Horror movies don’t sit well with me. I’ve tried some of themto try and up my “cool cred” to very little avail. I sat through ten minutes of High Tension, while trying to impress a boy before I said “screw this” and made him turn it off. I struggled through a half hour of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre before it was turned off for me. I stealthily covered my eyes throughout most of Scream (how embarrassing, I know) and tried my hardest to fall asleep during The Uninvited.
I don’t like straight-and-out horror, obviously.
Sometimes though, it isn’t the scariest movies or the blood soaked movies that truly freak us out. Sometimes we’re caught in a weird mood or it picks at something specific that makes the hair on the back of our neck stand up and, often, it’s because we watched a movie or scene that freaked us out as kids.
So, with that said, here are films that scared us over here at The Young Folks when we were younger. Laugh at us, agree with us, what have you, let us know in the comments!
Ryan Gibbs – Live, “Lightning Crashes” (video, 1995)
As one of the site’s “music people,” I figured I’d talk about a music video that freaked me out instead of a film. As penance for bending this article’s original idea, my story involves like three or four of the most embarrassing facts about me in rapid succession. Deal?
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For a bit of background: As a little kid I used to watch a ton of MTV and VH1 (which should explain a lot, right?). Because I grew up in the 90s, I often saw videos that have been regularly cited as being among the most frightening ever made – tons of metal videos, Aphex Twin’s “Come to Daddy,” Prodigy’s “Firestarter,” the entire Ministry videography – and none of those ever really scared me that much!
Instead the song and video that really freaked me out was “Lightning Crashes,” a milquetoast ballad by the ‘90s alt-rock outfit Live. Yeah, really.
One afternoon I was watching VH1 and it hit me that this middling pop song unnecessarily jampacked with a bunch of ten-dollar words was about death, the afterlife and reincarnation. Those are things you really don’t think about much when you’re five and they really, truly freaked me out at that moment. Somehow, “Lightning Crashes” triggered the “death is horrible and I’m scared of it” phase a good 20 to 30 years early. For months, I was creeped out by the song and its pretentious video. That was unfortunate for me, because the song was a huge hit at the time and basically unavoidable on the radio. Since my parents never acquiesced to us kids’ requests to change the radio to something else, I was stuck with that song coming up on car trips pretty much every week. I always felt relieved when the thing was over, and especially so once it fell out of rotation.
Nowadays, Live’s Throwing Copper has become a CD dollar bin staple (a fitting punishment!) and I just find “Lightning Crashes” to be as ridiculous as the other modern rock radio staples on it. Unless you’re five years old (and even that’s debatable), you just can’t take Ed Kowalczyk mumbling something about a placenta falling to the floor seriously.
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Gabrielle Bondi – The Omen (1976)
My grandma took a lot of pleasure of freaking me out as a kid. From her scary bedtime stories to making me watch ALL of the Alfred Hitchcock movies as a six-year-old, she really liked to test my limits. The one movie that she insisted I watch was The Omen (1976 version).
During the summer I was seven, we took two buses to the video rental store (Ha, remember those?) to get the movie. I was mostly just happy that she also let me rent Father of the Bride Part II and bought candy.
Anyway, seeing a man decapitated by a sheet of window glass is definitely the kind of thing that will scar a seven-year-old. What freaked me out too about The Omen was that a child was the villain. That someone like me or my little brother (and yes, I did check his head for a trio of sixes) could be so evil made me feel a little unsafe. It also didn’t help that I went to Catholic school, so being introduced to something called the “Antichrist” did a number on me as well.
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Despite being freaked out, I did actually like the movie. It did give me a couple nightmares, but that didn’t stop me from watching The Omen a dozen more times later on in life.
Jon Winkler – The Ring (2002)
When I was in third grade, The Ring was like an urban legend amongst kids my age. Everyday in the lunchroom, I heard my friends whisper and gossip about this movie and, more importantly, if “the tape” was real.
“GUYS IT’S REAL! My brother’s friend’s girlfriend’s cousin saw it a week ago…and, like, no one has heard from him.”
“I heard it’s being banned from theatres because everyone who saw it DIED!”
“I heard it’s scarier than everything ever made!”
“I kinda wanna get another pizza.”
