Pajiba

True story, when I was little, I used to swap the heads of my Barbie dolls instead of changing their clothes. Swapping the heads was faster. My family called me "Mombie."

Return to Oz. F*cking nightmare fuel.

*there, not their. sorry, i've had the flu for a few days...

My knee-jerk reaction to the word "Mombie."

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb6O3a4v8Bc

Seriously watch it. It may be what you need to do to keep from hurting yourself after reading this list.

Skeksis aren't so bad... I work in a cubicle next to one. It's mostly the voice and the smacking that I really can't stand.

mc,
I think the video is in the link in the explanatory paragraph. I don't blame her. I wouldn't want to watch that depressing shit anymore than I already have.

Has anyone seen the 2 part TV movie of Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the looking glass? The Jabberwocky is terrifying. And yes, that was present tense.

Made the mistake of clicking the Land Before Time link. My insides are shaking.

I was over 18 in the Eighties, so most of these films are terra incognita to me. I still have Roger Rabbit on VHS, though, and I enjoyed The Dark Crystal.

The Rescuers was released in 1983 and messed me up. LEAVE PENNY ALONE!

Return to Oz may be one of my favourite movies of all time. Scared the shit of my sister though. Then again, Gremlins scared her too.

@elleyezee
I kid you not, I had the exact same experience with Peanut Butter Solution! I could only remember tiny images of that movie and no one ever seemed to know what the hell I was talking about when I would ask "remember that movie about the kid with the hair that grew really long?"

I finally just googled it and it turns out, I'm not making it all up. I also had this kind of experience with that movie where the kids make a spaceship out of a washing machine...I think River Phoenix was in but for the life of me I can't remember what it was called.

Thank your lucky stars you were never exposed to the fantastically crazy and scary Eastern Bloc children’s movies. There was one (I think the name was Akadamia Pana Kleksa?) which was about a professor and his orphanage. He would take the warts off his face and eat them. All the children had mirrors next to their beds and he could watch their dreams while they slept. And the battle on the end took place in huge flying noodles (the kids sat inside the noodle). I shit you not.

Then there was another one about a crippled boy who had this huge shaggy monster show up in the basement, equipped with a pitch fork and creepy, glowing laser eyes. I don’t remember this movie too much because my psyche has suppressed it.

We also had our own very special edition of the Narnia story (the wardrobe one) which was mostly focused on misbehaving kids and the punishment they deserved. And a movie about the matchstick girl (the one that sold matchsticks and died in the cold on Christmas). On the end the passersby nudged her and kicked her and threw her dead body in an ally. But it's OK because she was with god!

/shudder

@Janet Snakehole: IMDB is your friend.

Definitely Land Before Time, Secret Of Nimh, pretty much anything where the animals are at peril.

Oh god. The scene in Who Framed Roger Rabbit where the little red cartoon shoe gets dropped IN A VAT OF ACID AND DIES A SCREAMING DEATH scarred me for life. I still remember watching it, I shrieked and ran from the livingroom and cried in the bathroom for half an hour while my parents tried unsuccessfully to calm me down.

And The Land Before Time destroyed me. I still can't listen to the soundtrack from that scene without crying. I completely blame 80s movies for giving me childhood anxiety disorders.

I'll see your scary monsters and go all in with the Child Snatcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Also the Flying Monkeys in The Wizard of Oz. The classics never die.

Foolishly my parents let my sister and I watch Terms of Endearment when we were very young. When Debra Winger died we became hysterical and threw ourselves at our mother screaming 'Please don't die!'. I don't think we were aware that your mom could die, so it was especially traumatic.

@Socrates

I lived and breathed those Alice in Wonderland movies and my mom eventually made me fast forward through the Jabberwocky scenes because I was having nightmares so often. In senior year of high school my English class had to read the poem and you could practically hear the collective shudder go through the classroom. Children of the 80s have seen some shit.

For me, my scariest childhood image is david bowie's package in labryinth

Holy fucking shit, 'Roger Rabbit.' That poor little shoe who died screamingly, and then when Judge Doom removes his FACE AND OH MY GOD THE EYES AND THAT HELLISH SHRIEKING VOICE GET IT AWAY FROM ME

For me, my scariest childhood image is david bowie's package in labryinth

Posted by: sfgirl at May 26, 2011 4:05 PM

I was strangely fascinated by it. Funny how these things work.

