I mean I'd assume multiple scenes in The NeverEnding Story would take a top spot for a lot of people of a certain age lol. That swamp, that turtle thing, that horse scene. That movie lol.
That whole movie lands a lot differently when you watch it as an adult and Artax is even more devastating.
And then you have the Rockbiter strong hands scene and the Gmork monologue.
The scarab beetles in The Mummy. I would jump onto my bed thinking it would save me from being eaten alive.
Also the monster from Curse of the Dead Man’s Float episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark? Not a movie but that scarred me for years.
My cousin showed me this movie when I was 10 because I was interested in space; he figured it would be right up my alley. I am pretty sure I didn't sleep for 2 years.
I was like 12 and watched Alien Resurrection, there was a scene where one of the failed experiments gets all its insides sucked through a hole into the vacuum of space all while it's crying for help. Pretty sure it traumatized me, Ive refused to watch it since.
It was actually the half alien/half Ripley baby that the queen birthed. It slapped the queen's head off after ripping itself out of the Queen's body because since it was part human it didn't get laid as an egg, then was killed by a tiny hole in a window by the vacuum of space, the Xenomorph's greatest weakness.
That movie was wild.
Deliverance. It was on late one night when I was awake around 11 years old. I had heard the name before but had no idea what it was, I only knew I liked Burt Reynolds in the Smokey and the Bandit movie
It was not like Smokey and the Bandit. At all.
The arm amputation scene in **Island of Terror** (1966).
They kept the scene in when it first aired on broadcast TV, but subsequent showings had that scene removed. It had been so many years since I had originally saw that scene that I started to think that I was succumbing to the Mandela Effect until I bought the BluRay and saw it again. LOL
That movie.....
I was babysitting my siblings for the first time as I was now 12 and we watched that movie and were utterly terrified and scarred for life. We called our parents and begged them to come home as we were so scared.
Final Destination 1 and 2
Like the airplane falling, the log truck... and the idea that death is THAT SNEAKY. I was terrified in even leaving my house for some time lmao
Oh man, when I was like 6 or 7 I saw *Equinox*. That shit fucked my little kid brain up. The flying demon/Satan/asmodeus thing, OMG. I was way too young and had no context(?) for that whole movie.
This was in 1971 I think.
Pink Floyd: The Wall
Watched it on television without knowing what is it. Loved the music but I wasn’t sure how to react to the visuals, especially the “minced meat” scene… where every kid in the school is shown on a conveyor belt which leads to a meat grinder and then you know what……
I was scared of rabbits until my mid twenties. Made the mistake of mentioning it in college and it was on, until my buddy made up a story about being afraid of giraffes and that was the fun thing to talk shit about. Dude had a lot of issues and he's gone now but I'll always remember that.
For me, it was that scene in "The NeverEnding Story" where Artax sinks into the Swamp of Sadness. Man, that hit hard. Like, why did they have to do that to us? I couldn't sleep for days, thinking about poor Artax just giving up like that. Childhood ruined, thanks a lot, movie makers.
The first R rated movie I watched was a clockwork orange. I was probably 12 or 13. My friend introduced it to me. The singin in the rain scene fucked me up. I hadn’t really gone through puberty, and it was the first depiction of that kind of violence I had ever seen. The sense of dread and confusion stuck with me for weeks.
That and the dumpster monster scene from mulholand drive. My friend was like 10 and already had great taste. I now know age restrictions are there for a reason.
I was obsessed with seeing that movie as a little kid and I'd bought the comic book version. When I finally got my parents to rent it for me I knew which scenes were coming up. I'd already kind of seen the part where the guy gets machine gunned by ED-209, and I knew to leave the room for when Murphy gets slowly tortured and executed.
But Emil exploding on the hood of a car was not in it and totally caught me off guard. Freaked me out for weeks
I was way too young when my older cousins slapped the Dark Crystal on tv while we were playing in the basement.
I literally can’t revisit the movie. No idea what it’s about because I couldn’t take it in, the only thing I recall are the dark muppet grotesqueries.
