Something that was cool to do in third grade was to find the kid who had figured out a way to see a Nightmare on Elm Street movie and have them tell you everything about it and then never sleep again
Most of my friends in grade school watched R-rated horror movies regularly and would fill me in on all the details, which is why Jason Voorhees still looms larger in my imagination than he probably ever would have if I’d just watched those movies as a kid.
Yeah, I wasn't allowed anywhere near those kinds of movies so they took on a powerful sense of The Forbidden which is so much more dreadful than the actual films themselves
in some ways i associate that period as being more censorious - which it was about sex, i guess - but the amount of insane violence/horror we all saw...
There was a TV movie of the week about Idi Amin that had some of the craziest scenes that ever made network television and I was just old enough to be scarred by it
Horror movies of that era were insanely moralist. Drinking, partying, drugs, promiscuity, all of it lead to problems or death. The final girl was usually the "good girl" and would even get mocked for it. Action movies relied heavily on "former Vietnam vet gets revenge" tropes. It was nuts.
I once had the opportunity to play castlevania on some family friend’s NES, but I had to pass a Freddy poster to enter the room. This was very terrifying.
I snuck down to watch nightmare on elm st when I was like 6. In 8th grade I turned the corner of our living room and Freddy was on the screen and the next thing I remember was my mom trying to calm me down from a panic attack I was having under a table in the kitchen. Great movie
It was a teenaged summer camp "counselor" for me - she collected a gaggle of little kids around her and recounted all the teen horror plots with gory details. We were transfixed and nightmare-plagued for months.
Tho the Jaws-esque tv movie short made me jumpy in showers for years.
I mean hey, how much worse could it be than those traumatic PSA films they showed us at school about all the terrible ways you could die if you aren’t careful about safety
We also had thumbed copies of really traumatic books about the Holocaust. And sharing details of Mengele’s experiments on children. Remember that vividly.
Those were wild movies. But I'd like to just point out, even *family fare* was just so fucked up back then.
The original Muppet Movie came out in 1979. Imagine being 4-8 years old, watching as Charles Durning hires someone to mercilessly try to kill Kermit the Frog.
Aliens for me. Ian earned his popularity by re-enacting for all the chest burster scene. So engrossing we forgot to wheel in the TV so we could watch 20 Minute Workout.
My Dad read the book to me, one chapter each night and then took me to the pictures to see it. I was never frightened by the imagery or Woundworts ruthlessness because my Dad was sat next to me and he was my heavyweight champion of the world.
My mom put this on for us one saturday afternoon.
She Rented it because "its a cartoon, it is for children with cute animals".
And then she left the room.
Only Returned when the Sound of children weeping caught her ear 🫠
Don Bluth made an animated movie called "All Dogs Go To Heaven" and naturally Don Bluth reasoned that the existence of Dog Heaven implies the existence of Dog Hell, which HE THEN LAVISHLY BROUGHT TO LIFE
the last scene was actually filmed without her, when she says goodbye. you can hear burt reynolds choking up because he’s actually saying goodbye to her.
Ian, have I ranted in your direction about Disney's One Magic Christmas, where children are kidnapped and apparently drowned, parents are gunned down in a bank robbery, and the overhanging theme of the whole picture is a looming divorce?
Remember kids, if you had a parent die and they didn't come back to life because it's actually the dead who make toys, not elves, it's because Santa didn't think you were good enough a little boy or girl
Bambi gave me added trauma because in the theatre the film, like, got stuck and bubbled and melted down (while they were switching reels?) and that was BEFORE the forest fire scene. To! This! Day! trauma, haha.
When I talk to younger people who were “traumatized” by the opening of Up, they are treated to an epic rundown of movies. They teased Optimus Prime’s death in the marketing of the Transformers movie.
Terminator was the main attraction for my brother's 11 year old birthday/slumber party. I, grizzled 12 year old, watched with 10 very intrigued little boys.
The first broadcast TV airing of Alien was in 1984 on CBS, and so it is that I know with precision that the first time I saw Alien, I was six years old. I remember precisely three seconds of it and those three seconds are crystal clear in my memory.
I forget how old I was but it was the early 90s and basic cable would just sometimes run the nearly uncensored Heavy Metal animated movie after midnight
I have a sister who is 5 yrs older than me. She liked to watch scary movies, but she didn’t like to watch them alone. She used to talk me into watching with her by promising that I could sleep in her bed that night — fine for that night, but, for all nights thereafter, not so much.
We took our kids to see Zootopia at the cinema and when Judy Hopp turned in her badge, the silence of the theater was pierced by some little girl wailing "Oh no" as sadly as it is possible to say. She was utterly crushed. I still think about that kid (who is probably 15 or 16 now) and hope she's OK.
Favorite line from Crazy People (1990) about an ad exec who launches honest ad campaigns: "Paramount Pictures presents 'The Freak.' This movie won't just scare you, it will fuck you up for life."
We watched gremlins recently and it was shortly after that movie that they made pg13. Holy hell. I can’t imagine being in a theater with kids, seeing this movie blind after the kitchen scene.
