY freaked me out as a child–I caught it on regular TV as one of those late-night movies because my dad always let us stay up too late when we were staying with him. For those who haven’t seen it, the man shrinks to the point where he gets stuck in his basement battling off giant spiders because his wife thinks the cat ate him and he can’t yell loud enough to let her know he’s still alive and she ultimately moves out of the house because she doesn’t realize he’s still there. And then at the end he just keeps shrinking forever down to subatomic size which sent me into a complete existential crisis.
Another one–does anyone remember the Vend-A-Face sketches from the Muppet Show? A machine where the characters would put a coin in and these robot arms would mess with their face? I couldn’t even be in the same room as the TV when one of those was airing.
I remember hiding in my room while my parents watched Batman Forever. I was a hyper sensitive kid (and still am) so they told me to stay in my room til it was over and kept the sound low so I couldn’t hear but just knowing they were watching a “scary” movie was enough to scare me. I also clearly remember seeing the worms that the head-explodey aliens in season one of TNG were eating which scared me badly. I was sure Star Trek was a very, very bad show that I had to protect my parents from watching. Many years later I also thought I needed to protect them from watching Independence Day because I’d seen a clip of the scientist (Brent Spiner!) after he’d been killed by the aliens.
This isn’t SFF but I saw a commercial for The Lawnmower Man when I was four and had nightmares for YEARS after. I also had a weird recurring nightmare about a swimming pool full of evil green goo that would swallow up the swimmers. No idea where that came from, I don’t remember ever seeing anything like it??
I need to agree about Child’s Play. As a kid, I watched Jurassic Park when it came out, so I was about 5? & it was COMPLETELY fantastic to me, even though it did scare me at parts (it’s that trex scene!) But it was a scare I understood and didn’t mind. (IMO, trex was hungry, all the dinosaurs are; if they wanted to eat people, I could understand that. It wasn’t malicious.) We saw Child’s Play on vacation & it freaked me out for years. It didn’t help that at night, the house was old and rickety and lights would flicker out at random, leaving you in the dark, and closed doors would swing slowly open… creaking…
One other big fear was an episode of Are You Afraid Of The Dark?, The Tale of the Dead Man’s Float. I lived on the river as a kid, and people drowning wasn’t as rare as you’d like it to be… And… Yea. I was TERRIFIED for years, especially (??) showers.
The first movie I remember seeing as a small child was a rerelease of Sleeping Beauty and Maleficent turning into the dragon was way too much for me.
After watching Night of the Living Dead at a very inappropriately young age, trailers for zombie movies sent me to the lobby until I made myself sit through ALL of Fear the Walking Dead.
The worst though, was a being called Dr. Gloom Doom on a local afternoon show out of Chicago in the early seventies called BJ and Dirty Dragon, though my family makes fun of my early fear of the Wicked Witch of the West. (Wicked is such a great BOOK, not musical).
It was an episode of “Get Smart” where models were disappearing and being turned into wax models. After that for months when we went to a store a check the mannequins to see if they were trapped people. The first time I saw one disassembled i nearly freaked out!
73. Yes! The tentacle head in the jar! The lab table freaked me out! And don’t get me started about the sand traps…. I was about 4 when a teenage babysitter decided to watch that and gave me nightmares for the longest time! My mom was furious because now she had to find another babysitter :-/
@71: agreed, these are not children’s movies. Yet one can still—accidentally or not—see them as a child.
My parents basically let me watch everything, with the possible exceptions of pornography and extreme graphic horror.
As an eighties child my biggest fear was nuclear war. I still recall nightmares where I saw the world go down in atomic bomb flames. Most horror was just funny.
With the single exception of David Cronenberg’s “Scanners”. Also not a children’s movie. Yet it kept me awake at night, afraid that my head would be exploded by a rogue ‘scanner’.
Until education and science taught me such a feat is extremely unlikely, to say the least. Until then, those exploding heads (filled with dog knows what) kept me awake at night.
