Redrum
Poltergeist clown
Amityville Horror
Mike sitting up in Halloween

Some of the scariest crap I can remember growing up in the 70's were from 2 TV movies:

Burnt Offerings
Salem's Lot (window scene)

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Mike sitting up in Halloween

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When he appears behind the glass doors when Annie is walking through with the phone. I've seen it millions of times and it still creeps me out.

Arachnophobia. My dad and I watched that together when I was about 7 or 8. I still can't stand spiders to this day.

Jaws. Watched when I was young.

Arachnophobia- all of it
It- they all float down here!
Halloween- pretty much every time they show his creepy ass mask

The siamese cats in Lady & The Tramp freaked me out.

As a kid: IT. I basically watched 30 seconds of it around age 8 and it"s when he is hiding in the sheets hanging from a clothes line. I vaguely remember it honestly, but it still triggers a memory when I see clothes drying outside (I"m pathetic).



Saw both Jaws and Anaconda when I was around 14 or so and I became very nervous in bodies of water all of a sudden.



As an adult: Paranormal Activity 2 did a number on me. Thank goodness I didn"t see it as a kid or even a teenager because I was much too fragile.

wow. spacing. not sure what that"s about.

Boneyendoplasm: start at the 3:00 mark.

Hands down. "Soylent Green is PEOPLE!"







and the riot scenes...

Shocked this wasnt mentioned yet.

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I remember being freaked out when Large Marge showed her true identity to Pee Wee.

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Oh yes.

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Hands down, the abduction scene at the end of Fire in the Sky. That movie messed me up like no other.

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This too.

After college, still single, rented the Shining one October. Turned the lights out and hit play. About half hour later, got up and put every light on. Never saw The Exorcist...never will. Don"t think I could handle it.

The Exorcist is still the scariest movie to me.



Hell, in The Conjuring which came out last year, it was pretty damn creepy/scary when the hands came out of the closet and clapped while they were playing their hide and seek game. That was the best scary movie in quite some time.

The first was Salems lot. I would never, ever look open the curtains at night on my window because I just knew a floating kid vampire would be out there



Then there was this movie (that would probably be silly now) that had about 3 or 4 short stories within it. In one of them a guy killed someone, cut them up, wrapped the parts in paper and put them in the freezer. Later those parts got out of the freezer and dragged themselves all over the house and killed his family. Have no idea what movie that was

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Good call





Shocked this wasnt mentioned yet.

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For some reason, my parents took me to a drive in when I was around 4-5. The double feature was Cat People and Psycho 2. My brothers were out of town that weekend, and I had nightmares of Norman Bates" mother and people turning into panthers.

The lady in white. It terrified me after the kid got locked in the closet and all the ghosts came out.

Poltergeist was another. There was also some terrible movie on one day and I walked out right as a bad guy shot a golden retriever and I saw it spin across the floor. I knew it was fake but man I was one upset 9 yo. I cried about it several times.

When I read the thread title, I instantly thought of the Elephant Man. My parents told me to stay out of the living room, and I accidentally walked through to the kitchen at the exact moment that his face was shown up close. It freaked me out pretty bad. It"s still a funny story that my parents tell today.



I didn"t actually watch the movie until I was about 30, and I really liked it. Great film. But it scared the hell out of me when I was a little boy.

A movie called The Gate, freaked me the hell out and another one called The Cats Eye, was a Stephen King one with Drew Barrymore.

Come for me, Gmork.







I AM ATREYU!

Another one from a movie that to this day I don"t know the name of it.



A guy goes up in an attic or under a crawl space of a house and is working on pipes above him while laying on his back in a tight space, when he cranks open a pipe this black oil comes pouring out and the guy gets trapped and basically drowns on the oil. Freaked me out.

Candy Man. The hook and mirror thing, I couldn't go into the bathroom without the lights on for a while.

Poltergeist

I second the troll from cats eye. I recall the scene from cocoon where "Mahoney" sees the aliens remove their skin and notice him in closet as being slightly disturbing.

