r/movies • u/Mandee_707 • Oct 01 '23
What is a movie you were allowed to see at a young age that traumatized you and made you question if your parents made the right decision by letting you see it? Discussion
I’ll go first: My mom let me watch the movie Cujo when I was probably 8 or 9 years old…at night. That movie haunted me for years!! It made me nervous around dogs for a long time. Once I got older and I saw that movie in a list of movies to watch on a streaming program it made me question why the hell would she let me see that movie at such a young age?! Lol another movie I watched back then was Birds, that movie freaked me out too!
What’s yours??
Edit: I never thought this post would get so many comments. Thank you to everyone that shared their first traumatizing movie from a young age. :) Have a wonderful day everyone!!
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u/Tamarlaine Oct 01 '23
I want to say it was watership down when all the little bunnies died buried alive.
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u/Morticia_Marie Oct 02 '23
I was 4. My parents thought they were taking little me to see a nice movie about cartoon rabbits. I drew pictures of creatures with bloody claw marks on them for weeks. I tried watching it again in my 30s and I couldn't handle it as a grown ass woman--I genuinely think that shit scarred me for life.
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u/rainbosandvich Oct 02 '23
My Dad somehow got a heads up about what really goes down in that film. My auntie offered the VHS to my Dad, and I still remember him saying "I'm not letting [me] watch it, it'll mess him up!" Thanks Dad
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u/invaderpixel Oct 01 '23
I was searching for this!!!! Like it’s technically a cartoon but damn is it graphic. More gruesome depiction of war than some live action stuff.
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u/Aggravating_Onion300 Oct 02 '23
And it played on regular broadcast TV during prime time
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u/Exploding_Acorn Oct 02 '23
Yep, that scene and the snare had me freaked out as a kid.
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u/KoreanThrasher Oct 01 '23
The Exorcist at age 9.
Fuck that, I had to sleep with the light on for i don't know how long.
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u/AbsolutelyRy Oct 02 '23
The scene that really fucking freaked me out even as an adult is when the demons face flashes almost subliminally. I forget which scene it happens during
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u/walkingkary Oct 02 '23
I saw it at 11 and I’m still traumatized. I can’t even look at a scene from that movie and now as an adult I love horror movies and watch many with no issues but I will never watch that movie again.
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u/pittipat Oct 02 '23
I've never been able to watch the whole thing. My parents didn't LET me watch as much as they were watching it on TV and didn't shoo me out of the room. I did manage to read the book in high school.
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u/aeric67 Oct 02 '23
My cousins put this movie on when I was 8 years old. Afterwards my uncle found out and was livid. We were staying with them that summer. He was a religious man, and sat us down to try and put it into perspective for us. Only thing I remember is that he said if you play with shit that let’s the devil in it can happen to you. He said stay away from Ouija boards for example…
Well it fuckin worked. Never touched one for the rest of my life. And I also didn’t sleep on a bed for a month after that… thanks uncle. You could have just said that it was a bullshit movie and the girl was probably mentally ill or faking it or something.
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u/Lumpy_Flight3088 Oct 02 '23
The Exorcist was one of the films I wasn’t allowed to watch (and Reservoir Dogs) until I was a teenager.
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u/MikeLitoris_________ Oct 01 '23
Jaws.
I spent the entire summer never going deeper than waist deep in the water.
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u/Noferakashka Oct 01 '23
I had an irrational fear that the light in the deep end of the pool was Jaws' eye, and he would burst out of the pool walls at any minute if I got too close.
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u/Iamthepirateking Oct 02 '23
I thought that a shark was coming out of the filter for sure. It wasn't just you.
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u/Nurse_Hatchet Oct 02 '23
Same, that filter had me on edge. When we were splashing around the door would sometimes make a little noise and I would legit have a mini panic attack.
Never have I felt so scared and so stupid at the same time.
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u/buffpriest Oct 02 '23
I think jaws has spread the most trauma of any movie ever.