Oh yeah, one that I love now but gave me nightmares as a kid – Forbidden Planet, in particular the attack at the fence by the invisible monster. Literally gave me nightmare for years – another gift from a babysitter to 6 year old me. This is the scene – it happens at the 2 minute mark
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UrG3Fx69Ws
The fire scene in Bambi! I know some people had fears about Bambi’s mother being killed but for me it was the fire.
It was one of the many movies that we watched over and over again, but when it was time for the fire, I’d have to go out in the hall, bury my head in my lap and put my hands over my ears until one of my parents came back to tap me and tell me it was okay to go back in. I had nightmares about fires for years.
You don’t know childish trauma till you saw this below as a child in 80’s Poland:
https://youtu.be/oX-qDh5opAM
The Dragonfly in bellybutton scene from the first matrix. Could sleep for a week.
Dumbo’s mother being hauled away from him. FML.
A giant spider (as in, larger than an ottoman) in Gilligan’s Island.
Off the top of my head– face-melty Nazis, the ENTIRETY of Temple of Doom (oh u mean some guy getting his heart ripped out of his chest isn’t the whole movie? I’m not gonna rewatch to find out), the Shoe and Judge Doom taking off his glasses (shudders), the boar demon from Princess Mononoke, the air conditioner from Brave Little Toaster… and fraking *Poltergeist*. Kind of the whole movie but especially the closet bit. even now it’s a metric ton of NOPE.
@73 That was the one (the original) that did me in for MONTHS! I was only 5, with a good imagination, and I had nightmares (apparently more about the probe advancing to someone’s neck). Nightmares weren’t the only part; I screamed in terror (because I had to close my eyes and replay that image in my mind) when Mom tried to wash my hair in the bathtub.
Can’t think of ANY film that afected me that way, either before or since.
The transformation of real human Jack Torrance into a human monster in The Shining is so horrifying, especially in the isolated setting and locale of the Overlook Hotel, that nothing else, extraterrestrial creatures, earth monsters, or imagined demons from within our own selves, has ever scared me as much. Jack Nicholson’s “Here’s Johnny”, axe in hand, still sends shivers down my spine.
The original Invaders from Mars. The whole idea that you can just suddenly be sucked into a sandpit (or, in the movie, your parents can) and somehow be taken over by Martians who drill into your skull was very upsetting when I was a kid.
That Big Bird museum bit is…well I like it a lot, but I probably would have cried as a kid watching that. I also found LEGEND an entrancing fever dream as a kid, but I’ve never found Jack smirky, (Tom Cruise on the other hand), and Meg Mucklebones was nightmare fuel, though I found myself more affected by both the shadow dancer, and the people being cooked into pies, bits.
The last Unicorn wrecked me in all kinds of ways. And The Never ending Story was one of my favorite movies, while also being something that filled me with dread. The Sphinxes and the Death of Artax, but also the huge…tortoise? Were traumatizing.
Ernest Scared Stupid terrified me as a child, to the point I just could not deal. The evil troll thing turning kids to little dolls or whatever, it just annihilated me.
My parents didn’t usually let me watch the original Star Trek when it first aired, but somehow 9 year old me managed to watch all of “Miri”. For a full week afterwards, I couldn’t sleep alone and I finally confessed to my mother that I was terrified that I was going to be covered with the blue-green stuff and go crazy. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized the trigger was puberty, which was approaching rapidly when I first saw the episode. Poor hormonal me.
No movie or TV show ever impacted me as much as reading “The Time Machine” when I was 9 or 10. Those Morlocks…!!
I am so glad TV stations stay on at all hours now even if it’s infomercials.
Because that means they don’t go to static.
And when they go to static the TV People come out and get you and your steak grows worms and crawls across the counter.
Also “Night on Bald Mountain” though I like it now.
As a child, we watched THE WIZARD OF OZ on TV every spring, and that long hallways in the Wizard’s Palace featured in nightmares for a long, long time (I understood perfectly why the Lion made a break for it).
As a mother, we banned the R type slasher movies from our house, only to find out later that our darling daughter went to a neighbor’s and watched them anyway. (sigh).
One I haven’t seen mentioned yet: Robotech, Macross Saga. It was an animated Japanese space-opera series, and America’s first introduction (afaik) to giant transforming robots.
