Thanks to a well-meaning relative, or a pliant baby-sitter (or, occasionally, a malicious one), many of us are introduced to certain scary movies long before we’re actually ready to handle the long-term terrors they breed. Horror movie tropes often rely on a combination of our own irrational fears and a hyperactive imagination—for kids who already ardently believe in sci-fi and fantasy worlds, horror can be a bit much to process. And it turns out several of us at Tor.com have such movie trauma in our past.
From killer dolls to sleeping terror, each of these were basically phobias in the making for our tiny selves.
Child’s Play
When I was about four years old, I had a babysitter who lived in the apartment next door. She had a daughter who was eight. One day she was called in for a late night shift when she was meant to babysit, so she asked her ex-husband to come over and look after me and his daughter. I’d never met the guy before, which was weird enough—and then he decided to turn on a movie. Knowing that I had certain limits (even as a four-year-old, yes, I know), I dutifully asked: “Is the movie scary?”
He said, “No, not really.”
No, not really.
NO. NOT. REALLY.
Then he put on Child’s Play. You know, the horror movie about the doll who MURDERS KIDS. And when I realized that this plan was going very, very wrong, I asked if we could stop the movie so I could go to sleep. He told me that I was welcome to head off to bed by myself if I wanted to. (His daughter, being four years older, did not find the movie frightening at all and I don’t think she liked me much, so she didn’t really care that I was terrified.) I tried to stay in the darkened bedroom alone with my stuffed raccoon, but the shadows in the room were moving. I was certain of it. So I came back out into the living room and sat through the rest of the film with a pillow in front of my face. And that’s the story of how I spent the next few years convinced that a homicidal doll lived in my closet—until I was told by an acupuncturist with a good grasp on child psychology that I could ask my stuffed animals to protect me at night and do all my worrying for me. A year after that my fear of the closet finally vanished for good, but I’ve never really lost my deep-seated sense of panic when I’m reminded of that ridiculous franchise. Someone dressed their toddler up as Chucky for the 25th anniversary at New York Comic Con and I almost dropped-kicked that poor kid on sight. Looking up an image for this (above, from the sequel) was traumatic. I should have had someone else do it. I’m going to go look at pictures of puppies for an hour now. —Emmet Asher-Perrin
Arachnophobia
Every time I go to put on shoes, I curse my babysitter… Victoria, bless her, introduced me to some of my absolute favorite movies; I still remember the utter delight that gripped me over my first watch of Clue. But in her “what do you MEAN you haven’t seen it?” zeal, she’d sometimes pop in VHS tapes and DVDs that I wasn’t yet ready for. Case in point: Arachnophobia—which to be fair, didn’t know whether to market itself as a thriller or a comedy.
It’s got an insane premise, in which a deadly Amazonian spider hitches a ride to California, mates with a local spider there, and produces egg sac after egg sac of tiny, equally venomous, babies. The Amazonian general and his American queen are pretty horrifying, as face-sized arachnids go, but it was those teeny-tiny offspring that haunted me: dropping down from a lampshade right as someone tugged the string, lurking in the toes of shoes lined up in front of the door, and—I’m shuddering—the wave of baby spiders crashing over the TV while the news reports about the epidemic. The thought that death, no bigger than a quarter, could be lying in wait, struck fear deep into my eight-year-old heart. I still can’t put on my shoes without turning them over and shaking them out. Just to be safe. —Natalie Zutter
A Nightmare on Elm Street
For some reason I saw this when I was 6? 7? Our neighbors had it on tape, my mother and I went over for a movie night, and I cajoled her into letting me watch it—I had seen R-rated movies before! I was tough! And anyway I could always just go into another room if it upset me.
Therein lies the rub, because it didn’t upset me while I was watching it. I thought it was great. Freddy Krueger was hilarious and gross, the kids were sympathetic enough for me to care, but not so sympathetic that I was undone by their gruesome deaths. I related to the conundrum of wanting to stay up late and falling asleep against your will. I also really liked the reveal the Freddy had done terrible things to children—the fact that the parents murdered him felt like justice to me. But then you get that last, horrible scene, where Nancy Thompson’s mother is murdered by Freddy just when you think everything’s OK. In one perfect twist, Nancy realizes she’s still trapped in a nightmare, the justice achieved by killing Freddy is undone, and evil triumphs. Wes Craven was a master at creating resonant horror, and this is a perfect ending. Old, Grizzled Leah can do naught but salute it.
