Board 8 > What film/tv show did you find scariest as a kid?

(+) Yeah! (+)

For me it is definitely Clash of the Titans (1981)...specifically the part where the go into Medusa's lair and the camera pans past her silhouette on the wall.



I can't find a better picture online but I swear to god this gave me nightmares for months and months.

And because of the way the street light shone into my bedroom, my overactive childish mind always imagined that silhouette moving past.

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EASILY 1990's IT. It was the first horror film I had ever watched, I was 6 years old, and it terrified me for years and gave me a clown phobia lol. I had my bed up against the wall, and there was a little hole in the wall and I ALWAYS thought Pennywise was looking at me through the hole. Around the same time I had also seen Candyman and The Ring shortly after and they scared me almost as much too. But never as much as Pennywise.

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that Are You Afraid of the Dark? with the ghost in the pool

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I don't recall being scared of any one show overall, but for individual episodes it'd be the Ramses episode of Courage and Dark Harvest in Invader Zim

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Was never brave enough to see IT I'm sorry to say. Speaking of The Ring, the closet jump scare is the most I have ever jumped during a film. To the point where I said "nope" and turned it off, went to bed and watched the rest in the safety of daylight the next morning lol

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hombad46 posted...

I don't recall being scared of any one show overall, but for individual episodes it'd be the Ramses episode of Courage and Dark Harvest in Invader Zim

I didn't explain very well but it could be a scene or moment of a film or show, not necessarily the entire thing :)

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there was an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark? where the main character was being watched by a hidden camera in the mirror and now my paranoid fear is that someone is watching me through a camera in my mirror

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The Nightmare Before Christmas and CSI both gave me nightmares as a kid

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IT does have admittedly cheesy parts nowadays but Tim Curry's performance, his mannerisms, his voice and makeup/costume, it still scares me! It's all so effortless, it's the fact that he acts like a normal clown while having these sinister undertones is the core of my phobia I think.

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One episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark where this kid (who might have been dead?) kept popping up out of nowhere and saying "I'm cold..." in this really freaky voice. I could handle the rest of the show but that one part killed me every time.

DeepsPraw posted...

that Are You Afraid of the Dark? with the ghost in the pool

Was that this?

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It gave me an absolutely uncontrollable fear of clowns until I was well into adulthood. I can be around them now but still feel very uneasy about them.

There was also an episode of the X-Files that caused me a lot of fear at the time. The one about the inbred family that has the house of booby traps.

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Snake5555555555 posted...

EASILY 1990's IT. It was the first horror film I had ever watched, I was 6 years old, and it terrified me for years and gave me a clown phobia lol. I had my bed up against the wall, and there was a little hole in the wall and I ALWAYS thought Pennywise was looking at me through the hole. Around the same time I had also seen Candyman and The Ring shortly after and they scared me almost as much too. But never as much as Pennywise.

This

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The Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland terrified me for years.

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A horror movie called Dolls

Dudley the Dragon



Mr. Crabby in particular fucking horrified me

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I found stuff scary while watching it but I can't recall anything sticking with me beyond that.

If we expand this to all fictional characters, for some reason when I was really young I was terrified of Santa Claus. I didn't like the idea of some magic stranger coming into our house.

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Ursula's laugh from The Little Mermaid.

Judge Doom turning into a Toon and then melting or whatever in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

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That Are You Afraid of the Dark episode where a computer virus tries to get into a kid's brain.

Especially the part where the kid a port on his hand and the virus is about to connect to that.

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Little off-topic, but when I played Silent Hill 2 at launch, I nope'd and powered the console down when the radio static got really loud. I also waited during the day to play through the prison section because it was just too much late at night.

And I wasn't even a "kid" kid - I was 15!

Considering 2001 standards, that game didn't mess around.

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There was another movie I watched as a kid that gave me nightmares. It was basically about a bald, fat cannibal who went around town eating people. I had so many nightmares about that guy eating me.

Anyway I must have blocked it out of my mind because all of a sudden it entered my head a couple of years ago and I found a trailer for it on YouTube.

I'm ashamed to say that the film that scared me so much turns out to be a shitty looking comedy. I obviously didn't understand humour that well when I was 6 and focused on the cannibal part lol. You should have seen my face when I saw the trailer for the first time.

Trailer below

https://youtu.be/9BTZMVYAunA

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During one of those free HBO preview weekends, I was watching Tales from the Crypt with my parents (probably because they assumed it was a kid's show like Are you Afraid of the Dark). The episode focused on a monster/demon/ugly faced thing, and the final scene was the big payoff where the monster's face was revealed. Well, right before I got to see it, my parents told me to cover my eyes, and I was already so scared by that point that I did so immediately.

I never saw the monster's face. It's been at least 25 years since, and I still think about that episode sometimes. I'll occasionally look up the list of episodes to see if I can find it, but no luck yet (and no, I'm not gonna watch multiple episodes of that crap for 10 seconds of childhood closure).

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Land before time

Tales from the Crypt

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Communion

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CaptainOfCrush posted...

