Scenes that Freaked Me out as a Kid

Fear is an interesting emotion. I was a very timid lad. I wouldn’t say fearful or cowardly, but timid. I wasn’t ever really afraid of the dark. But things that struck me as unnatural, startling, or cruel were what kept me up at night from time to time. As a kid, you’re still struggling to understand reality and how the world works. So you don’t really know what is and isn’t possible. In childhood, every once in a while something comes along and screws with your perception of reality and terrifies you. Things that, as an adult who understands how the world really works, wouldn’t phase you, can give you nightmares when you’re a kid. It’s interesting to look back on the things that scared me when I was a kid, and examine why they did. 

 

The Library Ghost - Ghostbusters

I didn’t ever fully watch Ghostbusters until sometime in my teens due to this scene at the beginning of the movie, where a ghost in the library gets pissed off at the paranormal investigators (not yet Ghostbusters) and scares them off. This scare had such a drawn out build-up to it too. I think the filmmakers tried to soften the blow by having jazzy music play as the characters run from this ghost, but that didn’t work on me. I was terrified.

 

Judge Doom dipping a cartoon shoe – Who Framed Roger Rabbit

 This was another scene that prompted me to demand my mother turn the movie off when I was little, so I never saw the whole movie until I was older. And it’s a pity because now this is one of my favorite movies. Seeing a cute cartoon shoe die a slow, horrifying death as it is erased from existence was too much for me to handle in early childhood. I guess by making it a shoe the screenwriters were trying to make it something the audience wouldn’t get too attached to, but the animators ruined that by giving the shoe such emotion in its final moments.

A Troll in the Bed – Ernest Scared Stupid

Yes, something in Ernest Scared Stupid of all movies actually scared me, sigh. But hear me out. In this scene, a little girl curls up in her bed, ready for a sound sleep. She turns over, to suddenly see this monstrosity staring her in the face. In the mind of a child, your bed is supposed to be the one place where you’re safe. Under the bed is sketchy, of course, but not the top of it. This scene just underscored that nowhere is completely safe. Complete safety is a myth. This scene taught me that I could turn over in bed and suddenly have a monster in bed with me. Maybe not this monster, but something or someone. It’s a slim chance of that happening, but not zero percent. This is the stuff sleep paralysis is made of. 

 

The Jabberwocky – Alice Through the Looking Glass (1985)

This is from my all-time favorite adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, a made-for-TV version that covered both books, from 1985. Since this was a year before I was born, I watched it on VHS much later. Being a made-for-TV production, the special effects weren’t the best, but the part that did creep me out was more due to the situation than due to it looking real. After returning from Wonderland, Alice enters her home. There’s an unsettling scene where she sees her parents in the mirror, but they don’t see her no matter how she bangs on the glass. This part is upsetting enough to a child, but pales in comparison to the next part. After this, Alice reads the Jabberwocky poem. The room fills with thunder and lightning, and then this thing, the actual Jabberwocky, shuffles into the room as she screams. It looks silly when I watch it now, but I think this scared me as a kid for the same reason that troll in the bed scene in Ernest Scared Stupid scared me. Alice was home, and home is supposed to be safe. This scene flies in the face of that assumption.

Hermit Ren – Ren & Stimpy

It should come as no surprise that this twisted cartoon had its share of disturbing scenes. But I feel like not enough people talk about this episode, because it was one of the later ones. “Hermit Ren” has Ren, stressed out from his job and Stimpy’s demented antics, reach a breaking point, and leave his life behind to go live as a hermit in a cave. In the cave, the isolation slowly drives him mad. He finds a mummified corpse in the cave who becomes his only friend. In the freakiest scene, he begins to hallucinate. He stares at his hands and watches the flesh melt away. He then looks over at the mummy and sees his face on it. This was too much for me to comprehend as a kid. As an adult though, I get having a terrible job and wanting to just hole up alone somewhere. The hallucination scene however seems like a bad acid trip or something. It could be the whole episode is a metaphor for drug use. 

 

Faceless Aliens – Are You Afraid of the Dark?

https://areyouafraidofthedark.fandom.com/wiki/Blank_Faced_Aliens

Are You Afraid of the Dark?, a horror show aimed at children in the 1990s, never usually scared me, except for this one episode, which I had mentally blocked out. For a long time it only existed in the fringes of my memory. I remembered a hole in the ceiling opening up, and all these faceless aliens beckoning upwards. It took me the longest time to realize this wasn’t just some figment from a dream, but from an episode of this show. I googled “faceless aliens in the ceiling” and found the source. At least it wasn’t a fragmented memory from a real alien abduction.

Decaying zombie face – Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

 

That face. Just that face. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark were a popular series of children’s horror books from about when I was a kid.  The stories in these books were usually corny, but the illustrations were the most disturbing part. And especially this one. A woman’s half-decayed face. Decaying corpses were a major phobia of mine as a kid, and still is. Can you believe this book was for children? Freaked me out. I don’t even really remember the story this illustration went with. This is all I remember. And that’s enough.

