A TV showing last night of a horror film I saw years ago as a kid prompted me to write this thread about horror movies that scared you when you were younger and your reactions to them now.

The film I saw last night was the Canadian horror film THE GATE (1987) which I first caught on video as a kid. I remember finding this one totally scary (especially the part with the hands reaching out from under the bed to grab the kids along with the zombies of the dead workman falling out of the wall.

Seeing it now, its a pleasant and entertaining film but not remotely scary. Its creepier before all hell breaks loose with creepy shots of the smoke-belching pit but Randall William Cook's stop-motion creatures are quaint (though they do move more smoothly than David Allen's stuff) but they're more cute than horrific (even the big one). The zombie workman is well designed but not well-employed beyond his first shock appearance. The visual effects are good but the rendition of hell on earth doesn't really raise any shivers. The hidden messages played backwards on heavy metal records was old stuff even back them. The super-saturated blue lighting is more MTV than atmospheric and Michael Hoenig and J. Peter Robinson's score is not as effective as some of their individual works.

Still, the three leads (including a young Stephen Dorff) are engaging and the supporting teenagers less annoying than usual.

LionsGate apparently owns the rights to this one now (judging by the closed captioning info before the end credits) but I think the only R1 DVD of this is one of those budget discs in an oversized clear jewel case with artwork that once cluttered the racks of mall video and record stores.

Horror films that I still find scary from my childhood, on the other hand, are HALLOWEEN, THE FOG (that closing shot...), THE HOWLING (whispers in the foggy night and that happy face sticker), THE CHANGELING (love that shot of the wheelchair at the top of the stairs that jolts Trish Van Devere)... "The Drop of Water" from BLACK SABBATH, and one I've seen more recently: GHOSTWATCH.

One I've been wanting to revisit that I remember being really scared by was the TV movie DON'T GO TO SLEEP.

Eric, you might want to "revise" the heading, since this is an interesting subject!

Done.

Of the ones that freaked me out when I was younger, the few that retain their creepiness (to say that I still find them scary at this age is overstating it, but I still think they're effective, for want of a better description) are Carrie, Halloween, Black Christmas and Salem's Lot.

For ones that don't, I think pretty much any horror film from the early-mid 80s fits the bill (Nightmare on Elm Street comes to mind - even the original I now find to be a plain old bad movie).

A lot of the horror films that I find the most effective are probably ones that I didn't actually discover until after childhood. Then again, so are many of the worst (I'm looking at you, Pet Semetary).

Of course, Night of the Living Dead did it's job, gave me zombie-themed dreams (after so many of them, they quit being nightmares and started to become sorta cool sleeping Creature Features) for years.

The opening of Day of the Triffids made me skittish during many a rural Ohio thunderstorm (don't look at the flashes or you'll go blind!). The apocalyptic sounds of the footfall and alien roar of the original Godzilla.

But then, the one that did the most damage to me I still haven't been able to figure out what it was: a pre-1965 (perhaps from a TV anthology) set in an Old Dark House, as a lumpen mummy-type thing picks off teenagers one-by-one from hidden avenues in the house, until the survivor staggers out at dawn to be confronted by a gargoyle-y thing hunched atop the gate arch of the exit way to the grounds, gnawing on... something.

I once submitted the description to Joe Bob Brigg's "Find That Flick" contest, but he never ran it. Although he did email me and laughed that I'd feel the fool when I finally figured it out... the bastard.

Everything that was supposed to be scary at any point in history was terrifying to me until I was eight or nine. I could hardly breathe during FRANKENSTEIN or DRACULA... or THE HUMAN MONSTER for that matter. I loved this stuff, but it would give me nightmares for weeks. I could sleep for days after watching episodes of "SCOOBY-DOO"! Contemporary horror movies were out of the question. I couldn't watch PSYCHO or TEXAS CHAIN-SAW until junior high. Now, unfortunately, nothing scares me, or even gives me the creeps for more than a moment. So no horror movies quite stack up to childhood fright-factor impressions. I cannot, however, successfully make it through Halloween haunted houses without shrieking, running, and completely freaking out.

Related, it's a little disheartening to revisit almost anything seen before the developmental taste switch gets flipped and personal quality standards are established. '70s Hanna-Barbera cartoons? "MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE"? "GILLIGAN'S PLANET"?! Boy, I sure was entertained by a lot of total garbage! Not like now. Excuse me, I have to go alphabetize my nudist camp DVDs.

I thought CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG (creepy Child Catcher), YELLOW SUBMARINE (Blue Meanies) and PINOCCHIO IN OUTER SPACE (space whale) were terrifying as hell back in the day. I suspect I wouldn't bat an eye at them now.