During one of those free HBO preview weekends, I was watching Tales from the Crypt with my parents (probably because they assumed it was a kid's show like Are you Afraid of the Dark). The episode focused on a monster/demon/ugly faced thing, and the final scene was the big payoff where the monster's face was revealed. Well, right before I got to see it, my parents told me to cover my eyes, and I was already so scared by that point that I did so immediately.

I never saw the monster's face. It's been at least 25 years since, and I still think about that episode sometimes. I'll occasionally look up the list of episodes to see if I can find it, but no luck yet (and no, I'm not gonna watch multiple episodes of that crap for 10 seconds of childhood closure).

Was the episode "The New Arrival" by any chance? That had a pretty killer reveal similar to what you described.

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Snake5555555555 posted...

Was the episode "The New Arrival" by any chance? That had a pretty killer reveal similar to what you described.

Actually, I may have just found it! I think it was "Til Death" from Season 2. The voodoo influence and dark colors at the end are definitely triggering some hazy memories. Assuming that is the one (I'm pretty confident)... yeah, that ending would have given me nightmares. Thanks Mom and Dad!

Though I just looked up The New Arrival, and that would have probably scared the crap out of me too.

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Sound of Music. The hills are alive, man. Chills, running down my spine.

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The Are You Afraid of the Dark episode where these kids were having their youth siphoned.

Also surprisingly enough Ernest Scared Stupid. I had seen multiple horror movies by that point but for some reason that one scared me

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E.T

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Oh Til Death is a great one! That's just a very classic EC Comics horror tale.

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Snake5555555555 posted...

EASILY 1990's IT. It was the first horror film I had ever watched, I was 6 years old, and it terrified me for years and gave me a clown phobia lol. I had my bed up against the wall, and there was a little hole in the wall and I ALWAYS thought Pennywise was looking at me through the hole. Around the same time I had also seen Candyman and The Ring shortly after and they scared me almost as much too. But never as much as Pennywise.

This

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The book IT had me scurrying past the sewer grate on my walk to school for years

From movies, that scene from the sixth sense when the ghost with slit wrists runs up to him from the hallway while he was peeing at night probably got me the most

But my imagination was always annoyingly "active", so any schlock horror movie with jump scares would have me on edge for days.


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Event Horizon and some horror movie that starts off with a monkey scratching a dude and turning him to a zombie, forgot the title.

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SwiftyDC posted...

horror movie that starts off with a monkey scratching a dude and turning him to a zombie

This is either 28 Days Later or Dead Alive/Braindead.

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Yeah 28 days later was my first thought

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Courage the Cowardly Dog

Pet Sematary

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Snake5555555555 posted...

This is either 28 Days Later or Dead Alive/Braindead.

It was an older movie than 28 Days Later, Dead Alive sounds right.

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Good question. I think one movie that stood out to me was Pagemaster. There was a book called Horror and I kinda vaguely remember that there was a scene with dimly light rows of book cases and there were elongated shadows lurking, that anticipation was pretty scary for kid me.

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-hotdogturtle-- posted...

One episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark where this kid (who might have been dead?) kept popping up out of nowhere and saying "I'm cold..." in this really freaky voice. I could handle the rest of the show but that one part killed me every time.

Was that this?

Since no one else seems to have responded to this - No, that was not the pool episode. The one you mentioned guess starred Melissa Joan Hart where her and the boy she babysits have a stay with his aunts. Why the boy needed his babysitter to go with him if his two aunts were going to take care of him makes no sense, but that's what you get with kids shows sometimes.

I have no idea about the ghost in the pool, though it certainly sounds like an AYAotD story.

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catesdb posted...

Courage the Cowardly Dog

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It was actually a theatrical trailer for the slasher movie Urban Legend, starting with a guy dying of poisoning. I was scared to sit through trailers for a long time afterward.

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ChichiriMuyo posted...

I have no idea about the ghost in the pool, though it certainly sounds like an AYAotD story.

it's called "The Tale of the Dead Man's Float"
http://www.mtv.com/news/2348148/are-you-afraid-of-the-dark-scariest-episode/

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My parents were protective and didn't let me watch any movies that might be actually scary. I would get spooked pretty easily, though. The only specific moment that really stands out in my mind was an episode of Punky Brewster where the cast gets stuck in a cave and one by one her friends disappear...and then there's this sequence at the end where they appear as heads on the wall of a cavern with weird (for the time) effects that unnerved me. And then Punky runs out of that room and when she turns around, her dog gets replaced by a giant dog skeleton. Of course she wakes up at the end at it was all a dream.

I don't even know why I was watching. It wasn't a show I followed.

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I had kind of hardcore Christian parents who censored a lot of media, but then I caught parts of The Exorcist on TV at 12 lol. That had me messed up for a while.

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Me and my brother were scared of the Childs Play movies. Just the idea of your toys having murderous intent or being vassals for spirits freaked us out.

but yea it WAS a horror movie and possibly not the spirit of this topic

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My first actual terrors came from seeing Johnny Depp be turned into a blood fountain after Freddy Krueger drags him into his bed. I didn't sleep on my bed for a week, at least.

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Oh, I was very scared of Child's Play and generally evil dolls too.

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Are You Afraid of the Dark - The vampire episode at the hospital

The Mummy

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The Twilight Zone, the Gremlin on the airplane.

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