You wanna see something REALLY scary? ...
Click to viewEven if I wasn't a huge Flaming Lips fan, I still think I'd find The Fearless Freaks pretty engrossing. One of my favorite parts is when Wayne Coyne and his oft-nude wife are preparing for Halloween. Wayne says, "I love Halloween and I love scaring those little kids. I remember, when I was a little kid, how much the being scared stuck with you. Then you grow up and you realize, 'Oh, I was scared of the Frankenstein monster or the giant spider,' or whatever-- and those things, really, in real life, aren't scary. But they're scary when you're a little kid... because, you know, once you get older, there's things in real life that are horribly scary. And you can't just run away from them, or turn on the light and it goes away. That sort of being scared when you're a little kid-- it can only happen when you're a little kid."
I think that's part of why Halloween is my favorite holiday, even when I'm distracted by as many scary-to-grownups things as I am this year. And it's explored much more thoroughly in this absolutely fantastic 2009 Onion AV Club article about pop-cultural ephemera that terrified its reviewers and columnists during childhood.
Donna Bowman: Most of my childhood fears sprang from my fundamentalist upbringing. I’ll never forget a slide show I saw during a church revival that featured a cloud of cigarette smoke… smoking a cigarette. The sickly, amorphous thing starred in my nightmares for years. As far as movies go, though, what undid me at age 8 was A Thief In The Night, the original “left behind” movie. (It even spawned the campfire classic “I Wish We’d All Been Ready,” with its endearingly gimmicky coda: “You’ve been left behind / you’ve been left be-.”) If you’ve seen it, you probably remember the opening sequence featuring the half-empty bed and the abandoned electric razor buzzing in the sink. Ignore the ’70s production values, if you would, and place yourself in a church basement with concrete-block walls and an uncomfortably low ceiling, with a 16mm projector whirring away and everyone sitting in sober, assenting silence.
Nathan Rabin: I remember being seriously freaked the fuck out by the commercials for Red Dawn and Amerika. Hell, I remember being freaked out by the mere spelling of Amerika. Something about spelling our country’s name with a k seemed inconceivably evil to me.
Leonard Pierce: I was a latchkey kid, and when I was very, very young-maybe 6 or 7-I saw an episode of Sesame Street in which, I recall distinctly even though I can find no evidence of it through Google, a gypsy cursed Oscar The Grouch with a human nose. Now, to this day, I cannot explain why I found this so profoundly terrifying and disturbing. Apparently it completely upended my entire post-toddler Weltanschauung. But whatever the reason, the sight of Oscar with a human nose upset me so much that I actually left the house and sat alone on the front porch until my parents got home from work, because I didn’t even want to be in the building with the television that had brought me such a horrific vision. I can remember clear as day how much it scared me, even if I have no idea why.
Amelie Gillette on (shudder) Return To Oz: Everything in that movie (the insane asylum at the beginning, the deadly desert that turns people into sand, the Gnome King and his rock spies, the Wheelers, the hall full of decapitated heads, the terrible way the witch’s original head booms, “Dooorooothy Gaaale!”) filled me with complete terror, so naturally I wanted to watch it over and over. But the part that frightened me the most as a child was when Jack, the makeshift scarecrow that pathetically calls Dorothy “mom,” loses his Jack-O-Lantern head as Dorothy and her friends are flying away from the witch. “Help me, mom!” he wails as his head falls through the foggy sky. The thought of his stick body going on and living, possibly forever, without a head was profoundly creepy to me then. In fact, it’s still really creepy to me now.
Noel Murray: I don’t know about “scared,” but I was so unsettled by a viewing of Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory at a church supper when I was 6 that I couldn’t eat my dinner. (And then I wasn’t allowed to have any dessert, which at the time struck me as preposterous, but now totally makes sense.) I didn’t really become aware of horror movies until a year or two later, when I started seeing commercials on TV for It’s Alive, with its slowly rotating cradle and hideous claw. (“The Davises have had a baby…”)
This article really hit a nerve with the commenters. There are thousands of additions to the list. Some of my favorites:
1. White hot molten steel on Sesame Street. Remember? Film footage of molten steel being formed into an I-beam, while menacing piano and horn music blared in my face. Jesus Christ, that segment used to scare the craps out of me! And maybe I'm imagining this part, but I could swear that at the very end, you hear the voice of a really fucked-up sounding kid say, "I".
