I've written to you about this one before (in your 5Live guise):



Return to Oz - the Disney-made sequel to Wizard of Oz. It came out in the summer of 1985 (when I was 5 years old) and I found it utterly terrifying.



It features:



1. An evil witch who can swap heads and keeps spares in glass cabinets

2. A desert that will turn you instantly to sand if you so much as touch it (think this might be why I dislike beach holidays).

3. An evil 'Rock' king who can turn you into antique furniture (no, really)



but, most terrifyingly of all:



4. The Wheelers: evil henchmen with Wheels for feet!



I don't even think I saw the end of this one because I recall being taken from the cinema bawling - oddly, this also happened with harmless comedy "Teen Wolf" as well...



It was definitely quite a dark film regardless. Still gives me the heebie-jeebies thinking about it now ...(shivers)

Sorry, the wheelers has wheels for hands as well as feet (Even more terrifying!)



Oh, and can I just say ... first?

I remember 'Return to Oz'. I too saw it at young age and was taken back by how dark it was, but I've always been a horror fan and seemingly desensitized at a very young age.



With both parents at work 9 to 5, I spent a lot of time with my grand parents. My grand father introduced me to a lot of classics such as 'Alien', Hammer Horror, and (probably the only film to REALLY scare me) 'Jaws'. Not strictly a horror film, but I've frequently been scared of the water over the years.



Always loved my grand father for introducing me to such greatness, this was early years of school, and 'Jaws' is my earliest film memory.



I've always had a soft spot for horror, and went through a phase of watching all the slasher movies of the 80s and 90s in my early teens such as 'Nightmare on Elm Street' and its cheesy sequels (having said that, I still think 3 is my favourite). Sorry I'm rambling.

I recall watching a film ,unfortunately i don't remember the title, where a guy was trapped in a tunnel( or sewers) and he was being chased by people with no heads ,while they were making a weird screaming voice.

I only saw that scene and it pretty much haunted my entire childhood..

I used to have dreams of beheaded people chasing me....I'm the exact opposite of Dr.K,i'm scared sh**** of horror movies,even light thrillers.

throw some religious diabolic stuff inside and its guaranteed i won't get any sleep.

I didn't really watch much scary stuff as a child. Like most children in the seventies I had to watch "Doctor Who" from behind the sofa then had nightmares. I also recall getting terrified by a film called "Grizzly" when I was nine or ten... I don't remember much about it apart from that it featured a bear killing people in the woods; obviously the producers wanting to cash in on the dangerous animal craze that followed "Jaws".

One of my favourite progs as a kid was 'Trap Door' which was about a monster in a castle and stuff. Actually kind of grotesque in a really enjoyable way. The Ghostbusters cartoon had a lot of fantastic monsters/demons which as a kid I greatly enjoyed but haven't been able to see since then.



When it comes to writing kid's horror, Neil Gaiman I believe to be the current undisputed champ of the world. Coraline the novel was excellent (the film was a good adaptation) but the Graveyard Book is truly wonderful. Kind of akin to the Jungle Book with added macabre goodness. Although not a horror, Philip Pullman's 'Northern Lights' had some very horrific moments in it.



Horror does feature in children's fiction, and is nothing new.

Surely that should be Hay, Hay Let's Gay?



(lyrically speaking, of course)

Well, I saw James Cameron's ALIENS at the age of seven, (yes, that's right) during a stay-over at a friends place. Couldn't understand a word of what anyone was saying (didn't speak any Enlish back then) which probably made the movie even scarier, but visually, the story was pretty clear to me from scene one. The slimy, spidery aliens were genuinely uncanny and believable, (in those good ol' pre-CGI days), and thus, I found myself really rooting for "the woman" and "the girl". To this day, ALIENS holds a special place in my kind and utterly uncorrupted heart, as it is still probably the greatest film experience I've ever had. Couldn't go to sleep that night and been a fan of horror films ever since.



P. S. Oh, and THE ADDAMS FAMILY was pretty scary too...

ah, that should be English. It appears I still haven't mastered it...

I didn't like horror films when I was younger but I do remember the scariest film I saw as a kid was The Medusa Touch with Richard Burton. No idea why it freaked me out so much.

I am an avid horror fan, aged 18 and lucky enough to have a family of film enthusiasts who, often taped a host of films and left those tapes carelessly lying around.

But anyway the films I most fondly remember which probably paved the way for my love of horror are: "Alien" and "Aliens", "Night/Dawn/Day of the dead", "Salem's Lot", "The Texas chainsaw massacre" and other such things including the hilarious "Maximum Overdrive".

However the one film which had the biggest effect on me was John Carpenter's "The Thing" which I saw aged 10 or so. After which I began watching all the horror films I could, from "Army of Darkness" to "Zombi 2" and beyond.

The horror genre in my opinion the most enjoyable and entertaining form of escapism.

Such an Influence is evident in a short film I made. Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwadU5m-btQ

I'm with you on return to oz. as a child in the 80s. I saw many horror films. Including some of the video nastys. But the one movie that gave me nightmares was return to oz. Dorothy having eletric shock theraphy, the wheelers, the yellow brick road being smashed to pieses, people turning into sand, and the headless witch. A really underrated childrens movie.

Totally agree with the above posts about 'Return To Oz' - the Wheelers (and pretty much everything else about the film) are terrifying. It's amazing the difference it makes when the Scarecrow doesn't have a human face, but has a big pumpkin for a head instead. The entire film is filled with menace and threat. Everything is ugly and dead or deserted. Compared to 'The Wizard of Oz' in which almost everything is beautiful and soft focus - it was like a horribly detailed and realistic nightmare.



Two other terrifying films I saw as a child - Roald Dahl's The Witches and Disney's Pinocchio. 'THEY DON'T COME BACK AS BOYS!'

For me, a love of horror seems almost genetic as I was fascinated by all things arcane and uncanny from as long as I can remember (I was barely out of toddlerhood and I was already fixated on cemeteries). I wonder if the seed was planted by religion--all those early images of beheadings, stonings, floodings, and of course...crucifixions. I'll bet Gibson and Scorsese had their imaginations captured in the same way--no doubt some of their later gruesome film imagery was first worked out in a church pew.



While I had many horror influences, I can pinpoint one source which had a profound effect my particular tastes. That was Roald Dahl's short story 'The Swan'. The story of two loutish bullies who torment a sensitive young boy at gunpoint was the first work of art to convey to my young mind that there was real evil in the world, and that that evil sometimes goes unpunished. The story's final images will be forever imprinted on my mind's eye, and have given me a specific taste for the melancholy and darkly beautiful. If any of you have not read this story I strongly suggest that you seek it out (I think you can find it in 'The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More').

Ha! Finally able to post after correcting my email address and finalising my account!



As a kid I loved horror films. I used to get them from a now, long gone video shop called Newro Video...the only film the man in there wouldn't let me have was The Exorcist which was still banned at the time.



I did however see a documentary either about the film or about horror in general that showed clips from it, and can remember being quite haunted by them at night.



I seen everything else as a child really...all the Hellraiser, Nightmare on Elm Street & Poltergeist series, Witch Board, Dawn of the Dead...



While at times being creeped out by these films (especially the first Nightmare on Elm Street - Michael Bay should be shot) none of them affected me quite as deeply as the scene in Never Ending Story where the horse gets pulled into a swamp or quick sand or whatever it was and dies in front of you...that was really messed up

My earliest memory of being terrified was watching a children's weekly serial back in 1971. It was called The Boy From Space (I think) and was part of an educational programme helping kids to read. The bad guy was called The Thin Man and he really freaked me out.

