My first “too scary” movie was the 1999 cinematic masterpiece The Mummy starring Brendan Fraser. For those unfamiliar: not very scary at all, but I was probably eight when I saw it.
My siblings and I would fight over who got to sleep with the cat - in the movie the mummy is scared away by cats. Anybody who owns a cat knows this is a pointless argument, and the cat sleeps with who it wants.
Jesus those scarab beetles going under the skin.
Fuck those scarabs, gave me a lifelong fear of anything under skin
Sounds like they really got under your skin…
The cat probably sleeps with whomever doesn’t want the cat to sleep with them.
The scary movie that got me was No Man’s Land. A serial killer kills himself to avoid being taken to prison and his ghost traps the whole town while he goes on a killing spree.
I watched it again years later and it wasn’t nearly as scary as I remembered. I was like 12 and it was 2 in the morning, so it chilled my sleep deprived self to the bone.
Oddly enough, this movie wasn’t what gavee the worst nightmare I ever had. That honor belongs to the kids show Chalk Zone. The episode with the pink, hair eating frogs scared me in my dreams so bad I still get goosebumps just remembering it.
You know what, I could see it. I wouldn’t want to run into one of these frogs in a dark alley.
spoiler
Pet Semetary for me lol
I was terrified by Critters when I was a kid. It’s not even remotely scary as an adult, but for sheltered little me it was traumatizing.
The mummy, then, The Ring. The Ring doesn’t really hold up, but goddamn that movie was the pinnacle for its timem
The ring definitely fucked me up as a kid too haha. Couldn’t be in the same room as a TV by myself for a bit
I begged to see Poltergeist when it came out in 1982, I was 11. One of my main arguments was that it was only rated PG, ET came out the same year and it was rated PG; the PG-13 rating didn’t exist yet.
I did not sleep in my room for 3 months after that and when I finally was able to go back all my stuffed animals had to be out of the room.
I have never found another movie again that scared me so much and I have seen more horror movies than I could count.
I also watched that movie when I was too young for it. Man that tree was nuts.
I had a nightmare about that tree. Made this scene from Family Guy many years later cathartic.
Watch scary movie 2 and all will be forgiven
I upvoted but truly dislike your comment–I had forgotten about the tree. (I too watched at too young of an age.)
Holy shit! I was the same exact age! Yeah, didn’t sleep for weeks.
Wife and I just watched it Sunday. She wasn’t impressed.
I had my wife watch it too and she did not get why it was so scary. It was very disappointing. 😂
For me it was the multi-legged gargantuan monster at the top of the stairs, and something in the way the psychic described “the beast” that really struck terror in my poor preteen heart.
Oh and the guy ripping his own face off in the mirror! 😱
My experience with this was event horizon, “where we’re going, you won’t need eyes to see”. Man, I didn’t sleep right for months. No horror movie has scared me as much as that one
That and Jacob’s Ladder are the scariest movies I’ve ever seen. Sure, there are movies with more gore, or more jump scares, or creepier, but those two movies found a perfect combination of all those things, and executed it masterfully.
I think it was just building on a good premise too, the idea that an interdimensional space ship could end up somewhere you don’t want to go.
This happened to me. Same film. The eyes in the guys hand and when that red guy. Appeared. I was way too young for that film. It stuck with me for decades.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind terrified me as a kid. Not because of the alien shit, but because the thought of a vacuum turning on and running by itself was just the most horrific thing I could imagine.
I didn’t realize my cat had a Lemmy account.
Not to scare you, but those vacuums exist.
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Me and you both.
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I was 3 when my babysitter decided to show me Child’s Play. That’s bad enough on its own. But did you know that the Good Guy doll that Chucky possesses in the movie was based on a real doll on the market at that time, the My Buddy doll? And did you know that I had a My Buddy doll that I slept with every night? And did you know that the only way to keep your doll from murdering you and your family is to bury it in the closet under as many books, toys, blankets and dirty clothes as possible and never step foot in that closet again? I DO! My Buddy got banished until I was probably 8 years old
I too had a My Buddy doll. He was cool, until he wasn’t. And he was also banished to the attic closet in my room… and never received a pardon
I still remember the My Buddy and Kid Sister ad jingles 🫣
My dad did this too! It was more like he would just leave them on the TV, though, and not as much having me sit down with him to watch. It kinda let me tap out whenever, but boy did I get real scared at times.
I remember when Signs was on once, that one got me. Anything that vaguely sounded like clicking at night would have me sweating, haha. We had this fish tank and the filter noises from it would keep me up for hours just listening in case it was an alien.
All that said, I remember those things as a quirky and kinda fun memory now, and probably was what got me into scary movies as an adult.
