When we were kids, we got scared by some of the silliest things in movies. Well, maybe YOU were, but I was so stoic that only truly terrifying images would fuel my nightmares for years to come. Here are six of them that I can remember from my youth:
1. Woman-eating computer from Superman III
For all intents and purposes, Superman III was a weird comedic attempt on the franchise that suffered for it. It was a silly light-hearted romp for the most part, which made its ending that much more shocking. Richard Pryor’s character had created a super-computer in the Grand Canyon (just go with it) to battle Superman, but the computer ends up going haywire and sucks in a woman before anyone could blink. Before our eyes, the computer — which must be running a particularly brutal form of the Apple OS — transforms this woman into a scary cyborg chick. I just felt really bad for her and stayed the heck away from computers for a couple hours after watching this movie.
2. Charbroil knight from The NeverEnding Story
The NeverEnding Story had quite a few trauma-inducing moments for youngsters, but for me there was nothing scarier than the scene where the hero had to walk up to and between two laser-shooting Sphynxes who could read his bravery meter or some such. We’d already seen a knight get zapped, and when Atrayu gets to the place he died, his visor flips up and shows us this horribly burned visage. Thank you but no thank you.
3. The opening scene of Jaws
A babysitter ended up letting us watch a bit of Jaws when we were just wee tykes, which certainly didn’t end up scarring my psyche and convincing me that a shark was going to eat me each and every time I went in the ocean. It’s a scary scene precisely because it shows very little, just a terrified girl being attacked by… something. And then your imagination was left to fill in the blanks.
Kids have BIG imaginations.
4. Soul-sucking from The Dark Crystal
It’s weird — I never actually have seen this movie, just a couple of scenes through a window at a friend’s house when we were playing outside. Even so, the parts where the Dark Crystal sucked the soul/lifeforce/puppeteer’s hand out of the good guys ended up haunting me more than it probably should’ve.
5. The demon from Don’t Eat the Pictures
Don’t Eat the Pictures was a Sesame Street special from 1983 that probably nobody remembers. The cast get stuck in the Metropolitan Museum of Art overnight, and Big Bird befriends an Egyptian boy who’s been trapped there for a thousand years. Which kind of sucks for him. Anyway, the special makes a big deal out of the fact that at midnight a demon appears in the tombs, and it keeps showing us clocks as it gets closer and closer to the time. I think it was the buildup that scared me, that feeling of approaching doom, more than the actual demon itself. Because he was silly.
6. Brain-washing chair from The Muppet Movie
I’m sorry, but even though this was Mel Brooks and all, this chair freaked the heck out of me. The bad guys made a brainwashing chair that would change your personality or somesuch, and Kermit almost gets fried before he’s saved by Miss Piggy and the bad guy gets it instead. Well, I guess every kid needs to have an introduction to torture sometime!
Yes, I was a wuss.
Mutant Reviewers 
1 — I would flinch and cover my eyes when the fried knight’s visor opened well into my late tween years. 2 — HOLY S**T I ALMOST THOUGHT THAT SESAME STREET MUSEUM PROGRAM WAS A BIZARRE DREAM F**KING HELL I MUST FIND A COPY!
for me it was always the scene in Ghostbusters 2 when the slime kidnaps the baby out of it’s own hosue.
Most of my traumatic childhood movie moments involve charred corpses. For years I wasn’t able to sit through Batman, Batman Returns, TNES, or the three Indiana Jones movies without covering my eyes at the gooky dead guys.
1. The bunyip song from Dot and the Kangaroo. Linking it here because it’s so obscure.
I’m not sure if this was the exact scene that freaked me out, but I remember this movie solely because it scared me.
2. Watership down: the flashback scene where Bigwig tells what happened in their old burrow.
Claustrophobia as rabbit heads in very realistic fear and angry try to push out of narrow tunnels as the gas fills them.
3. The villain in the Fantastic adventures of Unico’s true form.
He’s a blue-skinned bishonen man, and he’s captured Katy, the cat turned into a girl. He has her chained on top of a spire while he stands and watches.
What happens next is a crowning moment of awesome. Unico flies up and charges him, rips open his shoulder, causing him to fall down and IMPALE himself on a spire, killing himself. As he does, the whole castle collapses as he turns into this giant, demonic thing that bots out the sky.