Unfortunately Small Leah had to go home and go to sleep immediately after watching the movie. I still remember the dream I had: I was at our house, exactly, every detail correct. My parents and brother were there with me. And the monster wasn’t even Freddy—instead I was stalked by a Grim Reaper figure, cloaked, with coal-red eyes, silent, who would disappear and reappear much closer to you, with no warning. I understood in the dream that I was dreaming, and that it didn’t matter, because if a monster could move between dream and reality with no effort, how did you stop him? My mother tells me that my nightmares continued for weeks, what I don’t think I ever told her was that the real nightmare was too much for a child to communicate: how could I ever know again when I was awake, and when I was dreaming? —Leah Schnelbach
Now that we’re thoroughly creeped ourselves out remembering our own traumatic movie experiences, we turn to you: what was the first film that made you hide beneath the covers?
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
That movie just freaked my 10-year-old brain out when it first aired on TV (it doesn’t anymore). Between the veiny-faced underground mutants and a cobalt-based nuke destroying all life on the planet (47-year-old spoiler, deal with it)… I couldn’t sleep for days.
Jaws, then Phantasm. My aunt took me to Jaws, despite Mom an Nana saying I’ll have nightmares. Said I’d be alright and if course first night nightmares.,.. Phantasm also young, and saw alone. Tall Man and the finger turning into a fly had me hiding. Speaking of The Fly….. “Help me !”
The original Fright Night. I was 8 and one of my older cousins picked it out at the video store (it was their turn to pick a movie and we were unsupervised) and I watched it at my grandmother’s while my mom cut the grass. As soon as it was over, I went out into the hot, bright summer sun and just stayed there, I was so terrified. That night, I climbed in bed with my parents, which I hadn’t done since I was 4 or 5. Considering I had always been a child afraid of things that go bump in the night, I don’t know why I sat through it.
In Cold Blood, the movie about the conviction and executions of the killers of Holcombe KS’s Clutter family. Based on the Truman Capote true crime novelization. I would have been about 8 or 10, and was watching it as a late-night feature with my dad.
The scariest part was Robert Blake’s continually asking to to go to the bathroom before the hanging, since he knew he would mess himself. Then, the release of the trapdoor. . .
I’m not sure it was the first, but The Watcher in the Woods (1980) was distinctly scary. To the point that my (6 year old) brother had to leave the theater half way through, although myself, I stuck it out.
Actually, The Last Unicorn. I would watch the film almost every day when I was four, five years old, but hit behind the sofa cushions every time the Red Bull appeared on screen, begging my father to fast-forward the scenes, being absolutely terrified.
My dad talked me into watching “An American Werewolf in London” with him, which granted didn’t take much convincing since I’d always loved scary stories. I wasn’t even that young at the time, at least twelve or thirteen. I think my dad had just been impatiently waiting until I was old enough and he could share some of his horror favorites with me.
I slept with the light on that night.
Gremlins. My parents thought it looked like a cute kids movie with a fuzzy little creature (and I did love my stuffed Gizmo that I eventually had), but then things took their predictable turn and tiny me–I was maybe 4 or 5?–was freaked out. Nightmares and fear of the dark for ages after that, convinced if a single digit hung over the edge of my bed, I’d be drug into a subterranean cavern beneath it where singing, dancing gremlins would do horrible things to me and other children they’d captured. I distinctly remember that dream 30+ years later.
Nightmare on Elm Street. Then Pumpkinhead. That unstoppable monster coming for you got its hooks into me. I still have trouble with Freddy now :)
Ernest Scared Stupid. I was 7 and my mother took my brothers and me to see it in theaters as a kind of family outing. The trolls freaked me out sufficiently that the theater owner had to sit with me outside the building while we waited for my father to pick me up, as my mother and brothers stayed and finished watching the film. It was several years later before I finally watched the rest of the movie.