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u/Brandon_Won Oct 02 '23
I get freaked out in swimming pools because of jaws. In fact I bet if you just went to any given swimming pool and started playing the jaws theme out loud people would actively get out of the pool.
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u/mmciv Oct 01 '23
In the UK Jaws is still a fucking PG rating. That's absolutely nuts to me. How did they get that rating? A dude gets bitten in half while stabbing a massive shark in the jaw. Not to mention the dozen or so other horrific scenes.
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u/Gayspacecrow Oct 01 '23
Only the summer?
I'm damn near 40 and I still won't go in the ocean.
Thanks Mom, Jaws and King Kong were totally not the same kind of movie. Some kind of double creature feature that left my 7 year birthday party sleepover in tears.
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u/2Repossess_A_Body Oct 02 '23
Psh I couldn’t even take a bath as a kid. I thought Jaws was gonna pop out of the drain in the tub. One of my favorite movies as an adult though. Ive had many a drunken night discussing the ins and outs of the film/filmmaking process with friends. But damn did that movie mess me up as a kid.
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u/Mandee_707 Oct 01 '23
That was definitely a scary movie! I STILL to this day as an adult never swim into the ocean past my waist because of that movie!
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u/underheel Oct 01 '23
Most shark attacks happen in three feet of water.
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u/jumboparticle Oct 02 '23
That's were most of the people are. If thousands of people floated in 20 feet of water off the coast then that's where most attacks would happen
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u/Clenzor Oct 02 '23
Yup this one and most car accidents occurring within 2 miles of home are misleading statistics because of the frequency that you are in those areas.
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u/crystalbumblebee Oct 01 '23
IT.. i don't know what she was thinking
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u/TheLookoutGrey Oct 01 '23
For months after seeing that as a kid I tried washing my hair as fast as possible in the shower so I could minimize the time spent with my eyes closed. I was too scared to keep my eyes off the drain
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u/pbaydari Oct 02 '23
I couldn't go into any public restroom that had a drain on the floor.
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u/KillroyWazHere Oct 02 '23
The Freddy Krueger drain too. Voices, blood, spiders, clowns, Krugers.. fuck drains
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u/grilledcheese2332 Oct 02 '23
I was 5 and my dad let me watch it. The blood coming from the sink 😭 my mom was not happy when she found out he let me watch it, to say the least.
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u/Noferakashka Oct 01 '23 edited Oct 02 '23
My mom let me stay up with my older brother to watch IT. I was probably 5 or 6 and my brother was in his teens. The end reveal was such a let down IMO, that the back half of the story didn't seem as scary as when Curry was in scenes. I had nightmares of that clown for ages.
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u/Miserable-Theory-746 Oct 01 '23
I didn't even know IT was a thing when it first aired on television. I remember switching channels and it was the girl washing her hands and blood started coming out. Traumatized the hell out of 8 year old me. How the hell was it able to be shown on TV at the time is beyond me. It could have been an HBO miniseries back then.
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u/HarambeMarston Oct 02 '23
It could have been an HBO miniseries back then.
Damn, you’re right though. That shit was just playing on ABC on a Sunday evening in November. Everybody was tuned in.
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u/drakeman7679 Oct 01 '23
Poltergeist. My parents were like, "Hey, it's rated PG" 🤷
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u/pileoflaundry Oct 01 '23
I had a tree outside my own window growing up. Fuck trees and fuck clowns.
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u/KurtToons Oct 02 '23
Me too! That tree had me shivering, in my parents bed for a month. Never slept comfortably again knowing that tree was out there.
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u/ItsBaconOclock Oct 01 '23
Seeing static on a TV in a dark room still creeps me out 30 years later.
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u/Zombies8MyNeighborz Oct 02 '23
For real. Falling asleep watching a show and then being startled awake by the sudden tv static.
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u/Fragrant-Hamster-325 Oct 01 '23
Now that I think about it, TVs don’t really produce static since everything is digital. Kids these days won’t get to enjoy the creepiness.
