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I snuck out of my room at around 5 years old and watched Child's Play from behind the couch. That kinda freaked me out a bit, but it got way worse when I realized that they'd fallen asleep partway through. I'd watched it alone. I had a few nightmares, then forgot about it. A week later, my uncle came by to bring me a My Buddy doll. That motherfucker. I wound up burying that doll in a bog not far from my house a week or so later because I thought that little stuffed bastard was going to cut me up and steal my soul.
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Feb 23, 2014 00:54
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I remember the Killing Zoe VHS cover freaking me out as a kid.
ebilflindas has a new favorite as of 01:09 on Feb 23, 2014 |
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Feb 23, 2014 01:03
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For anyone scared of Teddy Ruxpin, allow me to tell you a brief tale. I loved Teddy Ruxpin at first. A bear who talked and sang seemed like a neat idea and he always worked well and played tapes well, I was just a little wary of his eyes looking around so before bed he would go in the toy chest away from anywhere he might see me while I slept. One day I forgot to turn him off and the battery died so I took it out and left him on the floor, immediately forgetting about him as kids sometimes do when a toy is out of commission. Forgot about him all day and left him there when I went to bed. I woke to a horrible sound, like someone being strangled and a whirring awful mechanical noise. It was like waking to hear someone being choked to death by a robot. I sat up and turned on the bedside light to see Teddy Ruxpin on the floor, eyes wide and blinking, mouth moving, flailing and making that ungodly sound. There was no tape inside him. ...or batteries. I screamed until my mom came running and agreed to throw him away. From then on, to this day, I dislike talking dolls, commercials where animals talk awkwardly, and especially jerky-movement robotics. ...and bees. But that's just because they're scary.
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Feb 23, 2014 01:46
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Powerful Two-Hander posted:I pretty much avoided the original Ghostbusters cartoon after seeing the episode with the Boogeyman which scared the poo poo out of me. Even worse, our TV had a weird problem where it would sometimes fail to turn off when you hit the power and instead flip the volume to max for about 2 seconds, guess what happened? gently caress this show. I think there was an episode with a grey spooky man who had a buzzsaw blade stuck in his skull and he hunted people. That was the last episode I saw, I used to switch channel after that episode.
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Feb 23, 2014 02:00
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The THX sound. It's so otherworldly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U28YgbZyGWg
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Feb 23, 2014 02:22
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Spergminer posted:gently caress this show. I think there was an episode with a grey spooky man who had a buzzsaw blade stuck in his skull and he hunted people. That was the last episode I saw, I used to switch channel after that episode. Are you sure you're not thinking of the Extreme Ghostbusters episode "Deadliners"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEiGIQVLrzY I thought it was creepy, but I was 10 when I watched so it didn't scare me too bad. Not like that nightmare-inducing episode of Darkwing Duck with the ghost known as "Paddywhack". Apparently I wasn't the only one who was freaked out by that episode as it was pulled from syndication.
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Feb 23, 2014 02:45
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I remember the end credits of the Ghostbusters cartoon being creepy as hell.
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Feb 23, 2014 03:15
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When I was like five or six I had a few recurring delirious fever dreams where I was shrunk down to the size of an insect and a bunch of lady bugs kept firing roasted turkeys out of cannons at me as I tried to hide behind blades of grass and for a few years afterwards the sight of lady bugs made me really nauseated. Still liked cannons and roasted turkeys though.