In other news, I clicked on The Neverending Story clip and sat through approximately 15 seconds before I turned the motherfucker off. The Land Before Time clip almost made my ass cry. Seriously. The only reason I held it together was because I didn't want my younger brother (also a child of the Eighties)to call me a puss.

Watching that Dark Crystal clip made me a bit depressed at the fact that no studio would ever make a film like that in 2011. No one. Kids movies are kind of lame these days. Yeah, these flicks scarred us, but now we have character, goddammit.

Couldn't watch the Neverending Story clip, but did follow the link to Land Before Time and made it approximately 30 seconds before closing the window. Not sure I'll ever be able to show those two to my daughter.
She's seen Follow That Bird multiple times, but hasn't figured out that the lady who takes Big Bird away is portraying an actual profession.
Guess we'll have that chat someday...

Great list!

All who mentioned the Jabberwocky, I'm so glad I'm not alone with that. My mom taped that for me (complete with pausing the recording during commercials, so very high tech!) and I used to watch it obsessively, but the Jabberwocky scene absolutely terrified me. I got into the habit of wandering out of the room while it was playing, hoping to avoid it and come back when the scene was done. Invariably my mom would come in and see the movie playing to an empty room, so she'd stop it. Then along I would come a few minutes later, la la la, push play, and OH MY FUCKING GOD! Right in the middle of the worst Jabberwocky moments imaginable. My poor little mind never quite recovered.

And Return to Oz always was one of my favorites. I remember being a little horrified by the beginning when she's in the asylum...uh, if I'm remembering correctly. Shock therapy, creepy doctor types. Am I confusing that with something else? Anyway, I was totally mystified by the heads.

The scene from Flight of the Navigator where Robot Pee-Wee Herman takes David back in time through some kind of interdimensional thunderstorm from Hell was absolutely terrifying when I was a kid. Today, the only truly terrifying thing about that movie is how Sara Jessica Parker.

I absolutely thought I had imagined The Hugga Bunch movie! I mentioned it once to a group of strangers at a bar and was shocked to find that it did exist. Except in my version Susan Sarandon was the Evil Queen so there's that.

I loved that Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass movie! I watched it so many times on VHS that I broke it. I don't remember the Jabberwocky bugging me even a little. Those monkeys in Wizard of Oz, though, freaked my shit out. They still kind of give me the creeps, no lie.

@Janet Snakehole

We are not alone. If you look up the movie at Amazon, and read the comments, there are a lot of people like us who were convinced to their core that they had made the entire movie up until they either found someone who knew it too or typed the right word combo into google. It's just that kind of movie, I guess. :)

I still drink to forget the death of Optimus Prime.

I was gonna storm in here Nd announce that I got u all beat but Darth Corleone beat me to it. Time Bandits shold get a mention with that jarring ending where the parents ignore their kid and touch the artifact and go poof! That stuck with me for a long time. :(

painted blue and forced to sing sad songs.
AND WEAR PANTS! Oh, the humanity!

RE Jabberwocky - this is why JoRo and Socrates are my online besties.

I second (?) the need to add Labrynth. I wasn't allowed to see it until I turned 13, but it still creeped me out.

The 80's were a strange disturbing time for kids movies, every now and then I get a flash of a memory and I break out in a cold sweat, palpitations, shortness of breath, I tell myself it wasnt real, no one would think that was acceptable for children to watch, it was all a bad dream. It wasnt a dream.

Sidebar-What the FUCK is that Mother Goose thing?????????

The end of Who Framed Roger Rabbit where Judge Doom peels himself off the floor and pops his eyeballs out gave me nightmares for WEEKS.

I don't remember much about The Brave Little Toaster, only that I found it horribly, horribly sad.

@Myy Sharona:
I can't believe someone else has seen Watcher in the Woods. That movie terrified me, so much so that I watched it periodically until I was in my mid-20's, just to see if it would have the same effect. And you know, even though the script and acting is horrific, I still got freaked out every time. Shake camera work in the woods was really effective, I guess. However, this was pre-Blair Witch, and a thousand shaky-camera horror movies after that, so I'm not sure what I'd think now. I guess it's time to find out!
BTW, I had completely blocked out that Neverending Story scene and always refer to that movie with affectionate nostalgia. Now, at parent-age (though not a parent), I am horrified and stuck in my own sadness swamp. Thanks a lot.