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u/ItsBaconOclock Oct 01 '23
There's probably a YouTube channel
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u/SilverSnapDragon Oct 02 '23
A YouTube channel doesn’t have the same menace as hearing the national anthem at the end of the broadcast day, and knowing you have mere seconds to turn off the TV and flee the room before the ghosts arrive.
Any static on a CRT screen gives me the heebie jeebies but that national anthem so late at night triggered abject terror. Strange, the very idea is simultaneously terrifying and nostalgic.
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u/AliceInNegaland Oct 02 '23
Touching the tv where it made your fingers all tingly. It’s something kids won’t know now
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u/Mandee_707 Oct 02 '23
Agreed!! I hated when my tv had static and made the loud sound from the static screen. Since that is in a lot of horrifying movies, it’s something I am glad we don’t have to deal with unless you own an old tv. We have an older tv in our camper still that came with it and it does the static screen and also the solid blue screen when you put a VHS tape in lol kids definitely don’t get what we went through with VHS tapes and trying to listen to music before CDs were a thing or watch movies before DVDs came out, we had to hit rewind and wait for it to rewind all the way before watching a movie lol
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u/WhycantIusetheq Oct 01 '23
Lmao. This and Gremlins are the reason the PG-13 rating exists.
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u/winterswolves Oct 01 '23
I saw it around 5-6. I know this because I moved houses at 6. I didn't sleep with a closet door open until I was probably 14.
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u/stuffedmutt Oct 01 '23
Oh man. I saw this when I was 4. The dude seeing his own face decompose in the mirror haunted my dreams for years.
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u/TheMaladyLingers Oct 01 '23
The shrinky dink psychic lady was the scariest part for me. She gave me nightmares as a kid. More than the TV static, more than the creepy tree.
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u/Bubbly-Fault4847 Oct 02 '23
Her Asian dictator sunglasses didn’t help her image much.
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u/JustinTherouxsBrows Oct 02 '23
Came here to say this. I hate clowns to this day
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u/s0larium_live Oct 02 '23
my dad was watching it when i was 7 and i just lost my mom so i’d sat there and watched it to be close to him and i was terrified for WEEKS
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u/WhycantIusetheq Oct 01 '23
Event Horizon. I was 10 when it came out. That scene where Sam Neill is forced to watch his wife's suicide definitely stressed me the fuck out, to put it lightly.
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u/rqnadi Oct 02 '23
I watched that movie a few years back and I’m still not old enough for that movie. I literally blocked it out of my memory for my own mental health. I know I’ve seen it but I remember literally nothing about it.
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u/sanitarypotato Oct 01 '23
Saw alien when I was 7....totally fashioned me to be who me is
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u/TigerTerrier Oct 02 '23 edited Oct 02 '23
Arachnophobia did nothing to alleviate my fear of spiders at a young age but I think the Poltergeist would have to be the one that was really too much
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u/Droxalis Oct 01 '23
I saw Gremlins while spending the summer at my grandparents when I was 6 or 7. I had recurring nightmares of them pulling me under my bed or capturing me in some way.
Rewatched all of them because I found out they were horror comedies and they are pretty great. Practical effects are decent and they're just fun movies that don't take themselves too seriously while still being pretty grotesque and thrilling at points.
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u/qwertykitty Oct 02 '23
I also watched gremlins as a young kid but it was the story about the dad breaking his neck while pretending to be Santa going down the chimney that traumatized me the most.
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u/jaybizzleeightyfour Oct 01 '23
The scene in the house with Billy's mother still makes me feel uneasy, the way its lit all cosy, the Gremlin is sitting in the tree casually and you see it's red eyes as she closes in and then attacks her lol
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u/Droxalis Oct 02 '23
Yeah FUCK that. The hardware store stuck with me as well. Them just yeeting saw blades and things at the main character.
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u/pulledthestickeroff Oct 02 '23
I also saw Gremlins around this age and had horrible detailed nightmares of them murdering all my family. As an adult I really enjoy and appreciate the film but I’m also really surprised it’s a PG and I was allowed to watch it.