Yeah, we watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in second grade - and I've always heard that cited for why they came up with PG-13. (Sure, the 8-year-olds can watch someone's heart pulled out of their chest, that's fine.)
My wife and I just unironically discussed showing my son some movies from when we were kids to mature him a bit since most modern day kids stuff is colourful slop
Yeah. Nothing in any 80s film will traumatize you as much as that and we simply did not know because we did not have instant access to that information in the 80s.
It’s the absolute worst. So sad. Apparently, Reynolds recorded Charlie’s goodbye to the little girl after finding out what happened to the actress. Unbelievably sad.
The girl who voice acted in that movie was murdered during the filming and Burt Reynolds took approximately 63 takes to deliver the last scene knowing she was dead.
"What's that, kid? You like dinosaurs? Here, have BABY - SECRET OF THE LOST LEGEND. You get to watch the daddy brontosaur get painfully gunned down by an African warlord just for the fun of it."
Bluth's Secret of Nimh scared me as a kid but is also still one of my favourite childhood films. A healthy dose of darkness in entertainment, even at a young age, confronting difficult things in an accessible way is a good thing, important even.
During a storm that is flooding his farm, a child reads a story book about a rooster that brought up the sun, but one day it came up without him, but also once he stopped crowing the sun stopped rising. Now it gets weird, because a magic evil owl turns the
Live-action boy into an animated kitten to eat him. The boy escapes and then must go to Vegas, where the rooster is singing in a long reference to Elvis' later life. I swear this fever dream of a movie really happens.
Anyway, some hijinx later, the boy convinces Chanticleer the Rooster to crow and
Watership Down is definitely just a film for adults that happens to be animated though. People often mistakenly assume that the medium of animation is 'for kids', and it manifestly is not.
I read that book so many times as a kid the covers fell off. When the movie aired on TV I was too busy playing outside to come in when Mom invited me in to see it, and found out years later I had apparently missed out on some childhood trauma.
All Dogs Go To Heaven, what the trailer promised to be a light hearted romp, ended up with a young me being incredibly sad and on the verge of tears for an hour and a half. I've wanted to rewatch it as an adult to see if I was just being dramatic, but I've never been brave enough.
I did watch it recently as an adult and it turns out it’s a mafia movie with cartoon dogs slapped over top of it. like the contrast in tone between the visuals and the subject matter could not be more intense
All dogs go to heaven where they are judged and those who left poop behind (which seems an owner issue but Doggod doesn't mention them) are cast screaming into the lake of fire.
Don Bluth also did The Land Before Time, the movie about orphan baby dinosaurs and one scary T. Rex; and The Secret of NIMH, whose plot about a widowed mother trying to help her kid survive pneumonia will even traumatize the parents!
I saw Land Before Time in the theatre when I was 10 and I hated it. Far too stressful. Just made me anxious the whole time. Also, my aunt who took me chainsmoked through the whole thing because it was the 80s.
Same. My mother took all four of us to it and we all just wept openly throughout. And we still talk about how traumatizing it was for us. We're in our 40s and 50s now.
Nimh is a masterpiece, one of my favourites still. Sad they don't make them like that anymore, but happy I got see it at the perfect impressionable age. It was scary in a GOOD way.
Watership Down is a lifelong favorite. As an adult, I've talked to other horror fans who also loved it during childhood. But we agree that it was totally inappropriate that we saw it as young as we did. Cartoon bunnies did not mean it was content for kids.
My mom got all the cartoon movies because they were for kids... because cartoons. So I got Wizards, Fire and Ice, Plague Dogs, etc.... And even the kid friendly stuff was horrible. The Secret of NIMH made me scared of drowning. Fievel taught me about murder. Dumbo had me tripping pink elephants.
You should. It’s an offend overlooked masterpiece. That movie is about the emotional journey of the author and his fellow paratroopers during the WW2 Battle of Arnhem during Operation Market Garden. It’s brilliant but it’s definitely about as family friendly as Platoon.
The Wizard of Oz
Especially the Wicked Witch of the West right into adulthood. One freaky experience was a night shift around Halloween, when while explaining my phobia of the Green Faced Witch, I was given a Kinder Egg.
After the chocolate I opened the egg to reveal the toy.
But to this day, Amityville Horror 1976, makes it near impossible for me to look out a window at night without the fear of two red eyes looking back in at me.
I had the odd uh, "privilege" of being born at just the right time (very start of the year 2000) where I got to experience the fucked kids movies from mom's childhood AND the kids movies from the decade I grew up in which were fucked up in a new and exciting way.