If you haven’t seen this movie, and you have any tolerance for scary movies, stop reading and go watch this movie
Let’s make a high stress movie in one of the scariest environments possible.
“Okay but what if the main character has legit psychological trauma that we watch” I mean sure.
“And what if we add some of the freakiest and most unexpected jump scares before they get to the scary part?”. Okay…
“And what if this naturally scary environment also had monsters?”. What sort of writer are you?
“And what if we didn’t introduce the actors to the monsters until we were actually filming the scene, so their reactions are as legitimate as possible?” That would certainly be horrifying
“And what if the monsters were humanoid, and the humans were monstrous?” You seem to have some experience being a monstrous human.
“And what if we made multiple endings, each of them equally ambiguous about the main characters future?” Are you a monster? You are a monster aren’t you.
Yeah, I love this movie. Like first of all, Wendigos are dope. I feel like the top three pieces of Wendigo media are: The Descent, Supernatural S1E2, and Until Dawn.
Second of all, well you described it perfectly. The trauma backstory felt deep and impactful - especially with the real ending (not the US one that lines up the sequel).
I still think that scene where Rebecca free climbs across the chasm is the most terrifying part of the movie lmao. No monsters yet and I’m already screaming
For me it was the original Poltergeist when I was 8 or so.
And later I found out the skeletons in the graveyard scene were actual dead bodies. Yum.
True story. Real ones were cheaper than props.
Same thing happened in Apocalypse Now. The actors didn’t know until after.
Oh man. Yeah. That movie scarred me for life.
It was Stephen King’s IT for me. I don’t know how young I was, but too young.
As a (probably too young) kid, I had already seen some Jason and Michael Myers… but IT was the one that made me afraid to go to sleep after watching it. It’s the one that I still remember the fear and remember exactly where I was when I watched it
I rewatched that a couple years ago on Halloween night. I can’t understand why I was so scared as a kid. It’s a silly movie, and quite cheesy too.
Yeah, I think I was maybe 5 or 6? Wicked bad choice.
DO NOT DO THIS.
Fuck, that someone needs to be told not to fuck up their child like this. We don’t have time to be this stupid
Like the parents of one of these girls who had her watch a ton of scary movies?
The Descent scared the sh*t out of me. That one jumpscare was so unexpected and so intense that my body couldn’t even react to it, I just got massive chills all the way through without moving. It was surreal. Letting your kid watch this is just insane
I had the same experience when i watched it. The uncanny feeling lingered for a few days.
But, idk … For me, it was a mistake to watch it again. Knowing what to expect, i paid more attention to everything else and i didn’t like it, i don’t remember why exactly.
There being 2 endings didn’t help my mind when I watched it a second time and had a completely different experience… I was like, wtf, I know this is the same movie, but why do I feel so very different.
Ugh fuck just about everything about this movie. It was a masterpiece.
Let’s put extremely normal and relatable people into a pretty normal situation with pretty good intentions, then let’s have them do a somewhat risky hobby in a somewhat stressful environment, then let’s have normal reactions to some pretty fucked up, high stress situations, then let’s fucking have some pretty fucked up relationship stuff come out and some pretty understandable reactions to it, then let’s add some fucking fucked up fucking fuck fucks who may or may not be human and may or may not be looking to eat or just getting off on fucking people up. And then let’s have just the tiniest but it reminder of normalcy fuck up everything that wasn’t fucked before. And then you don’t know which ending you’re getting, and you don’t know which one is technically better for the characters.
I didn’t know about the 2 versions. Hmm, gonna see if i find the other version, you’ve got me hooked up. Both times i saw the same version, but i guess there is no “happy” ending. It can’t, really.
sigh, my claustrophobia already makes me gasp for air when i watch documentaries with people in tight caves. Here we go again.
Well now I kinda wanna watch it, even tho I’m not really into horror… that many uses of the word fuck in one paragraph -has- to mean something 😜
It’s already on my Plex so I guess now’s a good time!
Out of all the horror movies Ive ever watched, its my absolute favorite. It’s truly one of the best “horror” movies you will ever watch. The dread is so well done. The jump scares are well paced and actually add to the story. It’s fantastic and lingers with you for awhile.
My other favorites of all time, is the first tape from V/H/S, the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Nope, The Poltergeist, The Ring, Juon (White Ghost, Specifically).
It was really hard to watch through the land shift scene. I’m super claustrophobic. Reading wiki articles about spelunkers getting stuck is enough for panic attacks. I stopped right before the shift (fortune), and right after to recover. After that I did fine with it. It was very well done.
