Can't sleep, clown will eat me.

Watership Downs is so dark. I found the book as a kid in some cabinet and figured it'd be fun to read about the little bunnies life. That was a harsh loss of innocence.
Later as an adult I figured it wasn't really that bad and I watched the movie. Oh boy.

Nothing says "parade" like a biped elephant made up of eyeless elephant heads.

Dance.

Darkness Falls scared the crap out of me in 2003, when i was 32. I spent the next 22 years unable to go to bed without turning the light on over the stairs. Then we moved to a one-story house.

My husband said the caterpillars with the Cheshire Cat. 🤷

Not a very well-known movie, but the monster in The Funhouse (1981) - see the second clip in the videos section on that page if you want to see him. I don't recall exactly how young I was, but I think between 10 and 12. I randomly watched this on TV one night and had nightmares about it for a while.

It was interesting to see his face again after all this time. A little bit different than I remembered but I still think he's pretty freaky. It was also interesting to learn that this was directed by Tobe Hooper, of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist fame. I guess he has traumatized a lot of kids, just going by this thread.

The skeleton who came out of a coffin, which rose up out of the pool area, and had black and white striped hair terrified me because she reminded me of my 1st grade teacher who verbally and emotionally abused one of the kids in class, even physically abused him a few times, too.

One two Freddy's coming for you...

5 year old me was not prepared for Mr Toilet Man in Look Who's Talking.

Anton Bartok in The Fly II being turned into a hideously deformed lump of flesh that could barely move and is forced to suffer in a cage eating slop. Yes, he was an evil bastard, but the body horror of being in that position still haunts me.

The Fog. I couldn't sleep for weeks after watching that movie.

It IS a freakout!

'Pipes' from Ghostwatch. I was 11. First proper Halloween. I'd watched scary films before, like Silence of the Lambs and Poltergeist both of which scared the crap out of me but Pipes was on a completely different existential plane.

I had a lot going on with my parents, too much for a child to deal with tbh. That Halloween was my first proper going out trick or treating, the first and only one which actually felt like a halloween. Then I got home and got to watch a Halloween special with Craig Charles from Red Dwarf no less. I believed it was real and I freaked out, so instead of letting me watch the end they sent me to bed and I just kept waking up screaming. I remember them being so angry at me because I couldn't settle.

For probably a year afterwards I used to lie terrified and alone for hours in the dark listening out for any noise and trying to be as quiet and as still as possible. I didn't really get over it until I was about 13. When I rewatched it as an adult I realised it would have been so much better if they had just let me watch the end.

I basically grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere, and I've been a night owl since I can remember. When I was in early grade school, probably second grade, I was up late and excited to find a cartoon being aired in the middle of the night. It was the animated rendition of Animal Farm.

It freaked me out, but it also planted a seed. I wanted to figure out what that story was, and it led me to explore other classic literature. I'm grateful for that.

Very much so. When I was a kid my folks tried multiple times to get me to watch this movie and I could never get past the tunnel.

As an adult I still can't watch it and I love me some Gene Wilder otherwise.

When I killed your brother, I talked just. Like. THIS.

Who framed Roger rabbit, the scene with the judge guy putting a shoe cartoon into the acid barrel.

What's so scary about that?

Uuuggghh. That voice scrapes against my bones.

The Crate, from Creepshow.

In general I never cared much about scary movies, but there is ONE SCENE (in an otherwise crappy movie) that left a strong impression on me.

In the movie "Signs", there's a moment when the news are showing footage from an alien sighting in Brazil.
Usually, whenever a US movie tries to depict another country or culture, it ends up being so poorly done it's almost like a caricature. But not this one...

The scene is from a birthday party, and every little detail is so authentic that, as a Brazilian, it's immediately obvious that it was actually recorded in Brazil, at someone's actual house.

It's shaky footage from a camcorder (remember those?). There's the party decorations, the kids' hats, the car outside, the voices (which are intelligible Brazilian Portuguese, not gibberish). Everything felt so real and familiar, I could swear I have been in that exact party at some point in my life.
And then the alien shows up and HOLY SHIT did that scare me!

Ditto Tales from the Crypt, except for me it was just The Cryptkeeper himself. I don't remember any of the specific stories; my cousin and I would watch them when we were 5-6 years old. We weren't old enough to even understand what was happening, but I definitely remember the skeleton announcer being really scary.

