Films that terrified you when you were a child...

[nikolai]

This has got to be good for a topic: which films scared the life out of you as a small child? Bonus points for films that when watched as an adult are not really scary. I want films which showcase the terror/fear that atmosphere and an overactive imagination can produce.

 

[Jamdin]

I was never a fan of the slasher movies when I grew up. I did watch the Satinic movies spawned from "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Omen." There is one movie, which title that I cannot recall, that scared the life out of me. It had something to do with brides of Satan. Anyway, "Race With The Devil" with Peter Fonda made me never want to camp out or drive a RV. "The Devil's Rain" with William Shatner made me not want to play with candle wax. However, the most horrorible scene was in "Beneath The Planet of the Apes" when the underground dwellers revealed their true faces.

 

[Mercule]

My grandparents let me watch "Salem's Lot" when I was 5 or 6. I can ascribe (justly or not) a good many quirks to that experience. Strangely, I've had a vampire fixation for as long as I can remember.

 

[milotha]

I was terrified by Alien and The Thing.

We saw Alien at a drive-in, and I was so scared after the alien burst out of the guy's chest that I hid in the back seat with my eyes closed for the rest of the movie. I could still hear everything, and I kept imagining what was happening. I have to admit that my imagination was much scarier than the actual movie.

The Thing gave me nightmares for weeks as a kid.

 

[JoeBlank]

The Wizard of Oz

Those flying monkeys still give me the creeps.

 

[WayneLigon]

Hmm. Well, when I was a kid, all that existed were the broadcast channels and they cut so much stuff it's hard to tell what might have been scary to me as a kid.

For some reason 'Frogs' scared me. Don't know why.

'Don't Be Afraid of The Dark'. TV-movie. Scared the living crap out of me, and by God it's still creepy today.

Jaws. Yep. Ocean = Bad.

The #1 thing that scared me as a kid: The Patterson Sasquatch Video. For some reason that creeped me out big time.

 

[Teflon Billy]

David Cronenberg's Videodrome.

Until that point in my life I assumed that when you went "crazy" you began to act like Daffy Duck.

Videodrome showed a guy (James Woods) who literally could not tell the difference between real/imaginary or asleep/awake.

He also might be killing people.

I was scarred as much as I was scared

 

[Crothian]

Videodrome scared me as did Watcher in the Woods. Granted that one is just so mellow by todays standards.

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

The Wizard of Oz

Those flying monkeys still give me the creeps.

Same movie, but it was the munchkins that freaked me out. The two parts in particular are the damn twitching lollypop guild dancers, and the mayor's voice when he sings "She's reaaaaaally most siiiiiiinceeeeeerrrlly dead". Just thinking about them is giving me the creeps right now.

Two other scenes in films that really creeped me out were in Poltergeist when the assistant eats the chicken with all the maggots on it then tears his face, and in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Toht's face melts off when the ark is opened. Both of those scenes made it very difficult for me to go to sleep after seeing the movies. But I love both films now, so no harm done.

But those damn munchkins...

 

[kolvar]

Burried alive in black and white, alone in a back and breakfest room, the scene where he dreams of his crypt all gone wrong. One of the view movies I did not watch to the end (10 years later I had no problems with this)