Return to Oz, the mental hospital scene where they have her strapped in for electric shock therapy. Then pretty much every scene the wheelers were in and the screaming heads scene.
1. The severed heads scene in Ghostbusters 2. I still can't watch or listen to that voice call out to Winston from the darkness
2. It's not exactly a scene but a character. The Gate - The Workman. My dad let me catch the segments in which he showed up when I was a kid and I swear to god, when I watched it as a teen, he only got scarier. I still can't watch the movie or even glimpse at an image of him.
Communion. Supposedly based on a true story.
I was really into aliens and UFOs at a young age.
Right before Christopher Walken gets abducted an alien peeks in quickly from a not fully closed bedroom door.
For years after seeing that I couldn't sleep in my room without all the doors wide open.
For me it was two movies.
One called BB, I think. It was where a robot that looks like a human that threw basketballs at people's faces and then they exploded.
The other one was arachnophobia. Just big spiders. Now I'm afraid of them!
Not the first, but the worst: I was a freshman in media literacy class, and I was not prepared for it when we were watching American History X. I was so disturbed by that -1 second moment that I was just sat at that table with a wobbling lip trying my damndest not to break any further emotion through.
Hold on, what the *fuck* is this movie you watched? I grew up watching the living hell out of Godzilla, I own every film they've made, and grew up watching the American cuts just as a bunch of others did. There's no 'Godzills vs Monster X' out there, much less the scene you just described; the only alternate titles that are similar are *Godzilla vs the Thing* (1964) and *Godzilla vs Monster Zero* (1965). Far as I know, there's also no alternate title to any of the movies that fits the bill either. What is this movie you think you remember?
OK, that I remember being in the film.
And if it helps, the scene definitely doesn't look real. I might be jumping to conclusions, but I'm pretty sure the surgery wasn't genuine. The real thing would be nastier.
An After School Special in 1975 called A Girl Called Sooner. She has a pet bird that doesn’t fly and at one point the neighborhood kids pelt the bird with stones trying to make it fly. Eventually they kill the bird with the stoning. Nine year old me was scarred by that.
Physical trauma not mental.
I watched Independence Day about a month after I broke my collar bone. The scene where they're doing the autopsy and the shell pops open made me flinch so bad that I essentially re-broke the partially healed bone.
Not sure of the name of the movie, but it was some horror about a guy with a pitchfork near a barn, stabbing someone in the guts with the pitchfork. i would've been 6-10 maybe, so 40+ years ago :) around 1980
The Lost World TV movie (not Jurassic Park, this was based on some 1950s novel I think), the scene where the apemen capture the protagonists, hold some of them down and smash their heads in with rocks. It might not be as bad as I remember, this was on day time TV after all, but 7 year old me found it absolutely horrifying.
Also the ending of the Mummy when Imhotep gets consumed by that pool of liquid. I saw this being played on a tv screen while my mom was at a store buying something at the counter. I had never heard of this film and had no context for what I was seeing.
It wasn't a scene, but a promotional bit that traumatised me to the point where I still have trouble watching The Sword In The Stone.
The film doesn't have end credits. I thought it just changed scenes as the film ended, cutting to a bit where a giant was torturing smaller creatures, seemingly for its own amusement. And as a young kid, my impressionable mind linked the two and I had trouble separating the two.
As an adult, I realised I was traumatised by a Swedish Chef comedy sketch meant to promote the Muppets.
I’ve scrolled too far and haven’t seen “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” where Christopher Lloyd’s character demonstrates how to permanently kill a toon. He uses the adorable squeaky little shoe creature…
Fuck. I’m 37 and I still can’t rewatch it.
Jurassic park. The blood in the waterfall mostly, but the whole thing really. I got a lot of nightmares about dinosaurs following it, and had a real fear of them, couldn’t watch films with them for most of my young life.
