I know it varies depending on the child and the age, but for me Maximillian taking out Anthony Perkins went well beyond “rather scary”. And this was before I knew Perkins as Norman Bates.
The worst part of the movie, though, was the death of Old Bob. I managed to stop crying before we left the theater, but then in the car my aunt who took us said, “That was so sad when Old Bob died,” and my waterworks were off and running.
It was several years before I’d think to ask, how the heck does a robot die?
There is a millisecond moment in O Lucky Man! that has haunted me ever since I saw it as a young adult: when he pulls back the sheet and sees what the experimentation is that he’s just signed himself up for. I’ll say no more, because it really is bone-chilling. Yet the movie is billed as comedy/drama, not horror. That might be what was so horrifying about it: you’re not expecting it so it really comes out of nowhere.
I remember a health & safety film we were shown in Chemistry class (on 16mm film. Yes, FILM, you little shits!) that starred Bernard Bresslaw of Carry On fame doing foolish things in a lab like push bits of mercury round with his finger, and being burnt with acid, blown up etc. Made me sad. It goes to show how much Carry On actors were shafted by that franchise that he was doing that to pay the bills a few years later (or, possibly, at the time). Pretty sure they actually made him push real mercury about, too.
Oh, and scariest non-horror? Threads?
Not to mention the “those aren’t robots, we lobotomized the crew”, “let’s do brain surgery on the psychic to turn her into one of the walking dead”, and “maximillian and his creator 2gther 4vr at the end”
Also in the golden child, if the golden child ate human flesh he would become mortal and able to be killed. The backdrop of TVs/ radios and missing person announcements gave little doubt as to where the human flesh came from…
Ah, the joys of late 70s weekend television… What freaked me out the worst was a weird horror movie called “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” which was really creepy.
A close second was in Terror of Mechagodzilla, when the scientist’s daughter’s brain is removed to pilot Mechagodzilla - I just had a deeply creeped out feeling about it for the rest of the movie. I had a weird spectrum of feelings about transformations! I thought that people turning into monsters was a very cool, empowering thing, And even at like 5-10 years old, I was very sexually excited about this. But I was very fearful about seeing people or animals being cyborged, which I saw as a complete loss of autonomy.
