Ding dong, you're dead - the first fright
Everyone has one. The childhood memory of the scary movie that haunted you for nights to come.
It doesn't even have to be something as blood-curdlingly graphic as Nightmare on Elm Street or the old theme tune to Dr Who. One of the first horror films I saw was a crappy B-movie comedy-horror called House (made in 1986), which starred the Greatest American Hero, William Katt, as a Vietnam vet and horror novelist who moves into a haunted house (naturally, since authors are said to write what they know ...).
With the brilliant tagline "Ding dong, you're dead" (they don't write 'em like that anymore), House certainly left an impression on me. Here's a trailer for House - dig those amazing special effects - and here's an extra cheesy promo trailer for it, I especially liked the voiceover announcement: "now in production in Hollywood... (dramatic pause) ... and Hell". It's now a cult favourite and even has the precursor to those hideous singing fish wall-plaque thingummies that were everywhere a few years ago - only in marlin form...)
I don't remember much about House's plot (I even forgot it had George Wendt in it) except for a scene involving a scary severed hand being flushed down the toilet. For years afterwards, I felt the need to check the toilet for stray severed hands... funny how these things stay with you.
Sometimes it doesn't even have to be a horror film. My Dad remembers being terrified when he was litttle by the wicked witch in Walt Disney's Snow White.
My big sister was frightened by the faceless people in an episode of the spooky Brit sci-fi series Sapphire and Steel.
So the Halloweeny question of the day is:
What was the film that first scared the bejeezus out of you when you were little?
(Or not so little...)
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Pennywise from It. specifically the bit with him standing on the side of the road with the balloons.
chucky
IT by Stephen King! The clown in the drain that ate kids was pretty creepy.
Back then during the 80's, it was a Saturday night and I watching the Sci-Fi/Horror film Them! with my brother. It was filmed in 1954 and of course, it was black and white.
I couldn't have been more than 5 years old at the time but damn, it was very scary watching all those giant mutant ants gobbling up the unfortunate ones. It look rather silly now but as a child, I wanted to close my eyes.
Later that night long after the film has finished, I didn't slept very well!!
I remember watching IT when I was 5 on video.....couldn't walk past drains for a while haha - may have to have an old school horror movie weekend methinks
Beetlejuice. Only movie I can ever remember giving me nightmares.
None of the slasher-type films frightened me, but always found the Omen fims pretty scary, still shudder thinking of the man stuck under ice banging away at it before disappearing downstream...
Vividly remember watching Stephen King's IT when I was about 8 or 9. My firiend and I thought we were so cool 'cos the muppet teenager at the local video store didn't even look at the R16 (R13?) sticker before letting us have it... Didn't sleep for aaaaaages.
Still scares me, even though, objectively, I recognise it's not _that_ scary a movie. But Tim Curry, in Clown makeup, in a stormwater drain and that line "They all _float_"?????? Gah.
The Wizard of Oz.
I have never seen it all the way through and will never see it all the way through. I was about 6 when I walked out of a showing of this movie in the black and white bit when the woman on a push-bike turned into a witch. Probably ties in with my childhood trauma of storms.
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OMG - "House" was my first Horror too! I must have been about 12, and it was played on the "Friday Horrors". I had to videotape it because I wasn't allowed up that late... The scene with him flushing that mutilated hand down the loo had me freaked for years!!!! Everytime I sat down on a loo, I was scared a hand was going to jump up and grab my bum!