Yahoo News 11 Horror Movie Moments That Traumatized Us as Children
Maybe it happened when the “cool kids” started watching something tantalizing and a little too scary, or perhaps it was a random encounter during an afternoon cable marathon–some B-movie that most quickly forgot but you, at your very small age, internalized as a mildly traumatic memory that will lurk in the shadows of your mind forever. Whatever your first real horror scare might’ve been, it leaves a mark just like Freddy Krueger’s glove.
Each spooky season brings a fresh crop of scary movies to stream, and the best picks often stir up some shuddering nostalgia. Filmgoers of a certain generation might focus on Psycho, or Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or The Blair Witch Project—but most of the time, the frights that really keep us up at night are a little more personal than that. Here, for your perusal, are the ones that had The Daily Beast’s entertainment staff hiding under our covers.
A Mars Attacks! Massacre
I can still see it in my mind—flesh-and-bone bodies melting into orange and green skeletons and falling to the ground after just one blast from a laser gun. Pretty much every moment of Mars Attacks! scared the bejeebers out of me on first viewing, but at the time, 5-year-old me was desperate to impress the 13-year-old “cool kids” who’d picked Tim Burton’s sci-fi comedy for a random Saturday afternoon viewing at the beach. I slinked further and further under an ottoman and watched these horrific-looking aliens and their big, brainy heads lay siege to planet Earth. The scene that clinched my trauma and forced my mother to spray my bedroom with “Martian repellent” once we got home? That would be when the Martians first landed and, alarmed by a dove in flight, began mowing down everyone in sight. Something about the finality of it—one shot and you’re a freaking skeleton!!!—just stuck. And then they went and put Sarah Jessica Parker’s head on a chihuahua’s body?! Tim Burton, I will simply never forgive you. —Laura Bradley
The Other Mother in Coraline
Coraline may not be a horror movie in the most traditional sense—it’s PG, animated, and made for children—but as soon as the Other Mother reveals her gangly arachnid legs, it becomes the scariest film you’ve ever seen. As a child, walking into the theater to see Coraline, I figured I’d get some fun Monster House-esque thrills. The Other Mother looks like the bone-chilling love child of Slender Man and Voldemort, with Edward Scissorhands prongs for hands and buttons for eyes. Making matters worse, Coraline may be stuck with this freak as her matriarch for life if she can’t escape the Other World. Imagine an alternate universe where your kind, loving mom is replaced by a stick figure skeleton who wants to sew buttons over your eyes. After seeing this, all I wanted to do was bury myself into my real mom’s loving grasp! —Fletcher Peters
The Body Bag in A Nightmare on Elm Street
A Nightmare on Elm Street would be nothing without Robert Englund’s Freddy Krueger, and yet the most unnerving moment in Wes Craven’s seminal 1984 slasher—at least to my impressionable adolescent mind—has nothing to do with the charred supernatural fiend. Rather, it takes place early on, when Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) falls asleep in class and is visited by her recently murdered friend Tina (Amanda Wyss), who calls to her from a classroom doorway while encased in a translucent body bag. Dreamily dazed, Nancy investigates in the hall, where she sees Tina lying on the floor at the end of a long streak of blood, at which point her legs are picked up by an invisible force and she’s dragged out of view, her right arm wetly slapping the linoleum floor. To a 10-year-old, it was a vision of unreal horror the likes of which I’d never seen, and it remains arguably the signature sight of my early horror cinephilia—and forever changed the way I feel about walking through an empty school hallway. —Nick Schager
The First Time You See the Shark in Jaws
I could chart my entire life—up to this very day—with moments from movies that traumatized me. I watched Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and had nightmares that an evil witch was going to kidnap me that I still remember every detail of. I was too young to understand Edward Scissorhands, so, to me, it became a horror film about a person who might kill me with their finger blades. I saw The Sixth Sense, and then “saw” dead people in random dark corners for years. A friend described to me the plot of The Blair Witch Project, when I wasn’t allowed to go see it, and I was perhaps more haunted than if I had actually watched the film. But, sorry to be basic, it’s the first time I saw the shark in Jaws that affected me the most. I was fairly young when I first watched Jaws. While I don’t think it was age-inappropriate, if that movie was scaring adults out of the water, imagine its effect on poor impressionable me. —Kevin Fallon
The First Three Minutes of The Nightmare Before Christmas
I didn’t grow up watching “scary” movies of any kind. My mom unilaterally hates the horror genre; my dad watched The Exorcist not long after it came out and called it a day. I also suffered from incredible, debilitating anxiety as a kid (still do!), to the point where my earliest memories all involve me having absolute meltdowns when asked to say even one word to a stranger. All of this is to say: I have no idea why my mom picked up The Nightmare Before Christmas from the video store for my sister and me to watch when we were 4 years old. I guess she saw Disney on the cover and thought that it would be fine? It was very much not fine. Not one minute in, as the camera pressed through a seemingly innocuous forest to reveal Halloweentown, I felt like I was going to puke out of fear. Those ghosts swirling around! The beast with big teeth and red eyes! Why did the Mayor’s head turn around?! Even though Jack Skellington is probably the least creepy character in the whole thing—especially since he follows some horrible one-eyed creatures, a burning scarecrow, and a puking reptile—the second he rose up out of that vat of green goo, I yanked the tape out of the VCR and demanded my mom get it out of the house immediately. How I even made it to minute three, I’ll never know. —Allegra Frank
The Twins In The Shining