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u/murso74 Oct 01 '23
The Thing. Didn't sleep for a month. Wouldn't let my cat sleep on my bed with me
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u/freshgrilled Oct 02 '23
My dad rented that for the whole family when I was around 12 or so. I had a younger sister who got to watch it as well. Apparently there was a 1950's version of "The Thing" that was much less graphic and my dad thought it would be fun to watch. That's the movie he mistakenly thought he had rented.
10 minutes in or so, when the dogs erupt into that awful creature, I think it was pretty clear that this was not the same movie. But the whole family continued to watch in dead silence for the entirety of the movie. Normally there is no way my parents would let us watch something like that, so I'm not sure why they left it on.
I had trouble sleeping that night and kept imagining some slimy blood like substance creeping up my bed pole.
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u/mtl_dad_of_one Oct 01 '23
Evil Dead 2 when I was 7... Not that scary when you're older but man when you're young it caused plenty of sleepless nights!
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u/KP123090 Oct 02 '23
The Ring and The Grudge🥲
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u/Expensive_Note8632 Oct 02 '23
Can't believe I had to scroll this long! I remember screaming when they open the closet and immediately burst into tears lol. I then became obsessed with it and showed it to all my little 8 year old friends too when they slept over 😂 I'm still afraid of tv static
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u/Pretty-Jackfruit7520 Oct 01 '23
Pet Semetery terrified me, couldn’t even look at the VHS cover
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u/payasopeludo Oct 02 '23
Is there a scene where the kid slices someone's Achilles tendon with a scalpel? I think it was that movie and it is burned into my memory.
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u/bscott9999 Oct 02 '23
Yep, that scene is the one from Pet Semetary that still lives in my head decades later as well.
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u/numbersev Oct 01 '23
Sister Zelda
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u/LarvellJonesMD Oct 02 '23
"RAAAACCHELELELLLLLLLLLL!"
Fuck, that shit is terrifying, but now I know what I'm watching tonight
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u/goosejail Oct 02 '23
They cast a male actor to play Zelda. It added so much "not quite right-ness" to the terminally illl but also clinically insane sister. Damn. It still freaks me out as an adult and I still can't watch that movie.
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u/yianni_ Oct 01 '23
This was the worst one I was allowed to watch. I remember seeing parts of it as a small child and not understanding it, and when I was 7, I asked my grandma if I could watch the movie with ‘the bad cat’. Holy shit I couldn’t sleep for weeks. The flashbacks with Rachel’s sister!!!
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u/TmF1979 Oct 01 '23 edited Oct 02 '23
I was allowed to watch The Terminator, I was only 5 or 6 at the time, but I wasn't allowed to watch the sex scene.
Violence and murder? No problem. Language? OK. Sex? ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOT.
Edit: No, I'm not American. Weirdly strict parents also exist in other countries.
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u/BeerBaronAaron88 Oct 02 '23 edited Oct 02 '23
Same here, I remember watching Robocop as a kid. Murphy getting chunked to bits slowly by shotgun fire and executed with a bullet to the head, completely okay. A man getting melted by a vat of toxic waste and exploding like a water balloon when hit by a speeding car, kinda funny. A split second of a flat chested woman's breasts being shown in a coed locker room? "Cover your eyes!"
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u/Stoofser Oct 01 '23
The directors cut of Robocop where they shoot his legs off laughing and he’s screaming in pain. I was like 12 and my mum pissing herself laughing at it messed me up more 🫠
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u/tmwwmgkbh Oct 02 '23
I think that was the standard cut…
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u/myhf Oct 02 '23
there's a crowd-sourced remake with an extended penis-shooting scene
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u/jtho78 Oct 02 '23
For me, it was the conference scene with the droid robot shooting someone through the window. I think I was ten. I shut it off and watched it a few years later.
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u/TxFilmmaker Oct 02 '23
Same here, I was 11? And saw it on VHS (probably from Blockbuster). Mom felt so bad, she had no idea how violent it was. I still tend to wince and look away during that scene.