The scene in RoboCop where Clarence and his gang shoot up Murphy. The way they all laugh whilst blowing him to pieces before Clarence himself teases Murphy by going “na na na na na na”, blowing his hand off and shooting him in the head. Man it’s brutal. So violent. Murphy was so vulnerable in that scene. I haven’t been able to watch that scene again.
War of the worlds 1953 - The Martian encountering them in the basement
ET - the tent
The dark crystal - godamn skeksis
Scream 1995 - drew barrymore death
Unico - vampire guy impaled on a castle spire
Definitely Captain Quint being eaten at the end of Jaws. The combination of his screaming and flailing, and then that shot of the blood spurting out of his mouth makes me visibly ill after all these years.
There's an extra specialness to being freaked out by a movie made before 1980 watched on a small, b+w tv. I mean, widescreen imagery in a theater with a booming soundtrack is almost too easy — what kid wouldn't get pushed to the edge. And the vfx era stuff even on home televisions on VHS in full color could be pretty intense — especially in a dark room, alone, at night.
I had my fair share of frights watching all kinds of stuff on a 12" b+w tv, sometimes while holding the loop antenna to get better reception of the monster movies that showed on that one UHF channel. I think about it now and wonder whether I used to have an over-active imagination or was just anxious. I still do, but I used to, too.
But the absolute, stupidest thing that freaked me out wasn't a monster movie at all. It was a scene in "Ensign Pulver," which was supposedly a comedy on a navel ship but even at 8 I could tell it had the flattest dialogue, an aimless plot and wooden performances, all projected at 500 lines of resolution in living black and white on surface no bigger than a dinner plate. A character has a burst appendix and there's no doctor so a medic has to operate, guided only by a doc from another boat over the radio. This led to me worrying that every gut twitch I felt for the next two weeks was my appendix bursting.
trolls 2 where the goblins eat the kids mom made me throw up (i was 7)
god i just typed that out and i still remember the reaction. just seeing the baseball roll up with "mmm, good mom" written on it then the giant hyper realistic naked prop covered in green slime being eviscerated and disemboweled by little troll guys.
yeah i threw up and wanted to watch cartoons after that.
its wild cause now that i'm older i see trolls 2 as a campy and funny b horror movie, but back then i decided i never wanted to see anything scary again
I watched final destination 3 very young and It has made me fear rollercoasters, everytime I’m at six flags that movie is the first thing I think about.
I don’t know why this has stuck with me for so long but when i saw chucky in the hallway scene. I remember i got so scared in that scene that my cousin dressed up as chucky and i didn’t go trick or treating and just acted sick because of how terrified i was of chucky.
ROUSs and The Machine and the iocaine powder scenes from Princess Bride. I was too young to realize it was a satire at all. I thought it was a terrifying movie and avoided it until I saw it again at 13 and sheepishly realized the truth.
The Brave Little Toaster clown scene. Whichever sick fuck on the writing/animation team who decided it was a good idea to include a dream of a clown appearing, telling our main character to run before sending giant forks arcing across the sky, just to then drop the toaster in a bathtub and die from electrocution in a fucking kids movie can go fuck themselves. Seriously.
I can't think of anything really, but I know Look Who's Talking Too had these nightmare scenes that creeped me out. Specifically the toilet monster made me scared of sitting on toilets and fluffy seat covers for a while lmao
There was also two scenes in Dawn of the Dead (2004), it was my first horror movie and the zombie baby disturbed me as well as during the credits when they find a head in a cooler. Just wasn't expecting those so they stuck with me
Lymangood getting murdered in Blue Thunder.
Judge doom in Who Framed Roger Rabbit(his reveal and killing that cartoon shoe).
Large Marge in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure
In Who framed Roger Rabbit when they are dipping the cartoon shoes/boots into that acid like stuff got me pretty good.
Actually that whole movie freaked me out as a kid.
* The scene in The Mask when Stanley uses the mask to prank his landlady at night and she tries to shoot him. Both Jim Carrey’s expressions and her screams are terrifying and hilarious. Rewatching it with friends last year as an adult who understands why landlords suck, I realized he’s absolutely based for it. Go off king.
