Moments that scared you as a child (or an adult!).

[PopMartian33107]

Do you have any times that traumitized you as a child, or even an adult? Whether it be on tv, in horror movies, or in literature, list them here!

My first instance of being terrified of tv came from those dreaded, horrifying "public service annuncements". You know, the ones where they show the girls looking really cute, having a party...then at the end they said what day they died due to a drunk driver.

There was a very scary promo really late at night that featured a famous actor, not sure of his name, that simply said "Hello. I'm dead now, thanks to my addiction to cigarrettes". Very scary to watch as a young boy. There was another one where a girl was holding her teddy bear, the water slowly started leaking in her room...and soon, she drowned, due to herion. (???)

The thing that scared me most of all, however, came from a horror movie. A Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child. Ever seen it? It's pretty cheesy, but the plot is actually pretty good.

Anyway, I was never scared of Freddy...I always thought he was funny. My worst fears arised from the fact that I felt sorry for the poor victims he slaughtered, the strange and dangerous predicaments he would place those charatcers in. There was one, named Greta, who wanted to be a supermodel. Her mom always pushed her into losing weight and stuff. Durring Greta's nightmare, Freddy starts force-feeding her food and her very own GUTS, while her family looks on at her, laughing the whole time! This scared me a lot, and I felt sorry for poor Greta, as her cheeks were filled to the brims with food and body intestines.

Please share your own stories here!....If you dare.

 

[verte76]

That actor who said he was dead because of cigarettes was Yul Brenner, who played the King of Siam in "The King and I' on Broadway. Yeah, it was pretty creepy. He made the spots right before his death to be shown right after his death.

 

[verte76]

I had a number of traumatic experiences when I was a child. My sixth grade teacher physically attacked me and knocked my head against a metallic window frame, which caused a huge bruise. My parents damn near sued the school for that one.

 

[Laura M]

I really can't bear watching those ads where you see folk who have died as a result of drunk driving/ alcohol/ smoking. One of the worst ones I have seen is a group of young people travelling ni a car and all of them dying. The back passengers, a boy and girl, both fall towards each other and there is a horrible noise of skulls hitting each other. I knew the girl who filmed the ad, she went to school with my friend, it made it even worse. Another one is of a little school girl lying dead under a tree saying "If that driver had been driving at 30 mph there was have been an 80% chance I would have survived"

They are good at trying to make a point and all but I find some of them a bit too much to handle and some of them terrify me about driving by myself. I prefer when I have someone to shout at when I'm in the car.

I can pretty much freak myself out on a daily basis. When my sister and I are home alone our minds run riot. One night she had me convinced there was someone in our house and was making me go to the kitchen and check to see if anyone was there. When I eventually went to the conservatory door and opened it our neighbours black cat who used to practically live at the kitchen window jumped up at me and I started screaming so loudly my sisters boyfriend heard me from the top of the street. I really thought I was going to die from the shock of it. I'm now afriad there'll be a cat about to leap out from the side of the house when I'm outside and it's dark.

 

[cell]

i dont know if i ever told this one but here goes...

as a kid, i was deathly afraid of Darth Vader.

one time my mom and her friend took a group of kids to "meet" the characters. people who dressed up like them, take pics, get auto's...

well, i thought i was standing in line to meet princess leia. when i came to the front of the line, i looked up, and it was darth vader.

i got so scared i passed out.

 

[Tania]

The Daileks (sp?) on Dr Who use to terrify me (they don't any more).

Silence of the Lambs. That creeped me right out.

Walking into a spiders web in the dark.

 

[daygloeyes2]

I saw Child's Play when I was 7.

It warped my fragile little mind.

 

[u2popmofo]

I got attacked by a bird at the zoo as a kid.

I still hate birds.