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Feb 23, 2014 05:15
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When I was little I was terrified of Fire in the Sky. I was sure I was gonna get abducted. Later on I learned the whole thing was a hoax perpetrated by Travis Walton to get out of a lumber contract. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsjhdoWKtXM
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Feb 23, 2014 05:24
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Were you petrified of the Emergency Broadcast System as a kid? Because this is what would happen if there WAS a national emergency (it starts 5:35, the rest of the video is meh) I am so glad I never heard this as a kid. teen witch has a new favorite as of 05:42 on Feb 23, 2014 |
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Feb 23, 2014 05:36
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 This guy. I was really into Ghost Writers and then Gooey Gus was introduced. He was the reason I couldn't enjoy the Power Rangers movie with Ivan Ooze. After Jurassic Park came out, I was afraid velociraptors would come to my house, specifically, and eat me in my sleep. Just one specific house, my bedroom window, and only me. There was also a military base several miles away, and one night I heard them firing practice mortars for the first time. I screamed like a little bitch, because
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Feb 23, 2014 06:36
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kinmik posted:
I had a similar incident, went on a boating holiday when I was a child and during a particularly windy/stormy night the sound the boat made pulling against it's mooring effectively simulated the foot-falls of the Tyrannosaur causing me to cry. That clip above from Extreme Ghostbusters is almost irresponsibly frightening, there was another episode about clowns that would make you laugh and then suck out your soul which I remember gave me significant stress as a child. In fact, did Saturday Morning Cartoons in the nineties have a sudden injection of horror because it seems like the flood-gates opened in that regard, I am to this day a big fan of Batman: Animated Series but they managed to fit in a whole bunch of disturbing imagery, an extreme amount considering the show's primary audience was six year olds. Scenes like this for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHTZTJpNRc8 I remember having that on video and it scaring the poo poo out of me.
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Feb 23, 2014 10:13
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SLOSifl posted:Carol Channing turning into a goat still bothers me. "baaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhaaahhhdd".  Also on the X-files, I remember staying up late one night, my parents were ushering me to bed but an episode came on where a hospital bed was floating around and smacking against walls. No sleep for me that night. Although I love that series now. If only I had seen the episode where the monster wants to watch Cher perform. My life would make a lot more sense.
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Feb 23, 2014 11:49
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Tin Miss posted:Are you sure you're not thinking of the Extreme Ghostbusters episode "Deadliners"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEiGIQVLrzY gently caress me, hell of a way to introduce kids to Cenobites!
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Feb 23, 2014 13:30
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I've shared this story so many times with friends that I can't remember if I've also shared it in a previous version of this thread. So apologies if I have. You see, as a kid in the early 90s, I would raise a fuss if "Never Gonna Give You Up" came on the radio and would beg my mother to turn it off in a terrified panic. This is not a lame callback to a certain tired meme, I promise. The fact that whole thing happened later only kind of added a new layer of amusement to what was already an embarrassing childhood memory. My sister still reminds me of it, and it wasn't until recently I was able to communicate why it wasn't totally random or some kind of aversion to Rick Astley himself. Once upon a time my mother was visiting a friend and plopped us in front of the TV with her kids while they talked in another room. Supposedly, we were going to watch 'Peewee's Big Top'. We did not watch Peewee's Big Top. What we saw was what I'd find out in my adult life was called 'Killer Klowns from Outer Space'. Now, that flick may be ridiculously goofy to a grown up but to me as an elementary schooler it was absolutely traumatizing. I ran to my mother to cry over it and she told me "It's just Peewee!" and I don't think they ever realized what movie we were watching. It just so happened one of the first songs playing on the radio on the ride home was said Rick Astley song and so it was doomed to be associated in my childhood brain forever with vampiric clowns sucking blood. Green Jacket has a new favorite as of 15:02 on Feb 23, 2014 |
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Feb 23, 2014 14:55
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Bad Roy posted:gently caress me, hell of a way to introduce kids to Cenobites! Yeah clearly somebody on the production team had stayed up watching Hellraiser the night before writing that one. I always thought it was pretty funny that Extreme Ghostbusters had a guy in a wheelchair. Surely not all ghost related incidents are going to be wheelchair accessible?
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Feb 23, 2014 15:24
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kinmik posted:
Oh my god Ghostwriter. I completely forgot that was a show and I totally agree. Gooey Gus scared the bejeezus out of me. I had already seen the Power Rangers movie a hundred times by the time I saw that episode, though.