MyySharona, they showed Watcher In The Woods at my school, too - I think it was 2nd grade. Do early childhood educators not pre-screen this shit? I think I was huddled on the floor, terrified and drooling.

This entire list - YES. Especially #7 & #1. It's amazing I'm as well-adjusted as I am (HA!).

And to whomever mentioned the Peanut Butter Solution - for years I was convinced that that was a fever dream I'd had and not a real movie, because every one I asked had no clue what I was talking about. Thank goodness for the internet - bringing us all together to share our scars!

Maybe it was because I watched it for the first time about a month ago, but I found The Dark Crystal to be BORING. Am I alone in that?

Judge Doom terrified the shit out of me too. When he's all accordioned after being run over by the steam roller...GAH.

YES to everyone saying Watcher in the Woods!! I also watched it in what I think was second grade. It wasn't terrifying enough that time, so we watched it again in third grade. Just because it's Disney doesn't mean it's not scary!! I can still see the scene where the girl writes 'NAREK' on the window. People had double child muttering backward word weirdness on the silver screen seeing that the Shining came out the same year.

When the video for Thriller would come on I hid behind the couch. He's a zombie date girl!!!

"Skeksis aren't so bad... I work in a cubicle next to one. It's mostly the voice and the smacking that I really can't stand."

Pure awesome.

Willow scared the 6 year old crap out of me. I remember Gremlins 2 scared members of my birthday party out. And, for me, the clown scene in Pee Wee's Big Adventure...

The biggest scare I got was from "Robocop." Since there were cartoons and toys, my parents thought it was a kids movie. I was scarred.

I was scarred by the first Gremlins, the gremlins themselves didn't bother me it was the girl's story about her father dying in the chimney dressed as Santa.

I was about 12 when Labyrinth came out, but my younger sister is still freaked out by the orange things who can take their heads off and swap them.

Also I love everything Jim Henson but I have NEVER been able to watch all of the Dark Crystal, even as a I kid I found it boring.. I keep meaning to try again but...

I remember very clearly seeing Land Before Time in the cinema when I was maybe 6? I remember bawling my eyes out and being so so so sad. I do not remember THAT scene, so I stupidly clicked on it, and made it as far as "I don't think I can" and well... I had to turn it off immediately. Could feel the tears coming out, and just didn't want to cry over a cartoon dinosaur this late at night.

The Wheelers terrified me to the point where I would want to just curl up at the sight of a photo. No movement necessary. So thanks for bringing that back.

Also, the pollution monster from Ferngully. For some reason, it was traumatizingly horrific to me.

I still can't watch The Land Before Time scene. Nope, no way.

Thought I was the only one creeped out by Who Framed Roger Rabbit--why did they show that to kids?

And I legit thought I dreamed Return to Oz until about five years ago.

I'd also like to add that thank god for stupid ass movies like the classic, Emperor's New Groove that I will still watch just so I can laugh my ass off. Don't judge.

Squeek-squeek-squeekin.

There is something truly twisted about All dogs go to Heaven.
The Mufasa death scene in The Lion King was traumatic. I was a little older by the time this came out but I remember thinking, wow really - for kids?

damn you Brave Little toaster and The Land before Time. DAMN YOU!

Also not a kids movie but was shown to me as kid by a crazy ex uncle in-law: THE FREAKIN EXORCIST!

Now that's just abuse. He had never seen it either. NO EXCUSE!

Ok, I saw Roger Rabbit in a theater with my family when I was 8. When the shoe was put in the acid, I got so scared that I left "to go to the bathroom" and didn't come back. My parents just thought I couldn't find them in the dark.

Also, some genius decided to show my kindergarten class "neverending story." I have never watched it again and it scarred me so much that I still remember the Artex scene (Absolutely did not click on the clip), falcor and the towers that shoot lasers 27 years later.

One night, I was trying to find something on Netflix from my childhood that would take my mind off of things. I chose "All Dogs Go To Heaven." I was getting a little restless while watching it and decided to IMDb it. I clicked on the actress that played the little girl, Anna-Marie. That's where I found this: "Shot to death along with her mother at a tender age of 10 by her father, who then shot himself to death." She was also the voice of Ducky from Land Before Time, one of my all time favorite childhood movies.

Needless to say, I wasn't exactly in the carefree mood that I was looking for after that.