 

[beau2ifulday]

Star Trek!
I saw an episode of Star Trek TNG once called 'Frame of Mind' and it scared the living shit out of me. I remember it so vividly - there was this alien who kept appearing at this window, and his face terrified me. The alien was actually meant to be a bit creepy because only Riker could see him (or something like that). I haven't gone near that one episode ever since... I don't follow Star Trek avidly, but it has been on at times when i've been channel surfing, and I don't stop to watch it. I also remember being rather freaked out by the borg. Me and Star Trek didn't really mix too well.
As a younger child, I had an extreme fear of snakes. I still dislike them, but not halfway as much as I did back then.
I don't really fear too much these days, but one thing that really gets to me is when children are used in horror movies as the 'evil' - such as in Ring, The Exorcist. I can't handle that, for some reason - plays havoc on my mind.

 

[Muggsy]

]* When I was 5 an awful fucking clown tried to play with me in a party... I though he was trying to catch me (like in "it") ... since then i'm affraid of clowns, I can't even see one on TV cuz i feel sick.


* there was a tv serie about vietnam war (i dont remember its name)... everybody watched it . In one episode an american soldier rescues a little baby, but the baby dies in a crossfire; the final scene showed one of the soldiers holding the hand of the baby, covered in a white sheet... I got really scared and sad.

* watching news on tv was awful (still is) cuz in that time there were more terrorism acts in Bogotá, so I was always affraid of bombs. Once i was in school and a teacher started to say that a bomb exploded in the airport... i was terrified cuz my dad works there.

* when I was 7 I found a dead lizard in a puzzle box... it was sticked to the box and it was all brown and gross and you could see the bones and it smelled like shit... I felt like i was going to faint and my mom had to stay with me the rest of the evening cuz i was really impressed.

 

[BVS]

I couldn't sleep one night so I snuck out of my bedroom and watched Poltergeist on HBO at like 1am when I was 9 years old.

Let's just say it didn't help me get back to sleep. I couldn't stand white noise on a TV for years.

 

[lmjhitman]

I couldn't sleep one night so I snuck out of my bedroom and watched Poltergeist on HBO at like 1am when I was 9 years old.

Let's just say it didn't help me get back to sleep. I couldn't stand white noise on a TV for years.

that movie was the first thing i thought of when i saw the title of this thread. i must have been around 8 or 9 when i saw it as well. the tree outside that kid's window, the clown doll under his bed, when that guy goes into the kitchen and there's maggots in all the food and he starts RIPPING his FACE OFF??!?!??!

that movie scared the crap out of me.

 

[bono_man2002]

Gremlins.....scared bjesus out of me...I must have been....8-10 I guess.
I taped the Exorcist a about 2 years ago (14-15 at the time), and wasnt brave enough to watch it.....Mum and I started, it wasnt long before I was exiting the room....
As much as they scare the hell out of me, I still Like watching horror movies.....Cabin Fever and 28 Days letter were on cable last month, and couldnt sit through those.



Buffalo Bill scared me in Silence of the lambs too

 

[nbcrusader]

The Wicked Witch of the West from Wizard of Oz....

 

[DeadMansParty]

the face of ray brower ( dead kid from stand by me), I hated that when I was a kid

 

[RedRocksU2]

Watching the face of Linda Blair in the Exorcist.......I still can't watch that movie alone......no way ,man!

 

[Moonlit_Angel]

My first instance of being terrified of tv came from those dreaded, horrifying "public service annuncements". You know, the ones where they show the girls looking really cute, having a party...then at the end they said what day they died due to a drunk driver.

Oh, my god...YES! I was wondering if I was the only one who got freaked out by those things as a kid. Anytime there was a commercial that had that little Ad Council symbol in the bottom corner, that always freaked me out. They always had such scary music and images and stuff in them. I remember seeing one one time when I was really little that was talking about stopping child abuse, and the letters "Help stop a different kind of child abuse" were flashing across the screen in big letters, and that really bothered me. I'm getting chills just thinking about it.

I also remember seeing another abuse commercial in which it was from a dog's perspective, and you saw this guy right up in its face beating it about and having this really scary, angry look on his face while doing it. I only saw it once, though-due to its disturbing nature, I imagine it didn't get a lot of screen time.

And I remember seeing commercials for dyslexia in which there were letters that dyslexics would mix up in front of a spiraling background, and there was this eerie, almost warped-circus-sounding voiceover being all like, "Do you know what I am? Am I a 'p' or a 'q'?" or something like that, and that voiceover was just really creepy.