2. I really can't believe that more people on here haven't talked about PSA's, which to me were always the most terrifying form of media....particularly the late 80s early 90s PFDFA ones...this one in particular:
3. The computer/AI assimilation of the main female bad guy in Superman III. That messed me up but good. Never gone back and watched it again, but in my head, it's more graphic than Evil Dead treerape. (Me, Meyers, and Faux were just talking about that SUPERMAN III scene at the bar the other night. It freaked us ALL out as kids. Of course, looking at it now, it's just silly.)
4. "The Fog" was pretty scary (Dead pirates? Who travel with the fog along the northern California coast? And kill people because of a curse?) up until the moment my dad had to comment on Adrienne Barbeau's luscious figure: "Look! It's Adrienne Barboobs!"
5. Once on Oprah there was this medium (James van Praag or something) and he was saying that ghosts can appear in TVs that are off or their voices can come through on radios that are off. I cannot tell you how scared I was every day for years and years about the thought of that.
6. I'm still frightened by Sid and Marty Croft. It's a combination of creepy and also being bummed out about how crappy and pathetic it is. I know a lot of people are really nostalgic for it but for me it seems like there's a creepy child molester who's taken the form of a brown derby hat and he's waiting just behind that shitty looking fake tree in Lidsville.
7. That Mr. Yuk commercial scared the crap out of me when I was four... I had to leave the room the minute the music came on, and the first time I heard it I cried for hours. A few years ago, I looked up the clip on Youtube... I had to leave halfway through. On the bright side, I never drank drain cleaner.
8. I was always somehow terrified by the animated end credits on the Carol Burnett Show.
9. I have had a recurring nightmare since I was little featuring Lady Elaine Fairchild from Mr. Rogers. (She was in that crazy medieval puppet land...?) Anyway in my dreams she is actually a 7 foot tall man with a plastic head who's wearing a cape and hiding at every turn in my house while trying to kill me.
10. Spaceballs -- I saw it when a babysitter and her boyfriend were watching it on TV. I had never even heard of Star Wars so as above I had absolutely no clue that it was a parody or supposed to be funny. That scene with the alien that rips out of the guy's stomach stuck with me for at least two months, dwelling on it miserably while trying to fall asleep at night. I think I was like six or seven at the time I saw it. I also found the scene where the ship is self-destructing and everyone is rushing to escape and unable to do so incredibly, incredibly disturbing.
11. When Genesis's Land of Confusion video first aired, I was like 6. While I found 99% of it to be awesome, the part where Reagan's head came out of the water scared the absolute SHIT out of me.
12. Gage, anyone? Evil, scalpel-wielding undead toddlers do anything for ya?
13. FLIGHT OF THE NAVIGATOR! Seriously, what little kid wouldn't be sacred shitless by the prospect of being abducted by aliens and returned to earth years later? I don't care if the robot guy sang beach boys songs.
14. Oddly, Little Shop Of Horrors did not scare me at all. But the second there's a Coors commercial with a werewolf, it's the end of the damn world.
15. I had to turn the volume down in order to play the castle levels of Mario Bros. Music freaked me out as a kid. Incredibly wussy.
16. The Never Ending Story, when Artax, the horse, died in the quicksand/mud. I just read recently that the horse actually DID die accidentally, so all my fears were justified. Say what you want about CGI, at least it never murdered any poor showbiz horses.
17. I read an article a long time ago that held The Incredible Hulk up as the quintessential "scare kids shitless" example. Apparently nothing freaks kids out worse than when something normal and recognizable transforms into something alien and strange without warning. (The Hulk TV series ended in 1982, which would make me four years old, and I had a recurring nightmare about him. Not about the transformation specifically, or even Lou Ferrigno in that goofy shag wig, but the cartoon Hulk on one of my T-shirts and an inflatable bop bag a well-meaning relative had gotten me for Christmas. In these dreams, the Hulk lived in my closet. Every time I cried to my mom about this, she assured me that the Hulk isn't a bad guy, he's a good guy.)
18. The commercial for the Anthony Hopkins movie "Magic." This scared the holy living shit out of me as a kid, so much so that when it was in regular rotation I was afraid to watch TV and kept a blanket near me so I could hide my head under it if it came on. Of course, it was SUPPOSED to be creepy, but it scared me beyond all reason. I remember months going by, the movie was no longer in theaters, and I could finally breathe easy. I was happily watching TV, and inexplicably, the commercial comes on again, scaring the bejeezus out of me one last time.
