"What movies scared the beejeesus out of you?" Topic

Salem's Lot.

link

Tony

As a child, I saw House on Haunted Hill and it scared me.

As an adult, my wife, daughter and I went to see Passion of the Christ and no one in the theater spoke as we all left. And we all realized in the car we were crying. My 16 year old daughter said "I never want to sin again." She's a nun now.

Mike Bunkermeister Creek
Bunker Talk blog

"All the President's Men"

Could there really be corruption in high places?!?

(I was a naïve child, remember)

Arachnophobia.

Probably not my best choice of movies since spiders terrify me!

The movie that does it for me is "Cube".
Mainly because I could actually see some government doing it.

YouTube link

Children shouldnt play with dead things
prince of darkness
the brain that wouldnt die
the manster
the navy vs the night monsters

I'm trying to remember what the last movie that scared me was.

The first movie I remember that scared me, and introduced me to the phenomenon of "scary movies", was one that I don't remember the title of. I was probably around five years old. My grandmother was staying with us and our house had her TV in it for about two weeks. That was novel. (We didn't get our own TV until I was 16.) The movie had an underground traveling vessel, and there was a giant underground monster of some sort. Another early movie that remains nameless involved aliens entering and leaving people's heads. There were evil aliens and good ones battling them, and humans seemed caught in between. Watching the floating aliens emerge from their hosts was very disturbing to my undeveloped imagination.

The earliest terror movie that I remember the title to is "The Beast with Five Fingers". Saw it in the afternoon, had to walk through an empty field to get home. Terrified every step of the way, and for months after that, whenever I remembered any part of that movie.

Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein spooked me really bad. I knew it was supposed to be funny, but the scary stuff was too scary. For years, all you had to do was crank up the spooky music that was stock for all of the terror films back then, and I was a quivering mass.

Because I grew up with a hefty respect for my ability to be spooked by movies I tended to avoid them. But something challenged me too, so I would decide from time to time to watch another one. Gradually, the shock value wore off, until they became boring. I haven't seen one in years. "The Others" was probably the last one, and it was just by chance, not design. I found it clever, well, after that shocking death scream at the opening, that is. :)

The medium of movies cannot keep me on the edge of my seat anymore. I have too much disbelief….

@Bunkermeister: Passion of the Christ was special. I suppose the inclusion of the graphic Satan was a terror motif. But I was more horrified by the flagellation going on. Jesus the gorgeous man was being flayed because of ME?! WTH!!?? Been Christian all of my life and never had a clue that something that horrific occurred because I need "saving". I rebelled at the concept of a "God" who required such horrific games to keep souls out of hell. I still do. So, despite what I wrote in my previous post, that film jolted me like no other has before or since….

When I was a little kid it was The Wizard of Oz. Later it was The Fly, The Thing, and The Deadly Mantis. After that it was Aliens.

BTW, a buddy and I went to see Aliens. When the chestburster started coming out of the crewmans chest the girl behind us started making those sounds. You know the ones, right before you are going to throw up all over everyone in the row in front of you.

Trilogy of Terror, the Zuni doll segment.
Great scares for young me!

-Kosta

Alien, Hellraiser & as a young kid – Invasion of the Saucer Men (google it)

So many bad memories: Old Yeller (rabies scene), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Shark attack), Jaws, Aliens, Wizard of Oz, the Fly, and many more I can't remember the titles. The Exorcist I never saw but I had happened to see the trailer. It is still as vivid as yesterday.

When I went to see "Fury" the other day,my wallet wanted to flee in terror when it saw the admission price.

Probably the worst was the made for tv "Dont be afraid of the dark" when I was about 8 years old.

Also there was the Boris Karloff "Black Friday" when the ghost of the old lady wants its ring back.

YouTube link

Someone here put me onto this one. It would have scared the snot outta me as a kid. Great fun, now….

The Exorcist
Alien
The Sentinel
Carnival of Souls
The Other

Anyone mention "Dragon's Domain". An episode of Space 1999 and not a movie but it scared the heck out of me. A monster that compels you to walk into its mouth while you you know what is going to happen.

Movie wise is Alien and Halloween.

Jaws.

The TV movie version of The Woman in Black.

When my girls were teenagers, Thirteen. I had nightmares.

Cheers,
JohnG

I'll second the flying monkey's in Wizard of Oz

"An Inconvenient Truth"

It's scary what passes for science these days.

Saw The Omega man when I was about 10. I haven't seen it since, but, forty years down the track, I can still remember how scary it was and the nightmares that it gave me.

