Movies that scared the crap out of you?

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SDramstad said:
Them. The giant ants had me looking over my shoulder a lot. My dad had a workshop in an old warehouse that was real dark with lots of places for ants to hide. 8 or 9 at the time.
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Saw it on TV when I was 4. Nightmares about foot long flies walking up the back of the couch.
blackwing94 said:
I saw Jaws on opening day. It was sold out. The only seat available when I got in was on the front row.
Took me a while to get back into the water. I was 16.
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I saw Jaws and for a while would get a little twinge of fear even when getting into a fresh water lake. I think that severed limb falling on the sandy bottom really bithere me. I don't want to admit how old I was, but a few years later I was comfortable scuba diving in the ocean.

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I was an adult when I saw one of the alien movies, but it really bothered me. The image of something alien bulging out of one's own body. A guy I knew in college watched, I think, the original while tripping. He said it looked like a greased weasel and he thought it was funny.
 
I didn't see this one as a child - we found it YouTube surfing and then watched the movie.
However, I know those that did and it was described as total freakout.
The Mysterious Stranger scene from "The Adventures of Mark Twain."


"I can do no wrong, for I do not know what that is." Yikes.
The voice is composed of a male and female actor speaking in sync.

It is actually about Samuel and Elizabeth with an Adam and Eve metaphor.
And has a good ending. But the above scene, wow.
 
The first Alien movie I saw with some of my college friends on the big screen when it first came out. When something bad was happening, we'd scream like
little girls. Movie trivia: In the scene where Sigourney Weaver fights the Alien from a yellow mechanical device that evens up the odds, it's emblazoned with a
Caterpillar Tractor Company logo that's displayed onscreen. The producers of the movie actually sought out permission from Cat to do that. Cat decided since they were being shown as one of the "good guys" they gave permission to do so. Probably gave the production some "Cat yellow" to paint the prop with.
Later on since I'm in Central Illinois, it was reported in the newspaper that after Alien came out, Cat was getting inquiries if the device was in production and how much would it cost to get one!!! I was laughing my head off when I read that. That's an example of Hollywood magic becoming so real one can't tell it's simply staged or not. Kurt
 
"Event Horizon" full stop.

Hands down the scariest movie ever. Best watched in the middle of the night while completely alone for the full terror effect! This is the kind of movie that makes you jump up off the couch and karate chop the air out of sheer instinct. You will yell at the characters not to go in there, but they won't listen...

Now I gotta watch it again, thanks a lot 🫣
 
Like many I cut my teeth at a tender age on 1930-1960s horror. They didn’t really scare me because I love horror films and still do. Back in those early days I watched many a movie over the air Friday night at midnight on WNEP channel 16 and Uncle Ted’s Ghoul School.

Today the only kind of movies that scare me are those that could be real. One class is the post apocalypse genre. The best example of that which terrifies me still is “The Road”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Road_movie_poster.jpg

The other are any of the burgeoning movies which deal with satanic possession or the occult. While many claim this is nothing more than mental illness, the recorded fact of people speaking fluent Latin or other extinct languages they have never been exposed to gives me pause. The exorcist and any of the possession style movies which flowed from it are good examples. Fun fact, the exorcist story was based on a real possession of a St Louis boy who was possessed as a child. The church will not reveal who he is and he apparently is living a happy, demon free life and still alive.
 
When I was a kid, I watched all kinds of horror shows from '50s creature flicks to Vincent Price stuff. The vat of acid in the House on Haunted Hill stuck out in my memory and the curtains scene in Psycho are the most memorable. Before the age of 6, I probably watched more horror shows than most people in their lifetime! :popcorn:
 
As a kid I had to have EEG's (I think thats what they were called) and had to be sleepy all day so the docs suggested to my parents that I watch movies late night. They chose Poltergeist and I was 6 at the time. Surprisingly that movie did not scare me. In fact, it sorta pissed me off because I thought it was unbelievably stupid. Since then, there hasn't been a single horror movie that has scared me. The only one that has come close is The Shining but even that wasn't really a scare.
 
MALBAR 70 said:
Jacobs Ladder
Parts of that movie make my blood run cold.

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Saw Jacob's Ladder in a movie theatre.

After it ended, the guys in front of us yelled at the screen: "I want my money back!"

I agreed with them. Stupid movie---What a long way to go for nothing.
 
Someone's already mentioned it, but one more vote for The Haunting (1963 original version).

If it's possible, Shirley Jackson's book on which it is based, is even scarier than the movie---has some more really scary scenes they didn't include in the film (which would have Really made the movie Scary!)

I read the book while alone, late at night after getting off the night shift at McDonald's, summer before college and couldn't get to sleep. Do not do this!

Runner up: The Premature Burial.
Title says it all...
 
You guys will laugh, but more than a decade ago I was watching "The Fourth Kind" (quasi alien abduction movie, starring Milla Jovovich) and for a while I got pretty scared. Felt foolish after the movie.
 
The House on Haunted Hill (the original), maybe 8 or 9.

Archphoto said:
"Event Horizon" full stop.
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Yes, Event Horizon, probably 14. Not so much scared as repulsed.