19. Please, please tell me I wasn't the only kid to be scared shitless by the Crying Indian commercial. I can't quite place what it was that so terrified me--the music, the imagery, the cheap, grainy tape it was shot on, the feel of "Jesus H. Christ we're all gonna die right now!!!!" feel it had--but it all combined into a terrifying package. I would start screaming and crying uncontrollably whenever it came on. Even now, I can't watch it. The thought makes me hyperventilate.
20. The only thing I was ever terrified of- ever- was the Hamburglar. I saw The Shining early on, The Exorcist,whatever. I was finally given my own room at age 5, and I used to lay in bed at night, sucking my thumb, dreading a fucking hamburger commercial.
21. Was anyone else FUCKING TERRIFIED of the Emergency Broadcast System as a kid? With its unrelenting "OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOTTTT" sound? Every time it came on, it just shattered my world -- it sounded like someone evil had hijacked the world's media and Russian commandos would come crashing thru the kitchen window any goddamn minute. (That scared me too.)
22. Amazing Stories: Remember the Halloween episode with Christopher Lloyd? He played a teacher that somehow got his head cut off, and when one of his students went to his house or something, his decapitated head chased the guy and his friends around the house. Silly as fuck to think of now, but good gravy - I didn't sleep for days. One of Christopher Lloyd's finest roles ever.
23. My dad rented Watership Down when I was four, saying I would love it because it's "a cartoon movie about bunnies."
24. (In response to a lot of reported Large Marge anxieties: )I saw Pee-Wee's Big Adventure in the theater, as a very small child, and I laughed in delight at Large Marge, and laughed harder at the frightened screams of kids around me. I did, however, find the fake psychic scary. A couple of nights after I saw the movie, I got out of bed to find my mom and tell her I kept remembering that part of the movie where her crystal ball lit up, and it was creeping me out. My mom tried to explain to me that she turned it on with a switch, and she was faking the whole spooky psychic atmosphere--but that's exactly what creeped me out! Pee Wee was so vulnerable when he went to see her, and she just took complete advantage of him. It kinda disturbed me. (That captures Wayne Coyne's theory pretty well, I think. Shit that's scary in real life, like phonies who lure you in and steal yer wallet, leaving you scrubbing truckstop dishes for hours to pay off a tuna melt. That IS scarier than Large Marge!)
25. This second post is about a more personal memory this question has provoked. I read in the article about these being considered bad parenting decisions maybe? I kind of agree, my dad letting me see "The Shining" (Kubrick version) was really not the best one. The little girls freaked me out so bad I literally couldn't handle the thought of seeing the movie again. I think one time it was on some basic cable or maybe network TV, and the thought of accidentally changing the channel to it stressed me out to no end...
But, this fear was put to rest. When my dad had begun to noticeably approach his end during cancer treatment I found a Kubrick boxed set my brother has. I pulled out the movie and told him how it still kind of freaked me out. We sat there together and watched it, little girls and all. I remember the first time we saw it, he mentioned how he liked Scatman Crothers, (the guy who gets killed trying to rescue them) and as he watched this last time he got tearful as he thought of him again. I think this last time maybe he felt he might be getting a chance to meet Scatman soon. I think he also decided that this was going to be the last Kubrick movie he ever saw, and it must've been hard for him to come to terms with that. It did feel good to realize how dumb my fear of those girls were, when the scenes came he said very plainly "oh those girls used to scare you a lot" I don't think he could totally understand the impact they had on me. It was one of the last and best memories of my dad, and it was putting an old fear to rest. Now I've come to really appreciate the film, it brings back one last good memory. I think I'd be the only person watching it with a big grin on my face.
My nominees? The day after it aired, I distinctly remember incredulous conversations at school about a now-notorious Punky Brewster episode-- an otherwise predictable, sappy kids' sitcom that took a Lovecraftian turn without any warning whatsoever. Until we verified it with each other, it had sort of felt like we dreamed it. One week Punky befriends her school's retarded janitor, the next week she's howling futilely into the maw of a relentless, demonic tarantula-beast and her friends have become hell-corpses of the damned who can't stop screaming her name. It was just so fucked up... and you know the MOST fucked-up thing about it? THIS WAS A TWO-PART EPISODE.
And as I remember it, this was constantly advertised on FUCKING NICKELODEON:
Fuck this. I'm sleeping with the lights on tonight.