Wizard of Oz.

To my credit, I was afraid of the tornado and tornados are fucking real and scary.

Poltergeist, no question, slept with the lights on for 2-weeks behind that shit.

My neighbor friend's dad took me and her the day before 5th-grade started. That man levitated out his seat when that giant skull leaned out of the closet. My little brain: "oh shit oh shit oh shit the adult is scared..." To his credit, the movie was PG because PG-13 didn't exist in 1982. But still, c'mon Dave!

Didn't sleep, couldn't eat the cafeteria slop, it was 105F, heat stroked out in the hall crawling back from lunch recess. It was a very memorable day.

Hang in there buddy 🤣🩷

I was a bit too young to see Arachnophobia when I did.

Oh yeah my answer is poltergeist too. Too early, sucked. Bad sleep for weeks.

Also return to Oz. Those heads...

I'm not 100% what movie I saw as I was very young at the time. It may have been The legend of Boggy Creek. Basically a bigfoot horror. I grew up in the countryside beside a forest: It traumatised me against being outside at night.

Same! The whole family was leaving for a big hunting \ camping weekend, and we were leaving at 2am to get there at a decent time through the 10 hour drive. As my folks were packing, 8 year old me was staying up watching tv, and my mom goes, "Poltergeist is on HBO right now, you should watch it, I think you'll like it!" Well I don't remember if I stopped at the clown or the tree eating scene but I definitely saw both and was then immediately wisked away to stay in the woods for a week... Terrifying

Poltergeist, Critters, and honestly Earnest Scared Stoopid got me good as a kid. Oh also The Willies! Fuck that movie!

Leatherface. Which is funny because I have never, and still have never seen one of those movies. I do have the original acquired, however, and the plan is to watch it before the month ends. Too busy watching all the Universal horror stuff from the 30s, 40s, and 50s.

I don’t remember the name of the movie, but it ended with a man walking around in the sewers and merting another man that had shining red eyes, and it was implied that the first man died.

Don't be Afraid of the Dark (1973) scared the crap out of young me... The little creatures lurking in the dark and dragging them away.
My older sister reinforcing the fear with stories/teasing didn't help.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Be_Afraid_of_the_Dark_(1973_film)
I'm sure it would be laughable now, but my sister really knew how to push my buttons.

I had nightmares from watching critters.

Not a movie, but Unsolved Mysteries.

I was absolutely terrified of being abducted by aliens. would have a panic attack anytime i heard a weird noise or a weird light or a low flying plane at night in by bedroom.

This fucking guy haunted my nightmares for quite a long time. Haven't seen the movie since then though, maybe it's not that bad

The vinyl recording of it with that freaky ass artwork was a one-two punch of horror

I remember watching That Kiljunen Family (1981) as a kid and being shocked by one particular scene. Summary: This is a Finnish comedy film about a goofball rural family who win a contest and get to go to Helsinki. Goofball Family in Big City level hijinks ensue. The scene that terrified me was the one where the kids go joyriding trams. Probably too speedy for my kid brain.

After my father passed away, I found out that he had this film in his DVD collection, and my mother was like "sure, take all movies you want." (...doubled my DVD collection and then some.) Okay, the tram scene wasn't that bad. Obviously. (...I don't know, the humour hasn't dated the movie, it's just that a lot of the gags are only funny in theoretical sense. I did find one scene funny. One of the kids turns light switch off, it inexplicably cuts power to a whole city quarter, a foreign dignitary gets rescued from an elevator stuck between floors and shouts "down with nuclear energy!")

Watership Down

Was fucked up for a child to watch. My parents thought it was going to be a harmless animated movie for children. I watched it again as an adult. It is still fucked up.

The opening credits of Tales from the Darkside. The music scared me so bad that I’d cover my ears until the show had started.

https://youtu.be/Mioevxb2CfA?is=Twx4G2dzqwpzIdSZ

Still gives me a wiggins.

I think the AC blowing up was worse for me

The scene in Tremors when the car is getting pulled underground really got me. I was way too young to be watching that movie. Love it now though.

Twilight Zone movie.

The kid that the whole family is shit scared of.
One scene about being quiet.

The 80s rollercoaster of terrifying animation.

Secret of NIMH, was up there too.

I came here to post this exact thing!

I watched all kinds of scary stuff (thanks dad!) but that music creeped me the fuck out and still does!

I've seen the Public Domain, Ustinov version - The Curious Adventures of Mr. Wonderbird.

And yes, that king is cold.

https://archive.org/details/The_Curious_Adventures_of_Mr._Wonderbird

I saw it in the theatre at too young an age, but the scene where the astronaut in a spacesuit came through the patio door in E.T. The Extraterrestrial freaked me out as a kid.

When I killed your brother, I talked...JUST. LIKE. THIIIIIISSSSS!

There was an ad on TV for Knorr's soup when I was a toddler, and the big vegetable scarecrow character with the black hat scared the absolute fuck outta me. Just look at this cunt:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMzia7sJtVM

Like what was I supposed to take away from this? That a scarecrow is alive and knows when it's being looked at, and only then will it stop coming after me? And it eats its own flesh in soup-form? The fuck? 😭

Yes, this. The little girl had no mouth because she talked too much, and the little boy had divine powers. He took away her mouth to shut her up, and she hid in her room because she was afraid of him. They all were, I think.

