For whatever reason, THIS scared the bejeesus out of me as a kid–I had trouble sleeping for days:
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Here’s some more memories…
As a teenager in the 80’s, the TV movie The Day After was pretty intense. It brought a lot of people back to reality about what could happen if the cold war took a bad turn.
By the time I was in college in the late 80’s to early 90’s, AIDS was a real thing, and the movie Kids freaked me out in a bad way. Even though I was married by 96, that movie was stuck in my head.
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Yes and yes. My family didn’t have a TV when I was a kid, and were considerate of what movies I watched, and as a result any kind of horror movie got me a lot more than other kids my age, who were happily watching these things on HBO or whatever when I went for sleepovers.
Probably the cockroaches had the strongest effect on me. Shortly after I was living in Thailand, where they basically have taken over the ecological niches of both rats (whom they resemble in size) and pigeons (they fly).
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For me it was when the man tries to give his book of blueprints to the robot, who drills through the book… then through the man. It was done very cleverly so that you don’t need to see any blood to know what carnage is being done.
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If you’re NOT into the violent parts, DO NOT watch this hilarious fan-made scene from “Our RoboCop Remake”. If you can handle it though, it’s over the top gross and funny.
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Time Bandits’ ending was semi-traumatizing to me as a kid whose parents were on the verge of divorce. Fear of abandonment made visceral by the visual of the protagonist’s shitty parents turned into a lump of coal and his realization he now has to live with diminutive time bandits.
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Gosh, all of these posts are bringing up repressed traumatic memories! Here’s a small sampling of movies I saw as a kid that left indelible marks on my brain. Granted, these are mostly horror movies, but “Little Monsters” wasn’t. It starred Fred Savage for god’s sake! My parents were psychotic for letting me see this stuff… and I kinda love 'em for it.
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I saw “Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold” as a kid and there is that scene where they fall in that chasm and find that one guy they where looking for. His body kind of drops out of the wall and the rotting flesh falls off his face. I had nightmares for weeks, and even now I get queasy when I see it, even thou the effect is ridiculously cheesy, since the Quatermain movies were basically Indiana Jones on a budget.
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Mine goes waaay back. The first movie my parents ever took me to in a theater was Darby O’Gil and the Little People. I was maybe 5 or 6? It was all leprechauns and hijinx, but then at the end of the movie the old grandfather(?) dies, and the wailing banshees came to take him away in the flying black carriage. NOPE.
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I wasn’t allowed to watch anything other than PBS when I was a kid, so TV was a guilty pleasure whenever I went over to a friend’s house.
Mr. Rogers and the Electric Company did not prepare me for Attack of the Giant Leeches on Creature Feature:
I must have been about six and had just recovered from major surgery the year before; bloodsucking creatures went straight at all my hospital trauma. I remember actually vibrating with fear. For months I was terrified the leeches were going to come through the drain and get me in the bathtub.
The episode completely confirmed my mother’s low opinion of commercial television. I knew most of the episodes of Mr. Rogers by heart before she relented.
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Oh yes, Space 1999. Something like 1st or 2nd grade, I remember going outside, looking up at the moon, and being terrified of radiation poisoning*.
Maybe not a movie per-se but the chest bursting scene in the “movie novel” version of Alien that I browsed at the book store (I was 10 or 11 and knew I’d never be allowed to see the movie, turned out for good reason!)
*not that one shouldn’t be terrified of radiation poisoning!
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Trying to identify that led me to https://www.kindertrauma.com/ which, frankly, should be added to the original post.
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We still haven’t found Dinky Doodle.
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The worst part was that the knowledge that the shoe’s partner was now left alone forever. Way more disturbing than just killing some standalone cartoon object.
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I kind of feel like more little kids got “messed up” by Jessica Rabbit than by Judge Doom.
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That dude HAD to have been the inspiration for Mugatu from Zoolander.
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As a young pre-school tyke I’d always shut my eyes at the start of Chiller Theatre. (I could easily watch the actual films being presented because… context.) One night during a sleepover at my grandparents, my visiting “evil” uncles said not to worry and swore that what I was about to see on the TV was not Chiller Theatre. It was. I reacted. They laughed.
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I never liked the way the Kelvan commander crushed that poor redshirt who was turned into a chalk polygon in Star Trek. I think it was the first time I saw a cold blood murder on TV. A woman was killed for no reason.
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There’s one set of kids somewhere I know who are probably traumatized because I saw their parents take them out of the movie theater crying mid-movie.
The movie you ask? SEVEN! The 2 kids were like maybe 7-10 and they noped-out during the scene with the “sloth” guy strapped to the bed came to and startled everyone. Surprised they made it that long…
For me, there was a very old Dr Who episode I can barely remember which traumatized me a bit.
It had these coconut-like pods or something where a tentacle whips out onto some guy’s arm and he then grew into this giant monster which they proceeded to drag out over the whole episode. Haven’t looked it up now, but it sure had me all queasy then.
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