As far as cinema goes, I remember seeing Don't Look Now and The Wicker Man on telly like most people my age do. However, the film that really scared me was The Naked Prey, directed by and starring Cornel Wilde. Two moments in that film have stayed with me. One is the sight of people walking in and out of an eviserated elephant carrying organs to eat, and the other is of a man being plastered with mud and then roasted on a fire. I was under ten years old when I saw this film and it was incredibly shocking. I have recently rewatched it and think it deserves wider recognition, and I still think it's pretty intense stuff. Nobody else (except Mel Gibson) seems to have seen this film which is odd...Recommended!

Many of my early film memories came from waking up painfully early on cold sunday mornings and watching whatever video had been left in the player from the previous night while my parents slumbered unbeknownst. I think was about ten when I first chanced a glimpse of Aliens, back when the arresting effects of Giger's singular creature hadn't been regrettably denatured by overexposure and degraded by lackluster sequels.



At the time I never owned the cassette and therefore wasn't afforded the comfort of endlessly re-watching the images until every scene was safely overfamiliar and every fright became predictable, and so from then on the dark corners of my childhood bedroom would no longer be inhabited by benevolent trumpeting BFG's but vague dark biomechanical forms that had my infant self hurtling down the shadowed corridors of my house to get to the bathroom and back without getting eaten. It's the stuff obsessions are made off and I'm grateful for them.



However that's grown up material. For scary children's films I don't think anything was as quite as frightening as the screamingly brutal, inhuman vocalizations heard in the robot transformation scene in Superman 3 (1983). Watch it again and it's hard not to view it as simply badly judged for a kids film. "Bring back Gus Gorman", wept the children.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuSsSwg9MXs



And lastly hard to forget the Wood Beast sequence in the campy 1980's version of Flash Gordon.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPmLUUmS6W0



As a child that really did make me feel like a "pathetic earthling".

Yeah, somebody tweeted 'Whats Komode doing here, he dosen't like anything'. I pointed out that you liked The Exocist

When I was a kid, some 30 years back now, I remember seeing two cartoons back-2-back on a number of occasions... they were "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle"... "Rip Van Winkle" particularly haunted my imagination... wow, would I love to see them again!

I was never allowed to watch any horrorfilms from my mother.It is a great pity. I did however manage (without my mother's permission) to see Jurassic Park at the age of 5-6 and loving it. The scariest thing I remember seeing as a child was The Sorcerer's Apprentice in Fantasia. I was a lot more creeped out by those walking broomsticks than by dinosaurs tearing men apart.

... and nice ellipsis as the end of the vid Mark... reminds me of the time

My brother had a poster for The Howling that scared the bejesus out of me when I was a kid. My mother made him take it down after 3 days because I kept having nightmares (having seen the film only recently I was surprised how tame it actually was). Dr Phibes was another that I was terrified of, even though I was never allowed to watch it, the description of events put the fear in me. But the thing that scared me the most was the chainsaw scene in Scarface, I think I was 11 when I saw that and it has never left me.

The first time I remember being scared at the cinema was when my parents took me and my cousins to see Snow white and the Seven Dwarfs. I was terrified by the wicked witch as she is creating the poisoned apple and cackling all the while.



I assumed it was just my childlike imagination and my memory of the scene was worse than the scene actually was. So having watched it as an adult I am quite amazed to see some of the things that are in that scene. The crow standing on a skull and look out through it's empty eye sockets, the skeleton of a prisoner still reaching out for a jug of water placed just out of reach, the dripping skull forming on the apple as it's dipped in the posion and the witch going on about snow white being buried alive. No wonder I was scared at watching it at aged six.



The first proper horror film I watched was on TV, sitting at home with my mum at aged fourteen, we settled down to watch Jaws. I spent most of the time curled up in the chair with my knees tucked up against my chest. That was the position I found where it was impossible to jump out of my skin. The music in Jaws is without doubt the best cinematic mood music of all time, it signposts every scare in the film, you know it coming but that increase in tension from the portent of doom music makes the scares worse. Right from the first time you hear that music in the opening scene of the girl swimming at night, struggling and screaming as she's repeatedly pulled under the film still scares me and always will.

The Witch in Snow White that was so frightening I darted out of my seat ran straight up the cinema aisle in total fear, into the foyer and almost out on to the street with several adults hot on my heels which leads me on to......the Child catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang............be afraid.....be very afraid........;-)

Quatermass & A for Andromeda - UK tv series. Had me checking behind doors for years afterwards.

@rourkesdrifter - I remember standing and peering over the back of the seat infront as I watched Snow White. Then ducking behind the seat at the scary bits. My mum tells me that at one point I was sat on the floor with my back to the screen asking her why they had brought me to see bad people.

When I was 8 or 9, the film I remember scaring the hell out of me was Tim Burton's 'Mars Attacks!'. While I didn't get the satire of it at the time, I was still creeped out by these big-brained martians and even came up with a contingency plan for when they would come to Earth.



However, despite being terrified, I was also more facinated, and it was one of my favourite films at the time (my sister, who is about the same age as me, is still scared by it).

I'm a big fan of horror now but as a child I seemed to be scared by everything. I'd say one of my early memories of being terrified was watching Dougal and the Blue Cat on vhs, it had a strange nightmarish quality to it which has stayed with me ever since. It was like David Lynch had taken over children's TV.

I was born in the mid 80s and I grew up on a healthy diet of horror, fantasy and sci-fi that my dad loved so much. He got me started on things such as Hammer horror and Ray Harryhausen epics but the thing that frightened me the most was Ridley Scott's Alien. I was 4 years old. I love you Dad!

<RICHPOST>@17: Just throw in Star Wars, Superman 1 and the title sequence to "The Good, The Bad and the Ugly" and we essentially had the same childhood! Videos, as in video tapes (as opposed to DVDs) helped make me who I am, probably in the way that books made previous generations and presumably DVDs and the web will for the next...<BR /><BR />Okay the quality could be a bit variable, the sound was awful and they sometimes got chewed up, but I like the clunky, mechanical artifact of the VHS tape. There's something about the fact that the scenes are readily accessible and repeatable, but only linearly through rewind and fast forward - no skipping straight to the scene via the menus- that delivers gratification and repeated experiences but not without some effort. <BR /><br><BR />The 'Lady gets turned into robot' scene in Superman 3 still makes me a bit quivery, so much so I'm not going to click on the link you've provided! The odd thing about the scene is how much it jars with the campy tone of the rest of the film, particularly the utterly pathetic scene with the missiles, where Robert Wagner defends his secret base from the most invincible being in the universe by... playing a really crude side-scrolling shoot-em-up? <BR /><BR />As for Aliens, my older sister watched that (she would still have been underage at the time) but I was too afraid to watch it with her. Unfortunately I remember that, for some reason (curiosity probably), I ventured into the living room just at the point where Bishop is being attacked by the queen alien. Now, given that I had no idea of the plot or the context of that scene (in particular I didn't realise his character wasn't human) I just saw a man being ripped in half and it really, really frightened me for months afterwards. I guess the certification was there for a reason...</RICHPOST>

Mark, I would like to add to the other comments about Return to Oz. It was the first horror film I can remember seeing. My parents must have thought it was a sequel to the 1939 classic and plonked me down in front of it to keep me quiet one afternoon. But it scared the living daylights out of me.