No one told me there would be melting faces in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. That's a lot of a kid to deal with.

On the ride home, I kept checking my ankles to make sure I wasn't melting.

In 1985, I swallowed a bug outside of my school. You can imagine what that led to.

And you know what? RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK and THE FLY are still pretty damned strong films now, particularly now that I understand uncanny parallels with terminal disease in the latter.

I keep almost buying the new POLTERGEIST dvd, but I always put it back on the shelf. Even though I haven't seen it in years, I always had fond memories of that film as the perfect suburban ghost story.

And then I also remember how seriously melodramatic it gets, manipulating parents' and children's emotional fears in a way which is oh so Spielberg considering that the film was directed by that TEXAS CHAINSAW guy. I remember that the chaotic climax was completely relentless and effective, but then I also remember that it mostly involves chucking skeletons at the family and the audience.

Don't get me wrong. Seeing corpses and extreme injuries gives me a real sense of horror as do skeletons in coffins, but the final ace that Stobe Hooperberg had up his sleeve was a relentless barrage of, "Ooooo, another skeleton!"

Huh. I guess that was kind of effective, wasn't it? I sure wouldn't want to be in a swimming pool with them. It's funny, because the notion of corpses and skeletons seems unique to Hooper while the idea of suddenly finding yourself swimming in them seems borrowed straight out of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. There's more synergy there than in A.I.

With my childhood viewing stretching from the mid-'60s to the mid-'70s, and only very very rarely ever getting to the cinema before I moved out to college, I'm rather hard-pressed to come up with childhood scares. For me it was black-and-white classics on TV (courtesy of Sir Graves Ghastly) and subscriptions to Famous Monsters and The Monster Times.

I have ever-so-vague memories of Val Lewton's films in my toddler days, and bulging doors in THE HAUNTING giving me the creeps. I got to select the films for two family outings...the fanged hairy critter of THE HORRORS OF SPIDER ISLAND certainly impressed me (though a half-decade later I would perhaps have been more appreciative of the half-clad European actresses, and the genius scientific deduction that the presence of a pickaxe meant there was uranium ore in the vicinity), but way more dramatic was the time we took in a double-feature of the relatively tame HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS with the not-nearly-so-tame TALES FROM THE CRYPT.

I did end up seeing NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD at a local comic book convention at age 16, which hadn't actually been my plan (I thought it was going to be a Hammer flick). That one did scare me a bit.

I daresay that had I been born a decade later, however, there would have been a lot more nightmare material around.

There's a nice R2 "special edition" of The Gate. There are no extras (which is why I put it in quotes, though it says "special edition" in big letters on the front of the box), but it is a high-quality widescreen, anamorphic transfer, which makes a real, substantive difference compared to viewing the craptastic US disc.

The movies that scared me as a kid were Nightmare On Elm Street and Testament. I enjoy Nightmare On Elm Street to this day - it's inventive, sometimes funny, and generally one fun, well-executed idea after another - but have never watched Testament again... I imagine it will feel like just a dumber Threads knock-off... I don't know. Has anyone seen it recently? Is it actually good?

Anyway, yeah. Except for the chance to startle (i.e. quiet... quiet... quiet... then a sudden flashing image and loud noise), I don't find movies have the potential to actually be scary anymore. No matter how atmospheric or whatever I can find a horror film, they never actually *scare* me. On one hand, it can be a shame that I'm missing out on those potential thrills that other people get from them, but I also feel like it lets me appreciate films in a different way than those people who are just reacting to it while sort of "under its spell," so to speak.

If you're interested in the swimming with corpses genre (hehe), Argento has made some classics with Inferno and Creepers.

Ray Harryhausen stop motion monsters scared the hell out of me as a kid. When I was 4 going on 5 [I actually had my fifth birthday on board], my family traveled to Singapore on an ocean liner. Every night they showed SINBAD movies. I had to sleep with the lights on. Those movies don't scare me any more, though I still find the animated ship's figurehead pretty creepy.

A movie I first saw when I was pretty young that still scares me is THE INNOCENTS. I was a grownup when I watched it on TCM a few years ago, at home alone, when I heard a scratching sound at my front door right after Miss Giddens sees Quint's face at the window. My heart skipped a beat. Heard the scratching again and finally worked up the nerve to open the door. There was a little lost dog on my doorstep trying to get in. Damn dog. :rolleyes:

I knew at the time that it was supposed to be funny, but the beginning of Laurel and Hardy's BLOCK-HEADS caught me in a fevered state (home sick with the flu) when I was susceptible to being creeped out, and I had nightmares for weeks about Stan as an amputee in a veteran's home, Ollie traumatized and upset at the state of his old pal, and failing to rise to the occasion adequately, sweating and squirming, his attempts to help out failing abjectly, only betraying all the more his guilt and shame; what was worse, Stan smiled on blithely and serenely in a manner half way between saintly and moronic, which only made things more embarrassingly complicated, aggravating cross-purpose impulses on Hardy's part to weepily beg forgiveness...and to bop Stan with his bowler, a response conditioned by so many two reelers in which that Gandhi-like smile was a sign of faux-ninny passive aggression showing Mister Hardy who was really in control of the comedy team...