There are many scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s horror masterpiece The Shining that would send any child or adult running for the covers, but for me it was those dang twins. I don’t remember the exact age I was when my father decided to show my older sister and me The Shining, all I know is that I was fairly young and it definitely left a traumatic impression on me. But, considering my love of horror movies now, it was a necessary first introduction. When Danny Torrance (Danny Lloyd) rounds that hallway corner —with the sinister score blaring in the background—and you see those twins for the first time, it’s a horror game-changer. Never has there been a scene that filled me with such a deep sense of dread. And that feeling just continues to build in your gut as the scene progresses and the twins say their famous line, “come and play with us forever and ever” as quick cuts to their hacked and bloodied bodies flash on screen. To this day, that scene still gets me and fills my stomach with the most queasy of feelings. Not even Jack Nicholson running around with an ax could scare me more than those dang twins. —Shannon O’Connor
The Vampires Tapping on the Windows in Salem’s Lot (1979)
I was far too young. I lived in the English countryside. Anything could be floating around out there. And so, the notion that these vampires would hang around in ethereal fog, tapping on my window, smiling creepily, tempting me to HELL was very probable to my young, impressionable mind. How did I see it? Bed-time was so strictly patrolled. But somehow I did. And so, the notion of vicious, floating vampires out there in the night took seed. Where to find a crucifix? On windy, foggy nights even today, my eyes flick towards the windows, ready for the tapping. —Tim Teeman
The Tanning Bed Death Scene in Final Destination 3
As an adult I watch a ton of horror movies, but when I was a kid, my parents resolutely refused to let us watch anything gorier than a Hitchcock film. To their credit, showing a 12-year-old girl Rear Window was an incredibly chill move, but their strict regime meant that my taste for contemporary fright flicks could only be satisfied sporadically, and at other girls’ homes when we had sleepovers. I don’t recall who supplied the contraband DVD, but around 2006, when I was 12 years old, we found ourselves watching Final Destination 3, the third entry in the shock-horror franchise famous for its outrageously elaborate death scenes. I’ll never forget the raw terror and dread I felt at the sight—you know the one, even if you’ve tried to forget about it—of two young women screaming in agony as they’re incinerated by fatally malfunctioning tanning beds. The girls are throwaway characters named Ashley and Ashlyn, and, as was typical during the ruthlessly misogynistic mid-aughts, you’re supposed to laugh at them because they’re hot and shallow; two bimbos doomed by their own vanity. And yeah, the scene is also a serviceable commentary on how tanning beds cause cancer. But most of all, it is terrifying. Trapped inside the fluorescent blue-lit beds as the temperature skyrockets, the girls’ skin bubbles and burns off as they perish horribly, entombed forever in their brutally satirical, thoroughly 21st century sarcophagi. Since I first saw it, I’ve never been the same. —Helen Holmes
The Cursed Videotape in The Ring
My intense love of horror movies almost certainly comes from repeated bouts of exposure therapy. As an anxious child, I avoided horror movies at all costs; the last thing I needed was another reason to lay awake at night, petrified. Knowing this, my precocious cousins would dare me to watch something terrifying with them while visiting their lake cabin, and not wanting to be uncool, I often obliged—at least until I ran out in a panic. I’ll never forget seeing the videotape that Naomi Watts’ character, Rachel, watches in The Ring: a collection of non-linear, chilling images that aren’t too scary on their own, but feel eerily blood-curdling when stitched together. There are women looking into mirrors, maggots squirming on top of one another, giant centipedes crawling out from under metal desks, and an eerie, piercing score to drive home the terror. To top it all off, Rachel’s character receives a phone call immediately after the video turns to static, warning her that she has seven days until something catastrophic happens. Shockingly, I managed to survive the videotape and the first six days, but by the time day seven rolled around, I bolted out the cabin’s nearest screen door, never to return to The Ring until decades later, when the truth was revealed to me: It’s really not that scary at all. —Coleman Spilde
The Girl Under the Bed in The Sixth Sense
I was 9 years old the first (and only) time I saw The Sixth Sense. That’s way too early for anyone, especially someone who hates scary movies. (Or maybe that’s the inciting incident that made me hate scary movies? Either way, 9 is too young!!) I was petrified by pretty much everything that happened in M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller—the woman from the bicycle accident, the bodies hanging in the school, etc.—but the one that sticks with me is when the little girl reaches her hand out from under the bed and grabs Haley Joel Osment by the ankle. “Reaches” is perhaps too delicate a verb; she thrusts that pale, deadly hand of hers out, and it was so terrifying that it changed the way I got into bed for years afterward. No exaggeration: From then on, I would get a little running start from my bedroom door and hop onto my bed, never getting close enough to the edge of it, just in case Mischa Barton was lurking under there, ready to grab me. This happened for years, and I still think about it. So, thanks for that, Marissa Cooper, you terror. –Madeline Roth
The Clifton House Mystery (ITV, 1978)
Why the hell this was shown on Sunday MORNINGS for anyone to watch? Like an actual ghost story, I still wonder: did it actually happen? My young mind recalls ghost-soldiers walking in and out of walls, blood dripping from the ceiling, and a music box whose tune summoned up spirits. It has stayed with me as the scariest TV show ever. Even as a kid I could not believe it was on, and no one was monitoring me watching it after the “morning service” (i.e. church/hymns/prayers) on ITV. —Tim Teeman
Keep obsessing! Sign up for the Daily Beast’s Obsessed newsletter and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.
Get the Daily Beast's biggest scoops and scandals delivered right to your inbox. Sign up now.
Stay informed and gain unlimited access to the Daily Beast's unmatched reporting. Subscribe now.