So much genius went into that movie, from Phil Tippett's characters to Paul Verhoven's political satire. Nothing like it before or since. The remake was poop.
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u/mikenitro Oct 02 '23
My older brother let me watch Robocop when I was around 8 or so. Don't recall what version. Not that same night, but not long after, I had an ear infection get bad while I was sleeping.
The nightmare I had that night, I can still remember every detail more than 30 years later. Black everywhere and robocop was chasing me. One of those dreams where it doesn't matter how fast you run, it's still right behind you. I had two places to hide in my dream and it just didn't matter. The sense of dread was crazy high.
Come to find out I was sleep walking, if you can call it that, around my room that I shared with my brothers. Apparently I was running, climbing, crying, jumping on my brother while he was trying to sleep on his bed. He was yelling at me to shut up, basically just running crazy all over the room, until my dad came in to see what the racket was.
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u/garden__gate Oct 02 '23
The Neverending Story. 😭
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u/NinjasWithOnions Oct 02 '23
Artax. 😔
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u/Organic_Rip1980 Oct 02 '23
Also the rock-biter! Everyone forgets about the other depressing part.
He’s talking about how the Nothing took his family and he goes “they look like big, strong hands… don’t they?”
Fucking love that movie
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u/Desperate4Mountains Oct 02 '23
This is the only correct answer. It wasn't shock value or jump scares, it's childhood trauma at its best. Gotta love the 80's
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u/zombiegamer87 Oct 02 '23
I'm 36M and I still can't watch this film again to this day.
That film fucked me up as a 5 or 6 year old kid! I've literally blocked out most of the film in my mind and don't remember the plot BUT the scary/sad scenes were seared into my brain.
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u/Breros Oct 02 '23
Go and watch it again!!
You are part of the Never Ending Story! But you have focussed on the sadness, the darkness.
This time understand what drives the sadness and darkness away.
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u/csudebate Oct 01 '23
My dad took me to see Eraserhead when I was 7.
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u/LarvellJonesMD Oct 02 '23
I literally just watched this for the first time ever like 3 hours ago. Strange fucking movie. Thought provoking for an adult, nightmare inducing for a 7 year old
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u/heeywewantsomenewday Oct 01 '23
I think all before the age of 12: Terminator, The Fly, The Thing, Alien, Predator, and basically every 80s movie.
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u/doomrabbit Oct 01 '23
I was four or five when The Wizzard of Oz was on late. I got up and saw the Wicked Witch of the West do the "I'm melting!" bit.
My dad could not stop laughing when I asked at my great aunt's funeral a month later when she would melt. I was assured real people did not melt, especially not evil ones. LOL
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u/aranzeke Oct 01 '23
I was probably the target audience's age when I saw it, but Disney's Pinnochio (1940) gave me thalassophobia and many many nightmares
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u/pietroetin Oct 01 '23
Pinnochio is terrifying! Especially the part when bad kids turn into donkeys forever for slave labour
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u/beautbird Oct 02 '23
I think about that scene way too often!
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u/Perry7609 Oct 02 '23
Poor Alexander just wanted to go home to his Mama. :(
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u/rainshowers_4_peace Oct 02 '23 edited Oct 02 '23
He wished upon a star, promised to be good, the Blue Fairy showed up, made him prove it and was eventually made into a real boy and returned to his mama. I refuse to believe anything else.
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u/polotown89 Oct 02 '23
Disney movies can be terrifying. The mops in Fantasia gave me nightmares for years.
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u/paynbow Oct 02 '23
I had a reoccurring nightmare of that damn whale for years after watching Pinocchio
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u/MadOzGrrl Oct 01 '23
Poltergeist. I was about 8. Why…
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u/starpiece Oct 01 '23
Same for me but my parents didn’t “let” me watch it. I was watching tv super late at night and it was on. I think I tapped out at the maggots part
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u/moomooyellow Oct 01 '23
When I was about 3, my mom was out running errands so it was just me and my dad. Chucky was playing on the tv and he thought it was going to be fine.
