Same!

This is embarrassing, but I was really, really young.

Invasion of the Saucer Men

I watched it during a Saturday morning creature feature on TV.

It has a disembodied alien hand that crawls around attacking people. The hand has needle-like nails on the fingers that it uses to inject victims with poison. It terrified me. I spent years jumping to my bed from the door in case there was a hand hiding under the bed.

FYI, if I remember correctly, the "poison" it injects is just alcohol. If it attacked you, you just ended up drunk.

I used to have nightmares about E.T. standing at the foot of my bed, reaching out to touch me with his glowing finger. He was essentially my sleep paralysis demon.

Oh man, completely forgot about this until now. Could explain why I'm not a cat person

The Stuff scared the fucking shit out of me as a child, I definitely watched it way too young. My mom told me that after watching the movie, she was helping me in the bathroom and she had to leave because the phone was ringing (I was young enough I still needed help to go to the bathroom). When she came back I was standing on top of the toilet lid crying and screaming that the stuff was going to come up out of the toilet and get me.

I haven’t been able to watch it again. I understand it’s a comedy and I would probably enjoy it, but I’m way too fucking traumatized to even try.

Kinda late but Neverending Story.

Those laser beam statues scares me. Also when the giant turtle emerges and you get that shot of it la head slowly approaching the camera. Somehow that was super distressing to me.

Invaders from Mars (1953)

Don't know how old I was (like 8 or so), but it aired in the afternoon and my parents left the TV on... Didn't sleep for months.

In the 70s apparently showing a horror movie during daytime was okay 🫣

https://youtu.be/Ntf5_ue2Lzw

I still find myself humming the Bunyip song to myself constantly, decades later.

I think it was from one of the Creep Show movies, Tales from the Crypt, or a similar collection, but a short about teens on a raft on a lake being picked off by some kind of black slime/algae thing. Never been comfortable swimming in lakes since

Friday the 13th. My parents didn't really regulate what I watched in terms of violence.

Sybil 1976 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075296/
The Entity 1982 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082334

Both supposedly based on true stories. I was watching them around 5 years old. After The Entity I started at the ceiling all night and at times could have sworn I saw electricity arcing. I was dumbfounded by Sybil and how someone could do that to their child had some weird nightmares from that for sure.

I had never even heard of this before, but it was really fun to watch! I didn't know I needed a Robocop musical before now! 😆

The letter home to mom and dad and the ED-209 having the same Alex Murphy style flashbacks as he was killed were hilarious, and of course the alley of perpetual sexual assault.

that looks like a great movie, but mine was in Black and White... god it really is seared into my brain

Something Wicked This Way Comes

The spider scene

Darkness falls.

It's a movie about the tooth fairy but the tooth fairy is actually an old woman who used to collect the teeth of the children in her village until the townspeople burnt her alive and then she became a spirit who was essentially the tooth fairy but if you ever saw her she'd kill you.

It's cheesy as hell but it was terrifying when I was younger

That movie is responsible for one of my favorite movie quotes that no one recognizes:

"We're safe in the car, right!?"

Oh! Look at the cute cartoon bunnies! This will be great for the children!

☠️

Return to Oz

Childhood trauma all over the place...

for some reason, i was terrified by the 1989 batman vhs sleeve as a kid. not the movie itself, just the sleeve the tape was in. i don't think i'd even seen the movie at that point. looking at it now, i cannot figure out what i found so scary about it.

Volcano (1997) terrified young me. How could anyone sleep peacefully when lava could just appear out of nowhere?

Needless to say I never lived even remotely close to any kind of geologically active area, let alone a volcano.

And you're in fact NOT safe in the car

Large Marge.

Oddly enough, I had nightmares about turning into a dog and not being able to get back to normal after watching Shaggy D.A.
Also remember my dad, brother and I watching a rented Betamax copy of American Werewolf in London in our little unfinished basement TV area and being very spooked about being alone in the dark that night. Those subway access tunnels!

To be clear, it still terrifies me.