It’s an amazing scene, you can find it by searching for “The fantastic adventures of unico 9/10” on Youtube. I’d link but I want to save your bandwidth.
4. Faeries: the shadow duel.
In the 80s, rankin bass animated a network special based on Brian Froud’s art and books. It’s surprisingly serious, and the last battle was between a shadow and the hero, who could only fight it by his own shadow. Whatever happened to his shadow happened to him, and his back got clawed. Very dramatic stuff because the shadow was trying to snuff the light and kill the boy’s ability to fight back. It’s also on youtube.
5. The devil and daniel mouse: Jan the mouse being chased by…um…Satan.
Jan the mouse made a deal with the devil for fame, signing her soul away in blood. Now it’s time for the devil to collect, and he does so by chasing her as he changed into nightmarish forms: a demonic cat, a fish,a rhino, a tree. All scored to a horror film soundtrack.
Then, he catches her, and she has until midnight to say goodbye to her friends. It ends well, but this has to be one of the most intense scenes in a kids cartoon I have ever watched. Its searchable on youtube as well.
The 70s and 80s had some freaky stuff.
Large Marge from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure scarred me for *years*
Personally, I think the paucity of these sorts of scenes in recent family movies is a terrible shame, because to my mind, a movie that freaks you out as a kid stands a pretty good chance of becoming one of your favorites later in life. I mean, there’s a whole long list of movies that I wouldn’t watch as a little kidlet – absolutely refused to – because there were bits that scared me. Just about all of those are now ones I consider to be thoroughly awesome. I think the initial fear cements it in your mind, and that gives you a certain fascination with it that just can’t be replicated – if it’s any good at all, subsequent revisitations make you go ‘whoa – this is awesome! Why did I avoid this for so long?’ – and that’s the birth of cult movies, right?
Great article.
The one that freaked me out was the scene in Flash Gordon (that ’80s flick) where a computer completely erased that bearded guy’s memory. We got to see his memory wiped from the present going all the way to his birth and even the time in the womb.
I was below 5 years old, but it stuck.
The scene when ET was captured by those scientists and he looked dead, that messed me up too.
One BIG TIME childhood messer upper came from Galaxy Express 999. A lot of scenes actually. When the mother of the protagonist was hunted down by robots on robot horses… The scene when the hero travels to Pluto and find the place to be a graveyard for people who replaced their bodies with robot bodies and entombed their flesh & bone selves there, and the mad doctor who zapped himself and his ashes were spread outside a chimney.
I was 8 years old and never forgot that awesome but disturbing anime. My Dad never enjoyed Japanese animation since…
Oh yeah, Voltes V had an execution scene when a giant Boazanian was strapped to some kind of crucifix and was killed or something. Wohoo
I know these are not scenes per se, but whatever.
1 — A friend shamed me into watching Alien when I was little. I was not able to drink milk for days afterward. Thank you whomever decided on white bile.
2 — I watched Michael Jackson’s Thriller video when I was 4. FREAKED. ME. OUT. Bear in mind, I lived in an old house in the woods by an abandoned cemetery. And had a fucked-up imagination.
I also did not watch Star Wars until I was a teen because I was terrified of Darth Vader. This is probably rooted in the “Vader in the grocery store” incident.
“Vader in the grocery store”? Is this a reference I’m missing?
Only to something which happened to me. Grocery store Vader appearance + imaginitive 4-year-old me = terror from beyond the pale.
Ah. Yes, I can see how it would. Free of context, Vader is one CREEPY mammajamma.
Especially when he’s silently standing right over you and you are stuck in a grocery cart.
What must have made that worse, I’d imagine, is the fact that Darth Vader is one of those characters who merchandizing has placed EVERYWHERE in western society – I mean, he’s inescapable. I’ve heard of people being terrified of the Wicked Witch of the West when they were kids, but at least she doesn’t generally show up on cereal boxes and candy wrappers.
I second the Large Marge comment.
Also, the greasy girl from The Ring. I saw that the night my family went for a road trip, and left me behind because I had to work. I didn’t sleep for the two weeks they were away.
“Time to go to sleep
Don’t make a peep
We’re gonna kill you…”
Evil Dead
No sleep that night. And I was an adult.