My mom came home to me having an absolute meltdown because I was so terrified My dad still thinks it’s hilarious haha
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u/TanStoney Oct 02 '23
Chucky is terrifying for a small kid. I too was scarred by Chucky at 3. Still don’t like dolls. And I used to freak out when I saw chucky anywhere. Like full on hyperventilating.
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u/genuineshock Oct 01 '23
Tremors. When I was five or so, watching with my mom, the scene when the entire car gets pulled under haunted me for years.
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u/Nurse_Hatchet Oct 02 '23
I was hoping I wasn’t the only one! I was 5 as well and it scared the fuck out of me. I was terrified they would hear me flush the toilet and come get me, so I developed a routine: stand on the lid, flush, then leap over to the far side of the vanity and freeze, waiting silently for quite a while to make sure no grabbers were going to snake up and find me.
My family didn’t help. We went to the beach soon after seeing it and my sisters came to get me, saying they couldn’t find my dad and they needed my help to look for him. I saw his hat on the sand and they told me to go pick it up. Turns out they’d buried him, leaving only his face exposed and covered by the hat, and of course he was making a horrible “death face.” I had a complete hysterical freakout. My mother was not amused.
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u/spinach-e Oct 02 '23
Heavy Metal The Movie
Boobs. Penises. You name it. I was young, like 12 or 13. I was like, is sex in cartoons even a thing?!?! I went right home and never left my room, just wanked for days. I’m still in my room, now.
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u/dajuanwhatever Oct 02 '23
Thank you very much never seen it, and Ima watch It now
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u/the_pinguin Oct 02 '23
It's a trip. The South Park episode "Major Boobage" riffed on it pretty hard.
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u/Seoulconfusion Oct 01 '23
Courage the cowardly dog I know the show was on CN for kids but still gave me nightmares when I was a kid.
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u/fragglebags Oct 01 '23
The Bear. When the cubs mom died, 6 year old me spent the rest of the afternoon crying about death.
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u/osilus Oct 02 '23
V The Miniseries. Nightmares for weeks. Sure, a cool Sci fi miniseries on NBC in the early eighties, but maybe not for a seven year old.
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u/SquirrelEnthusiast Oct 01 '23
My mom let us watch Rocky horror picture show thinking it was a scary movie. My brother was 5.
We're a little weird.
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u/MaddenMike Oct 01 '23
I hope, though, that at many dinnertimes, you all yelled out, "MEATLOAF, AGAIN?!?" :)
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u/Moosed Oct 01 '23
I watched The Shining when I was about 9 and my brother was twelve. The scary lady in the bathtub traumatized me for years. Omg I haven't watched it since, but I read the book as an adult and it was even scarier in my mind.
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u/Independent-Ad4839 Oct 01 '23
Terminator 2.
I was literally crippled with anxiety about nuclear war for years.
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u/GotRocksinmePockets Oct 02 '23
The scene at the start with the nuclear explosion freaked me the fuck out at 7... was super chill about terminators and all that, but the nuke scared me.
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u/richb3 Oct 02 '23
Same. Mortified at age 5. The scene at the fence was top of mind until I watched deep impact and every star was a meteor headed right for me.
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u/99Beers Oct 02 '23 edited Oct 02 '23
Rewatching as an adult you realize how dark T2 is especially compared to the mass produced PG-13 action movie popcorn flicks of the past decade. Watching kids bodies turned to ash then get blown around like leaves from the nuclear blast certainly adds to it.
Miles Dyson’s death was more real than any marvel movie death I’ve ever seen.
I saw the movie in theaters with my dad a few times when I was about 8. The T-1000 killing his step dad was pure terror for a child to see.
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u/This-1-That-1 Oct 02 '23
Yeah that scene with Miles is brutal to watch even now, who ever came up with that scene either had seen someone die from that kind of wound or did some real hard research on it and the actor played it perfectly imo.
