The Changeling, 1980. For reasons I will never understand our 6th grade teacher rented it and we watched it in class. Scared the crap out of me.
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Now that I am thinking about it, being shown “Walkabout” in 7th grade social studies probably did me no favors either. Thanks Mr. Moemyer.
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I was just thinking about this film the other day. I saw it on TV when I was sleeping over at a friend’s house when I was maybe 10 or 11 (so very early 80s), and I still can’t believe her parents let us watch it. I didn’t sleep that night. And I haven’t seen it since!
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I was probably in my late 20s when The Day After came out. Didn’t bother me, it was just big, gross, violent kabooms and fire and destruction.
The nuclear war movie that I still occasionally got nightmares about 30 years later? Testament. There’s no violence, it’s just a quiet little Marin County town, and one day the TVs stop working and the commuters don’t come back from the city and people start getting sick, first the old people and the kids, and there’s nothing they can do about it.
Jaws. Back in college I had a somewhat older friend at church who had grown up on Long Island, so the setting was familiar to her. Her reaction to it was that the movie was WAY better than the book - the book was trying to have a plot and a bunch of subplots and tacky soap opera filler, while the movie knew that it was about The Shark and didn’t waste time messing around with anything that wasn’t about The Shark.
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So many insects have died because of those mind controlling ear bugs.
Quick someone add these two scenes.
Superman III the robot scene… Why is there body horror in my campy superhero movie?
Did no one else see The Ice Pirates? The castration scene still gives me nightmares. This was another of one those tonal shifts that I wasn’t ready for.
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You have a thing against green bubble wrap?
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There is a scene in the film that has never left me and it’s when Freddy pulls out the character’s major arteries and uses them as puppet strings… just, no.
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Trivia: Those are Steven Spielberg’s hands pulling the flesh from the face. The prop was one of a kind. Without the possibility of a retake, the actor was nervous about getting it just right, so Spielberg (who was spending a surprising amount of time on the Poltergeist set for a producer) stepped in and did the tearing.
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Not these days. But when I was 10 I fuckin’ hated it.
I’m surprise how many people here saw R-rated horror movies as little kids. Sure, a lot of the scenes mentioned were good and scary/creepy/unnerving, but, for me, they weren’t childhood scars.
My childhood scars largely came from movies that were supposedly family friendly. We didn’t go to the theater often, so these were mostly small screen memories.
The Wizard of Oz: Dorothy’s nightmare images during the tornado. When the Wicked Witch threatens the scarecrow with fire. When the Wizard’s booming voice makes the heroes quake with fear. Flying fucking monkeys!!! The witch melting.
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory: Gene Wilder’s Wonka calmly reciting poetry while the boat is plunged through a nightmarish psychedelic kaleidoscope.
HR Puff and Stuff: [In a theater.] I completely lost my shit when the hands came out of the boat to grab the kid with the magic flute (right at the beginning of the movie). I screamed my head off and we left. I’m in my 50s now, and I still cannot watch Puff & Stuff. Lidsville, with Charles Nelson Rielly’s maniacal laugh, is right out as well.
A Christmas Carol: Marley’s ghost weighed down by chains.
Star Trek: The horta. Even though I was too young to really understand the plot on first viewing, the tension in “The Spectre of the Gun,” combined with the surreal landscape overwhelmed me.
Turning the channel selector and catching a televangelist claim that nonbelievers will go to Hell.
As a kid, “death-defying escapes” produced anxiety overload. When Doug Henning did the water torture cell in his TV special, I almost had a panic attack. (As an adult, I love magic, but escapes are totally uninteresting.)
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[quote=“aidtopia, post:151, topic:185419”]
I’m surprise how many people here saw R-rated horror movies as little kids. [/quote]
Usually it was one or a combination of:
- Cable tv
- Video stores
- Cool parents/relatives who let you see them in theaters.
Plus kids of the 70’s & 80’s were the “latch key kids”. Pretty much left to their own devices with little supervision most of the times.
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Didn’t see it until I was an adult. But it did leave effed up memories. Even worse when I met my in laws for the first time. They lived it, more or less.
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There were also the movies that were edited for television, but only came on the late show in the 70s. I spent many a night watching TV in the basement and the sound turned down low. 
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I saw it in my early 20s and it was because a Japanese friend wanted to show it to me. I didn’t know anything about it and by the end she’s crying her eyes out and I’m sitting there in silence trying to process the sheer sadness of the movie. It was rough and I don’t know if I can rewatch it
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They showed it on TVJapan for the 75th anniversary of the surrender. I got through about 15 minutes and changed the channel. Once was enough.
Added to the mix, my wife’s parents were adolescents in Osaka during the war. We bombed the crap out of Osaka. They barely made it through alive. Putting the movie on a more personal level than I ever would have wanted.
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I remember seeing Halloween on prime time TV in edited form.
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In the pre-VCR era, if you didn’t see a movie on the big screen, your next chance might (or might not) come two years later, with ads and lots cut out. I remember being taken to The Wicker Man at age 9, the usher suggesting that maybe my parents (already inside the theater) might not want to take me, and my mother telling the usher “He’s very sophisticated.” They hadn’t learned their lesson from taking me to Tommy at age 5, when I ran screaming from the Cousin Kevin scene.
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This commercial at 4 years old:
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a whole generation’s first exposure to Lovecraftian horror
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