In the 2000s kids movies still were toying around a fair bit with methods to traumatize kids on purpose, but now they were also doing it by accident, probably because advanced (for the time) CGI was new and no one wtf they were doing with it
Either way, much like you're haunted by the shit Secret of Nymn pulled you don't forget seeing someone's parents get turned into grotesque monstrosities and then guarded by imposing thumb-headed abominations in a high security prison
To be fair though kids today see like actual real corpses and suicide footage and shit on TikTok so even if their movies are more tame we ultimately had it easier overall 😅
Not a movie. January 1987, we were home for a snow day in grade school and the news was on and during a live press conference the PA State Treasurer shot himself on live TV. 😳
For me it was "Once upon a time in the west". I was 13 yo, crying and traumatized by the scene, where the boy standing with his father on his shoulders and the screaming, desperate sound of the harmonica. It took me a while to get over it.
I saw that with a friend and his mom. At one point, it was just too much and I asked permission to leave the theater. I sat in the lobby for a few minutes and went back in. I was 11.
We had to leave the theater because my sister was traumatized. I was also traumatized but I faked not being traumatized for her sake. She was disconsolate.
People look at me like I'm nuts when I mention how scary Gremlins was. I still don't even like the "Can You See What I See" song after all these years. (Pretty sure that was from the sequel though )
Maybe they only saw the sequel, which is much more of a cartoony creature comedy. Made the mistake of renting the first one as a kid because I liked the sequel. The super dark writing went over my head, but I do remember really not enjoying that one as much.
Me to my kid : oh you’ll love this film, it’s so cute
Kid : I don’t like it , I’m scared
Me: it’s not real! Don’t worry about the blender! Or the knife! Or the dog bring hung! Or the bit about Santa in the chimney ! The lady on the stair lift is probably ok! #Gremlins
When it caused the implementation of PG-13 the same year my friends and I turned 13, we were so stressed because we didn’t know if we could still see movies on our own or not.
“Does PG-13 mean we don’t need an adult, or do we need one to buy a ticket?!?”
Gremlins: the scene where Phoebe Cates explains how "she found out there is no Santa Claus" ... because her father died playing Santa and his rotting corpse was found in the chimney after a couple weeks because it was stinking up the house. 😳
But it sets up the gag in gremlins 2 where she starts talking about why she doesn't like Easter and her boyfriend says "we don't have time for this right now"
Yeah I mean I can barely watch that monologue as a grown-ass adult. But also I'll never get one of those electric chairs that brings you up the stairs either.
I saw a movie, early 60s, where a woman and her child are driving late at night on a narrow, curvy road built into an oceanside headland. A car coming the other way appears, careening wildly down the road. Clearly very drunk. The woman screams and it is over. I'm terrified of driving. 🤯
E.T. I had nightmares (when I could actually sleep) after watching this. Especially this terrifying scene. Genuinely actually regretting searching for this gif now too
Grandma took us to see that (I wanted to see Fantasia, but nope,) AND took us out to eat someplace where I ate something I was allergic to, so I had terrifying E.T. hallucinations all night, still haven’t completely gotten over it
My mom had to take a friend and me home from the theater after Artax drowns in The Neverending Story (spoiler alert for a 41-year old movie). Neither of us could handle it, and it was years before I could watch that movie again.
Never ending story, brave little toaster, all dogs go to heaven, and American Tail are the reason millennials are all in therapy. And don’t even get me started on the trip “who framed Roger rabbit”
lol some movies my brother and i got taken to see at the theater when we were kids: Alien, The Deer Hunter, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Champ, Animal House (!)...
yeah, seriously. that one was just my brother, not me, but he was only 10 at the time. i wonder if my stepfather didn't really know much about the movie and just thought it was a run-of-the-mill war flick or something.
Are we talking the one with the earworms or the one with Kirk and Spock separated by glass? Because that film traumatized me TWICE (but only one of those scenes still freaks me out to this day and it is NOT the sad one).
I watched Plague Dogs (supposedly a children's cartoon) when I was eight. Since then, I've discovered that I can watch execution videos and combat footage without flinching.
All ages horror was definitely a thing in the 80s. Even non horror films like The Goonies, Cloak & Dagger, The Last Starfighter, etc… would slip in a horrific sequence or two that would be at the level of whatever John Carpenter or David Cronenberg were doing at the time
A quick Google resulted in a possibly AI-created 30 second video letting us know that originally the scene called for the head "completely melting away" but this was decided to be too PG-13 for this PG film.
Cloak & Dagger was one of my favorite films growing up. but holy cow, a young boy shoots and kills an adult man (yes, he was being chased, and was about to be turned to swiss cheese), and of course kidnapping and blowing up a plane.
E.T. was terrifying to me when I first saw it in like...kindergarten. Some big jump scares and the entire quarantine sequence is scary as hell for a little kid.
The climax of the film has the Dad dying in horrific plane explosion and then reemerging from the flames as his son’s new imaginary friend. In a kids movie!
"Willy Wonka" has so many scenes where Gene Wilder just basically laughs at these (admittedly awful) kids and parents getting tortured. Watching one kid get sucked up the chocolate tube was particularly upsetting.