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Feb 23, 2014 15:30
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Two that are funny now as I love the series in question as an adult... I used to run screaming from the room when the Doctor Who theme music came on, because of one episode with a disembodied green hand in a box that moved. I remember my grandmother babysat me one night and that episode was on, then she was scratching my back and when she stopped it still felt like she was scratching and I thought it was the hand. My first date with my boyfriend was to watch that episode as an adult, and I adore newWho. Original Star Trek--the flappy things that stuck on Spock's back were mentioned a page back and holy poo poo they terrified me too. I later became a huge Trekkie in middle school so I guess I got over it. I was afraid of hail hitting my neck because an older kid told me, when I was 6 or so, that if it hit my neck it was instadeath. I was 99% sure he was full of it but YOU NEVER KNOW. I would hold my collar closed when it rained too just in case. In kindergarten I was terrified of the intercom. This was in the early 80's so they were terrible staticky creepy things. My mom used to write notes to put in my lunch that said "and remember not to cry when the intercom comes on, it can't hurt you!" I still have a weird uncomfortableness about stuff like that. The baby monitor I have creeps me out, I'm always afraid I'll hear/see something on it.
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Feb 23, 2014 17:04
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kinmik posted:
I was scared of that episode too! Not the part where they were writing the story, but the part in "real life" when Gooey Gus kept just appearing in random places seemingly on his own. I also got really scared of the episodes where they had to go back in time in order to save Jamal's dad. At the end of one part the writing in a newspaper article starts disappearing a la Back to the Future because they're not changing the past fast enough. I think it didn't help that at the end of every episode they always had some really ominous music and it was always a cliffhanger.
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Feb 23, 2014 18:41
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kinmik posted:
Came here to post this. That set of episodes freaked me out so bad, and PBS reran the hell out of them.
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Feb 23, 2014 19:00
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When I was maybe 6 or 7 I was terrified of the bathtub drain. I would still take baths, just on the opposite end of the tub and I'd keep a watchful eye on the drain the whole time. This was because I had several nightmares about this city under the ground that was connected to all the bathtub drains in the world. There were these monsters that lived in the city who looked like Jabba the Hutt except with legs and human faces, and they'd send up this stuff through the drains that would cause the bath water to foam up and turn kids into these monsters. I was always sure to stare down that drain so I could make a run for it if I saw it start bubbling. It sounds like the silliest thing on earth as an adult, but I had these dreams so frequently that kid-me was convinced that Underground Bathtub Monster City had to be real.
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Feb 23, 2014 19:50
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I used to be absolutely terrified of forklifts. Whenever I'd go to the hardware store with my dad, I would inevitably end up in a screaming, crying pile of mush because I could hear that beep-beep-beep of the forklift backing up, and the whirring as it drove around the store. If we were in an aisle close to one, I would try everything I could to run away. I'm really not sure why they hosed me up so bad, but I still get a little uneasy if I have to go into Lowe's or something and I can hear that ominous beeping from across the store.
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Feb 23, 2014 22:20
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Forklifts are actually really loving dangerous so it was probably good of you to be scared of them when you were too young to think about proper safety around them.
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Feb 23, 2014 22:44
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Was anyone else traumatized by the book Night of the Twisters? I had to read it in 3rd grade, and I had nightmares for weeks about that scene where the main character's house gets hit by the tornado. To add to all the stories of kids traumatized by Unsolved Mysteries, I was obsessed with that show when I was in high school and would watch it every day after school. It never scared me, but my little brother, who was 8-9 years at the time, was freaked out by some of the stuff on the show. One day my brother and I were watching this uplifting episode about angels rescuing people, and he got super freaked out by this one story about an angel saving a baby's life. For a long time after he was deathly afraid of angels. To his credit, the sound effects and visuals they used were really creepy, but I always found it funny that out of all the scary poo poo on the show, angels were what traumatized him.