This was no colourful kids film; it starts with Dorothy being placed in a mental institution and given electro-shock therapy. She is rescued by a pumpkin-headed scarecrow who I found to be even more scary than the wheelers themselves. It was incredibly dark and disturbing. I don't remember crying though, perhaps I was just too terrified for that. I think I watched it to the end although I haven't seen it since. I'm considering picking up the DVD for nostalgia's sakes; I would like to know what you think of the film.

I actualy sat down and watched The Wicker Man with my dad when i was 9 or 10 he was a bit of a film fan so that now has a special place in my heart and i am most likley the only person who smiles when the credits roll because i can remeber peering from behind my hands when the wicker man went up.

Oh i remember being scared kiteless by the ghost of christmas yet to come in an 80's version of a christmas carol. I seem to recall Scrooge getting taken to hell where everything was frozen. . .

...said that Herzog's Nic Cage vehicle is a completely pointless, overrated and inferior retread of Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant.



Charlie's brother, Andrew, was my Early British Cinema tutor at the University of East Anglia.

As a young child I was lucky enough to have a group of friends that were much older than me. This meant that I had access to horror films, when other children my age did not...this not only made me 'cool' but also a fear junkie. I remember the first horror film that I saw was 'Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday'. I was around 6 or 7 at the time and I loved it (watched it recently and it isn't quite the brilliant film that I remember). I went on to watch many of the classic horror films my favorite being 'The Evil Dead 2'. Nothing however could quite prepare me for the Bruce Lee poster that my Grandma gave me a couple of years later. His eyes followed me around the room and I couldn't sleep until I eventually moved it into my shed. It really was my first experience of horror!



(My first time on the blog, looks great, I'm a big Dr K fan and will be posting on here a lot in the future)

I was and still am crazy about books and by the time I was seven I was already reading every horror novel I could get my hands on. I spent a ridiculous amount of time at the library, renting books eight or nine at a time and polishing off a good stack of books each week, everything from trashy teen gore novels to short story compilations to the classics - I remember reading a lot of Christopher Pike, a lot of Mary Downing Hahn and a LOT of Lovecraft. My mom was really into flea markets and, just being happy her kids were reading SOMETHING, would pick up literally boxes full of secondhand Poe and King and Barker for us, so there was always something new around the house to read.

The Goosebumps series was a huge fad for a while in grade school and most of the kids in my class collected the books like baseball cards; it seemed like, for the longest time, every day there would be groups of kids conferencing at the back of the school bus or on the playgrounds swapping books and trying to make deals with one another. I think I ended up with fifty of them myself before it lost it's interest. The books themselves were never even remotely frightening but I ate them up anyway.



Movies were a bit more strict in our household, though for some reason most classic horror always got the greenlight. Being a little kid, I thought stuff like Night of the Living Dead was boring, but we had The Abominable Dr. Phibes and House of Wax on VHS and I watched those almost nonstop until the sad day that the tape finally had enough and committed suicide inside of our home VCR during the eleven-thousandth viewing. I also remember the video store having aisles and aisles of horror titles with freaky-looking covers that I would study and then go home and write fully-illustrated stories about, which I would give to the parents to read. Sometimes they would even get pinned to the refrigerator. God knows what happened to them after that, they're probably still sitting in a box somewhere in the basement.



Two movies that absolutely traumatized me were Poltergeist, which I saw at a friend's house, and - no kidding - Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Bear in mind that I was only three when that movie first came out, but everything about Judge Doom terrified me and I would literally run out of the room any time that movie was on. I also remember smuggling home The Exorcist to watch when I was ten and, coming from a religious upbringing, spending the next long week in sleepless cold sweats convinced that Satan was coming to get me.



That's tip of the iceberg. But needless to say I was a very healthy, well-adjusted child.



Apologies for the long post. And yes, changing the age of the characters from 14 to 16 is petty and ridiculous and probably changes the shape of the story. There's a huge difference between those two years.

By the time I scrolled through to the end most of my childhood bugbears

had already been listed.



The child catcher form Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is right up there with

the wicked witch from Snow White and Fanatasia (which also had scary dinosaurs, by the way). Jon Pertwee's Doctor Who series was quite scary because I was of an age where I couldnt appreciate the flimsiness of the scenery and costumes.



I saw Forbidden Planet as a child and was quite scared by that because the "monster" was apparently without form. How do you defeat something like that?



I was an adult by the time Lord of the Rings was made into a film but the earlier animated version had scary versions of the dark riders (also known as the nazgul, ringwraiths, nine riders etc).



Also some of those Star Trek original series were quite scary for a kid. I remember particularly "Where No Man Has Gone Before" where helmsman Gary Mitchell starts to develop super human powers and the rest of the crew grow to fear him as his powers grow and eventually have to kill him breaking the rule that people that start out as good crew members (and aren't incidental members of a landing party) don't die.

@Joel: Absolutely agree about the VHS comment. Maybe it's just rose-tinted nostalgia but there is something about the rough quality of them that still appeals to me and I have literally hundreds of the things stacked away in my closet that I inherited from the family and can't bear to throw out!

I thought that ET was terrifying. I can't explain it but I genuinely had more nightmares about that friendly extra terrestrial than I did about the Alien films.



Arachnophobia made me afraid to switch any lamp on or off for a few months due to one particular scene. And obviously it made me afraid of Julian Sands.



Mainly it was horror films about the supernatural that scared me, many of which have been mentioned by others. Watching Goodfellas was my introduction to a different type of horror. I didn't have nightmares about Joe Pesci (they didn't begin until after I saw his dyed hair in Lethal Weapon) but I distinctly remember a prickly sweat forming on seeing those famous scenes.



A lot of TV for children is scary. Simon Davies mentioned The Boy From Space. I was at primary school in the 1990's but I'm sure I remember seeing that. I definitely remember the series it was part of (Look And Read) and I think there was something very similar in a series called You Can Read that featured a terrifying alien encounter all in the name of education. At least one of the two traumatised me.



I was quite young when I first watched the, then, three Wallace & Gromit shorts. Having watched them at any opportunity since, I've enjoyed them in different ways as I've aged. Now it's the warm and subtle humour that is most gratifying but as a child it was the incredibly sinister and even outright scary villains that were the main attraction. It's a rare thing to be able to see something as a child and to enjoy it as much as an adult for more than just nostalgic reasons and it makes me a little sad that I won't be able to see anything through a child's eyes again.



This is a good topic. It's nice to read about everyone seeing films at far too young an age, with horror films that's always the best way.

Citv's Knightmare had some creepy moments, as I recall; Lord Fear looking at 'you' with demonic eyes when he realizes Treguard's team of adventurers is spying on him, the giant tarantula Ariagni (I think) and her arrival motif, and the dreaded Goblins slowly but surely gaining ground on the contestant with horn-herald.

The first time I was honestly scared by something as a child, was when in one school assembly we were read a book. It was called 'The Tailypo: A Ghost Story' by Joanne and Paul Galdone. The basic premise is that a hunter is out doing what hunter's do, hunting for something to eat and he stumbles across a strange cat-lik ecreature with a long tail. He tries to kill it with his axe but only cuts off the tail. He takes it home and eats it. The hunter is then haunted by this creature at every turn, and a voice saying "Tailypo,Tailypo, give me back my Tailypo". The last scene is the now scared hunter sat up in bed with a giant cat with huge claws leaping on to him and eventually getting it's Tailypo back.

I used to tell this story to my younger sister (I was 8, she was 4), and it used to scare her to death. A couple of years ago, I thought I'd hunt that book down, to see if it was still that scary. It was, and to my surprise it was recommended reading for ages 4-8 years old. My sister received the book, aged 18 as a Christmas present.

