Badmovies.org Forum

   I can remember a couple of movies I saw as a child that scared the heck out me, not just during the movie but  for weeks and months after I saw the movie. The first one I can think of was "The Beast With Five Fingers", it was on TV. I was bout 8 years old. My father was watching so we all, more or less, watched also. When the hand started roaming around , that was pretty bad but when it started climbing up people, that was it. I just sat there with my eyes closed, didn't want anybody to know it scared the s#$@ out me. I couldn't sleep, every noise I heard I thought for sure the "HAND" was coming to get me. 
    When I was a teenager it was the "Exorcist". The movie was just plain scary, but especially for me it was the devil's voice, the whole theater shook when ever it spoke in it's very low, guttural voice. The face on Linda Blair and the devil's voice stayed in my mind for a long time, again. I would close my eyes and there it was, her face.
    For my daughter it was the zoom out view of the men standing in a circle to show the shape of something under the ice and a fin sticking out..."THE THING".
    Do any of you out there remember the scariest movie or scene from childhood? It will be interesting to here different views of what was really scary to you at the time.






                                                                                                                                                 

The bathroom scene in the Shining.  I was up late and "the Shining" was on HBO, the scene when the little kid goes in the bathroom, then Jack Nicholson goes to investigate... I was too scared to get up and go to the bathroom and Peed my pants in the living room.

Carrie.  The scene where the survivor goes to Carrie's grave and  Carrie's hand grabs her.   :buggedout:

I was probably about twelve at the time.  It just scared the bejeebus out of me.

I have several.

I saw the beginning of "at the mouth of madness" and i was scared senseless. It almost made it worse, that i didnt get to see the rest.

Alien 2 was terrefying.

There was an episode of the X files that had this weird fish creature in it, that roamed the sewers, that just really did something for me as well. Also a thing that made you scared to go to the toilet!!!

I was about 4 years old when The Wiz was released. That giant silver head with the smoke and flames coming out of its mouth was pretty scary.

Oh, easy one --
Or 2:
I was about 8 or 9, and went to see "Kiss of The Vampire" by myself(!) on the big screen in my small town hometown.  When the first vampire at the gravesite slashes Andrew Keir's hand with her fangs . . . I was outa there --
For weeks afterward, I was scared of guys in red vests, not because of what I'd actually SEEN in the film, but because the head vampire on the poster advertising the movie at our local theatre was wearing a red vest.
Then, went with a bunch of friends -- probably same age -- to see "The Reptile" -- Despite being surrounded by a bunch of kids all making loud fun of the movie, the first time the Reptile is revealed:  Those bug eyes and scaly skin -- Well, some of us went behind our seats and wouldn't come up.
peter johnson/denny BOO!!

Back when I was about 7,they had a show on TV (SHOCK or CREATURE FEATURE) which showed old monster movies.At the begining,they had a montage from old horror flicks as part of the intro...and one scene was Vampiria(from PLAN ) walking straight towards the camera...hands out streched...YIKES! I ran and hid!
 At about the age of eight,I was watching The PIT and the PENDULUM(1961) on tv,and when Vincent Price opens the casket with his dead wife in it,he bugs out and slams the door on the tomb."NO one will ever enter this room again!" Well,my big brother Mike
 locked me in a dark closet and said,in his best horror movie voice "NO ONE WILL EVER ENTER THIS ROOM AGAIN!".The SOB!

There were several that frigtened me out of my wits. One I did not know the name of for years, I just recalled a boy in a grave suddenly becoming vampiric in a startling scene. It's been suggested to me that this was from the TV Series "Salem's Lot " which seems about right as a I was very young and absolutely terrified of vampires for years to come after seeing this. Seriously I would as a child bundle up the bed covers around my neck so as to keep vampires from being able to bite the ole neck.  :bouncegiggle: I'm still hoping to get to see this series again to be certain. Also have very distinct memories of a beautiful female, busomeque vampiress too.

Then there was PREDATOR, which I saw at an older age but it frightened me so badly that I dreamt for a full week that something unseen was hunting me through the woods near where I grew up.

What's funny is these initial scares were so bad but eventually I would come to love and embrace the horror and sci-fi genres with a passion becoming a dedicated fan.  Of course growing up with He-Man, Astroboy, Tron, Black Hole, Star Wars proved a considerable help to leading me down this path too.

I was four years old in 1973. One night I sat down to watch George Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead with my four older sisters and my mother. Needless to say, it was an intense experience for me. So intense, that mom had to send me to bed halfway through the film. Talk about torture! There I was, all alone in bed with a giant window hanging over me…and the curtains wide open. I started imagining the faces of dead people appearing in that window, the ghouls desperately trying to claw their way into my room in order to get me. To make a long story short, I was not able to go to sleep and began crying. Mom had no recourse but to let me back out to the family room where I was able to see the rest of the film.