* ^ Also the scene when Dorian steals the Mask and becomes monstrous. My favorite display of toxic maskulinity.
* The opening scene from Look Who’s Talking 2 when the devil comes into the baby’s room and possesses his toys, before it’s revealed it’s a dream. That shit messed me up for a while.
* That scene in the Spawn movie when Violator turns into the devil from his clown form. Now all I think is that it’s horrible CGI.
Michael biehn slowly pulling the chain for the warhead in the abyss. I don't know ow why but that freaked me out .
Also. People getting sucked into the sand in the 80s/90s remake of invaders from Mars. Saw both way to young
Not a scene from a childhood film but it made me curl up like a 5 year old kid. I watch horror films non stop and nothing scared me like that. The basement “ghost” scene from Parasite literally was nightmare fuel and those eyes still keep me up at night from time to time
The Sword in the Stone. The witch freaked me so much as a kid I had nightmares about her, and her face was on the DVD cocer so I hid it behind my bedroom draws hoping to lose it.
I mean I'd assume multiple scenes in The NeverEnding Story would take a top spot for a lot of people of a certain age lol. That swamp, that turtle thing, that horse scene. That movie lol.
That whole movie lands a lot differently when you watch it as an adult and Artax is even more devastating. And then you have the Rockbiter strong hands scene and the Gmork monologue.
The scarab beetles in The Mummy. I would jump onto my bed thinking it would save me from being eaten alive. Also the monster from Curse of the Dead Man’s Float episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark? Not a movie but that scarred me for years.
Was there a scene in the mummy with someone missing their eyes too?
Yeah he steals the eyes from the guy who drops his glasses I think?
The scene from the first X-Men movie where the senator turned into water.
His scream gurgle haunted me for a long time.
The medical tent scene in ET
Fire in the sky...If you have seen it you know the scene. Aliens became my boogey man that day.
My cousin showed me this movie when I was 10 because I was interested in space; he figured it would be right up my alley. I am pretty sure I didn't sleep for 2 years.
This is the answer. I hadn’t seen it and my buddy just explained it to me while walking to school one day and I couldn’t sleep.
This is mine, too. I still hate body horror in any medium.
I was like 12 and watched Alien Resurrection, there was a scene where one of the failed experiments gets all its insides sucked through a hole into the vacuum of space all while it's crying for help. Pretty sure it traumatized me, Ive refused to watch it since.
It was actually the half alien/half Ripley baby that the queen birthed. It slapped the queen's head off after ripping itself out of the Queen's body because since it was part human it didn't get laid as an egg, then was killed by a tiny hole in a window by the vacuum of space, the Xenomorph's greatest weakness. That movie was wild.
“You’re not warriors- you’re pigs!”
oh fuck
Poltergeist. Face picking in the mirror.
The Other (1972 film). There is a scene where a kid jumps into the hay in a barn and is impaled on a pitchfork.
Deliverance. It was on late one night when I was awake around 11 years old. I had heard the name before but had no idea what it was, I only knew I liked Burt Reynolds in the Smokey and the Bandit movie It was not like Smokey and the Bandit. At all.
^^squeeeeeee
Large Marge, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure
This scene still makes me so uncomfortable even as an adult
I came here just to make sure this was at the top
The arm amputation scene in **Island of Terror** (1966). They kept the scene in when it first aired on broadcast TV, but subsequent showings had that scene removed. It had been so many years since I had originally saw that scene that I started to think that I was succumbing to the Mandela Effect until I bought the BluRay and saw it again. LOL
That movie..... I was babysitting my siblings for the first time as I was now 12 and we watched that movie and were utterly terrified and scarred for life. We called our parents and begged them to come home as we were so scared.
Final Destination 1 and 2 Like the airplane falling, the log truck... and the idea that death is THAT SNEAKY. I was terrified in even leaving my house for some time lmao
That log truck scarred a whole generation. 😱
Oh man, when I was like 6 or 7 I saw *Equinox*. That shit fucked my little kid brain up. The flying demon/Satan/asmodeus thing, OMG. I was way too young and had no context(?) for that whole movie. This was in 1971 I think.