I didn’t find the jump scares to be very impactful, but maybe it’s because I was anticipating those and was more interested in the rest of it? Or the panic burned out my jump scare receptor lol
Sometimes it works out, though!
From a very early age, my parents let me watch increasingly scary stuff thinking I’d eventually hit a limit on what I could handle, but I feel like even as a youngster I was pretty aware that it was not real. Never got nightmares or anything like that. Horror movies and scary sci-fi movies were always my favorites and I still love them to this day.
The Descent is a fucked up scary movie, then the monster Falmer people show up and it’s spooky too I guess
Yeah. The blood and creeps are a bit goofy, but the claustrophobia is palpable!
Descent and its sequel (though cursed by virtue of being a sequel) were great. In general, women-led horror movies are awesome when done right, like having women in characters who self actualize instead being used as a filler or sideshow.
Some others include Ginger Snaps (and its second movie), Alien (don’t like the sequels), Scream, and Piggy (2022). Evil Dead as a franchise does not have a female lead (I am not that familiar with this franchise), but Evil Dead Rise was executed really well, and worked on many levels.
Evil Dead is… not the first title that comes to mind when discussing feminism. Too much tree branch rape.
Cabin in the Woods also has questionable use of female characters, but like Scream it was attempting commentary, so it works. Were older Evil Dead movies also doing similar kind of meta horror genre commentary?
Not really, the first evil dead just has a particularly egregious scene involving a handsy tree.
The series as a whole is fantastic and evil dead 2 and army of darkness are barely horror movies.
The first movie still has its merits and raimi has gone on record stating that he regrets the tree scene.
I’m not a huge horror fan but Cabin in the Woods was a fantastic movie.
Evil Dead Rise is a new cast. No Ash
You’d like “behind the mask the rise of leslie vernon”. That’s one of the core themes.
Yeah what I want out of a good entertaining Friday night film is shallow in your face Hollywood pandering on female empowerment and gender equality. It just makes for such a good cinematic experience.
For me it was gremlins, I was like 8. The end scene with the one that pops out of the fountain, that shit scared the living fuck outta me.
Also being forced to go see Lost Boys with my sister at 10 years old while sick with the flu, because my parents had a date and didn’t want to reschedule or some shit. That movie wasn’t THAT scary, but when you already feel like absolute shit…
Corey Haim is utterly terrifying in Lost Boys. Truly demonic performance.
Wow I thought I was alone. Gremlins scarred me as a child.
Gremlins was actually a huge part of the reason for the PG-13 rating, alongside Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The G rating was starting to gain a stigma for childishness so kids’ movies would throw in a damn or hell to get a PG rating, and movies that almost but didn’t quite cross the threshold for R landed in PG alongside them. This added up to parents thinking “hey it’s PG, so it’s family-friendly”, and ended up with traumatized kids.
I was already a teenager, but The Blair Witch Project made me quite scared of the forest after dark. Didn’t help that we lived right next to a completely overgrown property (it essentially was a forest… a whole family of foxes lived in there) with an old unused house in the middle of it.
Anyway… the psychological horror of that movie was intense. Jump scares I can get over, but the perceived fear of the actors and that ending in the cellar burned itself into my brain.
If I enter a room and someone is facing the corner, I will die. Just writing that has me feeling terror.
That setup was done so cleverly. They only dropped this in a tale in the beginning (that a child had to stand in the corner while the other child was being gutted alive) and then don’t mention it a single time for the next 60 minutes and then BOOM, your brain still connects these dots immediately and it hits far more than if they actually showed one of the people being gutted. Just that abstract fear of what looks like will likely happen … damn.
I like the blair pimp project way more
I remember all my friends losing their shit over the Blair Witch project, so maybe I went in over hyped, but I didn’t think it was scary at all.
One night as a teen, I was staying with some cousins and we were just goofing about and shooting the shit for a whole weekend. When we went to sleep we decided to watch a movie on cable. We eventually landed on a choice between Blair Witch and The Parent Trap. Three tough teens, landed on the decision to just watch the latter because we had already seen the Blair Witch before as kids and we were just scarred by the impression the movie had left in us.
Watched it later again as an older adult and it certainly isn’t really all that much. It was revolutionary horror at the time, but it still leans heavily on the “bunch of idiot young adults who have no critical thinking skills make a long string of bad decisions, get killed” trope.
Same here. I thought it was super stupid, but everyone back then was like aaaaaa scariest movie ever zomg. I felt the same about the Ring, or any Japanese or Korean horror. Still kind of do.
You might have done some emotional damage there lol
My parents took me to see aliens when I was a we lad. To this day I am terrified of the alien series.
I’m a grown ass man and I occasionally still have nightmares about xenomorphs.