@Amber: On constantly watching and re-watching videos - My sister's friend apparently watched the film "Annie" every day for several years until the tape either eventually gave out or the parents destroyed it in a fit of desperation (not sure which, although I suspect the latter).



Where does that come from, that desire to re-experience the same emotions and sensations over and over again? What was the analogue for previous generations : Re-reading books? Do kids still do this with DVDs?



Regarding lurid video covers, I remember being freaked out by seeing the video cover for The Stuff on a low shelf in the local video shop (see here for the cover). I never knew what the plot was exactly but the green face and terror in the eyes gave me chills. On reflection, I must have been a very nervous child! :-)

@Amber



I can also remember being simultaneously terrified and fascinated by WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT? as a child. That movie is pure paradigm-porn (in the best possible way). Not only did it feature cartoon characters next to actual human beings, but the 'toons were also from completely different shows! Somehow that cross-over element made it even more bizarre then the fact that all of them were interacting with the real humans. Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny in the same frame, talking to each other? Even as I kid I understood that this must be something very special.



And Judge Doom was just... really scary. The very definition of uncanny, if you know what I mean.

The thing which terrified me the most when I was a kid was when I was about 10 I saw the last episode of Twin Peaks. I got around to watching all of Twin Peaks around 10 or so years later.



Still terrified by the Black Lodge. Just writing those two words almost brings back the terror of the small man speaking backwards!



Probably explains why I love David Lynch so much.... Such a shame he makes so few films....

@Andy Goth and Antimode lets form a vigilante group to rid the world of childhood horror's......we could call ourselves ASHEN (Adults Still Have Extreme Nightmares)....Which brings me on to the old Saturday night double bill on BBC2 and secretly switching on the portable TV in my room and watching The Fall of the House of Usher with the late great Vincent Price whilst trying to stop the light from shining under the door.....Now as a kid that blew my mind!

I was always too scared of the horror genre as a child and never really watched a horror movie from start to finish until I was at least ten. I do, however, have two really early horror movie memories from two horror classics that I always thought was the same film. One is the little girl getting stuck in the TV set in Poltergeist and the other is that iconic scene in The Shining where little Danny runs into the twin girls while he's biking through the corridors.



Those two short snippets of horror were enough for me not to watch any more of either film for many, many years, yet there was always a pull in that horror. I specifically remember my brother having a pirated VHS tape of Terminator, which I watched more times than I care to count, followed by Evil Dead II. The title itself was enough for me to know that this was something I didn't really want to see, but still, I kind of did want to. I started watching it many times, and the intro was scary enough for a young boy, but the one thing that always got to me was that really tall bridge they cross. It was just too tall, and at that point I knew something was wrong, a bridge shouldn't be that high up! I could never go beyond this point.



It all goes to show how much mood and feel matter in horror and how much good a touch of surrealism can do for it, especially with a child watching. But, one has to wonder, what would my reaction have been if I'd seen more of Evil Dead II. Trauma? I was one of those kids who had nightmares from watching 'Are You Afraid of the Dark', and now I'm an avid horror fan, who just so happens to think Evil Dead II is comedy gold. Funny how things change.

I wouldn't really count myself as a horror fan

However, some of the "Point Horror" series of books left a pretty lasting impression on me at a young age (about 9-12). Especially one short story in which I remember someone being burn alive in a car.



Never did me any harm...

I am a 30 year old man and i consider myself to be a bit of a film buff but I have to admit that horror is the genre I'm the least knowledgable of.

Whereas many film fans would have discovered the illicit thrill of shock and gore during their teenage years, i would shy away freddie, jason and all the other slasher heroes my playground chums would idolise. This is because one film had such a profoundly shocking effect on me that it scared me away from an entire genre for years....

'The Lost Boys'

I'm embarrased to admit this in public but at the tender age of 7 or 8, my older brother and cousin sat down to watch this and I whinged at them to let me join them......

Two hours later I was a jaded burnt out husk of my former self. For months after I'd lie awake at night, genuinely believing that kiefer sutherland and his pals were hovering outside my window at night, fangs at the ready while I quivered under my duvet, any gust of wind or creak of a branch heard outside would turn my imagination into a paranoid mess of pre pubescent fear.

It was a good decade before I tested the waters of horror again and to my surprise, guess what?, horror films don't scare me. I've watched and admired many horror classics (Romero's Dead series, Hammer, Halloween, The Shining, Don't Look Now and er... that one from the seventies, you know, with the priests and the little girl posessed by satan... sorry, the name escapes me.) but none of them scare me. I wonder if I have built up an immunity to cinematic fear by bypassing horror at the age that we are most likely to be affected by it. As a grown man I have sat down to watch these aforementioned 'chillers' and, although admiring many aspects of these films, the edge of my seat has remained untroubled.

Incidentally, a few years back I revisited The Lost Boys, possibly to, in some way exorcise my demons (pun, of course, intended) and was again frozen in an emotional state that i could'nt control, only this time it was'nt fear, it was laughter.

I, too, as a youngster was scared of Mars Attacks! The scenes of vaporization were incredibly disturbing to me at the time.

Yeah first of all, I agree that changing the age of the kids from 14 to 16 makes quite a difference, especially if the book is aimed at people under 14.

As for scary movies I watched as a kid, Watership Down has haunted me ever since. In the first 5 minutes theres a sun made from blood spitting arrows, scores of rabbits killed by dogs and weasels, and an evil flying black rabbit! I love horror films, but I still havnt dared watch watership down again. It freaks me out.

I watched Peter Jacksons Bad Taste as well quite young, and although it was scary, I certainly found it funny too, what with brains being eaten with spoons and exploding sheep and all that. I actually only recently re-discovered the identity of this film, following years of asking people "whats that film with aliens and a flying house and cliff tops and brains, lots of blood, and an exploding sheep?" from which I got many a confused glare.

Jan Svankmajer's 'Neco z Alenky', or 'ALICE' is one movie that I saw as a small child that really stuck in my mind. The rabbit with the stuffing falling out, the socks as worms in the floor, and Alice going down the rabbit hole/ desk drawer are images that remain with me to this day. Although I had somehow changed the scene of the rabbit hole so that when she goes into the drawer, she is pulled in instead by tons of knives, forks and scissors (that one drop of blood she gets from the compass obviously having a big effect on my 5 year old self!)







As for Return to Oz, I'm gonna have to add my voice to the ever increasing sound of whimpering from scarred adults and say it was one of the scariest movies I ever saw as a kid. And yet I kept renting it out. I was a strange child.

A woman who has a plethora of decapitated heads of beautiful women, putting them on with the same ease as you would put a pair of shoes...

The desert that turns you into sand when you touch it.

And... the wheelers. I have watched a fair few horror movies (obviously not half as much as the Kermode) yet they are the things that still truly unsettle me.

@EstonianFilmFan: Oh, it's so nice not to be alone. I agree, it's such a surreal movie even now... but that part at the end, when the Judge gets flattened by the steamroller? Then he uses the air cylinder to blow himself back up and his eyeballs pop out of his head to reveal the BIG RED CRAZY EYES under them and his voice goes all high-pitched and REMEMBER MEEEEEEE EDDIIIIIEEEEE???



No. That is not a children's movie. That is nightmare fuel. (:





@Joel: The Stuff! Yeah, I remember seeing that one on the shelf for years, then finally getting to watch it and being so disappointed by the actual movie. I also was fascinated by the covers for Squirm, Creepshow, Dolls and especially Slaughter High, whose cover focused on a skeleton wearing a graduation cap and a pair of rad 80's sunglasses... I thought he was the main character.