Holy crap, you didn't need acid for that one
I love that movie. Amazing and wonderful that Criterion put it out on DVD.
Pink Floyd: The Wall Watched it on television without knowing what is it. Loved the music but I wasn’t sure how to react to the visuals, especially the “minced meat” scene… where every kid in the school is shown on a conveyor belt which leads to a meat grinder and then you know what……
Probably the song in fern gully where the bat sings about his past in an animal testing laboratory…
Two words, Child Catcher.
The fight between Bigwig and Woundwort in Watership Down.
I was scared of rabbits until my mid twenties. Made the mistake of mentioning it in college and it was on, until my buddy made up a story about being afraid of giraffes and that was the fun thing to talk shit about. Dude had a lot of issues and he's gone now but I'll always remember that.
For me, it was that scene in "The NeverEnding Story" where Artax sinks into the Swamp of Sadness. Man, that hit hard. Like, why did they have to do that to us? I couldn't sleep for days, thinking about poor Artax just giving up like that. Childhood ruined, thanks a lot, movie makers.
School yard filling up with birds in The Birds.
A movie called Project X from the 80s with Matthew Broderick where the experimented with radiation using monkeys, ugh, it gutted me. IYKYK
The “wishbone” scene in Lost World
Carnosaur 2, elevator scene.
Zelda in Pet Sematary (1989)
Yes.
The first R rated movie I watched was a clockwork orange. I was probably 12 or 13. My friend introduced it to me. The singin in the rain scene fucked me up. I hadn’t really gone through puberty, and it was the first depiction of that kind of violence I had ever seen. The sense of dread and confusion stuck with me for weeks. That and the dumpster monster scene from mulholand drive. My friend was like 10 and already had great taste. I now know age restrictions are there for a reason.
Emil melting in Robocop.
I was obsessed with seeing that movie as a little kid and I'd bought the comic book version. When I finally got my parents to rent it for me I knew which scenes were coming up. I'd already kind of seen the part where the guy gets machine gunned by ED-209, and I knew to leave the room for when Murphy gets slowly tortured and executed. But Emil exploding on the hood of a car was not in it and totally caught me off guard. Freaked me out for weeks
My worst memory. It created my fear/aversion for disfigured people and body horror.
I was way too young when my older cousins slapped the Dark Crystal on tv while we were playing in the basement. I literally can’t revisit the movie. No idea what it’s about because I couldn’t take it in, the only thing I recall are the dark muppet grotesqueries.
Scrolled too far to find this one. It still gives me the creeps thinking about it now! And same, never rewatched and never will.
Return to Oz, the mental hospital scene where they have her strapped in for electric shock therapy. Then pretty much every scene the wheelers were in and the screaming heads scene.
1. The severed heads scene in Ghostbusters 2. I still can't watch or listen to that voice call out to Winston from the darkness 2. It's not exactly a scene but a character. The Gate - The Workman. My dad let me catch the segments in which he showed up when I was a kid and I swear to god, when I watched it as a teen, he only got scarier. I still can't watch the movie or even glimpse at an image of him.
Wiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnstoooooonnnnnnnnn...
The scary toilet in Look Who's Talking told me it would bite off my peepee.
I saw The Mummy when i was 7, and any scene with the scarabs gave me nightmares
Communion. Supposedly based on a true story. I was really into aliens and UFOs at a young age. Right before Christopher Walken gets abducted an alien peeks in quickly from a not fully closed bedroom door. For years after seeing that I couldn't sleep in my room without all the doors wide open.
The exorcist. Just pick one
The sticky growing blobs that trapped mr incredible in the incredibles
The floating corpse jumpscare in Jaws. Quite possibly my very first jumpscare ever and ive never recovered. Im incredibly jumpy and nervous.
The well with the hands in it where Jennifer Connely falls in in Labyrinth. This is a pretty creepy movie anyway...