Aliens. It’s now my favorite movie of all time. But when you’re 7, not so much. Thanks, Dad!
when i was about 6 my dad was watching a random vampire movie which was on tv. my mother told him i shouldn’t watch but he decided it wasn’t THAT scary, right? so he let me stay. and at first i was doing all right, i even was following the plot pretty well… there was a vampire who’d moved in next door to this boy and no one would believe him that the neighbor was a vampire. so his mother invited the new neighbor into the house for a visit, which the boy knew was a big mistake. i got as far as the part where the vampire shows up in the boy’s room and chokes him, shoving him out a window, only to be stabbed in the hand by a convenient pencil and go all monster face and that was that. i was officially terrified of vampires, a fear which lasted years, with that scene, the pencil through the hand and the monstous face, burned into my memory.
fast forward a bit, and i’m in college and have long gotten over the fear. but i’ve never been able to find that movie to re-watch it as a young adult; my parents didn’t remember what it was and this was just before the days when it was easy to google things like this. it’s october. my roommate is flipping channels looking for a horror movie to put on. when, what does she flip past? but that scene. that exact scene, the one which i’ve had burned into my brain. “go back, go back!” i cry. and there it is.
the very first, original Fright Night.
and on that day, any last lingering fear of vampires i might have had was killed. because the vampire? is prince humperdinck, and there is no way in heckie i can be scared of him. (chris sarandon is probably a perfectly nice fellow but….)
and that’s the epic tale of the first movie to ever terrify me. (side note: Fright Night 2 is a delightfully cheesy riot, featuring, among many things, a vampire on roller skates.)
Hmm…I remember the first movie that visibly disturbed me was actually Edward Scissorhands (specifically when the guy falls off the roof). I don’t remember when I first saw those horror movies, but I was old enough to enjoy them without nightmares.
Although now as a mom, the scariest thing about this article is the idea of a babysitter leaving my kids with some guy I don’t know, haven’t vetted, and him showing my kids stuff I may not approve of.
Poltergeist. For weeks after watching that movie, I had to push my bookshelf in front of my closet every night before going to bed.
What’s the Matter with Helen? I would have been just a few weeks on either side of my ninth birthday. I thought it must have been in the days before movie ratings, but apparently not, so God knows what my mother was thinking. That movie creeped me out so much (and I loved watching old monster movies on TV). There were parts I absolutely couldn’t watch and I had nightmares. To this day seeing Shelley Winters in anything (even Batman!) makes me a little uneasy. As I recall it was in a double feature with Big Jake, and that was hard on me, too. But in fairness I was already a mess from the other film.
Carpenter’s “Prince Of Darkness”.
I saw it on TV when I was about 11 or 12, and it creeped me out. The message from the future is just engraved in my brain forever, and almost 30 years later I can still picture some scenes from the movie like it was yesterday.
I’m 58 now. When I was a kid I loved scary movies but hated when somebody caught fire and ran around screaming. It happened in the original War of the Worlds. In Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman an old woman fell in a fireplace and ran around burning and screaming. I think it was meant to be comedic but, Ugh! Also the film Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte. That’s enough. {shivers}
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the old B&W one. I watched it at ~12 one evening, thought it was no big deal, went to bed, and subsequently stayed awake for hours just … thinking.
The Exorcist. I can’t remember how old I was but not old enough, I’m thinking. For a long time after that I hated going into my dark bedroom and turning on the light because I kept imagining she’d be there in my bed. That movie at such a young age is probably why I was a horror-head until my late teens – being scared was delicious! – and why I am not anymore. There isn’t anything that can scare me anymore. Well, nothing but the news.
I have been thoroughly scared by a total of 5 movies in my life:
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Children of the Corn
The opening scene of The Ring
Nosferatu
Cloverfield
The Exorcist. I wasn’t even that young but crap that movie really affected me for some reason.
I never liked the hack and slash, the graphic violence for the sake of gore type horror movies, I find them very boring and very repetitive. I like my horror on the subtle side, my imagination does a much better job of scaring me then a bunch of mindless blood soaked gore.
Cliche to say, but Watership Down. Woundwort terrified me, still does.
Also a movie called Wolfen made me afraid of dark streets for over a year.
I am SO GLAD to see Arachnophobia on this list– my best friend and I freaked the hell out of our 8-year-old selves with that one. As a teenager it was Misery. I’ve never quite been able to buy Kathy Bates in a benevolent film role because of it, and if I wasn’t already horrified by the idea of being physically incapacitated and at someone else’s mercy, I have been ever since.
OH also, Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH was kryptonite when I was 6-7 years old. My parents totally thought it would be fine since it was animated, but it scared the bejeezus out of me and TBH I still find it kinda creepy.
The Haunting (the original 1963 version, not the 1999 POS remake.)