I miss VHS covers. Most of the time they were better than or even completely unrelated the actual movie they were advertising for, but the amount of detail put into the better ones produced a lot of amazing artwork.

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is a magical musical extravaganza, right? Wrong!

Somewhere between the intense poverty suffered by the Bucket family at the beginning of the film and the wanton disposal of children in inventive ways once they're inside the factory, there's an entirely random and haunting sequence.

As Wonka and co sail through a tunnel, red and green lights illuminate the chocolatier's face, much to everyone's consternation. What does Gene Wilder do to soothe the target audience's anxiety? He starts SCREAMING.

Lovely children's entertainment- it's telling that Tim Burton entirely toned down the equivalent scene in his remake.

Mark mentioned walking trees in the video. I too used to find them terrifying when I were a lad! But speaking of trees what I found really scary when I was young was "The Singing, Ringing Tree!". I used to hide behind the sofa when the dwarf appeared from under the bridge, I recently watched it again and still find it creepy for some strange reason...

I have to agree, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was - and is - terrifying. I was haunted by the witch for many years after seeing that film. I was taken out of the cinema from a screening of live-action Disney film The Watcher In The Wood, which even now, I would probably avoid watching if it was on. I've only ever met one other person who's even heard of it, but it had a blindfolded girl trapped in mirrors.

If Bob from Twin Peaks were to walk in the room right now, I would probably run screaming.

To echo alot of other statements my brother and I used to the love the 3 first 3 Alien films but strangely I wasn't hugely probably the most emotionally scaring horror moments of my childhood were the Tooms episodes of the X Files and the reveal of Two Face on the Warner Bros Batman cartoon series

I was only very young growing up in the early 90's when I was subjected to IT The Clown (1990). That film more than any other tapped into my worst fears as a youngster. A character with so many vibrant colours, could be so evil, which I'll be honest scared the living daylights out of me. But there is a great irony, which is a clown is part of child's upbringing and so the book and TV movie both tapped into my worst fears, and put me off clowns for a long long time. The sad thing is now I look back and its just a poorly acted and shoddy made TV movie. So age is of course important when dealing with people's fears and anxieties.

It's gotta be Salem's Lot for me. The image of Danny Glick appearing at his brother's window and scratching on the glass still haunts me even now. It may seem cheesey to others but it still strikes the fear of God in me!

I also accidentally saw a movie called Don't be afraid of the Dark, a 1973 movie stary Kim Darby. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069992/ absolutely terrifying. I vividly remeber the final scene where she is dragged through some air vent by the creatures...just horrible. I can't walk past a vent like that without dragging up memories of that movie.

I also remember my local video store having a video nasty section that was a bit too within reach of children my age! The covers on some of the films used to terrify and fascinate me in equal measure. One in particular sticks in my mind, the cover to Driller Killer. I remember looking at it each time I went into the store and wondering just what was inside this partucular case, but also being very scared.

I also remember a really horrible movie called Blood Beach that I saw at a friends sleepover party; one would think that it is a very poor B movie horror now but at the time it made me scared to go on any sand! A bit like you with Return to Oz @Peter Dawson!

Last but not least reading Stephen King's IT. My God those first few chapters where Georgie Denborough is chasing his paper boat along the gutter in the rain, to his imminent death scared the s**t out of me. I couldn't read the rest of the book for months, I had to put it in another room away from me. I eventually picked it up and read the whole thing but those images still haunt me to this day. What a writer!

Gotta back you up again @Peter Dawson. I think Jaws has a profound effect on everyone that sees it, particularly if you watch it at a young age. As I recall it only had an A classification which meant that it was passed for all but was a bit scarier than a U. Staggering when you think about it, I don't think that it would happen today.

I was so terrified by that movie I was even scared to go to the loo! hehe!

Now, however it is probably my most favourite movie ever and I watch it regularly, getting something new from it every time! Just wonderful!

Also forgot to mention Misty... a fantastic horror comic published for girls in the 70s and 80s. Comics for girls, up until that point were so boring filled with horse stories, boarding school stories, dull as ditchwater. Then along came Misty with it's twisted stories of evil schoolgirls, ghosts, possessions, totally refreshing and more than a little bit scary! I picked up the first issue and got my mum to buy it for me and was completely hooked, putting it on order at my local corner shop. I still have my collection to this day.

Incidentally I would echo Mark's comment on availability of movies etc. Back in the day it wasn't easy to view horror movies if you were young...it always seemed like a rather 'naughty' task to try and get to see them. Sneaking down late at night or watching at a friends house made it all the more dark and dangerous which adds to the fear factor. You're watching something that your not supposed to be watching.

Nowadays you can pretty much see whatever you like. My daughters are already on the road to being horror fans with their favourite shows being Buffy and Supernatural. I would encourage it too as horror remains one of the most imaginative anf exciting genres there is.

When I was 10 I found two tapes at the home of a friend: Brain Dead and Evil Dead II. I loved both of these and found them hilarious (Still do) and soon moved on to Bad Taste and the original Evil Dead.

The latter one scared me to the edge of being sent to Shutter Island.

I still view the first Evil Dead as more of a horror film than comedy.

I frequently stayed up late on a friday evening when I was a nipper - as my mum was out working so I had control over what I watched. And strangely the most interesting things on late at night on a Friday was the 'Continental Movie'. Generally myself and any other lad at school with access to a tv watched these on the off chance that there would be some French sauciness or general weirdness - but our desire for sauce led to us watching Truffaut and Buñuel at the age of 11 or 12(on ITV!). But the scariest film I saw was La cabina (1972) - a short film about a man trapped in a telephone box. Not horror but horrifying. He couldn't get out of the telephone box, it was like being buried alive. I don't want to spoil it, but it doesn't end happily. I don't remember seeing much gore on the telly as that and swearing got cut but Mary Whitehouse didn't speak French and she went to bed early on Friday night so The Continental Movie slot could get away with anything (though I suspect even at the tv station they didn't watch them, they just put on the next film in the pile).

I wasn't into horror at all when i was a child, im not even sure i knew about the genre at all but there were definatly certain things in kids movies that used to scare me that may sound silly now but as the good Dr has said in the past, kids understand horror and trajady and darkness just as much as adults if not more so. So some bits i recall are the shot in 'The lion King' when simba is left in that gorge alone and all those cattle come stampeeding towards him and the shot zooms upto simbas face and his ears go down and his eyes and mouth open in shock and the shadow kreeps over his face and the tribal roar sound clips playes in gave me a chill. Also things like the witch in 'Snow white' and Christopher Lloyd as judge doom in 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit'. The shooting and forest fire scenes in 'Bambi'. I think the first horror films i saw were the jeppers creepers films which i think will always stick with me weather people agree or not because i was around 10-11 when i saw those and used to dream of much more fritening versions of the creeper monster back then. Having watched both creeper film agin recently i don't think you can deny that they are well made and are actually scary compared to just the torture porn of today. One thing i didn't know about the films is that they were executive produced by ford coppla, weather that means anything i dunno but just thought i'd throw that in there

Hay Mark, when it comes to Horror I have always been a complete wimp, still to this day, I cannot watch them without over analyse them when I'm in my bed that night, sending my imagination into orbit, terrifying myself as I delve into the psychology of the whole thing.

When I think back to my childhood, there are one or two that stand out alright, bits that can only be described as traumatising, memories that still to this day send shivers down my spine.