I didn't think that Jaws was particularly scary, but it did give me a headache. We saw it at the old Corio Theatre in Geelong (a 1930s picture palace that had been re-opened temporarily to cope with the demand for Jaws). We were late and ended up in the back row. Every time the damned shark popped up, we cracked our heads on the wood panelling behind us.

When I was a kid…

The Haunting (the original)
House on Haunted Hill

Also…

Psycho
The Shining
Exorcist
The Omen
Alien

Most recently-

Descent (the one with the women spelunkers. I'm a little claustrophobic to begin with.)

Alien

For years before I saw it I kept telling friends how movies and TV shows blew it by showing the monster too early and too often. I figured the scariest movie wouldn't show you the monster until the very end, but would give you occasional glimpses of it during the actual movie and what it left behind when someone met it.

Alien was that movie.

As with many of the posters, a lot of movies scared me as a kid, even stupid stuff like the dead witches feet curling up and disappearing in The Wizard of Oz. During the past year I've been looking up movies that scared me as a kid, or that I could watch as a kid, and watching them as a 62 year old kid. My younger daughter gets dragooned into watching these with me (I say it's so she can get an appreciation for them; she says it's my warped sense of humor). Just watched Them over the weekend. The opening third of the movie was the scariest part with the blowing dust and weird noise without getting a good view of the giant ants and then the scene where they fly over the giant ant hill and see the ant come up form below and release a rib cage to roll down the side.

Other movies that scared me as a kid were any of the Dracula, Wolfman, and Frankenstein ones, The Time Machine (1960 version), and Invaders from Mars (1953 version).

The Thing (1982) and the remake of the Fly (around 1986), at the time, each had scenes where nightmares come from.

Movies and TV have never scared me, but a Black bear getting to close to a kid and not having a gun in hand, that scared the crap out of me. Lucky i can run fast and I picked up a big rock and hit it with a hard shot to the face and yelled my self out of air. (I still have nightmares about that)

Not scared so much as disgusted by certain movies(theatrical and 'made-for's"). However,one mid -late 1990's TV pic(done in a Orson Welles-like War Of The Worlds style) had me ready to defend my apartment from any who would have taken the show too seriously.

Exorcist.
Children of the Corn.
Pet Semetary [sic]. When the kid cut the old guy's Achilles tendon… yeep!

I have to say that House on Haunted Hill scared me quit a bit. Saw it at the drive-in. I haven't found to many modern movies (last 15-20 years) that scare me. To formulaic. blair Witch made me sick though.

gamertom – In addition to not showing the Alien right away it is one of the few times where the Alien was actually scarier when you DID see it.

That JQ episode got me too! The tension of the noise and heartbeat sound of that creature preyed on me, just like the monster from Forbidden Planet.

I saw Alien and The Thing (in 3d!) in the theaters when they came out (I think I was 8 when I saw Alien) and they scared me, but the one that affected me most was an episode of In Search Of… don't exactly remember what all it was about, but between the way Nemoy narrated that episode and the subject matter, I didn't sleep for several days. Spooked the hell out of me.

Jaws spooked me too, to a lesser degree, because I saw it about the time I was learning to surf!

None, they are films with actors.

Quatermass and the Pit

Go see if you can sit through 'Don't Look Now', with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, even as an adult and not be uneasy and a bit jumpy by the end.

None. They're movies.

LT

Never saw the movie, but this trailer, on TV at late hours of the night (while dad was napping between the late-late-early kaiju move and Rat Patrol) scared the beejeesus out of me.

Trailer for Magic (1978)

Tell me if there isn't a creepy poem recited in the above link. Over thirty years later as an adult after having seen first hand some of the worst that human beings can do to each other, just pulling that up creeped me out. I declined to actually watch it.

Happy nightmares, everyone.

Hitchcock's The Birds scared me for months as a kid.

Night of the Living Dead (original) is still the scariest movie ever made.

As a child, the original "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". When I was a little older I got pretty hard to scare, but one day when I was in my forties(?)I saw a movie with Kevin Bacon (of all people) called "Stir of Echoes", which I found so profoundly disturbing I had to turn it off and finish it the next evening.
I can't explain it except to say that the story, the characters, the setting and the sets, everything was so uncannily like the neighborhoods I knew from my youth in New England that it was uncomfortably close to home, disturbingly believable, and therefore… scary!

When I was a kid, "The Green Slime" was scary.

Alien – I saw at the cinema when I was 17, and then had a 10-mile cycle home down dark country lanes on a windy night. I doubt I've ever cycled so fast before or since

Spoorloos (The Vanishing) – the ending gave me the willies, and I haven't seen the film since.