What is that movie you saw at too young an age that still haunts you to this day?
Mine is the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre
I seldom just stop watching a film but I'm glad I did with this one. Afterword i looked up a summary of the rest and I'm glad I stopped.
There's some others in the same genre too. Cannibal holocaust was one I think. Salo too, less intense but still pretty fucked up. The human centipede too.
So if you want more regrets in your life ...
I guess i just don't put them on the same level in my head. Visually shocking g vs morally horrifying. Salo i have avoided now since Serbian Film because I'm a little more cautious lol
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Salk and Cannibal Holocaust are actually good movies. A Serbian Film sucks, but is has shock factor
Growing up in the 80s meant that pretty much any kids movie was going to be traumatizing. Gremlins: horrifying. Neverending Story: emotional damage. The Land Before Time: can't think of dinosaurs without tearing up. It's like the whole movie industry was explicitly devoted to fucking us up.
You also have the Dark Crystal, Water Ship Down, The Last Unicorn, Watcher in the Woods (which was a Disney movie!) and the Secret of NIMH. Seriously, kids movies in the eighties were horrifying.
Hey, don't forget Transformers: The Movie, the one in which all your heroes just fuckin' died (so some greedy toy company execs could boost sales).
I vividly remember watching that movie in the theater. My brother and I were so hyped we were standing on our seats for the opening song. Then they had Optimus Prime cuss and we absolutely couldn't believe it. When he died, I had never seen such bullshit. Optimus Prime can't die, he was the toughest robot ever.
Flight of the Navigator was awesome.as a kid. Kinda fucked up when I rewatched it a few years ago
I suspect a bunch of animators wanted their work to be taken seriously as art, but were stuck making kids movies, so they made kids movies that were shockingly dark to try to persuade people that animation was a versatile medium.
can't think of dinosaurs without tearing up
It may be of solace to know that dinosaurs have survived that mass-extinction event in the lineage of birds.
Unfortunately, the trauma of Littlefoot's mom dying isn't lessened by the knowledge that pigeons are shitting on my roof thanks to her sacrifice.
We'll it doesn't haunt me but looking back it was RoboCop. That movie is a bit much for a 6 year old to watch.
I kept scrolling to see if someone else posted this. I don't remember it bothering me much at the time (my memory isn't great). However, I watched it later as an adult and thought, holy shit that's intense.
Also, Ren and Stimpy. A very messed up show.
I have a vivid memory of my first time watching it (at about 8 years old, on good ol' VHS), and running away to peek from behind the door during >!Murphy's execution!<. It's still fucked up every time it comes on. Horrific
Watership Down
My parents thought it was a nice cartoon about rabbits I guess. Weirdly, My nightmares where mostly about the intro with the special art style, mostly…
Oh it's a nice cartoon about rabbits, very child-friendly! The fact that the Wikipedia article has a section called "Effects on children and BBFC classification" that opens with
Watership Down has developed a reputation as a distressing children's text, with Ed Power of The Independent describing the film in a 40th anniversary retrospective as a "classic" but which "arguably traumatised an entire generation".
sums it up pretty well!
They showed us that in primary school, i loved the book as a kid but that cartoon was gory.
Akira. My father rented it for my brother and me because "animated movie is for kids". I was 4, and my brother was 3.
I don't remember much of it clearly, thankfully. I know Akira is a classic but it turned me off of anything body horror forever.
Don't watch Tetsuo the Iron Man then. Director (Shinya Tsukamoto) has all kinds of horror movies which are sure to find that one phobia you have and ride it hard.
Event Horizon.
I know it gets a bad rap, but it is a cult classic in my book. The most perfect symmetry of science fiction and body horror since Alien(s). Add on top of that a fantastic cast, a mildly campy vibe, and it somehow manages to hold up well even today in my opinion. Even though it scared the fuck out of me as a kid, I have a weird nostalgia for it now.