Simply put, the movie scared the living hell out of me. I was so traumatized by it that for years afterwards, whenever a commercial came on that was advertising an upcoming airing of the film, I would quickly turn the channel. In instances where I was not close enough to the TV set to turn the channel before being exposed to too much imagery from the film, I would run like hell out of the room. When that wasn’t an option I went with the old classic of sticking my fingers in my ears, closing my eyes and humming. It would be many years before I let myself watch the movie again, and by that time I found it no longer scared me. In fact, after that initial viewing, I found that very little truly scared me anymore. Why? Because Night of the Living Dead scared me so bad, I got it all out of my system at once. Others might theorize that having four older sisters was enough horror in my life and that explains why nothing much phased me afterwards, but that is a debate for another day. :wink:

I was 8 years old in 1975 when My Dad took Me to see JAWS....
When the Guy Head came out of the hole in the sunken boat....
I Nearly Splashed in My Underoos!  :buggedout:

I think for me it has to be Trilogy of Terror.  The story with the Zuni doll.  It wasn't really the doll that scared me (although it did) but the ending when she's possessed by it and is squatting in the kitchen with the knife waiting for her mother to come over. Something about that gave me plenty of nights of having a hard time getting off to sleep. I think it was her teeth.

i was 4 or 5 around when the second childs play came out (90? 91?)( i know im a youngin) and those goddamn my buddy dolls were still in production (they still showed commercials and stuff) anyway chucky used to scare the s**t out of me, and i can remember one time in particular i was sleepin with my mom on the couch and i woke up to none other than chucky's face laughing at me on the tv screen and i f**kin freaked. i woke my mom up yelling desperatly to change the channel. i dont know who was more scared me or my mother  :bouncegiggle:

I stayed up and watched "fire in the sky" the bit where he wakes up on the UFO and the aliens attack him, freaked me out!!!
And when the guy reads out the passage in Evil Dead 2, we lived next to some woods and I was convinced the spirits would get me too!!
 :bluesad:

Well, As I said in the other thread Rawhead Rex was the main one that really got to me.
But I can also remember catching a scene from Poltergeist where all the skeletons float up in the pool....that scared the hell out of me.

Madman!
Anyone seen this?
That terrified me when I was a kid, you say Madman 3 times and he comes get you!! (before candyman was made)
He was a giant caveman looking dude with a massive axe!!! :question:

Do you mean as in "cower down on the floor, behind the seat" scares? Then I have two of them.

"The Fly," when Patricia Owen pulls the sack off of Al "David" Hedison's head, which I saw in the theater.

And "Atomic Submarine," when the Cyclops, or whatever it was, made its first appearance, which I saw on television.

Back when I was 9, my grandfather rented "Don't look Now". I watched the whole movie (bored out of my mind), and at the end when that old lady? Dwarf appeared, I couldn't get that face out of my head.

 :buggedout: When I was about 5 or 6 my great grandmother would let me watch Mothra. I used to get these weird nightmares about a giant moth living in our cross-space. I never fully recovered from that until I was ten, when I realized that, if a giant moth monster ever did attack, it was just as likely that the power rangers would come and defeat it.

pet cemetary.  That girl with the spinal diease.  The thought of her still brings shivers to my... something other than spine.

I'm pretty sure everyone who was born in the past twenty years has gone through a faze when Chucky terrified them. I know I certainly did.

When I was growing up, that part with the evil clown doll in the kid's room in the 1st Poltergeist scared the living sh*t out of me.

The "Father's Day" and the "Crate" stories were nowhere as bad as the Cockroach part of Creepshow. 

The biggest scares I can remember came from 2 really bad movies, I used to go alone to the Saturday matinee at the local theater, I was about 8 or 9 when I saw these movies. The first was Teenagers from Outerspace, silly title, silly movie, goofy looking monster crawdad thing, except at one scene the teenager has this thing in the back of a bobtail truck and a hobo decides to get in and sneak a ride, didn't show what happened to him, just got to hear loud screams and then this cracking popping noise that I assumed were his bones breaking as the space monster tore him apart. The second was Wasp Woman, it wasn't the title character that scared me, it was the alley cat the mad scientist tested his formula on, when he entered his lab and the cat/wasp thing attacked him it scared the daylights out of me. I've seen this movie several times since then and actually the attack was not that spectacular but as a youngster I could really get into these movies. Both of these made the walk home in the evening something to be remembered.  :bouncegiggle:

I'd say the movies that have given me the heebie jeebies (or outright scared me) would be:

1)  Prince of Darkness.  Saw this one on HBO one night, and the scene at the end, when the guy is reaching towards the mirror, I couldn't go near a mirror in a dark room for days.  Had to reach one arm into the bathroom, turn the light on, all the time expecting to feel something grabbing my arm....

2)  Jaws 3 (yeah, I know)  I was probably 12-13 when this came out.  Hid behind my knees in the theater seats for some of the shots.  Now, just like the rest of the world, I find it hilarious.

I've never watched a lot of "horror" movies, and my parents wouldn't let me go to see them, or take me to see them, when I was a kid....

The creepy gremlin on the wing in the Twilight Zone Movie.  Especially when he does the "no no no" finger wave when Lithgow's character tries to shoot him. 

Poltergeist.  The tree.  'Nuff said.

(In a lesser vein, there also was the opening "moonlight swim" from Jaws...still creepy to this day...and, though I was barely a teenager when I saw it, the nuclear detonation scene from The Day After.)

  I forgot about that part in the movie....I have to agree with you on that one...that stuck with me too.  :buggedout:

Even though it's not necessarily a "scary movie", I always had to close my eyes during the "get her" part in Ghostbusters.

 :question: I can't think of the "get her" scene.  Is that the very beginning when they meet the librarian ghost? 


The first real scary movie I watched was Nightmare on Elm Street.  I remember having bad dreams where Freddy's long arms would stretch out from his body and he would walk down the street towards me. 

Also, the scene in Pet Semetary when the little boy slices Herman Munster's achilles tendon and then opens up his cheeks for good measure.  Ouch!

I think I've explained this before, but here it goes again: When I was 10 I caught on TV the scene from "RoboCop" where the thugs kill Murphy. I think I was thraumatized for weeks, although many years later I saw the movie and has become one of my favourites.

I also developed an intense fear from the first "Alien" film, but that was before I was ten, and mainly because its reputation and  the concept, which I found very scary. I quickly overcame that fear after seeing it for the first time.