The drunk driving ones have always creeped me out, too. Yeah. I definitely know what you're getting at with the public service announcments, believe me. Some of them still creep me out to this day.

As for other things...I agree with the mention of the wicked witch from "The Wizard Of Oz". And when I was little, I wasn't one of those kids who was terrified of monsters under the bed or in the closet. No, my fear was of our bathroom hamper. I was always terrified that some of the freaky images from those public service commercials would come out after me, or freaky things from other shows, like "Are You Afraid Of The Dark?", would come out after me. That show...I loved that show as a kid, but yeowza, were there some really creepy moments on that show. I remember being particularly frightened of this ghostly witch figure that slowly moved down a hallway. Ever since that episode, and the hamper being right near the hallway in my old house, and all that sort of thing, dark, empty hallways have always bothered me. Matter of fact, I'm sitting here right now glancing over my shoulder at our darkened hallway, just making sure that I'm the only one up and about.

I'm also with bono_man2002 on horror movies and ghost shows and stuff like that. Those things always make me paranoid for a good number of days afterward (like with the movie "Halloween" a couple of years ago-I see it Halloween night, and the next day, I'm coming home from school, and there's this row of trees in our backyard, and I was like, "If I see Michael Myers peer out from behind one of those things, I'm running..."). And yet, I love watching them, and sometimes think that it'd be kinda fun to be a ghost hunter.

Cemetaries, morgues, and funeral homes have also always creeped me out. Seriously, you couldn't pay me to spend even an hour in any of those three places alone. Ugh.

Okay, this post is getting long-winded, so I'll end here for now. But I'm just really happy to find that I'm not the only one who gets creeped out by public service announcements .

Angela

 

[Moonlit_Angel]

Watching the face of Linda Blair in the Exorcist.......I still can't watch that movie alone......no way ,man!

*Nods* You know the part where she's rising from the bed, and it shows her from the front, and her eyes are all glowing and all that? I do believe that is possibly one of the most frightening screen moments I've ever seen.

Also, speaking of movie moments-that girl from "The Ring" who climbs out of that well...yeah, I reeeeeeeeeaaaaaallllly don't like that.

Angela

 

[RedRocksU2]

Funny things is that my 3 year old daughter looks like the girl coming out of the well when she wakes up!

 

[myusernamehere]

 

[IWasBored]

david bowie scared the hell out of me in labyrinth, i saw it when i was 8. i still won't listen to bowie or go near that movie. i made sure i wasn't home when my brother rented it a couple years ago.

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

When I was little I was scared when I went to have my picture taken w/ Santa. I look traumatized in the picture.

I was terrified of Silence Of The Lambs, Psycho,...this old movie, I think it's called something like "He Knows You're Alone" -this girl is getting these phone calls and it turns out the guy is inside the house. I had this very scary dream about Bono a few years back too, he was chasing me w/ a meat cleaver

 

[Angela Harlem]

Which Nightmare On Elm Street movie had the girl drowning in her own waterbed? I dont really remember many of them, just certain scenes, and that was one of the worst. She was trapped in it and couldn't get out, but the top was see-through. Waterbeds scare me now. I dont like them.

We had the grim reaper in a few of our tv ads back in the 80s before the govt banned the really graphic ones. One which had immense public outcry was a girl lighting a cigarette but a fish hook came out the butt and she obliviously put it to her lips and the uncut version showed her mouth getting graphically and literally hooked by the fishing hook. It was horrible and lucky me saw it before it was banned. I still think of it.

 

[PopMartian33107]

Which Nightmare On Elm Street movie had the girl drowning in her own waterbed? I dont really remember many of them, just certain scenes, and that was one of the worst. She was trapped in it and couldn't get out, but the top was see-through. Waterbeds scare me now. I dont like them.

That was part one, and yes, very surreal, very scary. I still won't go near part 5 wth a ten-foot pole, though...just the memories of Greta's nightmare still haunts me, her cheeks bursting of food and intestines...it was meant to look scary, but I just felt incredibly sorry for her.