When a similar thing happened in The Matrix, I found that unnerving, too.

Body horror is a thing.

Night Gallery: The Caterpillar.

The Gate

There was a scene with adults at the door and then the head comes off and a bunch of demons come out which freaked me the fuck out when I was….I think 7 or 8?

Shoe murdering bastard

I didn't watch Robocop when it was new, but we rented Robocop 2. My mother made me leave during the disembowling scene, and I had this inflated idea of how bad it was. It really wasn't. What they did to Murphy in the beginning of the first one was far worse.

Then there's the third one where a little girl with a laptop hacks a robot between its legs where it can't get her and Robocop himself flies. Yeah, that shit was dumb.

There was a SA scene that really got to me and I forgot what it was. Found it years later so I could never watch that film again. Showgirls. I remember it being much worse, but it was still pretty bad. Also not the worst SA scene I've seen. All I'm gonna say is, "Jena Malone's first movie." IMDb will be very helpful in advising you which film to never watch (assuming you could ever find it, and unedited, at that — I mean Lifetime airs it from time to time but they gotta cut all the bad shit out). Easily the most disturbing film I've ever seen, just because that kind of shit happens. Oh, and if you look up the author, she just threw North (or South) Carolina under the bus because South = Incest Country. She's from fucking California. So yeah, that shit does happen everywhere, and for the most part, nothing's done about it. Huge TW on that whole thing. Yeah, staying up late watching Showtime was not a good thing.

A bit later, but the American The Ring (remake of Ringu). Was it better? Eh... It had its moments. The creature design on the teen girl being scared to death was too good, though. That shit haunted me for a while. So I set it as my wallpaper on my laptop to desensitise myself. People routinely asked me what the fuck my problem was when they saw it. Still creepy AF. If you haven't seen it... they made her look "scared to death and simutaneously having had instantly having been soaked in filthy water for a week. So her face was pale, water-logged, green-ish, and her jaw was unnaturally stretched open. And her eyes were blackened. Almost like what the Scream mask was, but applied to a real face. (And yes I know Scream came first. It might have inspired that makeup design. Also, that makeup/costume designer should have won some award. Say what you will about the rest of the movie, save for Daveigh Chase, who was awesome, but don't knock the makeup job.)

An American Wearwolf In London, and Jaws.

The Dark Crystal. Creepy fucking muppets.

My favorite Christmas movie of all time

Fun fact: Gremlins was one of the movies which led to the creation of the PG-13 rating.

I only saw parts of it and yet it haunted me for years. I found it genuinely terrifying and fucked up.

My parents LOVED scary movies. We went to ALL of them we could. There was a drive in and they figured I would sleep through it.

Jaws
Hills have eyes
Body snatchers
Incredible melting man
Sasquatch
Halloween
Friday the 13th

List goes on

Holy shit lol. Yikes.

The talking trees freaked me tf out. Think I was 5 or 6.

I think I can say Dumbo's satanic ritual scenes, since I still remember those.

I saw Ghoulies at a babysitter's house when I was 6. It was the first remotely scary thing I had ever been exposed to.

It opens with a satanic occult ritual. This was peak Satanic Panic, and my Assembly of God church was teaching me that Satan was real and people who worshipped him were actually performing ritual sacrifice. So in my little-kid perception, it was basically a documentary.

I had nightmares about it until I left the church in my early 20s. As part of my deconstruction process, I watched the film and saw how ridiculous it really was.

I think it was the '70s where Starburst candy used exciting sports like hand gliding to demonstrate how yummy the candy would be. They would show somebody pop the candy in their mouth, then go hang gliding off the top of a mountain or coast down the top peak of a huge roller coaster.

I was like fuck this shit, I'm never eating Starburst. I don't want to get flung off the top of a mountain or something high up.

Well it has been over 40yrs, but I was going for some kind of spoiler quality to my comment. XD

Still worth a watch, for the familial power-dynamic reversal, and the frozen terror and word-selection, akin to tiptoeing around an abusive/alcoholic parent.

Yeah, somehow I saw the transformation scene from American Werewolf... at a young age and it left a deep impression on me.

Given how long it took for films to make it to TV in those days, it's conceivable that I saw it on its UK TV premiere, whenever that was, because I sure as heck wasn't old enough to go to the cinema to see it. But what I still don't understand is how I would have been up late enough to catch it, because it would surely have been on past my bedtime.

Anyway, there were probably other scary things that I can't call to mind right now, but that stuck with me for a long time.

One of my favorite villain-death-scenes of all time

That movie fucked me up as a kid. I had recurring nightmares for a decade.

Watched "The Birds" on TV as a kid and it freaked me out so much that I had to look under my bed every night for a few days to make sure there were no sea gulls under there.

That horrid clown doll that sat at the foot of the bed in the boys room scared the heck outta me. I had one of those shitty things!

So Poltergeist.