@DarthBrookes,
I checked that story out online and it appears to be a healthy urban legend...there are definitely a few forums or sites that claim that happened, but they all appear to be virtual copies of each other. On the other hand, there are far more sources that claim that while the horse was handled in a was that would never be tolerated by today's anti-cruelty standards (the horse was allegedly chained to a lifting platform - not cool), he did not die...in fact it appears he actually fought back and accidentally knocked the kid into the mud, resulting in the kid needing a quick trip to the hospital. You may not have fond feelings toward a film that chains up its animals for a stunt, but you can take comfort in the probability that he did not die during filming. Hopefully. Honestly, it sounds highly unlikely.

I watched Return to Oz several times when I was a kid. Why? I have no idea because those clown things on wheels messed with my mind. I own The Last Unicorn and The Secret of NIMH on DVD but can't bring myself to watch them. They freaked me out when I was little, but I just kept on watching them. And what about Howard the Duck and Little Shop of Horrors? Those might not be kid movies, but I watched them and I was forever scarred.

@DarthBrookes

I had that same experience with Jaws as a child, except it was my older sister instead of my parents. I still get recurring shark nightmares where sharks slowly nibble my feet off while I'm swimming in the ocean. And I still freak out about swimming in the ocean.

I am interested that so many of you find The Secret of Nimh to be so terrifying. I can remember being, what 11?, watching it in the theater and being SO PISSED OFF that Don Bluth or whoever changed the source story so fucking much. Magical necklace? Fuck that noise! The book was so much better and even MORE DEVASTATING than the movie.

Talk about a mindfuck! Mrs. Brisby and the Rats of NIMH totally blew my mind in 4th grade. Intelligent rats living under a rose bush and stealing electricity from the farmer? Holy shit, I could totally get behind that theory. My grandparents had a farm that was powered by electrical lines installed by my grandfather (an electrical engineer, NOT an electrician). It was completely plausible that the rat population in the barn was capable of doing these very things.

And by the end of the book, my 11 year old self had developed a crush on Justin (yes, the chivalrous rat), and he IS PRESUMED DEAD when the exterminators come in and gas the rat nest.

Childhood should be chock full of this kind of shit. Today's kids movies are pussified. The most traumatic thing in a recent kids movie was when the old guy's wife dies in Up. And I was affected by that since my two sons were sitting next to me asking why she was crying at the baby doctor office and "oh my God did she DIE????". Uncomfortable whispered discussion in the theater ensued.

The Little Mermaid was the only movie that messed me up. Allegedly. I'm trusting my parents when they tell me that they had to pull me and my sister out of the movie theater so we would stop hysterically crying after realizing that Ursula's little sacks of goo with eyes used to be PEOPLE.

A few weeks ago I went on vacation with a friend and her little girl. I sat in the backseat with her and we watched Land Before Time on the little dvd player. I cried so hard she got upset and her mom made me turn it off....

@Nicole: not Canadian, but I list such fine Canadian films as Anne of Green Gables among my most cherished movie memories.

So glad that others are shouting out that Jabberwocky from that TV series. It's amazing that something from OMG 1985! stands out in my memory like it was yesterday.

I am completely serious when I say that that jabberwocky is the reason that I have never, and will never, try LSD.

For me, my scariest childhood image is david bowie's package in labryinth

Posted by: sfgirl at May 26, 2011 4:05 PM

My sisters and I actually called this movie "David Bowie's package". One of my friends in college loved this movie and while talking about it I called it what I had always called it. She was really confused. A few weeks later, she wanted to show it to her other friend that had never seen it before. Once Bowie came on screen she looked at me and said "I hate you". Seriously though, how do you not notice? During the scene when Hoggle(?) kneels in front of him, she looked at me and told me to shut up.

Agreed on "The Witches." Anjelica Huston "unmasked." *Shudders*

I worked at a bar some years ago and one of our daily patrons was this nice chap who had a thousand theories for everything under the sun (as daily bar patrons usually do). One of his theories regarded horror/sci-fi/fantasy movies of the 80's, and his position was that the people who made those movies (the puppeteers, special effects teams, writers, makeup artists, etc) were all children of the 60's and 70's and to them the scariest things imaginable were scenes out of bad acid trips or LCD experiments. This made complete sense to me, especially when I reviewed (mentally) the list of trippy scenes out of nearly every 80's movie with a fantastical element. Examples include but are not limited to:

- The graveyard hallucination sequence in "Young Sherlock Holmes" (I still sometimes expect english pastries to open their cartoon eyes and try to squish their fellow tarts into my mouth)
- All the morphing dream sequences of "Dreamscape"
- All of "Labyrinth". I never saw the movie until I was an adult and I couldn't sit through it

Maybe the reason, then, that these co-called children's features were so trippy is because that's all that animators and creature creators knew how to do back then? If it wasn't Disney, it wasn't honey-coated, which meant it was time to eat the postage stamp, kiddies.