All of the issues with Event Horizon are because of the studio screwing up the story. And the footage of the good version of the movie was lost on the cutting room floor, so we'll never see it.
Its such a good premise and so well executed that its still good despite its story & pacing issues. One of the best moments of my life was showing it to my Warhammer 40k loving friend for the first time. It blew his mind.
Event Horizon is an awesome movie.
There was so much I never knew about the production of the movie until the guys at Red Letter Media did a Re:View about it. I was kinda bummed that Mike and Jay didn't like the movie, but it was cool to learn the history, warts and all.
I keep holding out hope that someday it might be remade or perhaps there could be a sequel from a competent team that enjoyed the first movie. I am generally against remake or reboot culture, but Event Horizon just always seemed like a perfect candidate for it to me.
Knew this one would be on the list. Factor in watching solo in the middle of the night and you have the recipe for staying up until morning.
Watching it solo in the middle of the night thinking it was just a regular sci-fi movie is what fucked me up. I was like "cool! spaceships! warp drives!" and then had my world fucking rocked.
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Missed it as a kid, but our local cinema put it on the big screen a few months back. Can absolutely see why it’s a cult classic!
Oh oh oh I know this one!
Glory! The civil war film! There's a scene where a union soldier takes a cannon ball to the head and it explodes in a gory mess. It was during a tour to Gettysburg, and I threw up on the bus after seeing it. Then they brilliantly played the Mel Gibson Patriot movie where a revolutionary also takes a cannon ball to the head, only this time it removes the head in slow motion and more detaches it than blows it to head smoothie
I remember watching the first one in school. That image of the cannon ball to the head was very shocking and it's practically all I remember about the film.
I was going to ask you what school you went to where they were allowed to show that, but then I remembered my private christian middle school took us all to see the Passion of the Christ at the movie theater for a fucking field trip 😂
It was a public middle school, would you believe! I remember we had to have a permission slip to watch the movie, at least. I had a great time at that school.
This reminds me of a time when I was on a bus in Honduras with the entire back third occupied by Nuns, the bus driver put on the action thriller Officer Downe where the scene kicks off with machine gun welding Nuns battling it out in extreme graphic action and gore.. Pretty crazy irony.
It's just so intense and realistic. I've learned to cope with splatter, but this is personal and cruel.
When I was about 5-6 I had fever and couldn’t sleep. I lived in a apartment complex and my mom had the neighbour from the next apartment over for coffee so I was sitting in the neighbours apartment while they had the doors open into the hall. Well, there I was, sitting alone in the dark, watching some sappy teens have a heart to heart while suddenly the earth opens under one of them and it gets brutally eaten the fuck alive while the other one screams in panic and tries to rescue it. Had some unforgettable nightmares that night.
Fucking Tremors man.
This movie for me too. The scene I most remember was a dude talking to another dude through a window. The camera is facing out the window. Then the outside dudes face changes and the camera switches to outside and his whole lower half had been eaten
Was scared of sleeping on the ground for years incase I got swallowed
The movie that actually fucked me up for a bit as a kid was some black and white movie about spiders that took over a small town. I don't remember a single thing about the movie, other than crates/the town absolutely covered in webs and people getting wrapped up like bugs.
I'm pretty sure you mean Arachnophobia, which is the film I came here to mention.
Someone put it on at a slumber party before I could see what it was (definitely wouldn't have stuck around if I knew what was coming). It kept me up for months and months, and intensified an already existing phobia. It's like 30 years later and I'll still occasionally wake up in horror from seeing huge spiders in my dreams..
I've seen arachnophobia, but I'm pretty sure that's not it. I just rewatched the trailer and I definitely don't see anything that looks like what i see in my head from the flick im thinking of.
Huh, well now I know there's another spider horror film out there for me to avoid, but not what it's called, so that's fun lol
Mostly kidding, but if you do remember the name at some point, please do share! 😂
I'll try to remember if the title ever comes to me. I've been tilting at this windmill periodically for years, so I don't have much hope.
