Remember me, Eddie?!
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.
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.
What are these from?
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!
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.
I’ve pretty much loved horror since the Cookie Monster, but The Blair Witch Project scared the shit out me in theaters.
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
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.
This is embarrassing, but I was really, really young.
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.
Tales from the Darkside, specifically the Cat from Hell sketch. It’s where a black cat slashes a guy pretty badly before literally diving into him. I left the room after that.
I didn’t revisit that scene until I was an adult, and let’s just say that kid me had good instincts, since the scene afterwards showed the cat literally burrowing through the guy before popping out of his mouth.
The Day After 1983
I was around 10-11 years old. the whole fuckin movie terrified me.
A Christmas Carol (1984) really fucked with me when I was younger; I think I’ve rewatched it since and it wasn’t that bad
Unfun fact, the creators of Return to Oz researched the top psychological fears of children and carefully built their movie around them.
Saw it on TV in the basement alone on a Saturday, and it is one of the most unsettling things I’ve seen to this day.
I saw bits and pieces of Event Horizon on the old satellite dish when I was probably 6 or 7.
Sure wish I didn’t have eyes there either, lady.
The lift. I was eight or nine. I didn’t dare enter any lift for years.
Cruella De Vil, both Glenn Close’s rendition and the animated version. Funny now, but man did she scare me when I was little.