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Feb 23, 2014 23:06
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In the 3rd grade we started learning about basic anatomy like the various organ systems, respiratory, circulatory, etc. For about the next 8 years I kept having terrifying nightmares about a giant living disembodied circulatory system and ended up being scared of the dark because of it. Even today I can't stand gore or hospital stuff and I'm still a lil scared of the dark.
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Feb 23, 2014 23:52
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WeaponGradeSadness posted:It sounds like the silliest thing on earth as an adult, but I had these dreams so frequently that kid-me was convinced that Underground Bathtub Monster City had to be real. That would make an amazing kids book, to be honest. Either that or an episode of Amazing Stories or Monsters.
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Feb 23, 2014 23:58
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I was terrified of sponges. Apparently, it was because of a Goosebumps book that featured a sponge, but I don't recall ever reading it, and the cover I'm imagining didn't look anything like the one on that page. See, I was convinced that sponges would grow teeth and red eyes when the cabinet door was closed. And for some reason, sponges were found under bathroom sinks only, and only in brown, wooden cabinets. This also sparked my fear of flushing toilets. If a bathroom had a cupboard under the sink, I would run out of the room after flushing the toilet until it was finished making noise, then wash my hand. The fear of sponges went away a lot faster than the fear of flushing the toilet did. I'd always flush, but it would make my heart start pounding up until I was in high school.
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Feb 24, 2014 00:39
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copy of a posted:I used to be absolutely terrified of forklifts. Whenever I'd go to the hardware store with my dad, I would inevitably end up in a screaming, crying pile of mush because I could hear that beep-beep-beep of the forklift backing up, and the whirring as it drove around the store. If we were in an aisle close to one, I would try everything I could to run away. Thank you for reminding me why I hated going to Sam's Club as a kid, except that I'd just sort of stiffen up, like a scared rabbit. Beeep. Beeeep. Beeep. VRRRRRRR. 
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Feb 24, 2014 06:44
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Smam posted:For anyone scared of Teddy Ruxpin, allow me to tell you a brief tale. This happened to me once, but with a cousin's Furby. I was also given a Teddy Ruxpin for Christmas when I was like 3 years old. There's a home video of me holding him while he's talking, then, with a look that's like a mix between sheer terror and desperately wanting to like the Christmas gift, setting him down on the table and abandoning him. But my biggest fear as a kid was skeletons, thanks to this scene from Home Alone 2. That stupid scene still freaks me out a bit and I'm 28 years old. People in costumes really bothered me, too. When my parents took me to Disney World when I was really little, I refused to ride in the stroller, made my dad carry me everywhere and even rode Dumbo specifically to hide because I was terrified of Mickey Mouse. I was also terrified of balloons, but that one isn't really an irrational one. I once had a balloon accidentally get caught between my car seat and my face. It ended about how you would expect.
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Feb 24, 2014 07:00
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I had glow in the dark skeleton pajamas. Cue me waking up in the middle of the night, looking down and seeing my bones on the outside, and freaking the gently caress out, screaming and crying, "My bones are coming out! Help! Push them back inside!" My mother and Grandmother run in, turn on the the lights and I start to calm down. Loved those pajamas, but never wore them in the dark ever again.
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Feb 24, 2014 07:39
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I had an existential fear of acknowledging that fictional characters were not real. I knew on an intellectual level that they weren't real, but I thought that acknowledging that would break all morality regarding actual real people.
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Feb 24, 2014 08:26
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LaughMyselfTo posted:I had an existential fear of acknowledging that fictional characters were not real. I knew on an intellectual level that they weren't real, but I thought that acknowledging that would break all morality regarding actual real people. What characters were you worried about?
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Feb 24, 2014 08:40
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fork bomb posted:What characters were you worried about? Stuffed animals, mostly. Occasionally characters that I made up in little-kid-stories; more rarely popular characters from cartoons and films.
