Do you remember your first scary movie? Did you watch it at a friend's house (perhaps even sneak it in somehow)? I can't quite remember the first scary movie I watched, but I do remember it was either a scene from Poltergeist or Nightmare on Elm St. Both times, I did my best opossum routine before sneaking out into the living room to see what everyone was up to. Both exposed me to some things I probably shouldn't have seen, and one still contributes to my fear of clowns. Do you dare rent your first scary movie tonight?
I haven't been bold enough to try and watch either of those movies again. If I did, I probably wouldn't find them so scary — being instead distracted by the dated and cheesy effects. But maybe not. There was something elemental in those films in that they both really tapped into common phobias and fears. Maybe my clown phobia (which I feel like I have a handle on) would creep right back in — and cause me to check under the bed before sleeping. Maybe I'd have a hard time falling asleep for fear of Freddie Krueger. Where these films really well done or did I just get exposed to them at too early of an age?
I was having dinner with a group of friends this weekend and we all talked about our first scary movie experience. Most of us, like myself, were too young for them at the time and a lot of us were weary about watching them again too — would it bring back suppressed fears?
Here's a list of some of those memorable scary movies, in case you dare to watch one tonight. Heck, even the trailers for them can be a bit haunting.
Poltergiest
Nightmare on Elm Street
The Omen
Friday the 13th
The Shining
The Ring
Halloween
Pet Cemetery
Cujo
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My first time being terrified at a movie was Bambi, and the second was the Wizard of Oz. I'm not much better now.
I don't remember ... though I do remember one of my cousins reading parts of "Salem's Lot" to me. I was about 7 or 8 at the time.
I remember being afraid of the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz, haha
As far as I can remember the first one I saw on TV was A Nightmare on Elm Street, which is still my favorite. The first one I saw on VHS was either Child's Play or Puppet Master 2, similar theme. The first one I saw in the theater was Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. I've had a lifelong love of horror movies, but I can't really remember what started it.
I'd seen plenty of scary movies on TV as a young kid; but it wasn't until I went to a matinee alone at 14 to see "Prophecy", a movie about toxic mutant forest animals attacking and sometimes eating various folks including young campers, -that I couldn't sleep for days, and could not enjoy my first trip to Yosemite because of the raccoons...
I remember watching a black and white horror movie on T.V. with my sister when I was about 6 or 7. I can't remember the name but I remember the 'ghoul' was bald and had very long fingers. Playing up his shadow what was scary. But it never bothered me as a kid. In fact, I remember going to the bathroom and washing my face in cold water so I wouldn't fall asleep during the movie.
I still love horror movies to this day but they don't make them like they use to. My old time favorite is Physco with Anthony Perkins. My new favorite is 30 Days of Night. I hated the Exorcise..now that did scare me and I think I was in my late teens when I saw it.
ET scared the crap out of me (still does).
Pet Cemetery. Ugh.
'The Exorcist'. Scared the living s-t out of me then (I was about 8 - clearly not the right age to see it) and still scares me now.
Well, I'm probably the oldest person on this comment thread because I remember watching The Creature from the Black Lagoon on TV in black and white in the '60s and that REALLY scared me!
When I started going to the movies with friends, I think it was The Omen that took me over the edge...
I remember watching American Werewolf in London. I was MUCH too young to understand that it isn't actually a scary movie. I made it through the first werewolf attack and didn't sleep for MONTHS!
My dad was in A LOT of trouble :)
I love horror movies. I honestly don't remember being scared by any when I was a kid. @LyonStill I think you might be talking about Nosferatu, one of the oldest movies filmed in 1922. Classic. What I hate are the gore-fest movies. Like the Saw ones. Just gross for the sake of being gross. But they don't scare me, they just disgust me. My boyfriend's scary childhood movie was the Exorcist and it still freaks him out. Honestly, I think it's kind of funny and ridiculous.
What did scare me as a kid was a David Copperfield televised magic trick. But not the trick itself. He demonstrated what he was going to do with an artists mannequin and that thing with no face freaked me out to the core for some reason. Now I own two of them.
I saw Poltergeist and Pet Cemetery at sleep overs, so I was a bit older. When I was really little I remember being terrified of The Dark Crystal. The Skeksis freaked me out. They still kind of do, but it's a great movie.
I can't remember which I saw first, The Exorcist or The Shining. Both equally terrifying when you're 10 and under. But I do remember the family sitting and watching The Exorcist and the TV blowing! That was spooky to say the least!
It would have to be Stephen King's "IT". We (ahem) "rented" it last night, but it just didn't have the same punch that I remember. Tonight we're trying People Under the Stairs.
