What frightened you as a kid/teenager?

[Steve Byczek]

akiratubo..I bet you were scared of "The Elephant Man". I remember just seeing commercials on TV promoting it scared the living hell out of me. Even though John Hurt had a potato sack over his face during the preview...just knowing this incredibly ugly person was beneath the sack was enough to make me stay home when my parents went to the theater to see it! LOL!  When I found out it was based on a true story...I almost flipped. I finally did see some real photographs of the real-life "Elephant Man" and I almost had a coronary!  My parents said there was an advertising campaign that said "The Elephant Man" would never be shown on television. Of course it has been shown on TV more recently. But back in 1980 before videocassettes,cable,and DVD's,they probably didn't expect such a depressing and disturbing film to ever be shown again.

akiratubo...Have you seen "Twilight Zone:The Movie"? There is a scene in the film where a boy with special powers removes his sister's mouth, and they do show a close-up of her face without the mouth. I bet this would have creeped you out as a kid. It sure did scare me as a teenager! Trivia note:The actress who plays the voice of "Bart Simpson" is in this movie.


Keep on posting!

Sincerely,Steve Byczek

[ulthar]

Do you have older siblings?

[Steve Byczek]

I remember having a horror film reference book as a child and it did have some stills from the movie "Freaks" a controversial revenge drama made in 1932. The plot revolved around a group of circus freaks who band together and mutilate a woman who marries and tries to kill one of their members, in order to get his money. The freaks in the movie were not created with make-up or special effects. They were actual deformed people in "real-life". Just looking at the photos from the movie in this book gave me the creeps. It got so bad at one point I was literally too scared to touch the book. I eventually got over it though. Amazingly,I had no problems watching the movie years later when it was first released on VHS. I found "Freaks" to be more sad than disturbing, and very funny at time,too.

akiratubo. I bet you would have had a hard time getting through the movie "Freaks" as a kid. That story you told about your "Howdy Doody" toy was amazing. It sounded like it had a life of its own!

Sincerely,Steve Byczek.

[akiratubo]

Steve Byczek wrote:

> akiratubo..I bet you were scared of "The Elephant Man". I
> remember just seeing commercials on TV promoting it scared the
> living hell out of me.

No, I never saw it.  I picked it out once just because of its title, thinking it would be a cute movie about an Elephant Man.  Mom and Dad wisely told me to put it back.
>
> akiratubo...Have you seen "Twilight Zone:The Movie"? There is a
> scene in the film where a boy with special powers removes his
> sister's mouth, and they do show a close-up of her face without
> the mouth.

Oh, hell yes.  That freaked me out to no end.  Just that image of her sitting there without a mouth, watching TV.  Gah!  The beginning where Dan Akroyd turned into a monster was a doozy, too.

[Susan]

gooble gobble gooble gobble..one of us!
we accept you
we accept you

[Archivist]

Good lord, are we going to list them?

1.  Vampires used to scare the crap out of me.  When I was about seven a friend got these plastic 'Dracula teeth' and threatened to bit me with them, and it scared the holy hell out of me.  Strangely, in my late teens I became quite fascinated with the whole Anne Rice vampire thing, watched loads of vampire movies, and generally enjoyed the concept.

2.  Box covers of horror movies at the video store.  I never saw a lot of these movies but just looking at the box covers and reading the blurbs and taglines was terrifying in itself.  Movies like Xtro, Bloodsucking Freaks, Scanners... I used to scare myself when going to a dark part of the house to visit the bathroom, thinking that the Xtro alien was waiting for me.

3.  Ozzymandias - I had never heard of the Velveteen Rabbit until you mentioned it here, and I just found a complete version of it on the internet.  Heck, I'm going to cop some crap for this, but I was crying NOW when I read it.  I had some much-loved toys when I was young, and the thought of having to have them burned is just awful.

4.  The movie of Carrie - yes, I was terrified of that movie, too.  I remember when my parents went to see it.  I seem to recall a newspaper article on it, with a huge picture of Sissy Spacek covered in blood.  That freaked me out.

5.  Any kind of torture scene or HINT of torture scene in a movie.  There was an Australian 'bank job' movie called 'The Money Movers' made in 1979.  The box had a drawing of a pair of bolt cutters and the line 'The lucky ones chose to lose their toes!'  Man, that sickened me and scared me to bits.

I just realized something.  Unless we (the people who post on the Badmovies forum) are not representative of the 'normal' population, this whole thread indicates that as kids, we had many strange fears that we never broached with our parents, fears that we kept to ourselves and were never able to talk about.  Does this mean that kids in general have many of these odd fears, without the recourse of being able to talk about them?

And how might our childhood fears have been alleviated at that time?

~Archivist~

[BeyondTheGrave]

What scared the hell out of me was chesterbusters in Alien movies. I mean I was scared as much as Ripley was. I also was afraid of being Abducted by aliens. Don't know why I live in a city.

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You can’t give it, you can't buy it, and you just don't get it!-Aeon Flux



Post Edited (05-17-05 22:21)

[odinn7]

Oh man, all this about the amputees and the "freaks" from the movie reminded me of something that scared the crap out of me when I was a kid and some of you will probably remember it too. In the 70's, comic books usually had some form of advertisement on the back cover. If I was lucky, it would be for a Daisy BB gun or some mail away crap. Once in a while, I would get one that had old b&w pictures of siamese twins, people with no arms, no legs, etc; I don't even recall what these ads were for but they made me very uneasy and I couldn't even look at them. There was another ad that graced the back covers and I didn't understand it and I'm not sure now why it bothered me but it did...it was an add or public service announcement type of thing about hemophelia (sp?) and showed a syringe. I had to tear these covers off of comic books just so I could read them without being all creeped out.