I enjoy the rest of the movie but this is one of the greatest horror sequences ever. A remake that truly surpasses the original.

EDIT: I have to give a shoutout to the movie that had the most real world effect on me. That would be Arachnophobia. I couldn't function normally for months. Sitting on the toilet. Putting my shoes on. Sticking my hand in a bag of chips. I was a wreck.

I've pretty much loved horror since the Cookie Monster, but The Blair Witch Project scared the shit out me in theaters.

And the clown.

Run!

No idea how I never heard about this. Loved the og twilight zone version

Watched this as an adult. Movie is messed up.

Blair Witch catches a lot of flak, but I consider it one of the better horror movies ever made. It was awesome seeing it in theaters back in the day and they made a website to make it look like it was all real and the found footage was real. It's a masterclass in tension. And made on a tiny budget.

Signs was such a good movie. The closet scene gets me every time I watch it, even today. Such a suspenseful movie. Forever a classic movie.

When I was 6 or 8 ish, my family watched Stepmonster on TV.

The monster scared the absolute pants off of me. I had nightmares for months. In hindsight, not that scary, but at the time? At my age? Terrifying.

Agree, the whole thing was a fever dream. Creeped me out

When I was 9 I saw Jurassic Park III for a friend's birthday. I had nightmares about dinosaurs for months. But the most distressing part was when the corpse in the parachute falls out of the tree. I still have the image of it seared into my brain.

What are these from?

My theory: Judge Doom needs to act always serious and frightening or else all his minion weasels are laughing themselves to death.

Hah, it made me more careful around cats, for sure. I blame tortitude and litterboxes for the reasons why I prefer dogs.

Terminator 1

Listen, and understand! That Terminator is out there! It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever, until you are dead!

This fucked me up more than any monsters... This thing just has one mission and it's relentless

I don't remember my age, but Spirited Away absolutely fucked me up for a little while. I felt like I was in that world and was terrified of No-Face eating me up. Legitimately had nightmares... It doesn't seem that bad rewatching it but it was not good for my younger mind.

That is still the scariest movie I've ever seen.

The guerilla marketing around the film was absolutely genius. I knew it wasn't real, but I was already immersed in the world for weeks before the release.

I was genuinely terrified at the end of the movie. We went home and I made my fiancé (now husband) watch Priscilla, Queen of the Desert with me so I could get to sleep. I had nightmares for weeks.

Bats, probably.

It wasn’t a movie per se. I thought it was when I was a kid, though. It’s an episode of “Friday the 13th: The Series” called “The Executioner”.

I was like maybe 6 or 7 at the time.

It starts with this guy in prison you see them take him to the electric chair and attempt to execute him. They botch it and the warden or whoever pretty much goes “oops, well by law we did technically carry out your sentence so you’re a free man now”

He then goes on to become a dentist and uses a “cursed electric chair” as his dentist chair to take revenge on the world.

This gave me a real fear of going to the dentist on top of just being a kid and being scared to go. Still hate going to the dentist (who doesn’t I guess)

I used to play Myst at the time and that even made me feel uncomfortable in the Time Machine room with the dentist chair at the first island.

edit: I watched it again as an adult and it was corny as hell

And the other movie that scared the hell out of me was Superman III when Vera got sucked into the machine at the end and turned into an android.

Haha as an adult my reaction was "ommmmmggg this is the fuckin shiiiit"

Not to dismiss your reaction. Kids can have very intense reactions to stimuli like that. The movie Alien terrified me.

That story is The Raft by Stephen King. It was included in the book Skeleton Crew, which was a collection of his short stories. The movie version was in Creepshow 2.

ET. I’d have nightmares so bad that my dad had to sleep in my room because I was so terrified of him (I’d dream he was walking on my bed). He still freaks me out!

I remember seeing a trailer for that movie at the theater and it scared me so bad I had to cover my eyes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ntf5_ue2Lzw

This one?

Very scary for a child or anyone scared of that type of thing. But I think the consistency of the soup is the most frightening part. How is it that thick with only one packet?