Take care stranger.
You're good, and who knows, maybe today is the day some other random stranger ends your search, it's just wasn't me lol
And thanks, right back at you!
That one put me in fear every time I walked into a room in my house for weeks. I would always be looking above the door and to the sides, just in case a spider was on the wall ready to pounce. ugh!
Was it one big spider? If so there are several.
If it wasn't in black and white there's a few other options
I don't recall if there was a massive spider, but I checked out that trailer and it didn't look super familiar. Pretty sure it was in black and white, but I could be wrong. I just have a vivid memory of the crates covered in spiders/webs, and it may have been the crate that brought the spider there. Also people wrapped up in cocoons ready to be eaten/already drained.
Could it be Eight Legged Freaks? It's not black and white but most of the action does take place at night. Giant spiders taking over a small American town, stuff covered in webs, and people in cocoons being eaten/drained.
Pretty sure 8 legged freaks is too new to be the movie I'm thinking of, it probably wouldn't have been on ota TV in the late 90s/early 00s.
"Tarantula" and "Earth vs the Spider" come to mind, but it's been a while since I've seen them. Both have the small-town thing going for them, if I'm remembering correctly!
Stand By Me - The scene with the leaches. As a kid in a small country town with nothing to do on weekends but run around and swim in the local creek, I was so scared to ever do that again.
Hmm I guess I've only seen the edited-for-TV version of that movie, they don't show the body. Which reminds me, that's the original name of that story, based on a Stephen King novel called The Body.
Both of mine I later learned are comedy/satire:
Starship Troopers and Mars Attacks.
The sheer gore from Starship Troopers made me ill.
The Martian design was freaky and I wasn't a fan of the instant death lasers. It had me thinking aliens could come down one day and we'd have no chance against them.
Yeah, I saw the western version age... 12? Intrusive thoughts for weeks. Dude electrocuting himself in a bathtub was what did it for me for some reason
The Ring, age 8 or 9, did me in as well. The bathtub scene is also the one that messed with my head the most.
Western is like 1/20th of quality. Japanese is so so so much more on point. It's relentless and keeps on coming. It's not treating you as if you are watching a movie. American version has flashbacks, switching shots to different characters only for them to react. It's made like a movie. Japanese version is made like you are going to die in 7 days.
This movie was on network television at primetime! Like every kid in America was traumatized that day.
I read the book when I was ..12? Learned that reading a book can be much scarier than watching a movie.
I was around the same age, and even back then I knew the child orgy scene was really fucked up
My cousin and I used to spend the night at my grandma's house fairly regularly. Between my grandpa and my two uncles who lived there, the house had its fair share of old blank VHS tapes containing recordings of various horror films among comedy classics like Revenge of the Nerds. As far as horror goes, Return of the Living Dead scared the absolute shit out of us at age 8, as did Tremors and Gargoyles (1972).
And since you're no doubt wondering, I don't remember coming across any porn on those old VHS tapes, but my uncles did keep a few magazines stashed away in their closets that my cousin always knew exactly where to find.
EDIT: God damn, this really opened up a well of (positive) memories over an entire family that has since deceased. Cancer and poor health eventually took every last person in that house. Doesn't help that nearly everyone smoked and drinked to the day they died. They were all such good people, though. Rest in peace.
The Shining.
I remember asking dad "what's wrong with that man (Jack Nicholson)?" and he told me that he had spiders in his brain. That was also really weird.
the exorcist. At age 8
My Catholic church going up bringing has made possession into a genuine fair even though I'm atheist now.
My friend and I went snooping and found her parents' hard-core sex tape. Should not have watched that at 10 years old.
Got a good quick lesson in anatomy, though.
My wife's cousin has been terrified of clowns since he was 5 because of this movie.
I actually love it, it's pretty great :)