Not for myself but for my 3 year old daughter. I recently decided that she would share in my re-watch of all star wars movies to get psyched up for ep8. We watched 1 a night, when there was time. She was going fine, only somewhat even paying attention, but man after ep6 she had a night terror that night. On reflection ep6 is really violent for a 3 year old!
Personally I have no memory of being scared from a movie, not in the sense that I would get nightmares or develop a phobia, but sometimes the violence would wig me out. But mostly I thought it was silly or cheesy, the more over the top the less scared I was.
Then when I was 13 I saw Saving Private Ryan. Man did that movie stick with me. Supernatural horrors come to life and you hide from them in a closet instead of simply picking up a weapon or driving away was dumb to me. But being exposed to the horrors mankind actually did to one another on the beaches of normandy; That was horrifying.
No one speaks up for Trilogy of Terror, with Karen Black and the Zuni fetish doll?
I’m sort of giving away my age, but the very first movie to really, really scare me was The Crawling Eye (1958). No, I didn’t see it in the theater, but it was on TV when I was a little kid, and just the commercials for it sent me screaming into my room. To this day, I have never seen that film, and I plan to never see it. All this time later, and even thinking about it gives me the willies.
I have always loved scary stories, movies and TV so this is a tough question. Not much of anything gave me nightmares and few things had such a lasting impression than the crap I’d just invent on my own. However, I got seriously freaked out by an episode of Batman where they show Clayface’s backstory; the guy is force fed a lot of toxic cosmetics by mob goons. I remember being utterly horrified by that at age…5 or 6, I think. No nightmares though, thank goodness. I also recall being a bit spooked by the flesh-eating scarabs in The Mummy. but no lasting damage done. Also, I caught the scene in The Cell where a living horse is abruptly section by falling glass panes. That did creep me out a while, as did the film in The Ring, which at least inspired my nightmares, even if nothing from those made it into my subconscious. I was older for those, 10, 11 and 12.13 respectively.
I probably scared more by the opening 15 minutes of Clockwork Orange, which my brother insisted on watching when I was 12 and my mom had forgotten what happened in it. She shut the movie off when it got to the break in and I was IMMENSELY grateful.
My dad, for reasons only he knows, decided to show me “The Dark Crystal” when I was six years old.
Make no mistake, I LOVED it and it remains one of my favorite movies. But between the Skeksis and that scene where the crystal shard is used to mindwipe the podlings and (almost) Kira? I slept with all my lights on that night, and there are still some scenes where my first impulse will always be to watch through my fingers.
The first movie to actually scare me was the 1976 TV movie ‘Sybil.’ There is a horrific sequence in which Sybil (Sally Field) dreams of carrying a box of kittens while being pursued by a decapitated cat. All these years later just thinking about that scene disturbs me.
The first time I ever watched one of the Friday the 13th films. I think (maybe?) it was Part 2, years after it came out, when I was in college. I was alone, it was late at night, and I was sitting in the floor of my apartment watching it with the lights out. It was towards the end of the movie and the details have fuzzed in my head, but it seems like there were a couple of people in a cabin with the door locked, the killer was outside, and for some reason they decided to go outside too. One of them was reaching for the doorknob…and my power went out, suddenly plunging me into darkness. I came THIS. CLOSE. To screaming myself hoarse, but recovered enough to get a flashlight and check all the closets before I went to bed. To this day, 25 years later, I’ve still not seen the end of the movie. I’m not even entirely sure which of them it was, but MAN, what a rush that was.
Yep, Watership Down. It’s about bunnies, how bad can it be? All the bad.
When I was a pup, I was pretty good at self-monitoring and being on the lookout for horror/scary movies. I was so afraid of being afraid I kept tight control on that sh*t. The reason? Sitting in the back seat of the car at the drive-in theater while “Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte” rolled on the screen. I’m not certain I ever forgave my parents for that, I certainly never trusted my Dad’s movie selections after that!
Rose Red
Tremors, and a bit later, Jaws. We watched them with the whole family and I must have spent half of both movies under the blanket behind my grandmother’s back, but boy, were they something special (also, my first crush with Kevin Bacon, if I remember correctly).
To contribute in a more ‘horror’ aspect (even though it’s not a horror movie), the one movie that I recall actually giving me nightmares (I was in high school by now) was the Julie Taymore version of Titus. There is one scene in particular, where Lavinia’s family finds her after being raped and mutilated that stayed in my head for a long time.