We had the grim reaper in a few of our tv ads back in the 80s before the govt banned the really graphic ones. One which had immense public outcry was a girl lighting a cigarette but a fish hook came out the butt and she obliviously put it to her lips and the uncut version showed her mouth getting graphically and literally hooked by the fishing hook. It was horrible and lucky me saw it before it was banned. I still think of it.

Ouch, literaly. That probably would have scraed the crap out of me as a young child, too! Drug Ad commercials really ARE the worst, in my opinion...

 

[PopMartian33107]

Re: Re: Moments that scared you as a child (or an adult!).

Oh, my god...YES! I was wondering if I was the only one who got freaked out by those things as a kid. Anytime there was a commercial that had that little Ad Council symbol in the bottom corner, that always freaked me out. They always had such scary music and images and stuff in them. I remember seeing one one time when I was really little that was talking about stopping child abuse, and the letters "Help stop a different kind of child abuse" were flashing across the screen in big letters, and that really bothered me. I'm getting chills just thinking about it.

I also remember seeing another abuse commercial in which it was from a dog's perspective, and you saw this guy right up in its face beating it about and having this really scary, angry look on his face while doing it. I only saw it once, though-due to its disturbing nature, I imagine it didn't get a lot of screen time.

And I remember seeing commercials for dyslexia in which there were letters that dyslexics would mix up in front of a spiraling background, and there was this eerie, almost warped-circus-sounding voiceover being all like, "Do you know what I am? Am I a 'p' or a 'q'?" or something like that, and that voiceover was just really creepy.

The drunk driving ones have always creeped me out, too. Yeah. I definitely know what you're getting at with the public service announcments, believe me. Some of them still creep me out to this day.

Thanks a bunch, I think I remember some of those public servce announcements now. I'll be having bad dreams for nights, thnk you!

The scariest public service ad I ever saw as a kid involved a robotic, snake-like man...you couldn't see his face real well, only the trench coat he was wearing. Anyway, he was haunting and asking this little boy questions in an elemantary school. The boy was holding a basketball, ready to go play recess. The man would say, "Hey, kid! Smoke me.", and you'd see puffs of smoke arise from his trench coat. Then he'd say "Hey kid! Drink me." The boy lurched back in fear, but the final seconds of the ad showed the basketball go rolling down the dimly lit school hallways, as if the boy had suddenly died.

I tell you what, as much of a man as I am, I STILL have bad dreams abut that one!

Okay, this post is getting long-winded, so I'll end here for now. But I'm just really happy to find that I'm not the only one who gets creeped out by public service announcements .

Angela

Awww, how sweet. I'm happy I'm not the only one terrified of them, too!

 

[Laura M]

Now I'm remembering movies that terrified me. I'm a huge Roald Dahl fan and I really loved the Witches so my Dad got us the video. He told my Mum it was child friendly so she let us watch it one afternoon while she was tidying the house. About an hour later she came to check on us and we were all hiding behind the sofa crying. To this day I've never been able to watch the movie again.

I would also not watch all of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang because of the child catcher. My sister was a really huge fan of musicals and she used to watch that every single day for months. My Mum said she always came in from work at the same time (where the childcatcher is enticing the children into his childcatching contraption) and my brother and sister would be copying everything he said and apparently I used to sit with my fingers in my ears and my back to the wall.

My Dad is one of these people who buys his children movies because he wants to see them. For Christmas when I was about 7 or 8 he bought me Edward Scissorhands. It terrified me. About 2 years ago he bought me it on DVD for Christmas thinking I somehow really enjoyed it the first time around, I let him keep it.

 

[BAW]

Uncovered or open windows after dark scared the living hell out of me a child all the way into my teenage years and I'm still a bit freaked out by them. I think it started after I had an extremely vivid nightmare when I was 4 years old, where I saw a robot looking into my bedroom window. No amount of reasoning or logic (it was a second story window) could convince me that there was no robot with blinky lights looking in at me.

From there it progressed into a fear of the Goodyear blimp (again the blinky lights in the night sky) and UFOs, which I started seeing on a regular basis of course.