I didn't watch the show again until about 25 years later, and was surprised to find that the skeleton announcer was actually supposed to be funny. :D

I just that with my kid and it for some reason I laughed so hard my kid thought the whole thing was funny. It's just so absurd and terrible and wonderful. He's this nightmare murder dude in a kids movie.

It's genuiy terrifying. But I made it fun for my kid somehow.

The Air Conditioner in The Brave Little Toaster.

Eh, showing my age.

Watership Down

What an awful movie for a kid to see.

I watched The Sixth Sense with my family when I was 6 or 7 (hehe) late at night and the lights went out shortly after so I just had to rawdawg the rest of the night, no Cartoon Network, no Nickelodeon, just me and my thoughts. I don't think I have been that spooked since, lol.

Are you talking about when it grabbed that woman and turned her into a cyborg thing? That fucked me up.

Don't ever watch Tusk.

Quite a few Doctor Who episodes. But as an adult, the Weeping Angels: https://screenrant.com/doctor-who-weeping-angels-statues-episodes-every/

A Wearwolf ? A fashionista lycanthrope?

That movie was terrifying in general, personally I was more scared of the ceiling lamp

Those god damned wheelers man. And then the heads in jars.

I grew up with a family that liked horror movies, and it was the 80s, so I watched a ton of kid-inappropriate stuff, and I felt the same way.

I still don't watch the Murphy death scene to this day. I guess I never thought about the "why" of it, but you saying it now, that these guys were just normal people, not monsters or supernatural supernatural beings, and not in a fantasy setting, but a realistic enough place, and were taking so much realistic joy in killing this random guy in the worst way possible was more messed up than anything else I've seen.

The other stuff in the movie didn't bother me, since it was mostly people getting what they deserve, but I also never really liked them throwing their buddy out of the moving car when he was begging them not to and I don't recall him being all that injured for someone in a movie. I could never enjoy That 70s Show either, and wouldn't watch it because I just couldn't think of anything else but Clarence Boddicker when I saw him.

I didn't know it at the time, but I saw the bit of Aliens where the pilot got merc'd and everyone was basically fucked. Years later I figured out my persistent nightmare.

Communion with Chris Walken. Slept with the lights on that night.

I change my mind. I most certainly do not want a boat just like this.

There's three of them that did it for me.

1. Chucky. Cuz duh, my dad let me watch it when I was far too young, and I had nightmares for weeks.

2. Return to Oz. The Wizard of Oz sequel that featured a desolate Oz filled with nightmare creatures, and a witch that stole your fucking face.

3. Some random movie that my older brother and his friends were watching. I came in just in time to see a scene, depicting a female led band on an outdoor stage. A man was brutally beaten in the audience, and the crowd set him on fire. He was desperately rolling around, trying to extinguish the flames, and almost did it, but then the woman lead singer of the band took a swig from a liquor bottle, and spit it out on him. The flames engulfed him, and now he lay motionless. The fear I felt was half from the agony of someone burning alive, and half from the wretched cruelty of the crowd and the lead singer. The mob mentality where nobody helped him, and not just didn't help him, but made it worse. Fucking horrifying. My first glance into the mind of psychopathy.

I always felt bad for the dog he replaced. Poor doggy.

I lived on elm street when that movie came out. Did not appreciate that very much.

As a fundamentalist Southern Baptist, Ghostbusters terrified me.

I saw it again in my early 20s and was like - this scared me???? WTF?

Did they do the first slice of birthday cake thing? I only learned about that a few years ago and it is such a cute and delightful tradition :)

First Contact is the first Trek media I remember sitting down to watch on purpose. The Borg messed me up for a good while. Dying is one thing, but having your very self be subsumed into a greater whole against your will is freaky.

A clown, a clown firefighter, and a shark

In my youth I was constantly peeking out my window before bed to make sure there weren’t any terminators or Aliens waiting to break into my front facing bedroom window. Watching those at like 10 or younger wasn’t the best

It's a comedy stretched over the bones of a horror movie.

Makes sense a kid might get spooked.

#3 sounds like a childhood interpretation of a kill in Serial Mom.

Especially steeped in "religious warfare". heh. But as an adult, it is so silly. But I guess also when I saw it for the second time, enough time had passed for SFX to improve so it also feels a bit campy on top of it all :)

The Last Unicorn

IT gave a whole generation of us Coulrophobia... I'm in my 40s and still get creeped out by fucking clowns and avoid anything that has clowns in it or any media that has clowns.