Movies that freaked you out as a kid (1 Viewer)

[bigshot]

The sequence with the blind old folks and the german shepherd in Tales From the Crypt disturbed me a lot as a kid too. Something very visceral about that

 

[RichMurphy]

DARBY O'GILL AND THE LITTLE PEOPLE scared the you-know-what out of me as a kid. I watched the film as an adult when it came out on DVD, and when the banshee appeared, it gave me the willies again.

 

[Timothy E]

I started looking under my bed at night at age 7 after seeing the hippie zombies in The Omega Man.

 

[disctrip]

Another vote for the '53 Invaders From Mars. I was 8.

 

[SamT]

And what are your opinions about our parents who let us see all these movies? There was no Internet and it would have been very difficult to know in advance what a movie contains I guess. And I suppose at those years they weren't too worried what kids watch.

 

[Gary Seven]

That would have to be seeing The Exorcist on the big screen at 13, while I was in parochial school. Took me weeks to get over it.

 

[TravisR]

And what are your opinions about our parents who let us see all these movies? There was no Internet and it would have been very difficult to know in advance what a movie contains I guess. And I suppose at those years they weren't too worried what kids watch.

I saw some crazy movies as a little kid so I don't know what the hell they were thinking. My parents were reasonably strict (not like I was beat up but I would have never gotten away with staying out all night and getting drunk as a teenager) but it was no limits in terms of what I watched from about age 8. I still chuckle thinking about how my mother dropped me and a friend off to see the latest Halloween sequel at the movie theater when I was 10 years old.

 

[TJPC]

The movie that freaked me out the most as a child was "The Picture of Dorian Grey". The scenes where you saw the portrait increasingly distorted as the main character becomes more and more evil caused me to almost be catatonic, and we didn't even have colour TV!
My cousins had endless fun sneaking up to me and intoning "Dorian" which made me scream.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

My parents were pretty strict about what I watched. They weren't merciless, but if it was rated R, they'd insist on seeing it first before deciding if I could watch it. (You can imagine the debates I started over movies. I'd do like six degrees of Kevin Bacon except instead of Kevin it was relations to movies my parents like. "I know it's rated R, but it's directed by so-and-so who directed [movie you loved] so it can't be bad!)

So my terror moments would come from more seemingly innocent fare like 2001.

The one time I remember my dad slipping, he fell asleep on the couch while channel surfing past Cronenberg's version of The Fly. I saw from after Goldblum tried the machine up until he kidnapped Geena Davis. My dad woke up then, commented that the movie wasn't for me, and changed the channel. I think not knowing the ending was more terrifying, feeling on some instinctual level that Brundlefly was out there somewhere. When I finally saw the end years later, I thought it was kinda lame and the movie never bothered me again.

 

[cinemiracle]

No film ever freaked me out as a kid. The scarier the film, the more I enjoyed it. Films never gave me any nightmares.

 

[AshJW]

I guess it was in the middle of the 70's, I was five, six years old.
Our parents went out and my two older siblings and I watched a Dracula movie on the telly. Well, I watched it with my hands cover my face.

Another film, also during the 70's. I forgot the title of this German film (maybe a TV-production).
It was about a young boy, probably my age at that time, that was put under pressure by an older kid ("wenn Du mich verrätst, mach ich dich tot!" = "If you betray me I will kill you!"). That frightened me more than the mild violence showed in the movie. It was mild by todays standards.

 

[Richard V]

Scared the crap outta me.

 

[Jimbo64]

My Grandmother loved movies and we would watch all kinds of old black and white movies on tv when I was a child. Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte, The Bad Seed, The Innocents, The Night of the Hunter and The Haunting were all on her favorites list. I still have vivid memories of Shelley Winter's hair flowing underwater with the algae in that sunken car. As for films at the theater I had nightmares about Robert Helpmann's character in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for years!

 

[TravisR]

I saw marathons of The Twilight Zone on either WPIX or WWOR (I'm in Pennsylvania but their broadcasts must have still been seen here in the 1980's) as a kid. I distinctly remember being really scared by the episodes The Invaders (the little metal guys trying to get Agnes Moorehead), The Midnight Sun (the shot of the mercury shooting out of the thermometer is burned in my brain) and Nightmare At 20,000 Feet (William Shatner and the gremlin on the wing).

 

[Tino]

WPIX. I watched the same marathons. TV was so important as a child. With only 6 or so channels every film was a treat..especially the scary ones.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

I watched those TZ marathons from Long Island on WPIX as well!

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

One I thought of from when I was a little-ish kid: The Witches with Anjelica Huston. I don't know how they got away with their real faces when they peeled of their "nice" faces in a children's movie.

Another from when I was older: the original American remake The Ring, from around the same time as Frailty. The psychological horror and disturbing imagery haunted me for days afterward, even though it's not really a gory or gross movie. I kept checking reflections in screens, and the burning tree and the well really stuck with me. The only one that's come anywhere close to unnerving me that much since was The Conjuring.

 

[dana martin]

three people are to blame for my childhood nightmares, Richard Matheson, Dan Curtis and Stephen Spielberg, between The Night Stalker, The Night Strangler, Trilogy of Terror and Duel.

and now that i look back on it yes made for TV movies, that is better than 90% of what Hollywood pumps out on a weekly basis, god i wish they could get back to great story telling with the right talent (actors and directors) to pull it off! instead of bad stunt casting,

 

[cinemiracle]

Scared the crap outta me.

I loved seeing this film when I was a kid in the fifties. Watched the dvd again recently and it was one of the best of those fifties sci-fi films. It was scary but that only made me enjoy it more. For some reason filmmakers have forgotten how to really scare cinemagoers today.

 

[cinemiracle]

I remember seeing Jack Clayton's The Innocents on the late late show when I was about 15. I had a little portable B&W TV I had bought with paper route money and I plugged earphones into it so I could watch TV without my parents knowing it. At 15 I wasn't old enough to understand all the subtext, but the ending of the film horrified me and disturbed me. I am a lot older now and I can catch all the subtext going on and I'm still disturbed by that film!

Vivien Leigh was at the matinee of THE INNOCENTS when I saw the film in Wellington,New Zealand.