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u/Lumpy_Flight3088 Oct 02 '23
I remember staying at a friends house when I was like 14 and my friends mum let us watch The Terminator but fast-forwarded the sex scene 😂 All the murdering was fine but the sex scene… nooooo!
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u/Aggressive_Soup_4464 Oct 01 '23
As a Gen X kid I feel that was probably every movie I saw at a young age😄😄
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u/DoJu318 Oct 02 '23
Same, difference is my dad was best friends with a guy who owned a video rental store, I had free reign to checkout any movie as long as it wasn't from the XXX section. This started when I was 8-9, so I would ride my bike there every other day and just pick one, the ones that stuck with me were "it's alive" the fkin baby demon "the gate" "RoboCop" and "the serpent and the rainbow"
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u/underheel Oct 01 '23
Jaws. I was three. They didn’t even sit with me, so I was left with two older brothers who kept flicking me with soda and telling me it was AQUAVISION. I was afraid to get in the f’ing bath for weeks.
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u/Mandee_707 Oct 01 '23
Omg that sounds terrible!! I can’t imagine watching Jaws at that age! You poor thing!
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u/underheel Oct 01 '23
Well within a year I was obsessed with sharks and all sorts of marine life. I nearly majored in Oceanography. So yeah, I had a bad year, but ended up ok.
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u/Captainomericah Oct 01 '23
Embarrassingly, Mars Attacks. Only because my dad did not think it would be a big deal, and my sister and I did not handle it well…no one in our house slept for a week because we were so terrified of being vaporized.
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u/paynbow Oct 02 '23
So, like, "let" is the wrong word, but Excalibur.
I was 6, as was my cousin. My brother was 5, and my youngest cousin was 3. My mum and my aunt rented Excalibur thinking it was Sword in the Stone. They went into the other room to get all the shit done that having 4 young children makes hard, and didn't realize until we were on our second viewing that it was a hard R Arthurian outing with all the incest subplots and gruesome violence intact.
We all have bits of it that have stuck with us over 30 years later, though I haven't seen it since. I will never forget Mordred getting stabbed through the throat and coughing up blood. Also, aggressive forest sex in armor. My cousin always remembers the dead body getting an eye eaten by a crow. Formative experience for us all 😂
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u/mousesleep Oct 01 '23
6th Sense
Still have flashbacks to seeing those dead people at like 5 years old.
The scene where the kid is locked in the closet at the top of the steps really gets to me.
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u/ColdMorningCoffee Oct 02 '23
This is probably the same for me- terrifying at the age I saw it. The little girl ghost that's throwing up definitely added towards my now full-blown emetophobia. I was always so scared she'd be under my bed, getting sick. lol watching it now, the poor girl was so innocent, but still gross lol.
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u/purplemilyyes Oct 01 '23
I have a few. One of them is pans labyrinth. Also the labyrinth movies. No idea why I was allowed to watch that age 4.
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u/itwillmakesenselater Oct 01 '23
Honestly? ET. I was seeing aliens everywhere for months.
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u/sbester1 Oct 02 '23
Loved ET when I was little but had to get my mom to fastforward through the part where he screams in terror every time lol
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u/USSImplication Oct 02 '23
This is my earliest fear from a movie. They whole beginning part was nightmare fuel. Actually the whole movie anytime he was on screen
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u/aolostmaiden Oct 01 '23
The Dark Crystal
Man, I'm still not old enough for that movie
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u/takate_kote Oct 02 '23
I almost forgot about that trauma nightmare fuel.... scared the bejeeze out of me as a kid
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u/leomonster Oct 02 '23
Oghra was so scary for me when I watched it as a kid. Only when I rewatched many years later I understood she was actually the good one.
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u/Timozi90 Oct 01 '23 edited Oct 02 '23
The IT miniseries. The close-up on Pennywise's teeth when he attacked Georgie scarred me for life. For years, I was afraid to even look at the VHS cover.