"The Black Hole" included a crew turned into zombies, a guy getting cuisinarted by a giant red robot, and whatever TF was going on with that last sequence
That's fair. I read the book after seeing the movie, so the book had its dark parts but still was way less dark than I was expecting, so I probably graded it on somewhat of a curve
Those trees trying to grab her?!?! I was LITTLE- like my grandmother’s purse was in the seat w me so the seat wouldn’t fold up- and we lived in the WOODS
"Fun" fact! Duke was supposed to die in the GI Joe movie, but based on the trauma inflicted by Optimus' death in The Transformers movie, the studio 'fixed' it with voiceovers. You can clearly see when he was supposed to die, but instead he slipped into a coma and was declared fine in the coda.
The 1982 rerelease of Bambi was the first movie my parents took me to I was almost 4. They had to take me out of the theatre because I was sobbing so hard I couldn't breathe.
Ring of Bright Water. 'It was only an otter'. I was taken to see it to cheer me up after my dad died. If only there had been spoiler alerts at the time.
my mom put on Watership Down and left to go shopping while us kids were thoroughly traumatized lol. she thought it was a kid’s film because it was animated
Last emperor on a ferry crossing when 9. Rather traumatic. Parents thought it was Empire of the Sun which probably would have been equally traumatising
Lol ‘Romeo and Juliet’ doesn’t connect with children nearly as well as anthropomorphized animals. It’s the whole “implied innocence of pets” thing, I’d assume.
Yes! It wasn’t just traumatizing movies. It’s not real kids lit unless parents have already died, friends are dying, pets will die, and/or the main character is abandoned in pain.
I think I'm starting to remember why I took to Fantasy books at an early age - and those books weren't free of death or suffering, but usually at least gave it some sort of meaning other than being the only way the writers knew how to start off a "Heroes Journey"
We read Bridge to Terabithia, Where The Red Fern Grows, and A Summer to Die all in 5th grade, and I genuinely wonder if they just wanted to traumatize us.
This movie caused me to have a lifelong phobia of flying/stinging insects. I had to cover my eyes/ears during that scene in the first Hunger Games movie, lol.
My mom found me balling about the claymation version of the little drummer boy: they killed off his parents and when he kept crying they painted a smile on his face! #movietrauma
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. That ferry ride on the river scared the bejeesus out of me and create a lifelong FEAR of Gene Wilder. Intellectually, I *know* he was a lovely person, but my scarred lizard brain would never allow me to like him. He always creeped me out.
Books were no better. I was traumatized by every horse death on screen & in books. Then I found out how they used to use trip wires in battle scenes. Sickening.
Where the Red Fern Grows, Old Yeller, Black Beauty, the Red Pony, & at 11 I saw Jaws and Demon Seed. Traumatized for life.
I remember watching Indiana Jones. Raider and Temple both had reeeeal messed up scenes. For me, the worst was the melty guys in Raiders. I LOVED the whole 'heart pulled out and burning while the dude is sacrificed to lava and maniac laughing' scene in Temple. Then i grew up and went...
Aw hell naw to those tarantulas. Them, and the ones in Something Wicked This Way Comes.
I think inwas like 4 orn5 when insaw Raiders. I loved that they melted cuz they were bad guys, but goddamn it was creepy haha
I love practical effects. Like, cgi has its place, for sure, but movies, like The Thing needed practical to look real. And practical looks more disturbing than 'uncanny'. Id rather disturb in a scary scene like melty face
Not a kids movie, but "The Day After" was one of the most traumatic films from the 80s. Shown on prime time ABC no less. Very accessable to unsuspecting children.
Yea, I've heard about Threads in the UK. Haven't seen it but I understand it was worse than The Day After. Which I can't imagine how much worse it could be.
I'm absolutely useless in remembering important things like girlfriend's names, passwords, or stuff I need to know to pass exams, but I remember the names of nearly every character in a TV show/movie I liked and I remember that last scene in "Threads" even though I haven't seen it for 40 years!!!!😲
So, awful! We were encouraged to watch it in elementary school and it was a “viewing event”. My mom was big mad after I was so terrified I wouldn’t sleep in my bed for a week.
Nestor the Long-Eared Donkey, a Christmas special in which an adorable baby donkey is saved from freezing to death by his mother and has to crawl out from beneath her dead body at the end of the snowstorm.
I'm still not over it.
As a little kid I watched a made-for-tv movie about a racist dog. I have no recollection of what it was called. Maybe the dog looked like a white German Shepard, but that seems too on the nose.
And felt like lots of movies about different insects traumatizing/eating people.
I signed up for a self-defense class for my PE credit in college in the early 90s. The instructor decided to show us the pivotal scene in some misguided effort to confirm why we needed to take the course.
It was mind-blowing when I looked the actor up and learned he was an acclaimed ballet dancer and choreographer. But that explains the (spooky) agility.
Speaking of 80s movies, Babes in Toyland was a wild watch for me as a kid. Young Keanu Reeves and Drew Barrymore in an absolute fever dream of a Christmas(?) movie
Unfortunately, the Terror Dog in the closet in "Ghostbusters" scared me witless and gave me nightmares. Also, "Gremlins" had enough moments to send my stupid brain into conniptions and I was literally afraid to walk in dark places for at least a week. Sometimes I hate my brain.