There is the bit in IT when the old woman goes down to pick up broken cup, there was the moment when Michael Myers pulls that homeless guys head off in Halloween but it was when I saw my own father playing an innocent farmer with a pregnant wife getting eaten in a low budget Irish horror movie called Rawhead Rex that I finally found, aged 4, the most terrifying televisual experience of my childhood. I found my demon and his name was Rawhead.

Growing up in the early 80s I can vividly remember three things scaring me senseless - on TV it was the Tripods and The Box of Delights (which featured wolves chasing after children). In film it was the end of Land of the Pharaohs, when the tomb seals and fills with sand leaving Joan Collins trapped in a room with a load of tongueless slaves as she screams 'I don't want to die' - very disturbing for a four year old!

As a kid I found Toms Midnight Garden really quite creepy, whilst not scary as such there was something unsettling (but also enjoyable) about ghost children meeting at night in the grounds of a Victorian garden.



My first introduction to adult horror was a film my Mum taped and allowed me to watch called Halloween III: Season of the Witch, when I was about 12. In Hindsight this was a big mistake as it terrified me and put me off serious horror for many years, all throughout High School I avoided the Nightmare On Elm Street and Chucky films that my friends were watching.



As someone has already mentioned above, Stephen Kings IT which was on channel 4 in the Nineties, scary but enjoyable and helped in my horror rehabilitation.



I'd also like to echo that of the Person who mentioned Goodfellas. I was about 13 or 14 and had a TV in my bedroom and remember channel hopping late at night and stumbling into the pistol whipping scene, I felt sick and quickly changed channels. I then later turned back to Channel 4 only to see Joe Pesci stabbing someone to death in the boot of a car, I quickly switched channels for the last time that night. I can't say whether I was scared or horrified or frightened or just repulsed, all I know is that I hated what I'd just seen, the funny thing is that Goodfellas is now one of my favourite films and must have watched it 50 times.

I was certainly a horror fan as a kid, less so now. Early memories of stuff that really scared me was seeing Children of the Corn at a ridiculously young age (parents had rented it, I believe). Also had many a sleepless night due to various Hammer Horrors, and I also recall the original TV adaptation of The Day of the Triffids in the early 80s, as being particularly frightening.



I was also very much enthralled by the works of Roald Dahl and loved the darkness of books like The Witches and the BFG. Later in my teens I moved on to read James Herbert's novels.

I got into a cinema Cronenberg double-bill of "Shivers" and "Rabid" a few years before I should have - and wimped out after "Shivers".



The sick feeling in the pit of my stomach during the scene when the doctor murders the girl was the first, and so far only, time that I have felt truly physically ill in the cinema.



I would imagine that most people have passed this sort of milestone moment in their lives - after which things are never quite the same again.



(The only time I have felt this since was when I witnessed a real full-on suicide marching in front of a speeding express - and having a pile of his large intestine land 2 feet away.)

As i'm 15, i still count myself as a kid, and i enjoy quite of lot of horror fiction. Stephen King is a big favourite of mine, though my favourite books, and film adaptations of him are his non horror stories. darren shan is also a good horror writer, though i've heard the film adaptation of his Cirque de freake series was awful. Read some Neil Gaiman, some Sandman, and am now halfway through American Gods, which i am anjoying, but i'm not quite sure whether it is horror, fantasy or another genre entirely. Maybe thats the mahic of his writing.



On to films now. One of my favourites is The original Nightmare on Elm Street. Although it looks a bit dated now, the story is still intruiging and there are still some sequences that i can watch and still find scary. When i watched it originally when i was 9, i was completely terified of it. A few more that i like are: THe sixth sense, Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, 28 Days later and An American Werewolf in London. The main one that i was disappointed in was The Shining. Just had a felling of "meh" the whole film.

Reminding me of all the old VHS covers around, the one for the first 'It's Alive' (tagline "Save your screams until you see it's face") always used to creep me out. Eventually saw the movie - and realised that the poster was SO much better.



And there was another VHS horror tape that seems to crop up everywhere called "The Love Butcher", which I'm sure was a load of old tosh.

OK, I'm carbondating myself now. The most horrifying image I saw in a movie as a kid was the morlocks in the original The Time Machine. I recently rewatched this with my nephews (7 & 4) and they recognised the morlocks for what they are - actors in bad costumes. Looking at it as an adult I can see what they are - actors in bad costumes. My nephews, having been exposed to more sophisticated stuff than I was as a child, can see them for what they are - actors in bad costumes. When I was 10 years old they were the scariest creatures I'd ever seen.



Another scene that absolutely horrified me as a child was the "locked up with coffins" scene in the musical of Oliver. Oliver was seriously one of the most traumatic movies I ever watched as a child. What genius came up with the idea to present the heartwarming story of an orphan starved and then sold into slavery, only to escape into the clutches of a den of thieves and then befriend a prostitute who is murdered by her pimp who is then killed by an angry mob? And then set it to music? Oliver, the musical, is without a doubt, the most horrifying and traumatic movie I ever watched as a child. How anyone could consider this to be suitable content for children to watch is beyond me.

Your question on watching horror as a child reminded me of a wonderful time either in the late 70's or very early eighties when I was 12 or so. BBC2 had a Saturday night horror double bill, the first being a black and white classic, the later a lurid colour, frequently hammer horror. I preferred the spookier black and whites as the acting and sets/photography were much better, presumably as the budgets were higher. They were also generally more scary. I do, however, remember being terrified for weeks after watching a colour horror called "buried alive". I'm scared just thinking about it and probably this is a good time to make certain in my will that burial is a no go. PS a better suggestion for a comment to make by the listener passing the pirates of the caribbean 4 set would be " forgive them Lord, for they know not what they do". Cheers and I love the show. Pete

The best horror BOOK that I've read is THE SHINING.



A much, much better work then that silly Kubrick movie.

I have been watching horror movies since the age of around four and rarely does a film scare me, the most profound experience I have had as a child with a film was with The Exorcist on two occasions.



The first time I came in contact with The Exorcist was when I was eight years old when I visited an uncle who had a really old, really dodgy quality rental copy from somewhere (it was in that old big early eighties Warner Brothers rental box) and I watched the first twenty minutes of it before I was told I had to turn it off. I wasn't so much scared but creeped out, the dodgy picture and sound quality added to the general creepiness of the film, it felt like I was watching something forbidden, which I was as The Exorcist was banned in Ireland at the time.



The second time was when The Exorcist was officially released in the cinema when the ban was lifted around ten years ago. This time the print was absolutely gorgeous and the sound quality pristine, but seeing that film on the big screen and in it's entirety for the first time really shook me, I had never seen anything like it and had never had such a great experience in the cinema since watching Dolph Lundgren in Masters of the Universe when I was four years old back in 1987.



I guess my love of horror comes from those sneaky screenings I had as a child of films like The Exorcist, Halloween, Death Wish 2, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday The 13th Part 3D, etc. Me and my friends would have sleep-overs and stay up all night watching these movies and it was a great part of my childhood I remember fondly. Contrary to what censors believe, watching those movies as a kid didn't turn me into a monster, it turned me into a film critic. Kevin Smith may say there is no difference...

who framed roger rabbit probably scared me most as a kid. i never got to see that much in the way of horror films, as my parents tended to keep an eye on what i watched. it also terrified me that you never saw the kids come back in willy wonka and the chocolate factory.



all that said, when i was younger and we were in america, i managed to find some crappy film called 'mikey' about a kid who brutally murders his family, this was on tv at about 2pm.



i'd also like to bring attention to the cartoon, the ren and stimpy show, which used to confuse and scare me a great deal, but to this day i still find it one of the best things that's ever been on tv.

from what I remember as a child most children's fairytale films were terrifying, but that is what children's stories should be about. telling them that there is darkness in the world and it will scare you, but there is also light. children can handle a lot more then adults think they can.