Any movie or show with skeletons, any age. I can't explain why, but something about skeletons terrified me to the core. Maybe because it used to be inside a person? And any genre, not just horror. Like all the skeletal mummies in Indiana Jones, or the dead pirates on the ship in Goonies.
 
Has anybody seen The Legend of Hell House? I don't remember the first time I saw it but it gave me goose bumps. The second time I saw it was at Michigan State. It was shown in a small lecture hall. The place was packed. I was there with some guys from our floor. By the way our floor was called reefer. We were all felling good. It has Roddy McDowall in it. It's a ghost story. In one scene the camera is scanning a book shelf. All the books are erotic. Then the title of a book comes into view. You could have heard a pin drop in the lecture hall. The title of the book was Autoeroticism. I said in a slightly loud voice, Is that sex in a car. The place exploded in laughter and applause. I stood up and took a bow. One of the funniest things I ever said. Watching it that time it wasn't scary.
 
prfesser said:
The one I remember best was in 1983. "Special Bulletin": group builds an atomic bomb and is going to set it off in a boat in Charleston SC unless yada yada. It was covered as though it was a real story. Videotape rather than film for most of the movie, made it visually more realistic.

The TV in the house I was renting at that time was defective. After a couple of minutes the picture would begin to shrink, and it had to be turned off to cool for a minute or two. Turned the TV off during commercials. Without seeing ads it seemed even more like a real news story.

I knew it was a movie. That didn't help, the impact was that of a bulletin in real time.

NEST guys working to disarm it, they start shouting, one guy drops what he's doing and runs...and the image went all weird...and the screen went black. Back to the news anchors who are horrifyingly aware of what just happened. Kept telling myself "just a movie. Just a movie."

I didn't get to sleep at all that night. Wasn't much good at teaching the next day, either.
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Just watched part of that on YouTube.
 
"The Gorgon", a Hammer Studios/Christopher Lee joint from the '60s. I saw it on a late night creature feature on my Mom's black and white TV when I was 8 or 9. Nightmare's for years. 😱

Bonus content: 8th Man vs the Nuclear Witch. Bad dreams man. A few years younger when UHF Channel 17 in Philly showed all the Japanese classics: Astro Boy, Speed Racer, Tobor the 8th Man ...

 
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samb said:
Bonus content: 8th Man vs the Nuclear Witch. Bad dreams man. A few years younger when UHF Channel 17 in Philly showed all the Japanese classics: Astro Boy, Speed Racer, Tobor the 8th Man ...
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OMG, I can't believe someone mentioned this. I also watched channel 17 from Philly when I was young and the 8th Man episode with the nuclear witch scared the heck outa me. I didn't think there was anyone else who even remembered that. My favorite was Astro Boy and that show is probably the reason that I became an engineer. I spent most of my early childhood trying to figure out how to build a robot that could fly.

Remember Wee Willy?

Randy
 
I was scared of 'the twilight zone.' There was one episode where a guy hits an alien in disguise and breaks his human mask off to show his true monster face underneath. Not good to see when you're 6. The theme music still hits a nerve--turn the TV off now!
 
I don't know if it was the Twilight Zone or the Outer Limits. I think I was in middle school. The episode was about an alien creature that looked like a big crab. Other people that were controlled by it would put it on the back of someone lying on a bed and the creature would dig in and take control of the person. The worst part was that the creature was kept under a bed. After I saw it I would jump into bed from three feet away. It still bothers me 55 or 60 years later.
 
teepot said:
I don't know if it was the Twilight Zone or the Outer Limits. I think I was in middle school. The episode was about an alien creature that looked like a big crab. Other people that were controlled by it would put it on the back of someone lying on a bed and the creature would dig in and take control of the person. The worst part was that the creature was kept under a bed. After I saw it I would jump into bed from three feet away. It still bothers me 55 or 60 years later.
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That's an episode of the Outer Limits titled 'The Invisibles". Outer Limits was known for nasty looking monsters and that was one of the ugliest they ever came up with. The episode featured Don Gordon who was in a lot of shows in the 60's and 70's. He played Steve McQueens partner in Bullitt. He and Steve were real life friends.
Jim
 
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There has been only one movie that has "scared/disturbed" me since I was 5 or 6yo. Now, I take pride in the fact that monster/horror/scary movies really aren't scary for me. Alien is the gold standard by which horror movies should be judged, but I wasn't scared. Mainly enthralled...
Jump scares are not scary and are usually predictable. Forget Freddy, Jason, Michael and Willian Shatner. Blood and gore are a big *yawn*. Zombies a passé. Jaws was intense but not scary. Session 9 gave be a bit of a chill in the final reveal.
But the first time I watched The Ring alone, in the dark, I had the urge to turn on a light. It was the first time in over 30 years that a movie gave me a cold tingle down my spine! The second time I watched it with an old girlfriend and we laughed until we cried. Go figure...
Still looking for that next real movie scare.
 
I was 7 or 8 when I saw Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The end was so disturbing at that age.

Kinda related, later I would bring friends to see Pulp Fiction solely to watch them squirm during the Mia Wallace overdose scene. Or watch the end of Easy Rider.
 

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