Oooooh yeah. My parents were rightly pissed at Hasbro for the psychic damage I incurred from seeing all my favorite Autobots get brutally murdered on screen.
The soundtrack for Transformers: The Movie kicks all kinds of ass tho, and I listen to it regularly. So... silver linings I guess. 😂
I was 18 and stoned when I saw that movie. That scene will go down as one of the times I laughed the hardest in a movie theater. People were doubled over, falling out of their chairs hysterical. It was so unexpected!
That's why it's great. How are kids supposed to learn to deal with difficult things in later life if they don't get eased into it by the stories they're told not shying away from topics like death and loss when it's appropriate? The best stories still do this.
The thing that makes this different is that if you read or hear a story your mind will only allow you to picture what you can handle, while the visual images in a movie can be more real than kids’ brains are prepared for. That was a balance we’re still working on figuring out.
I mean killing someone's parents in a movie or book is still going to be unrelatable to kids because they aren't associating with "The Loss of a Parent": "My parents are FINE and they're NEVER going away, I'm sad because Little Foot is crying"
It's why some movies hit A LOT HARDER when you're older
I almost passed this by since my perspective is different from many people, having lost a parent at a young age (9). But except maybe when I was very little (toddler age), I don’t remember thinking that the sad part was just that the on-screen character was crying. 1/
Before age 9 I remember engaging with such stories as a frightening reminder that you could lose your parents or other loved ones at any point, and I looked at the stories as a tale of parent loss, not just a movie character being sad. So I disagree with your premise.
Unless you're unlucky enough to lose a loved one at an early age, films like this are how you first learn to grapple with the concept that someone you care about might be gone some day. Kids understand more than people give them credit for.
... but it's certainly true that stories hit in different ways at different stages of life as you gain more perspective and experience and relate more to different characters.
Those movies figured it out just fine. It is def a mistake to think kids' imagination is necessarily less distressing than what they might see in a visual form. Books are not safer than movies. It depends on the story. Don't show a kid horror movies for adults but do show Bluth films and the like.
Stories are for entertainment and for teaching us things (in some cases). If the main thing some media is teaching kids is trauma, then that’s not a good option for them to engage with.
Given the number of people in this thread who have mentioned having extensive nightmares or grief years later, or the description of having multiple children leaving the movie theaters wailing, I disagree that they did just fine in their judgment of what kids could handle.
The link I just shared is to an article that discusses trauma from scary movies on kids and teens. It shows that for 1/4 of people, the trauma from said movies lingers on for a long time (in some cases, years), and can affect and control their choices in areas related to the crazy media.
I remember Transformers: The Movie where they killed off Optimus Prime. Man, there was a bunch of parents who took their kids out of the theater, because they were WAILING after that scene.
Apparently the same people who ran a vampire horror flick before David Copperfield, or some other literary classic based movie I now will never remember. A school field trip in a yellow bus, and half the kids ran back out onto the sidewalk.
I remember watching that! I grew up with a vintage hardcover Grimms' Fairy Tales those are brutal. The shorter the story, the more abrupt the violent ending.
Tho now that I think about it, I know of that punishment from The Goose Girl, where a maid impersonates royalty & creates her own punishment (via a trick question).
I’m sure it’s for parents too!
I have an old old book, pre-ISBN-codes with these stories
Each December my teacher would turn the lights off, we'd light advent candles at our desk and she'd read us a Christmas story. After she'd read TLMG she talked about history and how children were mistreated and made to work, making it more real
No other story makes me tear up each time like it does
I have never seen Bambi because my mother, at some point in the late 1940s, had to be led from the theater five minutes in because she was so traumatized. She never let anyone in our household watch it, and I honor her wishes on this one.
I'll see if I can keep it up for another generation.
In the early 2000s, I showed my kids The Last Unicorn (1982), which I had never seen--not sure how it ended up on our VCR--and it traumatized all of us. Extra-trippy Rankin-Bass. Couldn't stop dreaming about the Red Bull.
OMG I just posted about this movie. I had nightmares from 1986-1988 about a “mud bull” that terrorized me and also the Cosby kids who I was hanging out with for some reason. But I’ve seen it so many times that I can recite the entire movie by heart.
How about the harpy going in for the kill with her multiple titties flapping in the breeze. Oh, and the drunk skeleton screaming, “Unicorn!” But I still loved Last Unicorn.
TERRIFYING. We loved the Rankin-Bass Hobbit, but there was something particularly unhinged about the Last Unicorn, it was almost venturing into Bakshi territory
And then there's some of the old Henson/ Muppets stuff. Labyrinth, obv, but also Tant Aminella from the Frog Prince. In general, puppets are horrifying (spukhaft, as Karl Rosenkranz described so vividly in his 1853 Aesthetics of the Ugly). Stuff of (disturbing) dreams.