Not a horror film really, or even probably even considered remotely scary by anyone...but Vigo the Carpathian from Ghostbusters II still gives me nightmares to this day.

Most of the terror during my childhood was from cinema and a mild schizophrenia in real life, and really intense dreams. The one cinematic experience that has disturbed me more than any other would probably be Disney's The Black Hole. There's one scene where Maximillian Schell was floating above some hellish vortex and comes across Maximillian, the red shelled automaton with the blender blades for hands, and infuses himself with the robot. After Schell's transformation, I was always terrified of the succeeding sequence where he turns around in the robot's suit and through the robot's visor we could see Schell's eyes illuminated in dark crimson that stared back at the audience. To this day, I am still unsettled by red human eyes in anything. Another film that freaked me out was The Secret of Nimh, particularly the flashback sequence when they were doing experimentation on lab rice. But, what's strange, is I was never scared of horror titans like Jason, Freddy Kruger, or Michael Myers, but more of the subtle horrors that weren't that scary to begin with.

From the dark ages, I remember being terrified listening to 'Journey into Space' on the radio when I was a little girl and then tried not to think about it as I walked upstairs to the bedroom where dark shapes loomed at me when the light went off!

Well I'm quite young ( only 18 years old, turning 19 later this year) so Horror films were already on the rapid decline as I was growing up. But that doesn't mean I couldn't enjoy the fantastic films that came before I. I remember sitting in front of what I then thought was a incredibly huge television in my grandmother's living room, playing with a Tonka truck. Don't know if Tonka was ever popular in the Uk, but it was a construction truck toy and you could store all your action figures in it and drive it about. I had to be no more than 5 or 6 years old and the Halloween commercial came on and completely took hold of my attention.



The interesting thing about it was that I don't remember it being for the newer films or at that time "Curse of Michael Myers" which is Halloween 6 I believe. It was footage of the original Halloween. I remember the image of Jamie Lee Curtis lying against the side of the bedroom door frame as the Shape lifted himself from the dead and turned towards her. That image stayed in my head forever and ever since then I actively sought out things that terrified me. Halloween has since become my fourth favorite film of all time and I've seen it countless amount of times. Wes Craven's New Nightmare was another film that I discovered as a child via commercial. I was 4 years old and the television spots would air and there was that shot of Robert Englund's scary mug mouthing the words "Miss Me?" as he climbed through the laundry shoot. Or was it a ventilation system? I don't remember.



Horror films are the best as a kid. The world is oh so new to you and these films are your first kind of introduction to the cruelty the world can deliver and it's all so fascinating. It's frightening but it's incredibly intriguing and it gets your blood flowing in ways that you've never had before as a kid. I'll always cherish those days in my room around late October, where the then USA network would play all the Halloween movies. I would watch them in terror, loving every second of it.



Sorry for the long post. I actually did a blog post on Horror for my website, which attracted some attention from folks in the industry. Though I doubt they'll really listen lol. If you get bored Dr. K

https://romanmfrance.com/2010/06/01/scaretactics/

When I was 13 my dad was dying of a brain tumour. On the night of his death, we stayed in a hospice playroom with my dad's bed in the corner and a television in the other. That night we couldn't get to sleep so we watched a broadcast of George Romero's The Night of the Living Dead.



Both me and my brother we so exited when we watched it that (I know it sounds trite), for that time our minds were diverted from my dad dying at the other side of the room. That not only started my love affair with horror, but also with films. Horror has always got me out of the worst of times. I still prefer going to the cinema than going to bar, and I'm now a student.



Also, as a child I remember watching Pinocchio and being terrified about the transformation from boy to donkey if you were naughty. The other donkeys (or boys) being packed up in boxes with one crying out, "I want to go home to my mama" made me never want to smoke.

Way before I ever saw The Exorcist I remember my brother having the paperback novel with this cover

For some reason I found it very disturbing, maybe it was the creepy, blurry image of a face, or the fact that all the "grown ups" in my life were talking about the negativity surrounding the release of the movie, that somehow made me believe that this book was evil in some way!

When the day (or rather late night) came when I had the chance to actually see the movie, I remember a feeling of utter fear in the pit of my stomach that somehow this movie will cause me to be possessed in some way. Crazy, I know, but fear as a child is profound and stays with you for the rest of your life.

From the age of twelve i have been watching horror movies I have been enjoying them ever since. I think the first one was 'Hatchet for the honeymoon' and i used to rent a few VHS tapes every weekend. Nothing bad came out of this .

I do have to say though that a friend of mine who watched around the same age 'The exorcist' had a severe reaction to the movie and had to seek counceling

I guess it depands on the person

I'll never forget the first time I watched "Raiders of the Lost Ark" as a child. During the final scenes I froze to the spot in utter terror at the sight of melting human faces. The film was rated PG!



A few years later my mum decided to let me watch Robert Wise's "The Haunting" and from the creeping opening to the frantic climactic scenes I was absolutely horrified. I genuinely think it's the most scared I have been and will ever be in a film.



On a more light-hearted note, I have a very fond memory of being aged 15 and watching the Evil Dead trilogy back to back on VHS with a close friend. I watched the cut version of the first film and thought that the "tree-rape" scene was admirably restrained; the following year I watched the uncut dvd and sat stunned at the difference a few shots can make!

Hi Dr K,



I loved horror as a kid. I used to read the Goosebumps books by RL Stine a lot, but they didn't really creep me out. I remember my dad used to read me books by Alan Garner though and they really got to me. watched a lot of horror kids TV programmes like "Are You Afraid of the dark?" and the peerless "Demon Headmaster".



In terms of "Rupert the bear" specific moments, there are three that stand out, though I can't remember the exact title of one of them. The first is "Earthfasts" a tv programme about a ghost soldier and a weird stone circle, that I didn't finish watching it scared me so much (I was about 6 at the time!), the second was some programme about a weird house and a storm with supernatural elements that was on about the same time (specifically a scene of someone sleepwalking on the roof), and the third was an episode of a show called "Frighteners" about flesh eating fairies which this boy captures and is eventually eaten by.



In terms of cinema, my earliest memory of being scared was "Jurassic Park". I was 5 when it came out and obsessed with dinosaurs so, although it was a PG, my mum decided to take me to see it. I thought it was amazing and that trip remains one of my greatest cinema memories, but the raptors scared the hell out of me and I didn't sleep for a week!



What really got me into horror though is that Channel 4 would show a lot of old Hammer and Amicus films late at night, and my grandad used to video them and we'd watch them when I stayed over at my grandparents.

firstly, i really like charlie higson's 'kiss kiss bang bang' back in the late 90's



being of a certain age, i used to watch horror films when VCR's were first available from my local video shop( i was far too young to rent them, so my mum used to do it!) saw a lot of the banned stuff and romero's films



TV wise, 'threads' scared the **** out of everyone as did 'salems lot' there used to be a late night double bill on bbc2 which showed horror/sci-fi every saturday night, 'la cabina' was shown on this

As far as I can remember horror films and books have always been a part of my life. The first two horror films I remember watching were Jaws ( is this a horror film?) and John Carpenter's Halloween.