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Feb 24, 2014 09:15
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WeaponGradeSadness posted:When I was maybe 6 or 7 I was terrified of the bathtub drain. I would still take baths, just on the opposite end of the tub and I'd keep a watchful eye on the drain the whole time. Huh, I had something similar growing up but it was a fear of inanimate objects flying and attacking me and the shower drain was probably the thing I was the most scared of. I had a habit to leave my foot on top of it with a wash cloth to keep it on the ground. For whatever reason I think it was caused by the movie 'The Langoliers' about these weird things that chewed through reality, I finally watched it on Netflix a year ago and it was cathartic to go back and laugh at how silly it really was. Also, giant drains (think like the wave pool at a water park or something) always freaked me out, I'd always worry that I'd be dragged to the bottom and drown. No idea where that one came from, but those things still unnerve me to this day.
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Feb 24, 2014 10:08
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Haha, poo poo. Since I have OCD, it'd be easier to just list the things I wasn't screamingly afraid of as a little girl, but the things that stand out as the most irrational are thus: 1) Being abandoned in stores (and being stuck there...FOREVER!!!) if my mother wasn't holding my hand. I would cry hysterically and suddenly if she left my line of sight. 2) My hands being eaten by the toaster, the VCR, the oven. I avoided touching anything with a door or latch or slot for years. 3) Breaking my neck if I fell out of bed. I made a wall of pillows and my parents installed a gate for me. I was also bizarrely preoccupied with the possibility of becoming a normal kid who is transported to a fantasy world or awakening with superpower, realizing I'm just a side character, and getting hurt/dying because I'm not the hero. Seems too astute with the metafictional analysis for a grade schooler, but my parents swear I begged to be assured, over and over, that The Bridge to Terebithia and The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe were not real.
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Feb 24, 2014 10:22
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Most of you won't know Karbonkel but he was a real boogeyman for first-graders all around the Belgium and Netherlands area. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-JuZmJoKIw (Video is in Dutch) Karbonkel was a monster from an educational tv show called "Ik, Mik, Loreland". It was produced by the Dutch national television. It was about a girl who lived in some country where everyone would read, spell and write all the time. Except for the monster and since he was so buttmad about it, he would do his best to rid the world of all letters and language-related things. Most of the Belgian and Dutch public schools would watch this in class, as it integrated perfectly with some methods of learning to write, read etc. But the show apparently relied heavily on shock value, weirdness and the sudden appearance of Karbonkel, who according to the producers, was based on Bob from Twin Peaks. A lot of the critique on the show was about Karbonkel, and in the end the show got canned. But I still feel weird vibes when I look up clips. 
Darmvlinder has a new favorite as of 10:57 on Feb 24, 2014 |
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Feb 24, 2014 10:54
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This Goddamn thing. And people kept using that phrase too.
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Feb 25, 2014 01:43
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Aliens and being trapped alone with one on an empty space station. It came from a book I read at primary school, in amongst all the other books for 6-7yr olds about silly animals was one supposedly about spaceship/station. The plot (roughly) was there was a man on the station and everyone else was gone/dead and there was an alien on board, the man searched all the rooms but couldn't find anything so he went to the security room to watch the monitors. Again he couldn't see anything until he noticed with horror that the he could see the door to the security room was open but he had closed the door when he came in. He turns round and sees the alien and the book ends with the obvious conclusion that it killed him too. It didn't help that it was fairly well illustrated and wasn't cartoony.
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Feb 25, 2014 02:50
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 This. loving. Scene. My dad took me to the drive in to see this when I was 5. It was a double feature, Tootsie was on first, yes this dates me. The whole scene from when Slimer enters the frame till the titular slimeing left me in a dumbstruck panic for hours and messed up many normal things for me. Several I couldn't deal with for years. Hotels? Nope. Serving Carts? Nope! Long hallways? NOOOOOOOOPE! That being said, Harold Ramis' passing really bums me out despite the trauma his film caused me.
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Feb 25, 2014 03:01
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Huh, I'm surprised with all these mentions of ET nobody mentioned the part towards the end where he's dying and all white. I could get through the rest of the movie just fine as a kid, but gently caress that part.
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Feb 25, 2014 05:13
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