I was absolutely terrified of the Skeksis. We had a book-on-tape and I used to skip the pages with Skeksis (Skekses?) on them.
"Mmmmmm Gelfling?"
*Shudder*
I was probably 5 when it came out & I remember seeing a kids magazine with a picture of the 2 gelflings on the cover and it freaking me out! I think there was something too uncanny-valley about it for my 5-year-old mind. Didn’t see it till a couple years later at which point I loved it
When we were *little* my sister was obsessed with that video while I couldn't stop watching a pre-Disney version of The Little Mermaid that had the original Grimm ending. 🫠
A story about a boy who uses his imagination to save a fantasy realm called Fantasia, only there's a horse that gets depressed that will fuck you up. Rated U for Universal (family friendly) we didn't stand a chance lol
I saw that in the theater and couldn't take a bath for 3 years. logically I knew a shark couldn't fit in the tub but my lizard brain didn't truck with logic
Existential drama about what is life and what is machine or sad kids longing for attention in a world of absentee parents devoted to keeping up w the joneses.
Was pretty sheltered and only had basic broadcast TV for the longest time, and limited viewing time of that. Having trouble thinking of a movie that traumatized me, but a lot of children's TV was super odd and dark at times.
Oh, yes!
A favorite of mine. Had the audio cassette before I saw the movie. The death of Perkins, only from the audio, was the most terrifying thing ever!
My baby sister LOVED Michael Jackson, but absolutely terrified of the Thriller video, even though we had the VHS that showed the making of. She'd sit NEXT to the television when it was on, and invariably one of us would tell her it was safe. It was not.
Perhaps the biggest impact was a teacher having us all sit on the floor in a dark classroom to watch the 1958 film ‘a night to remember’ about the titanic. More effective than DARE. No fear of drugs yet I’m 44 and I still don’t want to be out in open water.
Naur I stayed up late to watch that on the telly with my older sister and I SCREAMED. My parents banned me from ever staying up with my sister for movies again.
Their entire existence defined by brands on their flesh, and even that horrifying individuality must be obliterated, relinquished so the collective can turn its unblinking gaze at whatever it deems impure. To stare...
It wasn’t just movies, I watched Challenger explode live but didn’t understand what that really meant until Space camp made me feel the fear. Space/NASA was ruined for me until my teens.
I’m not sure I would have internalized the full weight of the disaster if the movie hadn’t made me viscerally aware that there were people inside the rocket when it exploded. Hard thing for a 7 year old to grapple.
Funny you should mention Sesame Street. Apparently there was some discussion about sending Big Bird up on that Challenger flight … all that prevented it were the logistical issues with the size of the costume. One can only imagine how traumatised a generation of kids would have been by BB dying.
Children of the Corn
A friend’s older sister was watching it when we got to her house after school. I was probably 10 or 11. I still shudder a little hearing the name Malachai.
My mother took me (10) and my brother (9) to see The World According to Garp. We stayed the whole way through it 😳 If you've seen it, you know that the movie and movies like it are merely one of the reasons Gen X'rs, like me, are the way we are...basically grizzled veterans of childhood with PTSD.
No movies traumatized me as a child but I do remember when we went to Disneyworld in 1977 and I was a HUGE goofy fan. So we’re walking down one of the streets after visiting “it’s a small world” when Goofy came up behind me and scared the bejesus out of me. My mom smacked him with her pocketbook.
hell even the 90s weren't safe, that fucking clown in The Brave Little Toaster legitimately terrified me as a kid, I lost so much sleep to nightmares about that movie
'Let's put in an absolute banger about how it doesn't matter what you've done in your life, sooner later you'll be at the end where all you can do is wait for death while being seen as worthless'
AND the weird appliance parts store torture scene? Even the air conditioner screaming itself to death upset me and it’s always a debate between “was I just a sensitive child or were nice things just not available?”
The Last Starfighter clone
Neverending Story horse
Return to Oz headless witch and rollerblade guys
Witches of Eastwick vomit scene
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom everything
E.T. just him, wtf
The Empire Strikes Back vader mask with face in it
Krull brain worms
Star Trek ear worm
ugh, too many
A few years ago while talking to my dad I made a passing reference to Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) and was surprised to learn he had never seen it. It was then that I realized maybe it was a little weird that substitute teachers probably made me watch it a cumulative 50 times
I was around 10 when my teacher decided to show a short movie -- The Lottery (1969 version) -- to her class. That first rock bouncing off her head was an image I didn't forget for years
We did that as a one act play my freshman year of high school. I always chuckle to myself when there's a lottery to get into a marathon. I don't run marathons and settle for half marathons, so I'm always like, "Nah, I'm good."
They showed us that in 8th grade, not long after it was made ('72 or '73). And we lived in the bible belt, so the school was full of kids from families who were Just That Nutty(tm).
Kind of makes sense to show it to kids around your age (the story was probably in your reading list), but my classmates and I were just bug-eyed and freaked the fuck out
Try being a kid in the 70s!