[ulthar]

Archivist wrote:

>
> And how might our childhood fears have been alleviated at that
> time?
>

Small children of course have what seem to us as 'irrational' fears.  My daughter received a Mrs. PotatoHead as a gift from her grandparents; she would not go near it and would freak out if you mentioned playing with it.  The weird thing was, she would always mention Mrs. PotatoHead-like driving in the car, she'd say "I Love Mommy, I Love Daddy, I Love Roxy (our cat) and I Love PotatoHead."  It was like that crazy thing was part of the family, but she would not go near it.

Now, at almost 3, it's one of her favorite toys.

She's been like that with things that sort of look right but don't.  Once, in a gift shop, she noticed some ceramic angels that were very pretty, but did not have faces painted on them.  She went totally nuts.

We got some toy catalog that had a couple of pages of Halloween costumes near the back.  She was totally freaked out by one picture that sort of looked like a skeleton mask, but was just a little bit alien.  She would flip through that catalog, but skip that page.  Eventually, I convinced her it was just a picture, and eventually, she laughed at it.  The other 'scary' masks did not bother her one little bit.

On the other hand, she's got some cards from a series called "Incredible Monsters" or some such with pictures of sharks (in frenzy mode), dinosaurs, cobras, etc, etc and they are favorites.  For a short period, she was afraid of the dark, now she just thinks it's funny (I helped this one along by going into the bathroom with her and turning off the light.  We'd talk and play short little games for a minute or so, then go back to the living room; after a couple of times, darkness no longer phased her).  There is just no way to know ahead of time what will scare a child that age.

Once while we were dating, my wife and I were in a Rain Forest Cafe (or whatever it is called) in Denver, and a couple with a small boy sat at a table nearby.  The animatronic monkey started its gyrations and the kid totally freaked out.  They left the resteraunt because he was so freaked, and I began to wonder "what do you do if you just cannot convince your kid that it really is alright."

[odinn7]

I used to think that children were "programmed" to be scared of some things inadvertantly by people around them. Of course I realized that there are instincts that are imbedded and do need to be followed but my reasoning was that some things that are just not natural, well, how could a child know it was scary? For instance, Alien, how does a real young child know to be scared of this? I reasoned that if you didn't act scared or told your child that it was just silly, they shouldn't be scared. Well, as most of you parents know, it doesn't work this way for whatever reason. I tried this with my daughter but she still has things that she's scared of (reasonable or not). There are some things that I really wonder why she would be scared of (such as ulthar's potato head story, we've all seen something like that from our kids, haven't we?) and there are things that I think should frighten her but don't. It's just not something you can predict or "program" but I have learned that you can help to guide the child away from it in most cases.

[AndyC]

I think kids are just naturally scared of people and things that look strange and different. Since they don't know what it is, and whether it's a threat, nature just errs on the side of caution. That's probably why beards and clowns are such common fears for little kids.

The animatronic monkey reminded me of a trip to the Field Museum in Chicago a few years ago. My wife (girlfriend at the time) and I were going through this special exibit that was supposed to look like we were bug-sized and walking through tunnels in the soil. One of the cooler things was a six-foot earwig in its nest. When you walked up to the railing in front of it, a motion sensor activated the thing and it started to move as though defending itself. The tail flipped up over its back and those big pincers started snapping. Really made us jump. But, there was a family with kids not far behind us, and this thing really freaked their son out. I mean he was screaming his head off, yelling "kill it, Daddy, kill it!" His parents had to pick him up and carry him away, all the while explaining that its not real. We felt bad for the little guy, but also found the whole thing kind of funny, especially that his first thought was to kill it. Not to mention that it would be Dad's job to tangle with a giant, snapping earwig.

Funny that somebody also mentioned being scared of video box covers. That used to get me. I'd see covers with some of the creepiest things on them. I was old enough not to be scared of the covers, but imagined that the movies were far scarier than they were. That changed when I started renting them, and found that they weren't so scary. Most of the ones with the scariest boxes were actually quite cheesy.

What really got me, however, were TV commercials for horror movies. I was a little older when video stores came along, but commercials for movies like It's Alive, The Shining and the Changeling came along at just the right time. I remember being freaked out by Jack Nicholson limping along with his axe, or the empty wheelchair chasing George C. Scott at the moment the narrator said "Don't go in the attic." Later on, I made a point of watching these movies, and found the ads to be a little bit misleading. The Shining and The Changeling remain two of my favourite horror movies.

I also used to get a little bit scared when my older siblings (I'm the youngest by quite a few years) came home from a scary movie and told me about it. My imagination could make a hell of a movie out of that description.

[Steve Byczek]

akiratubo. Did you ever see the movie "Mask" made in 1985 starring Eric Stoltz and Cher? This is a movie about a boy who suffered from this disease that made his head and face become horribly disfigured. It is based on a true story,and is a very uplifting and moving film. But since it involves a boy with a facial deformity...I was wondering if it scared you when you were younger.



Sincerely,Steve Byczek

[odinn7]

Hey Steve, please do not take this the wrong way but I am getting curious here...Are you writing a report or doing some sort of research?

[ulthar]

I was thinking the exact same thing.  Again, it is no big deal to me, but if you are, you can tell us.

[Steve Byczek]

No my friends. I am not writing a report,or gaining any profits from your answers. If I was,I would ask everybody's permission. Please forgive me if you think I am nosy. I am just curious and I enjoy chatting with people about offbeat topics that I find interesting.




Sincerely,Steve.