As a kid, I remember having to kind of hide behind the blankets during the wolf chase in the old animated Narnia movie. Fenris Ulf still gives me the creeps!
@33 Watership Down is a bunny snuff film. From Fiver’s visions, with Bigwig getting visibly choked by a snare, Violet meeting the hawk “….Violet’s gone.”, Holly recounting the mass gassing of a warren in the worst acid trip sequence ever, a dog literally holding a disembowelled bunny in its mouth. And that is only half of it. That movie was nothing short of a snuff movie for furries.
One summer on vacation in Cape Cod my parents took my older brother and I to the drive in to watch a new movie just come out that was filmed just down the road a piece. It was called “Jaws”. I was 9. I was ok until the head rolled out of the bottom of the boat. I think I made a small wimpering sound as my soul died.
Not a movie, but there was an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark in which a teenager dies but doesn’t realize it and becomes completely invisible to his family and friends. This scared me on a deep, deep level and is the one thing from movies or tv in my childhood that occasionally comes back in nightmares.
The Tingler, 1959 movie with Vincent Price gave me nightmares about that creepy wiggly bug. Years later I found out the movie was supposed to be campy fun. Oh well.
I was utterly freaked out by the chewing-gum scene in the 1971 Willy Wonka movie.
One of the bigfoot movies from the 70s – either “Sasquatch: the Legend of Bigfoot” or maybe “Legend of Boggy Creek” had a scene where a bigfoot reaches through a window to grab his victim. I saw this scene on TV as a small child and was afraid to sleep near a window for years. It took moving to a house on a open plain (instead of the woods) for me to feel comfortable leaving my bedroom window open at night.
For me, it’s a toss-up between the original 1963 The Haunting and Quatermass and the Pit, which absolutely gave me the heebie-jeebies when I was a kid and caught it on TV.
Dark Night of the Scarecrow. A 1981 made for TV movie. I would have been 8 or 9 when I saw this on TV. I’m sure it doesn’t hold up, but back then it gave me quite a scare.
If you believe my late parents – and I’m not sure I do given how often they’d lie about bizarre and irrelevant things – the first movie that ever scared me was E.T. Apparently I found it so scary I cried in fear. Given how many traumatising scary kids films were released in the 80s, it’s kind of sad the one I found scariest at the time was so soft.
The first movie I remember finding scary is Return to Oz, when it was played at school in grade one, and given the Wheelers and the room with all the heads I don’t think anyone can blame me.
Time Bandits. To be fair, I was six. I’m not sure what my mom was thinking in choice of movie.
The original Psycho. I saw it in the movies when I was 12. My mother warned me but I scoffed. Man was I wrong. I was terrified of stairs, showers and the cellar for weeks.
My parents didn’t let me watch scary movies for the most part when I was a kid. When my uncle was babysitting me (this was before streaming, it didn’t matter if anything was on TV or not, you just watched whatever caught your eye), I saw Candyman on cable and that did a real number on me.
@42 Oh my God, the “Candy Man Can” song freaks me out but for reasons separate from the movie. When I was a kid we used to spend Spring Break in a coastal Oregon town where the candy store- windowless and painted with red and white stripes- blasted that song from outdoor speaks 24/7. It was next to a parking lot and I remember returning to get something from the car one evening and feeling like the owners wanted children to go to their shop a little too badly.
@46 The original illustrations of the wheelers are even worse.
Maybe this will mark me as a wimp, but I don’t care. Drive-In theater, with my parents. I’m maybe 4? Anyway – Kid wins a golden ticket for a tour of a candy factory, that’s nice, and Grandpa gets out of bed, yay. The guy who runs the place is a little weird, but I was ok until THE FAT KID GOT SUCKED INTO A TUBE. So – now I am concerned, but we are assured he’ll be ok, mostly maybe. Then THE GIRL TURNS PURPLE AND STARTS TO BALLOON OUT and I had had *enough of this. Into the back seat, hide my head. Eventually, after a long while, calm down enough to poke my head up and they’re on A WEIRD PSYCHADELIC BOAT and everyone is having some sort of acid trip or something. And I bowed out, didn’t watch it again until my teens.
So yeah – Willie Wonka. Not for kids. Sorry.
And I’m surprised: Has nobody mentioned Wizard of Oz yet?