The elephants on parade scene from Dumbo freaked me out as a young tyke

tried to read IT in middle school, didn't get very far

My dad took me to see Alien when I was 12. I don't think I slept well for the next couple of years and even as an adult have woken up in the middle of the night after dreaming of that f'ing critter - when I will just say WTF and go back to sleep. Hands down Alien is the scariest movie I have ever seen.

next on the list is The Exorcist. When I was a pre teen that movie aired on HBO. I saw just one shot in the movie that night, a dark presence standing over the girl's bed. I immediately changed the channel because that one shot was instantly scary. I watched it in full some time after I graduated from A&M and that movie cemented its spot as number 2 on my list.

I will go with the TV movie of Salems Lot at number 3. Lots of scary stuff in that one - the kid at the window, the vampire in the dining room....

At number 4 is The Shining. What was it, room 237? That scene still gets me. The little girls are creepy.

The Changeling is #5, with A ball bouncing down the stairs at the end of this ghost story.

The Amityville Horror checks in at #6. The pig eyes, GET OUT!, the purple shape standing in the window behind Margot Kidder...

Poltergeist is #7. I hated that clown. Still do. I watched this as an adult one Halloween night and could not believe how scary this movie remains.

Jaws comes in at #8. Growing up in Lake Jackson, I spent a lot of time at the beach before I saw Jaws; after that, when I was probably 12 or so, I went to the beach maybe twice before leaving the area to come to A&M.

At number 9 is Halloween, a movie I watched late one night on HBO when I was not supposed to. Seeing Michael Myers lurking in the shadows wigged me out.

#10 is a seriously scary movie for a 3-4 year old. I stayed up with my dad watching late night monster movies on probably Channel 39 in Houston. For years all I remembered was a sea creature that was captured, deflated in some kind of pressure chamber, and then re-inflated at some point by a little girl who came in to the room and pushed some buttons on the pressure chamber. Recently I searched long and hard for this movie, not knowing what it was called but just recalling that scene, and finally found it - The Monster That Challenged the World. A truly awful movie but so scary to such a young child.

Honorable mention - Phantasm, The Omen, The Thing from Another World, Dracula (1931), Frankenstein, and The War of the Worlds (1953)

Anything with zombies. Guaranteed nightmares for days.

Jaws scared me a little, but the all time winner is a scene in Swamp Thing that I saw at a friends house when I was like 9 or 10. There is this part where a bad guy starts transforming into some sort of Pig-Man in a horrifying and painful looking way. I had nightmares for weeks -and I was scared to tell my parents because I knew I wasn't supposed to be watching Rated R movies!

Ok, this is kind of embarrassing but nothing affected me more as a kid than ET.

The scene where Elliot found him face down in a creek bed, I think there was a racoon kind of milling around like it was going to start feeding on him, that messed me up. And then the whole ensuing scene(s) of the house being wrapped up in plastic and ET dieing and all of that. The worst, at least for me. Not even the "uplifting" ending saved it for me. I think that was 1982 so I would be been 8.5 years old or close.

Never watched it again. I have exposed my kids to countless movies from the 70's and 80's that I loved but never ET. Hate it. Flame on!

A couple of others


As an animal softie, when Mel Gibson's dog got killed in Road Warrior, didn't like that.

Clown in Poltergeist was awful for a child.

Indian Jones and the Temple of Doom - loved every moment of it as a kid except the heart getting pulled out of the chest.

Gremlins - the chainsaw freaked me out but I grew in lumberjack territory so we took that **** seriously.

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THRILLER - when Werewolf Michael Jackson looked up and said, "Go away!". I ran out of the room leaving a cartoon cloud behind.

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Glad to hear I'm not the only one that was traumatized by Thriller back in the mid-80's.

+1 for It as well.

Cat's Eye when the thing came out of the wall
Nightmare on Elm Street (snuck out of bed to watch that during one of my sister's slumber parties; then I'd sleep with my radio on and that can Will Smith song would come on and wreck my dreams)
It when the clown comes to life in the photo
Psycho shower scene

The Ring actually disrupted my sleep for about a week.

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A movie called The Gate, freaked me the hell out

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I loved this movie as a kid! For some reason it never freaked me out