I almost went completely over the bend after I saw the Amittyville Horror and it featured the ghost of a stupid little pig whose presence was made known by his two red glowing eyes looking into or out of windows of the house

Needless to say, if my bedroom curtains were open just a crack, I buried my head under the covers and refused to look. Even as a teenager, I would get scared sitting in a room with open curtains or blinds after dark and there was no way I was going to use the bathroom at night because my mom insisted that the window over the shower stay open. I would rather have let my bladder burst!

Other things I was terrified of but to a lesser degree:

the flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz

fire

kidnappers

 

[Moonlit_Angel]

Re: Re: Re: Moments that scared you as a child (or an adult!).

Thanks a bunch, I think I remember some of those public servce announcements now. I'll be having bad dreams for nights, thnk you!

LOL, aw, I'm sorry.

The scariest public service ad I ever saw as a kid involved a robotic, snake-like man...you couldn't see his face real well, only the trench coat he was wearing. Anyway, he was haunting and asking this little boy questions in an elemantary school. The boy was holding a basketball, ready to go play recess. The man would say, "Hey, kid! Smoke me.", and you'd see puffs of smoke arise from his trench coat. Then he'd say "Hey kid! Drink me." The boy lurched back in fear, but the final seconds of the ad showed the basketball go rolling down the dimly lit school hallways, as if the boy had suddenly died.

I tell you what, as much of a man as I am, I STILL have bad dreams abut that one!

Yeesh...I don't blame you. That one sounds freaky.

Originally posted by PopMartian33107
Awww, how sweet. I'm happy I'm not the only one terrified of them, too!

.

Also, in regards to the mention of "Psycho"...people, please tell me that I'm not the only one who still peeks out from behind the shower curtain from time to time.

I also remember that that "Tales From The Crypt" guy was a bit weird to me as a kid-I have a memory of watching an episode of that show once really late at night and seeing a guy's eyes get taken out by a bird. My poor sister-she saw that guy once when she was a kid, and she started screaming and crying.

Ooh! Also, according to my parents, there was a David Lee Roth album that we had around the house when I was a really little kid that apparently scared me-David's picture was on the front and he had a lot of face paint stuff on, and whenever I'd see it, I'd run screaming from the room and run to wherever my mom was.

My fear of spiders has been around since I was little, too-the earliest memory I have of being scared by a spider was on my 6th birthday-I was sitting on the kitchen floor with one of my gifts, and I looked off to my right and saw a black spider quickly crawling across the floor, and I jumped up and ran out of the room and told my mom to go kill it, which she did. Ever since then, I've hated spiders. Creepiest little things ever.

Angela

 

[BAW]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Moments that scared you as a child (or an adult!).

Ooh! Also, according to my parents, there was a David Lee Roth album that we had around the house when I was a really little kid that apparently scared me-David's picture was on the front and he had a lot of face paint stuff on, and whenever I'd see it, I'd run screaming from the room and run to wherever my mom was.

That is hilarious!

When my youngest son was small, his older brothers knew he was terrified of Freddy Krueger and they would chase him with the covers from Nightmare on Elm Street videos to make him cry. One of them would even trick him into going into the horror section at Blockbuster after he had put all of the Freddy Krueger movies at eye level so he would scream bloody murder! I would be in the new releases and hear this high pitched little "aaaahhhhhhh, STOP IT!!!" and just shake my head.

And my middle son was terrified of Alf! Every time the theme music would come on, he would start to cry and run out of the room

 

[AvsGirl41]

Poltergeist scared the crap out of me. It still does.

I also remember that Stephen King movie, "Cat's Eyes" where the little troll comes to steal Drew Barrymore's breath. Oh man. I kept seeing it appear in the corner of my room!! (I thought I had made it up, and then happened to see it one night on cable which was a relief.) And I believe I saw Cat's Eyes around the same time as "Critters" so basically I was seeing evil furry things everywhere.

I asked my mom once why, when we were little, they rented/watched so many horror movies. And she didn't know! Thanks, Mom and Dad!

Connected to all those great horror movie memories was this video store we used to go to--it was within walking distance of our house and wasn't a great area. We used to walk there and the owners had a popcorn machine and would give us little bags of popcorn. I remember being absolutely terrified of that video store, because there was a movie poster with this skull on it that scared me--but I never said anything to my parents. I didn't want to give up the popcorn.