Here honey, watch a Mouse and His Child, (where the villainous rat bludgeons the hero to death with a rock). No? How about Yellow Submarine, that’s a cartoon. Or Plague Dogs…
TBH mom was probably drunk on Tab and Canadian Club.
#genx
Old Yeller & Where The Red Fern Grows were 4th grade “reward” movies. The NeverEnding Story was 5th? I also remember watching weird film strips on Fridays that were old safety tips from the 60s? One was about not playing w glass and they sliced a leather hide and a huge roast with a broken bottle.
I just watched "Once Bitten" a funny vampire movie from 1985. A very young Jim Carrey plays the virgin guy whose blood Lauren Hutton's vampire wants to regain her youth. Not much trauma there.
Oh hey kid, you like this kindly father figure who transforms into a truck? Oh cool well anyway we murdered him and all his friends in a slow motion montage set to a metal song. Yeah, put some sick effects on the smoke coming out of the dead robot’s mouth.
My father in his infinite wisdom took me to see movies with him at very young age, 8 to about 12.
The first movie I had nightmares about, was the Thing or It Came from Outer Space. Second movie was The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Great movies now but at the time, at my age they scared the shit out
When we first plugged in HBO and turned it on, "Food of the Gods" was playing. I watched it because having a movie with no commercials at home seemed like magic in the late 70's. I was terrified for days afterward.
they showed both films when I was at school, at least in the 60s one piggy's death was a serious scene and not bouncing a paper mache rock off his head
You absolutely can. They took me to see it for my birthday because I loved unicorns. I've only seen it once, and if I have any power in this world, my child will never know of its existence.
I was so excited to see Transformers: The movie. I loved the TV series and had many Transformer toys including Optimus Prime, which made it all the more traumatic to watch all the colour drain out of his lifeless body in the first act.
Comments
in which big bird gets immediately kidnapped.
https://tubitv.com/movies/100005923/follow-that-bird
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM5zPaMD36k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrwflCx4X0g
Hadn’t seen the movie. Didn’t matter.
Tho the Jaws-esque tv movie short made me jumpy in showers for years.
Oh, and James Herbert. The Rats!!
WTF?
The original Muppet Movie came out in 1979. Imagine being 4-8 years old, watching as Charles Durning hires someone to mercilessly try to kill Kermit the Frog.
Just a wildly different time.
I loved the book, but that movie was a gateway to trauma. That said, I probably loved it as much as I did the novel.
She Rented it because "its a cartoon, it is for children with cute animals".
And then she left the room.
Only Returned when the Sound of children weeping caught her ear 🫠
They say, that all dogs, go to heavennnnnn
https://bsky.app/profile/dbeatcatdad.bsky.social/post/3lpudgycqtk2o
I have a sister who is 5 yrs older than me. She liked to watch scary movies, but she didn’t like to watch them alone. She used to talk me into watching with her by promising that I could sleep in her bed that night — fine for that night, but, for all nights thereafter, not so much.
Come on man
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0099316/?ref_=ttqu_ov_bk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4ebqRGt7e4
The Secret of NIMH
An American Tail
The Land Before Time
All Dogs Go to Heaven
Thumbelina
Anastasia
Rock-A-Doodle
And that animated short Small One that is a prequel to the birth of Jesus, I shit you not.
During a storm that is flooding his farm, a child reads a story book about a rooster that brought up the sun, but one day it came up without him, but also once he stopped crowing the sun stopped rising. Now it gets weird, because a magic evil owl turns the
Anyway, some hijinx later, the boy convinces Chanticleer the Rooster to crow and
I'm still baffled as to how the box office sold her tickets for several kids under the age of 10 and let us all in.
We fled about 5 minutes in. But still!!
@pubtoons.com
IF *ALL* DOGS GO TO HEAVEN...
What about The Neverending Story... oh. OK.
Gremlins? Kate's lovely story about her dad and Santa Claus?
...oh wait.
Fwiw, Gremlins is apparently one of the films that is referenced as motivating the creation of the PG13 rating.
Incidentally, I once met and chatted with Joe Dante and he’s kind and charming and delightful.
And to top it off, therapy was beaucoup taboo so we all just stuffed that trauma down into our young souls.
Or "Secrets of Nym"
Tommy messed me up
Especially the Wicked Witch of the West right into adulthood. One freaky experience was a night shift around Halloween, when while explaining my phobia of the Green Faced Witch, I was given a Kinder Egg.
After the chocolate I opened the egg to reveal the toy.
A Green Faced Witch
It still stuffs me full of adrenaline
Krabat, however, caused me decades of nightmares, starting at around age 7.
Krabat (1978) - IMDb https://m.imdb.com/de/title/tt0075811/?ref_=mv_close
But to this day, Amityville Horror 1976, makes it near impossible for me to look out a window at night without the fear of two red eyes looking back in at me.
I was so traumatized by the ACTUAL movies that I invented another one to scare myself with!
Of course we're screwed up.
WOULD NOT RECOMMEND.