The Amityville Horror. My babysitter (stupidly) let me watch it when I was six. She also was not bright enough to keep an eye on the time so she could shut it off when my parents were expected home. The movie did not frighten me, but my mother sure terrified the babysitter when she saw what I was watching - it was the scene with blood pouring out of the walls ;P
The blob
When I was a kid I saw the Disney movie Watcher in the Woods, I think it starred Bette Davis. Pretty dark and cult-y for a Disney movie! Anyone else remember that movie?
YES Andie. ET was the first movie I watched that truly scared me. I still will not watch it.
The Birds. I watched on TV with my mom. I started out sitting in a chair; finished up curled up next to her on the couch. A few years ago, while vacationing in California, I purposely filled the car up in Bodega Bay - without incident.
Answer 1: Children of the Corn
Answer 2: No freakin' way.
The first "horror" movie I saw was probably Poltergeist. But that didn't bother me at all.
Now, Steven King's It, and the sequel. Saw those two with a stroke of genius with a couple of girls in middle school at a sleep over. We thought it'd be cool to watch them at midnight.
You can be damn sure, I'm never seeing those movies again! lol
The Exorcist at about 10 yrs old and I've never been the same. I still can't watch that movie.plus I still can't do horror or supernatural movies.
@HeidiJoe - Watcher's in the Woods scared me as a kid and honestly I never got over it. You will find zero decorative mirrors in my house because of that movie!
I remember the first truly scary movie I saw was the original War of the Worlds. It was the metallic humming sounds of the Martian spaceships along with their ray blast sounds turning people into skeletons that gave me nightmares.
The Haunting with Julie Harris, Clair Bloom, Richard Johnson and Russ Tamblyn, made in 1963, not that wretched 1999 remake with Liam Neeson, Lili Taylor, Owen Wilson and Katherine Zeta-Jones. Woo! Read the book (by Shirley Jackson) see the movie.
Saw lots of classic horror on TV (Lugosi, Karloff and awesome Hammer Studios movies) when I was a kid - loved it.
What sticks in my memory is my high school best friend inviting me over to help chaperone her 11yr old brother's slumber party. They were going to rent Monty Python & the Holy Grail (one of my faves). I got there and she said the video store was out of MP so they got The Texas Chainsaw Massacre instead. INSTEAD? What the what?
I had no idea what I was in for. /shudder
LYNELL: Yup, I think you are right.
1) The tornado scene in The Wizard of Oz did it for me--I was about 4, so this was long before the devastationg 1965 storms--they were a nightmare come true.
2) Not even at gunpoint.
Alien - I was 8 years old and saw it in the theatres. Hooked on scary movies ever since.
Oh, we'll it's a bit dated and cheesy now but I recorded Blair Witch and Shining. After Sandy I may have had my fill of scary for the season though.
1967's Wait Until Dark with Audrey Hepburn and Alan Arkin. No creatures, ghosts, or special effects. Just sheer "someone's in the house!" terror.
The first time I remember being terrified by a movie was when I was about 6 and wandered in on my Grandpa watching V, the scene where the woman delivers the baby and it's a lizard thing and sticks its tongue out. Wouldn't sleep with my teddy bear for MONTHS. I'm 29 and my dad still teases me about it, especially when they had the new tv series recently. My bear could have been a lizard monster ok??!!
The first time I was scared as a "grown up" was watching Blair Witch Project at 14 or 15. High school friend and I watched it late at night, all the lights off, and ended up clutching each other for dear life for the last half hour of the movie. When it got to the scene with the guy standing in the corner of the basement, we couldn't stand it anymore and frantically turned it off. Realized the next morning that that was basically the end of the movie :-P Those types of "real" movies still are the worst as Paranormal Activity scared the crap out of me too.
I saw planet of the apes when I was about ten. As a resident of NYC, the ending scared me to no end!
Wasp Woman, a 1959 b&w horror tale was my first scary movie. A cosmetics exec discovers a substance taken from wasps offers eternal youth. Well, she used too much and turned into a wasp. When she appeared on the TV screen in a wasp get-up, five year-old me shrieked and ran from the room. Google "wasp woman" to see that image. I couldn't sleep for weeks. I rented the movie a few years ago and it proved to be laughable, of course, but children have no context and everything seems real.
I don't know the name of my adult scary movie. It was set in a summer camp and one of the counselors was lying on a cot and all of a sudden, an arm flung up from under the cot pinning the counselor's head to the cot and something pointy was forced through his neck from under the cot. Ack! I left the room and I don't want to see that again.
Yes! I totally remember that one...well, vague recollections that I used to find it pretty darn scary. I think I remember a scene where the old lady pushes one of the girls in a stream or something with a big branch?
My grade 4 school journal went a little something like this:
Me - I watched Poltergeist last night.
My teacher responds- Are you allowed to watch scary movies like that?
Me - Yes, I watched it with my parents.