The nightmare fuel was the episode two-thirds of the way through this children’s animated television series where the Zentradi Grand Fleet (I.e the bad guys) attack the Earth, while our heroes mount a desperate last-ditch defense… which fails, and most of Earth’s surface, including most of the human race, is destroyed. I still enjoy anime, but for a kid growing up during the Cold War, watching cities reduced to smoking rubble and civilians blasted to ash gave me nightmares for weeks.
My moment of terror in Pinocchio was when they went to bury the money, in the dark. I couldn’t bear to look at it and got my mom to take me out of the theatre. It was years before I saw the rest of the movie. Also in Fantasia, when the Toccata mountains got darker and darker and I just knew they would go to black — and they did! I still get uncomfortable there. My poor mother was so sure I’d love that movie! I was about three, I think.
Aren’t babysitters the best? <sarcasm>
Mine was a friend’s older sister, so I never told my folks what kind of movies she was bringing over when she took care of 7-8-year-old me. Children of the Corn. The original Piranha. (I was terrified to swim if I couldn’t see the bottom of the water for ages… awkward when we had both a pool and a lakefront cabin.) A weird – to my kid brain – movie called Angel where a high school girl becomes a prostitute to take vengeance on the guy who killed her friend.
To this day, I’m not a fan of horror movies, and I think her early introduction plays a big part of it.
I’ve also never seen the end of The NeverEnding Story; it scared the holy heck out of me watching it at a friend’s house when we were… 9? and I hid in her bedroom until it finished. And I’ve never ever had any desire to watch it again. I’ve thought about reading the book; I got as far as buying it, but that’s as far as I got. I haven’t actually cracked it open yet.
@28 yes to The Birds – I’d forgotten that Evil Babysitter played it, too. Interestingly, not afraid of birds, but it’s because of Hitchcock that I get so stupid scared by scores in film. Music sets the scene, and man do I have a startle reflex…
@66: I watched that film in my late teens, and might have mourned the creature if I hadn’t known there were sequels, but was mostly busy lusting after the creature and scorning/envying Kay because she could have had him and refused.* I’ve always been a pushover for lonely and/or aquatic people.
@74: I liked “Heffalumps and Woozles,” but got a little traumatized by the close-up of Pooh’s bee-covered paw after he reached into the beehive, and closed my eyes for that moment in the subsequent zillion times I watched the film.
@78: I was OK with that fictional tornado, but real-world tornado watches reduce me to helpless gibbering terror.
I’ve never watched Watership Down, but I recently watched the trailer for it in another Tor post and that was enough to give me a nightmare.
*A bit like how Jane Goodall often says in her speeches that when she was young, she loved Tarzan and hated that he got with “that other stupid wimpy Jane.”
Just saying, Alfred Hitchcock has some wicked bad karma to burn off ….
For me, the most traumatic movie is King Kong. I haven’t watched the sequels nor the remake because it depresses me.
Is this the most embarrassing confession in these comments? I was a child victim of the Goodies, a surreal UK comedy show.
They had one episode where they were running a dog show, and in amongst the contestants was a toilet snapping its lid and stop-motioning around. Little me was utterly traumatised by that. I didn’t trust toilets for years. I had to flush them at arms-length and keep a very careful eye on them to make sure they didn’t lunge at me….
I’m obviously a little older than most of those who have responded, but the only movie I saw as a child that had a lasting effect was the original The Thing. To this day, when I sense a certain feeling in the air (it doesn’t have to be cold) and I hear dogs barking, I freak out.
The fire-breathing dragon Katla from the movie adaptation of The Brothers Lionheart. Also from the same movie when the soldiers branded people on the chest marking them as belonging to the tyrant Tengil made a lasting impression on me as a child.
And of course when the spider died in Charlotte’s Web made me and my brothers weep.
um……
Not sure if this entirely qualifies, considering it is more fantasy than SFF – but since Bambi and Dumbo have made it to the convo….
And on top of the above reservations I was already an adult when I got traumatized……
I nominate the death of Leslie in The Bridge to Terabithia