Top 3 Films That Traumatized Me as a Kid

The Grudge scared the crap out of me when I was younger. I saw like 15 minutes and I was out lol.

Yeah, The Grudge got me pretty bad. I actually remember having problems taking a bath, 'cause I was 100% sure the tongueless chick was just a shower curtain away from licking my face.

The Ring was pretty bad for me too. Hey I was a kid.

I guess from another standpoint, Hostel and Saw helped make me a bit of a gore hound, and that in general makes me one creepy dude.

The Grudge scares me now.

"It" the photo album scene. Holy **** I think I slept under the duvet for like a month.

I know this is an ancient thread, but I checked it out because the subject is interesting. I'm surprised nobody mentioned the original Don't Be Afraid of the Dark. I remember the TV ads for Magic ("Magic is fun -- we're dead!") and The Omen freaked me out (no chance I'd've been allowed to actually watch those movies as a kid!). And for some reason, the "Oh-ee-oh" changing of the guard scene got to me more than the flying monkeys in Wizard of Oz.

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"You seem a decent fellow. I hate to kill you."
"You seem a decent fellow. I hate to die."

The Philip Kaufman Invasion of the Body Snatchers gave me nightmares for weeks based off dog-with-human-face alone.

I'm sure the human-faced spider in the original The Fly would have done it for me, if I'd seen it as a kid.

I mentioned that recently on another thread. I'd like to see the full thing because I really liked the creatures and thought they were a lot better than in the remake.

Yeah, me too. It's pretty grisly and visceral.

Speaking of The Fly... Cronenberg’s The Fly! Earliest memory of watching a movie. Any movie.

Okay so that one didn’t actually “traumatized” me but it did fascinate me at 5 years old.

Okay, so maybe it did traumatized me a bit.

I don't think anything really traumatized me but at least couple of films were really scary and probably caused small sleeping difficulties for a day or two: Evil Dead (Finnish VHS back then was cut like 10 minutes so most of the gore was gone so it was the atmosphere and the scary possessed people) and Spasms (especially the scene where the snake bites a guy in the face resulting in some huge boils or whatever). I think I was about ten years old when I saw those.

The third mention will go to a book:



This caused occasional sleeping problems too and every time I went to bed I was sure to stack other books on top of this to hide the scary skull on cover. Was maybe eight or nine when my big brother loaned this from the library the first time.

Count me in on the Childcatcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang...one of cinema's most bone-chilling villains, that guy scared the bejesus out of me.

Casper from 1995:


Really disturbing CGI phantom scared me a lot when I was 6.

The spider head from Toy Story also scared me a lot around the same time:

First of all, this thread confirms how freaking old I am. I was well into adulthood when most of the films mentioned so far were released. As for me, I was seriously traumatized by The Birds and the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz. To this day, I get very nervous when I see more than three or four birds perched in a single location. The Childcatcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang also scared the bejesus out of me.