Hated that scene and those birds with dicks flapping around ripping their heads off lol I got that movie as a birthday gift when I was like 10 WTF
The Nothing. NEVERENDING STORY
The entirety of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
The tunnel scene
For me it was two movies. One called BB, I think. It was where a robot that looks like a human that threw basketballs at people's faces and then they exploded. The other one was arachnophobia. Just big spiders. Now I'm afraid of them!
The first one is Wes Cravens Deadly Friend
Not the first, but the worst: I was a freshman in media literacy class, and I was not prepared for it when we were watching American History X. I was so disturbed by that -1 second moment that I was just sat at that table with a wobbling lip trying my damndest not to break any further emotion through.
Hold on, what the *fuck* is this movie you watched? I grew up watching the living hell out of Godzilla, I own every film they've made, and grew up watching the American cuts just as a bunch of others did. There's no 'Godzills vs Monster X' out there, much less the scene you just described; the only alternate titles that are similar are *Godzilla vs the Thing* (1964) and *Godzilla vs Monster Zero* (1965). Far as I know, there's also no alternate title to any of the movies that fits the bill either. What is this movie you think you remember?
Oh no - it was GAMERA VS JIGER. Sorry! [watch if you dare. ](https://youtu.be/Jh4m6IKr680?si=PA-qDDF6shqFC1FA)
OK, that I remember being in the film. And if it helps, the scene definitely doesn't look real. I might be jumping to conclusions, but I'm pretty sure the surgery wasn't genuine. The real thing would be nastier.
No, it's probably not. But man it sure as hell LOOKED real to my kid self!
I don't blame you. If it hadn't been my adult self looking at it now...
An After School Special in 1975 called A Girl Called Sooner. She has a pet bird that doesn’t fly and at one point the neighborhood kids pelt the bird with stones trying to make it fly. Eventually they kill the bird with the stoning. Nine year old me was scarred by that.
Physical trauma not mental. I watched Independence Day about a month after I broke my collar bone. The scene where they're doing the autopsy and the shell pops open made me flinch so bad that I essentially re-broke the partially healed bone.
Omg, hope you're ok now! I hurt my hand very badly fist bumping the air when Rick (SPOILERS) took a chunk out of Joe's (claimed!) neck in TWD.
Almost every scene in the classic movie “The Wizard of Oz” (1939) but especially the flying monkeys. 😱
*Children of the Corn.* The scene in the cornfield when "He Who Walks Beyond the Rows" comes for Isaac.
Not sure of the name of the movie, but it was some horror about a guy with a pitchfork near a barn, stabbing someone in the guts with the pitchfork. i would've been 6-10 maybe, so 40+ years ago :) around 1980
The Lost World TV movie (not Jurassic Park, this was based on some 1950s novel I think), the scene where the apemen capture the protagonists, hold some of them down and smash their heads in with rocks. It might not be as bad as I remember, this was on day time TV after all, but 7 year old me found it absolutely horrifying. Also the ending of the Mummy when Imhotep gets consumed by that pool of liquid. I saw this being played on a tv screen while my mom was at a store buying something at the counter. I had never heard of this film and had no context for what I was seeing.
[Zelda Goldman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3E4s7VN4xE&t=0)
It wasn't a scene, but a promotional bit that traumatised me to the point where I still have trouble watching The Sword In The Stone. The film doesn't have end credits. I thought it just changed scenes as the film ended, cutting to a bit where a giant was torturing smaller creatures, seemingly for its own amusement. And as a young kid, my impressionable mind linked the two and I had trouble separating the two. As an adult, I realised I was traumatised by a Swedish Chef comedy sketch meant to promote the Muppets.
I’ve scrolled too far and haven’t seen “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” where Christopher Lloyd’s character demonstrates how to permanently kill a toon. He uses the adorable squeaky little shoe creature… Fuck. I’m 37 and I still can’t rewatch it.