Naturally, like Charlie Brown falling for Lucy's football gag yet again, this was the same old routine with the same old payoff : Laurel had been sitting on his intact legs the entire time, and we the audience were clued into the situation long before his partner was: funny in principle, but Hardy's woe and agony was too palpable, Laurel's resemblance to a 'forgotten man'- much like the over-medicated, gormless and homeless, vets begging for change today a few blocks from where the scene in the movie was filmed, was all too morbidly plausible that I had the bejeezus scared out of me; and watching it again recently, my impression was pretty much the same!

Sadly, nothing scares me now, unless I will it to happen or the viewing conditions allow for it.

Although I've watched them several times now, the only films that make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up without fail are the Japanese JU-ON movies and the masterful DARK WATER (not the US remake). The scary set-ups are exquisite.

Victor

When I was a wee lad in the 60s and a devotee of the original Chiller Theatre on WPIX in NYC, nothing freaked me out quite as much as the bald giant in ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN. "Mr. Clean," I used to call him and he made my blood run cold.

Other notables from that same time period:

Around age 7: seeing the original DEAD OF NIGHT presented by Bambi's dad on the big screen in their living room with no preparation whatsoever blew my mind. Also there, THE OLD DARK HOUSE -- the hand on the bannister...

Going unprepared to see a double bill of UN CHEIN ANDALOU and BLOOD OF A POET, by myself, at The New Yorker, at age 6, well.... that scarred me for life. FREAKS, too, at the same venue.

As a teenager, DON''T LOOK NOW and THE EXORCIST did me in. There was also a memorable evening when my parents and I took my dear old grandmother to the movies for the first time in 25 years. A new film was in town and it sounded like it might be a religious picture. It was called DELIVERANCE.

DON'T LOOK NOW, the suffocation scene in TOURIST TRAP and the "Hitchhiker" episode of The Twilight Zone still give me goosebumps every time. Recent stuff: RINGU and Dreams in the Witch House had their moments.

It's tough being a big kid these days.

best,
FBC

Frank Coleman
Bambi Everson

I'm pretty sure the bald giant you're remembering was in THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN (1957), unless there was a second giant that I don't recall from 50 FOOT WOMAN.:unsure:


And, wait a second!--they let you into the New Yorker by yourself! when you were 6 years old?! To see BLOOD OF A POET and UN CHIEN ANDALOU??? What, did you sneak in? That sounds like a pretty liberal admissions policy for a large Manhattan theater, even in the '60s. (Neighborhood theaters in the Bronx were another story.) I remember trying to get into the Embassy on 46 St. and B'way to see FAIL-SAFE when I was 11 and they wouldn't let me in. :angry:

(Oh, I got it--you were a family friend of Dan Talbot, right?)

Hey, she didn't turn into a 50-foot woman by herself! She had help from the (accidentally) transparent bald gladiator giant who came to Earth in his big Ping Pong ball.

The Boy Who Cried Werewolf.

Because when I saw it for the first time, I was the same age as the boy...who cried werewolf.

Oops, how could I forget that?
(Actually, all I really remember from that movie is Yvette Vickers. :rolleyes:)

I only saw this film for the first time a few months ago and that very scene is what sticks in the mind more than anything as the first time in a long time that I've actually found anything in a horror film to be so eerie and creepily effective, more than eclipsing any of the current crop of quiet... quiet... quiet... then a sudden flashing image and loud noise (description ©JW McKelvey 2007) variety of horror movies. If anything, the utter lack of noise made it all the creepier.

My parents wouldn't let me out of the house alone at 6, much less take in a movie, even some innocuous Disney flick. :blink:

Hehe :)

By the way, as much as I liked The Innocents (and I did), I have to say I now prefer the Masterpiece Theatre production of Turn of the Screw. You guys should give that one a rent.

Throughout the 70s, in my pajamas, sitting about three feet from my grandparent's giant color TV that sat on the floor like a piece of furniture. I sat close enough so that I could change the channel if the movie got too scary. (TVs used to have these things called "knobs" that allowed you to change the channel - the new way is better.)