For me Jaws wasn't a particularly scary, but I still get a little unnerved when I'm swimming. However, with Halloween, the scariest moment for me was the opening titles which had the pumpkin close up with the Carpenter's original score. I couldn't sleep for days because that score was playing in my head and was scaring the life out of me.



Other horror films I remember watching as a child, such as Carpenter's The Thing, Poltergeist, and Romero's Night/Dawn/Day had an effect on me; but I wasn't frightened by these.



Things that did scare me when I was younger were Susan Hill's 'Woman in Black (the book and the ITV adaptation), and the BBC's Ghostwatch. I watched Ghostwatch again this week and I still think it is the most scariest thing I have seen.



Great blog again Doctor!

Did anybody else read the Scary Stories books as a kid? The stories weren't much to sniff at, mostly they were one or two brief paragraphs regurgitating classics like The Ghostly Hitchhiker and The Bride in the Attic, but the illustrations by Stephen Gammell were incredibly scary. I still have all three of them sitting on the bookshelf next to my computer desk, but when I was little I used to make the parents keep them in their room when I wasn't reading them because the pictures gave me nightmares. They're still some of the most consistently banned and challenged books in my home-state, which sadly doesn't surprise me.



This picture in particular really got to me:



https://img100.imageshack.us/img100/9085/sc33bu8.jpg



I picked up Where the Buffaloes Begin for my little niece a few months ago and have to say that even when he isn't working in horror, Gammell's illustrations still make me uneasy.

I adore Horror and I always have, I'm 20 now but I've watched Horror movies for years.



However, when I was about 4, I saw a glimpse of 'Suspiria' that scared the living daylights of of me. I saw the scene with the blind man who walks into a village square with his guide dog.

Never before have I ever ran away from the TV that fast in my life.

I've never been a fan of horror but having read most of these it has certainly bought back a lot of childhood memories. Simon Davis, I remember The Boy From Space and watching it at school - scared me half to death but because I was watching it at school I had to put a brave face on.

A lot of people have commented on "Return to Oz" and I can certainly see why. I was too old when that came out for it to affect me but a certain 8 year old that I know still hides when she watches the part with the wheelers.

During school lunchtimes I remember sneeking round to a friends and watching Evil Dead in the 80's when it was banned. It really scared me as it was the first thing I had seen like that - I've seen it a few times since and love it.

Yes, Doctor Who scared me - I remember one episode where a man pulled off his face and he was a green monster underneath - I had nightmares for weeks after that.

Chocky was another tv frightener.

On the whole Charlie Higson/Book thing - of course it makes a difference about the age difference. Anthony Horrowitz's teenage spy Alex Rider is 14 and because of this he is a boy, not a young adult with all the trappings of late pubescence. Charlie knows this and I presume this is why he has made the age 14.

Keep up the great blogs Dr K.

I remember snippets of The Wall from very early on in my childhood. At the time I didn't have a clue who Pink Floyd were but the animation scared the hell out of me. As the years past the memory of the film gradually faded and it wasn't until I became a fan of Floyd in my teenage years and I got it on DVD that I realised, "Hey! I've seen this before and it terrifying."



My first real cinema scare was when I went to see Jurassic Park when I was six. During the first T-Rex attack I remember being so frightened that I jumped down from the chair to cower behind the seat, and in the process, managed to toss my coke over the two people sat behind me. If you are reading this and were drenched in coke by a terrified little boy during a screening of Jurassic Park in 1993, then I apologise.

@Amber

That illo is creepy but there is also something quite beautiful about it; maybe it's the quality of the drawing...Something about the face reminds me of the illos for 'When the Wind Blows' by Raymond Briggs, particularly when the old couple start to show the effects of radiation sickness.

Now that's a scary story; sad too. Very much representative of it's time; I'm sure I remember my parents getting a leaflet telling them to use a door as a shelter if there was a nuclear attack; pathetic when you think about it!

It's funny you should mention the good old Rupert the Bear Annuals as I remember a particular frame in a Rupert Annual where a small, leprechaun-like figure with black rabbit-type ears was peeking out from behind a hedge.

He was all the more scary because of his crooked smile and wide eyes plus the scene was so green and friendly I'd try not to look at this character peeking from behind the hedge when I read it!





As for the most scariest moment of my film watching youth I have to go back to Watership Down and a particular scene where a rabbit called Cowslip (voiced by Denholm Elliot) invites Fiver and co into his den.



The scene has an underlying sense of fear as even though nothing actually happens you get a sense of death and decay. Also you get a sense by Cowslip limping that he's been a victim of some kind of violence. Elliot's voice is incredibly creepy too as it echoes around the empty warren. That scene still works today - for kids movie it's pretty scary!

I'm really enjoying reading this thread, it's also interseting to see the diversity of people posting on here. Where in the 'real' world would all these age groups get together to discuss movies? It's fab!

I reckon this one will go over 100 posts!

It did not take much to scare me as a child (or even now as an adult). The scariest things are when normal every day things turn out to be not what they seem. Those twilight zone and other show of that ilk where household appliances go crazy and people got killed by their blenders or a seemingly peaceful lake turns out to have some sort of killer liquid thing that swallows up teenagers out on a raft. My earliest memory is actually of the Disney cartoon Snow White and how absolutely terrified I was when the witched created the poison apples that looked so normal.

@RussiansEatBambi66: although I havnt seen Watership Down in years, I seem to remeber that every scene suggested death and decay. I remember feeling a sense of dread the whole way through...



@OllieSim, I had the exact same thing with Pinocchio! The donkey transformation has haunted me, I remember the donkey children playing pool which particularly chills me for some reason! And it also made me never want to smoke



Im glad I watched such scary movies when I was younger though, if nothing else it gave me an appreciation for horror movies

Im sure I've seen other horror movies before the age of 14 but at that age I witnessed The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, alone on Channel 4 at half 2 in the morning, after I had watched american football into those early hours. Needless to say, the moment when leatherface makes his first appearance ending with the scraping, slam of his metal door was utterly terrifying, a moment which had me gripped but unable to leave the room for a very good while after it had finished.

re. stipeysullivan - good call! la cabina is an excellent short, sadly i never seen it as a child but yes the end is extra special=]

@Marge:



"I'm really enjoying reading this thread, it's also interseting to see the diversity of people posting on here. Where in the 'real' world would all these age groups get together to discuss movies? It's fab!"



Agreed, it's absolutely wonderful!



Regarding When the Wind Blows, sadly the graphic novel seems to have slipped my notice but it would be safe to say that both the film adaptation of that as well as Threads both had a profound impact on me at a young age. I'm somewhat ashamed to admit that a viewing of either one of them now can still reduce me to pieces on even the best day. Horrors like that never lose their effect, it seems.



Makes Duck and Cover seem kind of naive, doesn't it?

My earliest proper horror memory is seeing FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN when I was 14 and being transfixed by the sight of Udo Kier's liver on the end of a spear. Even in 2D, it was an electrifying moment - and this film stands as the best thing Tonino Guerra ever wrote.

It's interesting to note, reading back across these comments, that Roald Dahl seems to have been a entree to horror for many here. I was enraptured by Dahl from about age 10 - he and Tim Burton were probably the two biggest gateway drugs to Hammer, Craven, Karloff et al that I encountered.



On another note, I'm 20 years old and rather depressed to note that I've yet to see a great, proper horror film in the cinema. The closest I've come is SHUTTER ISLAND, which is undeniably great, but not a true blood and guts supernatural horror. This is a sad commentary on the state of horror cinema - perhaps Guillermo Del Toro's proprosed remake of BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN will rectify this.