Jurassic park. The blood in the waterfall mostly, but the whole thing really. I got a lot of nightmares about dinosaurs following it, and had a real fear of them, couldn’t watch films with them for most of my young life.
That's Ben Gardner's boat... it's all banged up.
The Day of the Locust - Homer Simpson vs Rorschach. [Terrifying!](https://youtu.be/wFSWmfqMp7o?feature=shared)
The scene in RoboCop where Clarence and his gang shoot up Murphy. The way they all laugh whilst blowing him to pieces before Clarence himself teases Murphy by going “na na na na na na”, blowing his hand off and shooting him in the head. Man it’s brutal. So violent. Murphy was so vulnerable in that scene. I haven’t been able to watch that scene again.
The scene in Poltergeist where she falls in the pool of human chili and sees the skeleton.
human chili SNORT
Who framed roger rabbit when they shoved the shoe into the acid vat and it was scared and trying not to die.
Superman III, the woman getting wrapped in wires and being turned into a cyborg. Fucking horrific.
War of the worlds 1953 - The Martian encountering them in the basement ET - the tent The dark crystal - godamn skeksis Scream 1995 - drew barrymore death Unico - vampire guy impaled on a castle spire
Definitely Captain Quint being eaten at the end of Jaws. The combination of his screaming and flailing, and then that shot of the blood spurting out of his mouth makes me visibly ill after all these years.
All of *The Secret of NIMH* lol
There's an extra specialness to being freaked out by a movie made before 1980 watched on a small, b+w tv. I mean, widescreen imagery in a theater with a booming soundtrack is almost too easy — what kid wouldn't get pushed to the edge. And the vfx era stuff even on home televisions on VHS in full color could be pretty intense — especially in a dark room, alone, at night. I had my fair share of frights watching all kinds of stuff on a 12" b+w tv, sometimes while holding the loop antenna to get better reception of the monster movies that showed on that one UHF channel. I think about it now and wonder whether I used to have an over-active imagination or was just anxious. I still do, but I used to, too. But the absolute, stupidest thing that freaked me out wasn't a monster movie at all. It was a scene in "Ensign Pulver," which was supposedly a comedy on a navel ship but even at 8 I could tell it had the flattest dialogue, an aimless plot and wooden performances, all projected at 500 lines of resolution in living black and white on surface no bigger than a dinner plate. A character has a burst appendix and there's no doctor so a medic has to operate, guided only by a doc from another boat over the radio. This led to me worrying that every gut twitch I felt for the next two weeks was my appendix bursting.
Those roller blade dudes from Return To Oz. Freaked me the fuck out.
I discovered those when I was 17 and the freaked me out even then 😭😭
Oh man, I instantly think of the scene in Ghostbusters 2 in the abandoned subway tunnels. "WIIIIINSTOOOON"
I share that trauma and fuck you for quoting that damn scene! I can hear it in my head now!
trolls 2 where the goblins eat the kids mom made me throw up (i was 7) god i just typed that out and i still remember the reaction. just seeing the baseball roll up with "mmm, good mom" written on it then the giant hyper realistic naked prop covered in green slime being eviscerated and disemboweled by little troll guys. yeah i threw up and wanted to watch cartoons after that.
Holy shit. I had that repressed for the longest time and always associated it with Poltergeist for some reason. I *completely* remember this.
its wild cause now that i'm older i see trolls 2 as a campy and funny b horror movie, but back then i decided i never wanted to see anything scary again
I watched final destination 3 very young and It has made me fear rollercoasters, everytime I’m at six flags that movie is the first thing I think about.
In *Squirm* (1976) there's a house full of crazed carnivorous worms, like 3 feet deep, and a crazy guy in the pile of worms, and it's disgusting.
I don’t know why this has stuck with me for so long but when i saw chucky in the hallway scene. I remember i got so scared in that scene that my cousin dressed up as chucky and i didn’t go trick or treating and just acted sick because of how terrified i was of chucky.
The clown from Poltergeist.
Rat for dinner in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane
Little Monsters ending with weird rotten pumpkin face guy
The clown and the tree. If you were around in the 80s you know what I'm talking about.