PHANTASM - I thought I'd be okay, until that last moment. "BOY!" I haven't rewatched this in a long time. I'm sure it won't scare me, but I think I'd get a nice retro kick out of it.

FRANKENSTEIN: THE TRUE STORY - The scene with Jane Seymour's head scared the hell out of me. I've rewatched this a couple times in the last thirty years and still really liked it. I'd watch it again, but it's just so goldarned long. Too much of a commitment. I don't really have time to do anything anymore that lasts longer than 90 minutes. Kind of a shame.

THE EXORCIST - It was scary when I was a kid and it's just as scary now. And I don't even believe in the devil anymore. Doesn't matter. I hear "Tubular Bells" and I instantly become a practicing Catholic. And I was raised Protestant.

TOURIST TRAP - I don't remember much except the very beginning. I'd like to see this again.

DEMON SEED - Saw it again a few years ago. Still kind of freaked me out.

CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS - Great movie. Still scares me.

DEATHDREAM - Same thing. Maybe it's a Bob Clark thing. Before I even knew who he was, he was scaring me to death. I also credit his Holmes movie MURDER BY DECREE with turning me on to Sherlock Holmes, then literature, then reading big long novels.

D.

OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN. The rat unnerved me so much that after we watched it, when my dad asked me to walk a few blocks and pick up his racing paper (which came out in the evening) I shivered all the way to the candy store and back, jumping at every rustle and shadow.

I think both LEMORA and CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY have their longeurs, but then they both pay off in haunting, creepy imagery. And don't forget: "There was an old woman who lived alone..."

AMITYVILLE HORROR - Just saw this one on TV again. I remember the closet scene being scary as well as the window scenes (including the one with the glowing eyes).

Now, its pretty clunky. The priest characters are uninteresting. How convenient it is that the family has a psychically sensitive friend. Kidder's waking up from a nightmare screaming "She was shot in the head!" is as unconvincing as Brolin's "I'm coming apart!"

They didn't make much of the red-lit hole in the wall which I guess was a well but they didn't show much.

Even Lalo Schifrin's score simply wore on the nerves.

The only effective thing were the eye windows.

Anyone who doesn't doubt that this is a "true story" simple need revisit the 1979 movie.

On the plus side, it was nice to see that the MGM print preserved the American International logo (in beautiful condition) and had letterboxed credits.

For that matter, when is someone going to get around to resurrecting the AIP brand?

I mean, MGM and United Artists are back from the dead...

As long as they keep one of the old logos.

I'm surprised no one's mentioned those damned flying monkeys from WIZARD OF OZ.

And don't tell anyone, but they're STILL pretty creepy!

HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS

THE HAUNTING

BRIDES OF DRACULA

DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD

And I still love 'em!

Yeah, but Steiger is absolutely mind-blowing in this.


OOOOOOOOOOHHHHH LOOOOOORD!!!!!!!!!!!

Yep the Wizard of Oz monkeys were a real childhood trauma.

Also the ice monster in that animated Frosty the Snowman. My parents had to warn me each year before he appeared so I could leave the room but then also in a sign of things to come let me know when he was on so I could come back and watch.

An episode of Dark Shadows which ended with a knock at the door and when it was opened there were two children there who had earlier died. That's really all I remember, not even whether I watched the show.

Oddly, some Sunn International or similar four-waller film about a kid who paddled through much of Alaska alone and there was some really eerie scene with lights in the semi-darkness. It's still very vivid in my mind.

The trailer for West Side Story where the guy is holding a bloody knife and screaming that he killed somebody.

And, uh er ah, The Ghost and Mr Chicken. Don't tell anybody.

After about age 8 or 9 I don't remember anything that really got to me except on a kind of temporary basis. Even though I watched horror/fantasy/etc films whenever there was a chance I still was mainly a reader up until around college.

Ooh... Sun International. There was a trailer for a Bigfoot documentary (I'm assuming it was one of theirs, or a similar outfit) where the wail of the critter gave me the complete heebie jeebies as a kid (back in the late 70s).

Even though it didn't sound anything like what Bigfoot really sounds like.

Wow. There were so many scary movies. Creature From The Black Lagoon kept me from swimming in the lakes and canals around the area I grew up in. The House on Haunted Hill (Vincent Price) also scared the bejabbers out of me.

One movie that I remember seeing that really got to me was Castle Of Blood. I remember seeing it one late night and it stuck with me for years.

But if there were just one movie that really scared the hell out of me as a kid and to this day still does, it had to be The Haunting (1963). I grew up in the old family house that my mother and all of my aunts grew up in and I am convinced to this day that there was something evil and wrong about the place. Years after it was tore down and another house was built over it, I still steer clear of it whenever I'm in town.

