I was easily scared as a kid, but there were 3 things that fucked my head for years.
Darby O'Gill & The Little People (1959)
This is one of those old live-action Disney films from the period when Mousewitz was branching out of pure animation and is one of Sean Connery's first films (you can tell because he's singing songs instead of punching dudes in the face). The plot involves an eccentric Irishman named Darby O'Gill and his various attempts to capture the King of the Leprechauns in order to get his pot of gold; unfortunately, Darby's folksy traditionalism make him look like an old fool to the villagers despite the fact that half the time he's telling the truth. The ending of the film involves Darby trying to save his daughter's life--following a fall from a horse--from the soul-stealing harbinger of death: The Banshee, who heralds her presence with a spine-chillingly spooky moan. The result is one of those "Accidental Nightmare Fuel" things that happens in kids movies from time to time where something seemingly ephemeral and direct taps into a hidden Never-Sleep-Again fear tripwire in the brains of millions of kids. To make matters worse, there's one section where Darby runs outside to fight the specter and opens the door to find the thing RIGHT IN HIS FUCKING FACE POV-STYLE. That'll give you a fear of doorknobs like nothing else. Looking at it now, I can tell that it's just a very well-done 65mm dry-for-wet plate effect shot on infrared film at 60fps, but when I was 6, all I could see was
"REAL FUCKING GHOST!" It took about 2 years to get that shit out of my head.
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RIGHT TO KILL (1985)
One of those old true-crime made-for-TV melodramas the 1980s were famous for had the great misfortune to pick for its subject the true case of Richard and Deborah Jahnke, two teenagers who collaborated to kill their father Richard Jahnke Sr. with a shotgun in 1982 after a lifetime of horrendous abuse. To play Richard Jahnke Sr.--a pathologically paranoid IRS agent with a psychotically uncontrollable temper who regularly beat his family like a wagon full of runaway slaves--the production had hired Frederick Forrest (Chef from
Apocalypse Now), who unfortunately didn't realize that he was working on a made-for-TV movie in 1985 and brought the full weight of his A-List acting chops to the plate, completely overwhelming the acting output of the entire cast. Imagine every punch-throwing temper tantrum ever had by Russell Crowe combined and then give him PCP and you'll have some idea of how intense Forrest was in the part. For an 8-year-old kid, this was spine-freezingly terrifying and if the real Janhke Sr. was even half this bad, it's no wonder that Jahnke Jr. had his sentence commuted 2 years later.
Superman III
Normally being an awful movie is scary in only the existential sense. But
Superman III was scarier for a reason that is simultaneously ridiculous and understandable. The climax of the film involves Superman fighting with the supercomputer built by a greedy industrialist and Richard Pryor (no you did NOT misread that last part) after it becomes self-aware and targets everyone it detects. While trying to flee, the computer grabs one of them with a tractor beam, sucks her into its core and transforms her into a cyborg with death ray fingers. The concept of a 1983 computer having such powers is laughingly stupid, but the intensity of the way the scene was shot and edited can make even a jaded viewer say "Holy shit that was dark." Needless to say, this scared the shit out of me as a kid, but also needless to say, as a kinky person, it also fascinated me, which is also probably the reason I came to like
Hellraiser so much.
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