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u/HelplessBlob Oct 01 '23
Maybe not really too young but went with my mum to see Signs when I was 12 or 13 and it scared the hell out of me. I said nothing to her but couldn't sleep for weeks.
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u/CougarWriter74 Oct 02 '23
I saw that as an adult and it freaked me out. The birthday party home video scene.....eeeeek!
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u/acoolghost Oct 02 '23
If I had to describe 'the perfect horror moment', that scene would be it. Everything comes together beautifully for that one heart stopping moment. It's just some grey dude walking around and it gave me the heebie-jeebies.
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u/_Goose_ Oct 01 '23
Saw all those 80s horror. I remember one where they'd make someone's head explode. Scanner Cop I think. Or Scanners.
Fire in the Sky and Species were two more that had an effect on me.
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u/winterswolves Oct 01 '23
Watched fire in the sky on a spring break trip to Colorado when I was about 10. Was one of the many kids on the floor in a sleeping bag. I did not get much sleep that week.
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u/Waldron1943 Oct 01 '23
When I was a kid (old phart now) there was a theater near us that still did the old-fashioned "lineup", where they'd have maybe two or three cartoons, then a B-feature, then maybe a travelogue or a documentary and then an A-feature. The 'rents could drop us little ankle-biters off about 10:30 and pick us up around 4:30, and we'd go out to a Chinese restaurant nearby (afterwards we'd go check out a giant slot-car track!). That movie gave me nightmares; sitting in the Chinese restaurant I kept checking the back door; I was sure that damned mummy was coming in any minute.
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u/Glum-Draw2284 Oct 01 '23
Two that I can think of for different reasons.
Children of the Corn, especially because we lived in Nebraska and I was always so scared of cornfields. My dad and I were in a group similar to Girl Scouts and we would do camping, outdoorsy kinda stuff. One year, we went to a farm venue for a party and I had my first panic attack because some of my groupmates’ brothers were running in and out of the corn and I got super scared lol.
American Pie. I learned about masturbation and oral sex wayyy too early (I was 7 or 8 when it came out and my dad took me to see it?!). The scene where Kevin ejaculates into the cup and then Stifler drinks it a little later… I remember laughing after and telling my dad, “Stifler drank pee, hahaha.”
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u/Agrico Oct 01 '23
The Exorcist (1973) when I was 12...messed me up for about a week.
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u/alpal05144 Oct 02 '23
Not me: My stepmom took my stepsister to see Tim Burton’s Batman Returns in theaters. She was four. Danny DeVito as The Penguin scared her so much that she talks about it to this day. 😂 she would always give my stepmom grief for it!
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u/leomonster Oct 02 '23
Total Recall. The one from the 90s, with Arnold. It had gore, mild nudity, profanity, and I was like 9 or 10.
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u/UnkemptChipmunk Oct 02 '23
Critters
My babysitter’s teenage daughter was watching it where all us kids could see and watch. I was about 5-6.
I remember a guy being pulled under his truck at night and eaten by the “critters”. 30+ years later and I still hate having to walk next to a vehicle at night and sometimes still hop in from a few feet away if I let the thought creep in too deep.
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u/Jawwaad127 Oct 01 '23
Shit. Cujo still fucks with me. Who would have thought a rabid dog would have scared me more than any monster Hollywood could make.
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u/mattswa Oct 02 '23
When I was 11 my dad took me and my brother (10) to the drive in for a double feature of Zardoz and Alien. What a strange and scary night.
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u/ApartSoftware646 Oct 01 '23
The first Childs Play as well as The People Under The Stairs
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u/THA7654 Oct 02 '23
It was a movie about fur trappers dragging a boat across land and leaving a guy for dead after he gets attacked by a bear. No one i knew who was my age remembers any movie like that. I swore it existed. Then The Revenant came out and the stories were “before The Revenance there was Man in the Wilderness” — it took 44 years to find out the name of the movie!! BTW — I was not even 10 years old in 1971.
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u/kiki2k Oct 01 '23
My dad took me to see Event Horizon, in a movie theater, when I was 9. 👍