One of the greatest scares I had as a child came at the climax of the 'Baby' episode of Nigel Kneale's BEASTS. Viewing it recently, it seems that what has actually remained with me (and many other viewers of my generation) is not just the scare of the climactic monster reveal, but the dread engendered by the weirdly effective rural setting and the expectations generated by the mummified title creature. Viewing it now as an adult (and a father), I still found the episode fascinating for its unsentimental take on marriage, parenthood and their potential links to neurosis and superstition - and the possibility that there really was a scary old witch living in that spooky farmhouse.

Having said that, Simon MacCorkindale's shouty performance is still truly alarming.

The thing that scared me the most as a kid was Michael Jackson's THRILLER - I would literally run from the room screaming and crying when Jackson transformed into a werewolf in the video's prologue. I was six years old when the video premiered and my three-year-old, kid brother had no problem watching the video. I did not see the video in full until I was eleven or twelve years old.

When I was eleven years old I saw NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD on VH1 and I don't think I have ever been so nervous while watching a movie. I had been left at home alone on a Saturday night and this was an isolated home in a forest outside of Birmingham, Alabama. Thank god for commercial breaks. I had to watch the while seated in such a way that I could keep my eyes on the front yard and be ready to spring upstairs at the first sign of movement in the yard (I had turned on all the floodlights).

That experience stayed with me; and although the frightening nature of the film has lost much of its power over the years, the political and social messages of the film (which were over my head at eleven years old) are now the scariest elements.

and



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SPOILERS FOR UNKNOWN VINCENT PRICE FILM (OR TELEVISION SHOW)

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The film that has haunted me since I was a kid was a Vincent Price film (I watched it on a black & white 13" television) in which his child was kidnapped and held for ransom. At the end of the film (television show?) they find were the child has been buried alive. The last shot I remember (or somehow invented through memory) was a close-up of the child's skull in it's shallow grave...


Oh, yeah POLTERGEIST and JAWS 3 scared me because of the level of gore... They are pretty mild compared to the Fulci films that I saw in my twenties....

Another I forgot to mention was HELL NIGHT. I didn't particularly find any slasher films scary as a kid but I think this one had more of an effect on me because it mixed the slasher/stalker conventions with elements of gothic horror (creepy mansion, family history with both figurative and literal skeletons in the closet, the old fashioned costumes worn by three of the characters for the party that ended up fitting in with the candlelit atmosphere of the mansion). The ending half of the film was very effective.

Looking back at it, its still a great film but now its more a bunch of shocks in between atmospheric passages (that even Vincent Van Patten can't ruin) that's well sustained with actual sympathetic characters (even the older frat guys and the sorority girl playing the pranks are engaging characters. I'm much more appreciative of Mac Ahlberg's cinematography (he gave a professional gloss to a lot of low budget horror films in the eighties). It's far more than a HALLOWEEN knockoff and is still a favorite. The DVD commentary is fun too.

I'll have to try that one out. I'm only about twenty minutes into the Dan Curtis one and I'm very put off. The acting is awful (except for Megs Jenkins who seems to have completely memorized her character from THE INNOCENTS) and not only does the interior shot-on-video photography compare poorly to most British TV dramas, it even compares poorly to color episodes of DARK SHADOWS. The interview with the uncle is downright embarrassing and has the governess visibly put off by her gruff would-be employer to such an extent that one wonders why he hired her and why she took the job. This scene is completely the opposite of how it usually comes across in adaptations with the governess being charmed by the uncle (which at first seems to be the source of Miles' charm).

The shot on film parts seem rushed. They look very, very soft compared to the video. The manor house of choice looks fine in long shot but seems to have been substituted with another location in closer shots (shot on video) that may not have been so isolated since those exterior shots are filmed rather hurriedly (we barely see Miles face as he gets out of the carriage - so he hardly gets to make an impression on us or the governess). The brightly-colored interiors are by Trevor Williams (the DARK SHADOWS movies, THE CHANGELING) and seem more like a townhouse than a baronial hall. The flat and very bright lighting doesn't help the sets or the atmosphere. The pacing is also off. After Miles gets no chance to make an impression, we then go to the scene where the governess (with the ridiculous name Jane Coverly) sees Quint through the window (rather ineffectively staged and indifferently acted - he stares, shrugs, then walks off) and Mrs Grose hardly requires much persuading to speak of him. The governess asks about the effect the man might have had on Miles but, once again, we've barely met the kid.

I haven't decided whether to watch the rest.