Ok, so that last one was just a frequent thing I would say at lunch (who wouldn’t though, am I right?), but The Ring was hyped up beyond belief when I was a lad. I actually didn’t see the movie until a year or so later on HBO….and ho boy, it freaked me out. The creepy imagery, the uncomfortable atmosphere and Naomi Watts’ performance of sheer horror was something I thought was created by the devil himself. And of course, there’s the scene where Samara is finally seen crawling out of TV, which still sends shivers down my spine to this day. Perhaps it’s because my experience with horror movies at the time were the later installments of Nightmare on Elm Street and Child’s Play (which were honestly more comedic than scary), but The Ring was something that I had never seen before. It seemed like it wasn’t meant to be enjoyable, just to make you smash all tapes and televisions near by.
Allyson- A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
I don’t hate horror movies, I’ve just never watched one long enough to form an opinion. So, the films that have freaked me out are limited but present with early childhood traumas. If there is any film that had a negative lasting impression on my it was Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg’s film A.I. Artificial Intelligence.
No I wasn’t allowed to watch this as a child and no I didn’t see most of it. What I saw was the traumatic last few moments where the child A.I. meets his talking teddy bear and gets to live out one day with his mother.
Ten year old me woke up in the middle of the night, stumbled into the living room where the fluorescent television lights were casting an eerie glow on my log cabin house, and I heard Haley Joel Osment cry “Mommy”. Good god that is not what I ever needed to wake up to ever. Ten year old Ally did not need to hear it, think about it, see the unsettling image of a teddy bear walking into view. It’s made it so that I can never actually watch this film.
Jeremy Rodriguez – Darkness Falls (2003)
If the Tooth Fairy comes, don’t peek.
Well, guess what? I peeked and it gave me nightmares during my early teens! I like to consider myself a horror buff. I am obsessed with Wes Craven and Stephen King movies. My stomach can even handle the torture porn and gore of Saw and The Human Centipede. But the movie that I still remember terrifying me the most was about a murderous tooth fairy.
Darkness Falls was far from a box office smash and it can’t even be considered a cult classic but the moody film has just what it needs to make you afraid of the dark corners of your very home. The story centers on the legend of Matilda Dixon, a 19th century woman who received visits from children. They would give her their teeth they recently lost in exchange for a gold coin.
That’s creepy enough but it gets worst when Matilda is wrongfully accused of kidnapping two missing children. The town burns her and it turns Matilda into a hermit, afraid to be seen in the light of day. Now, Matilda visits children at night as the Tooth Fairy and murders anyone who lays eyes on her.
Yes. The premise is silly but when I watched it for the first time, I actually believed it was real. On top of that, the DVD version of the movie included a bonus “documentary” about “the real Matilda Dixon.” As I got older, I was able to tolerate the movie but I still feel a little uneasy when I think about it.
A few years ago, my nephew lost a tooth and it happened to be in the same week when I was staying with him on vacation. Of course, I had to share a room with him. You better believe I kept my eyes closed! I didn’t want the Tooth Fairy to kill me! Even I can’t take that last sentence seriously.
The one thing I was always thankful for was that I lost my last baby tooth BEFORE I saw this movie.
Bri Lockhart—Pee Wee’s Big Adventure (1985)
As a child, there wasn’t too much in the way of pop culture that scared me—having spent much of my younger years watching Are You Afraid of the Dark? and The Twilight Zone, I was more frightened of real life threats such as fires and tornadoes than anything pop culture had to offer. However, a piece of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure certainly got to me—while admittedly not anything close to a horror flick, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure has one moment that is practically seared into my brain for how much it freaked me out when I was little.
At some point during the movie, Pee Wee hitches a ride with a lady trucker. She unblinkingly details a horrific car accident, which you quickly realize is the accident that killed her. She’s dead, and she doesn’t care if she takes Pee Wee with her into the afterlife. To really send the message home, she turns towards the screen and her face goes CRAZY.
Every time I watched Pee Wee’s Big Adventure when it was the WB’s Saturday afternoon movie, I dreaded that scene. The feeling has carried over into my adult life; finding the below gif caused a visceral reaction, making me feel like I’m still seven years old, watching the scariest part of an adventure comedy I’ve ever seen.
So, sharing time! What movies freaked you out when you were a kid?
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