I'm 32 now and I was at party with some old friends, who I hadn't seen in a long time, and what they remembered of me all these years laterwas that my parents were the ones that let us watch the scary movies.
I remember watcher in the woods. If you can believe it, they showed it at school as a 'halloween activity' - creepy, creepy, creepy!
i've been watching horror my whole life. can't possibly remember the first. it was likely aired as a weeknight special in the mid-70s. i am old enough to have seen the series "kolchak: the nightstalker" but not old enough to remember it at all. horror movies are wonderful. (torture movies are abominable.)
someone mentioned a sequel to stephen king's "it." there is no sequel. the movie was a two-part miniseries. the book is about 1100 pages of riveting mythos. there's no sequel to that either.
Could it have been nosferatu? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Schreck.jpg
Could it have been nosferatu? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Schreck.jpg
The Lady in White, where the kid gets locked in the coat closet at school overnight and sees a ghost girl re-enact her murder. So scary in 6th grade! Did watch it again not long ago and it wasn't a bad movie actually.
I'm a wuss and everyone who knows me, knows this. Somehow, and I don't know why, I began watching The Ring, all alone, in my apartment. My brother happened to call and I confessed what I was up to. He laughed and told me he didn't think that was a good movie for me. After we hung up, he called my Uncle and had him prank me with the whole "7 days" bit. Mean!
Friday the 13th part 6. I was 8 or 9, it was the '80s, and I watched it with my best friend and my sisters during a slumber party. I remember a scene where Jason was just going crazy killing these teenagers in a cabin, I mean, they were already dead and he was still going at it. That movie scared the CRAP out of me.
I WILL watch it again, only because I just found out that Tony Goldwyn was in it and I love him on Scandal.
Easy. It was the Ten Commandments.
Rent it TONIGHT? And let that bearded creep BACK into my nightmares???
Nooooooooooo.
The first horror movie I ever saw was Child's Play. I think I was around 3. I actually had a good guy doll even so it was a bit trippy. However now days I LOVE horror movies. I own all of the Child's Play movies. I haven't been scared or even jumped at a horror movie in over 17 years. But I still love them if not to laugh at how many times movies tend to kill the same person over and over in the same scene.
I don't know, possum, I remember The Boy With the Green Hair scaring the living daylights out of me on TV in the early 60s. Was that even a horror movie? My brothers & sisters forced me to watch it. I have always hated horror movies.
My (older) cousins made me watch Piranha and it scared the crap outta me. They also made me watch Red Dawn, which was ever scarier, because then I was afraid of a nuclear holocaust. Come to think of it, they were horrible babysitters.
A REALLY mean babysitter took me to see JAWS when I was four...Traumatized me but it is now one of my very favorites.
Scary movies were definitely forbidden fruit in my household as my mom hated them. As a result, two of the three kids are hardcore horror fanatics.
I used to watch silly monster movies from the 50s as a small kid but don't remember being scared, per se. But I remember the first time a movie image really frightened me and that image still haunts my dreams. I tried to track down the movie a few years ago (exorcism by exposure) and thought I had, but when I watched it, it wasn't the film I was looking for.
It was a black and white early 60s film. As I recall, the plot is basically young girls go to visit the creepy uncle of one of the girls who lives in a castle with a basement laboratory. Not a good idea. The friend of the niece disappears and the climatic scene shows the lab. The girl's head is in a box, all wired up but alive, and the mad scientist uncle says "Emma, move your arms," and then we see a wall of arms all wired up, which all flex back and forth in unison, along with other body parts and creepy things in jars. That whole image/concept freaked me the hell out and I never truly got over it.
But hey I still love scary movies. I watched FOUR yesterday. Of course I didn't sleep very well.
Poltergeist. When it first came out on LaserDisc, which tells you exactly how old I am. And no, I wouldn't watch it again, or any horror movie, for that matter...the downside to having a very strong visual memory is that any horror scene I'm exposed to is in there for good.
I cannot believe no one mentioned 'Carrie'. I was about 7-8 and it scared the hell out of me. I remained traumatised until I saw it again, when I was 26. 'The Exorcist' I tried to watch when I was 19 and I could not. Just the music creeps me, I cannot stand it.
The best horror movie ever made was the Exorcist. The story, the acting and the cinematography has never been matched. It is almost hypnotic. As an adult it no longer scares me but I believe it is still the scariest movie ever made.
My recommendation for the best horror on TV was Discovery Channel's A Haunting series. I believe it ran for four years and were true story reenactments of mostly very negative, evil or demonic hauntings. The narrator's voice was very powerful in creating and expressing the mood and the horror of each episode. It's a real shame the series was cancelled as it was so much better than what is on TV now. The only other show that comes close at times is Paranormal Witness, except there is no haunting narration.