Charlie goes to Hell – All Dogs Go to Heaven

Don Bluth put so many kids in therapy when they were older. At least he didn’t sugarcoat his movies, but ye Gods. Did we need to see the main character descend into Hell and get eaten alive by little demonic puppy things? And that is why this is another movie I didn’t fully watch until I was older. At least An American Tail was just depressing, it never scared me out of my wits like this scene.

 

Freddy’s chest faces – A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors

 

I was way too young to see this movie, but I remember channel surfing at age six or thereabouts, and coming across this scene. I didn’t even know what it was from until years later in my teens when I watched the third Nightmare on Elm Street movie and the memory came flooding back. I remembered seeing Freddy Krueger’s shirt ripped and there were these screaming faces in his chest, and it just terrified me as a kid. I changed the channel immediately, but I never forgot that image. What was this doing playing on TV during the day where some unsuspecting child could stumble upon it? I think my parents had HBO at some point for a brief time, maybe that was it. 

Trapped in a Painting – The Witches

 

This scene was unsettling for the concept. It has no jump scares, no monsters, no scary imagery. But the concept is what horrified me. Less a shock kind of scare and more an existential dread kind of scare. I fully understood the implications of this scene as a kid, and I didn’t like it. This part of the movie The Witches tells the story of a little girl who crossed a witch. The witch trapped her in a painting, and her grieving family got to watch her slowly grow older in the painting over the years, appearing in different spots each day and becoming an old lady, until one day, decades later, she was gone. The very idea of this scene was what scared me. What happened to the old woman? Where was she sent? Did she die alone in that cabin in the painting? 

Johnny 5 Gets Beaten Almost to Death – Short Circuit 2

 

I remember watching and enjoying the first Short Circuit film well enough. But the second one was something I had blocked out for a number of years due to a scene where the innocent, childlike living robot Johnny 5 gets beaten nearly to death by some thugs, all the while begging for his life. His human friend finds him in an alley, and when asked if he’s alright, he writes the word “dying” on the wall. Did they have to have this in the movie, really? Kids watched these movies!  I don’t even like thinking about this scene. 

2012 Apocalypse Prediction – Ancient Prophecies

People didn’t really talk about the 2012 Mayan Apocalypse Prediction until around 2008 or so, but I knew about it way back in 1997, thanks to the speculative documentary series Ancient Prophecies. As a kid I didn’t yet understand the concept of a “speculative” documentary, and figured if a documentary said something, then it must be true. So I believed all those prophecies, UFO and cryptozoology documentaries that even back then were all over the History Channel and the Discovery Channel. These prophecy shows are hilarious to watch now because of how wrong they turned out to be, but at the time, they filled me with angst about the future. In particular, the segment (about an hour and ten minutes in) about the Mayan prophecy insisted that on December 21, 2012, all of our technology will come to life and try to kill us. It happened to the Mayans, and it will happen to us next. “Imagine all of your household appliances getting a mind of their own, and deciding they don’t like you.” is the quote I remember. Images filled my mind of my Sega Genesis coming to life and trying to strangle me with its controller wires. I have never heard anyone else interpret the prophecy this way. Luckily, nothing happened. And I’ve learned not to believe everything claiming to be a “documentary “.
 

Leap Castle and “IT” - Castle Ghosts of Ireland

I saved the scariest for last. In the mid-1990s there was a speculative documentary series called Castle Ghosts, which discussed various ghost stories from castles around Ireland and the United Kingdom. The Ireland episode was the one that I never forgot. I only saw it once when it first aired, but when I finally saw it again almost twenty years later on YouTube, I remembered it perfectly. The first half of the episode is your typical spooky ghost documentary that’s not really scary. A World War I soldier haunts a castle he grew up in, a worker who died in an accident on the job haunts another castle. Eh. 

At about 34 minutes in, things go downhill fast, when they start talking about banshees. The screams in the documentary always creeped me out. But then, they discuss Leap Castle, one of the most screwed up, cursed locations on Earth. Here they discovered an oubliette in the wall. You might have heard the term oubliette from the movie Labyrinth. Real oubliettes were just deep pits with a big spike at the bottom. They threw you in to get impaled on the spike and bleed to death, and forgot about you. If you missed the spike, then you got to starve to death atop a pile of corpses and skeletons. It’s mentioned that when they finally cleaned out the oubliettes sometime in the early 1900s, long after they’d fallen out of use, they had to remove tons of bones and it took wheel barrel after wheel barrel to get them all out. Fun! Now if that had been all they said, that would have been enough. But no, there was a ghost involved. All of that collective negative energy from the people thrown into the oubliette manifested itself into an elemental ghost known only as “It”. (No relation to Pennywise the Clown.) It isn’t a proper ghost, just a being created by negativity. A tulpa, if you will. A woman in the castle once turned around and saw It, which looked like a rotting corpse with maggots in its eye sockets. They show this in the documentary as a dramatization, zooming in on the maggoty eye sockets. This scared the living hell out of me as a kid. More than anything else on this list. I would worry that It was in my closet or something. 

Anyway, that’s my list. There were probably more, but these stand out the most to me. What were some things that freaked you out as a kid, hm? You can tell me on Facebook, or write your own list.