“Die Hard” actually offers more in the way of holiday spirit, to my mind…(😂)
Kid : I don’t like it , I’m scared
Me: it’s not real! Don’t worry about the blender! Or the knife! Or the dog bring hung! Or the bit about Santa in the chimney ! The lady on the stair lift is probably ok! #Gremlins
“Does PG-13 mean we don’t need an adult, or do we need one to buy a ticket?!?”
We had already seen ‘History of the World’!
Ya know, for kids!
Grandma took us to see that (I wanted to see Fantasia, but nope,) AND took us out to eat someplace where I ate something I was allergic to, so I had terrifying E.T. hallucinations all night, still haven’t completely gotten over it
Right?
I’ve never done hard drugs because this movie scared me straight at 11.
Those rats killing the donkey 🥺
"Have a couple of alien toys"
...
Freddy was also a pop culture icon.
It was a weird and dark time.
I thought they'd come for me for sure. Made me paranoid for YEARS.
It's also a good example of the shit we were allowed to do with absolutely no parental supervision whatsoever.
I’m still low-key traumatized by the Vicious Knids in The Great Glass Elevator
Also Halloween (the original “teen sex = violet death” film?)
Then someone sent me a copy for Xmas one year.
I think my dad showed us on purpose lol.
“Alright kids, our next book will be Where the Red Fern Grows. Yall are gunna learn real fuckin quick why you shouldn’t get litter mates for pets.”
Make it an anthropomorphic dog and cat though?
It’s been 40 yrs and I can still see that blood bubble coming outta that kids mouth when he got an axe to the stomach.
😭😭😭
Where the Red Fern Grows, Old Yeller, Black Beauty, the Red Pony, & at 11 I saw Jaws and Demon Seed. Traumatized for life.
I think inwas like 4 orn5 when insaw Raiders. I loved that they melted cuz they were bad guys, but goddamn it was creepy haha
also damn, they did that with practical effects, like they made gelatin heads to melt them!
👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀
I'm still not over it.
Plus we had all the supernaturally evil child movies
And felt like lots of movies about different insects traumatizing/eating people.
At worst, Linda Blair
Every single one of us dropped it the next day.
I also saw Jurassic Park way too early, but that one didn't scarr me for life like Littlefoot losing his mum 😂
Now I make a living in media studies.
💯💯💯
Also, Congratz?
The soundtrack for Transformers: The Movie kicks all kinds of ass tho, and I listen to it regularly. So... silver linings I guess. 😂
Babysitter made us watch Dark Shadows if we weren't out playing in 1968
:later:
It's why some movies hit A LOT HARDER when you're older
But who also had neglectful 80's parents, so you were also watching The Lost Boys and The Fly?
Kids today have it too easy 🙃
It probably wouldn't have been nearly so traumatic in color.
“Comrade Napoleon is right. I will work harder.” 🐎 😢
Tho now that I think about it, I know of that punishment from The Goose Girl, where a maid impersonates royalty & creates her own punishment (via a trick question).
I’m sure it’s for parents too!
I have an old old book, pre-ISBN-codes with these stories
No other story makes me tear up each time like it does
I'll see if I can keep it up for another generation.
Which I loved, but the Skekzis draining the podlings! 😱
"Mmmmmm Gelfling?"
*Shudder*
It was the The Day After. I was 10.
I was waaayyyy too young. But it was the 80s and there was HBO
Now the danger is real.
#Sharktivity
I was maybe 10…
Look that shit up people
Floating eyeballs in a tank in a kids film.
Existential drama about what is life and what is machine or sad kids longing for attention in a world of absentee parents devoted to keeping up w the joneses.
A favorite of mine. Had the audio cassette before I saw the movie. The death of Perkins, only from the audio, was the most terrifying thing ever!
https://youtu.be/Bw2y3faZhUk?feature=shared
My baby sister LOVED Michael Jackson, but absolutely terrified of the Thriller video, even though we had the VHS that showed the making of. She'd sit NEXT to the television when it was on, and invariably one of us would tell her it was safe. It was not.
A friend’s older sister was watching it when we got to her house after school. I was probably 10 or 11. I still shudder a little hearing the name Malachai.
https://youtu.be/ZcWeE3NMeBQ?si=c-LsWpt0dtsrjmh7
Neverending Story horse
Return to Oz headless witch and rollerblade guys
Witches of Eastwick vomit scene
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom everything
E.T. just him, wtf
The Empire Strikes Back vader mask with face in it
Krull brain worms
Star Trek ear worm
ugh, too many
Sleep tight!
Here honey, watch a Mouse and His Child, (where the villainous rat bludgeons the hero to death with a rock). No? How about Yellow Submarine, that’s a cartoon. Or Plague Dogs…
TBH mom was probably drunk on Tab and Canadian Club.
#genx
The first movie I had nightmares about, was the Thing or It Came from Outer Space. Second movie was The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Great movies now but at the time, at my age they scared the shit out
now we’ve got damnfools refusing rabies vaccines after exposure, and my guess is nobody ever made them watch that movie!