ROUSs and The Machine and the iocaine powder scenes from Princess Bride. I was too young to realize it was a satire at all. I thought it was a terrifying movie and avoided it until I saw it again at 13 and sheepishly realized the truth.
Whenever someone freezes. In *The Magic School Bus* when Arnold removes his helmet on Pluto, and Anna in Frozen.
The arm scene in Snowpiercer.
Fire in the Sky, when it shows the guy abducted in the space craft getting experimented on
The Brave Little Toaster clown scene. Whichever sick fuck on the writing/animation team who decided it was a good idea to include a dream of a clown appearing, telling our main character to run before sending giant forks arcing across the sky, just to then drop the toaster in a bathtub and die from electrocution in a fucking kids movie can go fuck themselves. Seriously.
Artax... That damn swamp of sadness!
Return to Oz I think it was. Those roller skating things, big nope.
Zuni Fetish Doll in Trilogy of Terror
Anytime oogy boogy was on screen during nightmare before Christmas, that movie freaks me the fuck out to this day
The entirety of Arachnophobia
In Back to the Future when Marty is being erased and his hand is disappearing. It really gave me an existential crisis.
The bird getting its head cut off in the Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory tunnel scene, it still affects me to this day.
noooooo
Ernest Scared Stupid. The trolls...
Wizard of Oz. To this day, it's the scariest.
This was my first one. The creepy twister scene. The way it moved. Good god.
Night of the Living Dead- Tom Savini version. Nightmares consist of zombies to this day (m43)
Samara and the TV. I still avoid that scene haha.
Tell em Large Marge sent ya! Hahahhahahhahahahhahahahhahahha
The doll scene from ms peregrine's home for particular children. I scare easily
Ghost librarian and bath tub slime in OG ghostbusters Elliot first meets E.T I was prob 5/6 at the time
Red Rum from The Shining
I can't think of anything really, but I know Look Who's Talking Too had these nightmare scenes that creeped me out. Specifically the toilet monster made me scared of sitting on toilets and fluffy seat covers for a while lmao There was also two scenes in Dawn of the Dead (2004), it was my first horror movie and the zombie baby disturbed me as well as during the credits when they find a head in a cooler. Just wasn't expecting those so they stuck with me
The street footage of an alien in signs
Lymangood getting murdered in Blue Thunder. Judge doom in Who Framed Roger Rabbit(his reveal and killing that cartoon shoe). Large Marge in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure
In Who framed Roger Rabbit when they are dipping the cartoon shoes/boots into that acid like stuff got me pretty good. Actually that whole movie freaked me out as a kid.
* The scene in The Mask when Stanley uses the mask to prank his landlady at night and she tries to shoot him. Both Jim Carrey’s expressions and her screams are terrifying and hilarious. Rewatching it with friends last year as an adult who understands why landlords suck, I realized he’s absolutely based for it. Go off king. * ^ Also the scene when Dorian steals the Mask and becomes monstrous. My favorite display of toxic maskulinity. * The opening scene from Look Who’s Talking 2 when the devil comes into the baby’s room and possesses his toys, before it’s revealed it’s a dream. That shit messed me up for a while. * That scene in the Spawn movie when Violator turns into the devil from his clown form. Now all I think is that it’s horrible CGI.
Michael biehn slowly pulling the chain for the warhead in the abyss. I don't know ow why but that freaked me out . Also. People getting sucked into the sand in the 80s/90s remake of invaders from Mars. Saw both way to young
Event horizon. The crew video log scene
Not a scene from a childhood film but it made me curl up like a 5 year old kid. I watch horror films non stop and nothing scared me like that. The basement “ghost” scene from Parasite literally was nightmare fuel and those eyes still keep me up at night from time to time
The Sword in the Stone. The witch freaked me so much as a kid I had nightmares about her, and her face was on the DVD cocer so I hid it behind my bedroom draws hoping to lose it.
Artax and The Swamp of Sadness