I feel bad for kids these days. They don't have any of this good shit like we had. Instead they have Justin Bieber: Never Say Never. I guess that's scary enough though.

@sfgirl, OMG yes! I remember being too young to know what I was looking at, but feeling extremely uneasy about it nonetheless. Then, in '97 or '98, I was watching MTV when what should happen to come on but David Bowie's "I'm Afraid of Americans" and I thought, 'Oh look! The guy from the Labyrinth started a band!' and then I remembered the cod piece...

Return To Oz disturbed the hell out of me when I saw it 5 years ago.

I'm 37.

Like....not even capable of speech right now. I'll be in the corner, drinking to kill the memories, THANKS, ASSHOLES.

Jesus, try to find emotional balance these days and BOOM, trauma, right in the kisser.

You owe me ALL of the money for my therapy.

Also - the Red Bull from The Last Unicorn scared the bejeezus out of me!

I watched 3 seconds of that land before time clip, started to panic and closed the window. Man that movie was too much.

"A Mouse and His Child"

I thought I had dreamed this movie, until a few drunk weekends ago and I found it on YouTube. I got to the first part with the rats and I lost my shit. It's just too scary. Followed me in dreams for years and years and I couldn't put my finger on where the dreams were coming from.

Add me to the list of having been exposed to Watcher in the Woods at far too young an age. Second grade. Ironically, it was shown to me at my hardcore fundamentalist Christian summer camp. Go figure

The Fox and the Hound. All I remember was Grampa from Wonka hunting my best fwend with a shotgun

Holy poo. The Huggabunch wasn't just in my head? Well. There's years of therapy down the drain. ;P

Awesome list, esp Return to Oz, but the children's program that scared me worst had to be this claymation short (I think it was attached to some incarnation of The Nutcracker Suite) of this guy, either the Rag Man or the Rat Man. The confusion stems from his floating around the city at night, peeking into windows to find the naughty kids who stayed up late to read instead of going to bed. Turned 'em into rats and took them away forever.

It's broad daylight outside and I'm still going to turn on all the lights now. O_O

This list was originally ten strong until I realized the claymation Nutcracker to which you are referring and which was originally #7 was actually from the '70s. Nightmare juice. - CE

I did a bunch of reviews of movies from when I was a child last year. The link goes to "All Dogs Go To Heaven" since that crazy movie made me write a long meditation on one possible reason why there were so many dark kid's movies back then. Search for "Brave Little Toaster" while you're at the website; that's in there too.

Return To Oz is fantastic. Everyone focuses on the creepy bits and blanks the glorious rescues, happy reunions etc. Loved it as a kid. Still do.

Several on this list scarred me. In Roger Rabbit, it was the shoe scene where the shoe was placed in the dip. I still can't watch it at 33 years of age. I also can't watch the Artax scene or the scene in The Land Before Time. In fact, I had to leave the room as my daughter watched it. At the time she was only four years old, and she patted me and reassured me that, "It's OK Mommy, it's only a movie. His mama didn't really die." In The Brave Little Toaster, the bloody air conditioner scene upset me. It just seemed so needlessly violent and sad.

Another movie that damaged my psyche was The Rats of NIMH (they killed Nicodemus!). But I think the worst culprit of all time was Watership Down.

Me, age 4: *sob* Mama! The bunnies! They're... they're... fighting! Mama, the bunnies are BAD!
My mom: Yes dear, but it's only a movie. It's OK. Bunnies aren't really bad.
Me: But, *sob*, the bunnies... they're fighting! And they're dying! And, and, and... *sob* The bunnies are bad! And they're killing each other! *uncontrollable sob*
My mom, to herself: Well, this was clearly a mistake.

All this love for scary 80's kids movies and no mention of The Black Cauldron?

It's the animated Disney film to earn the PG rating.

The movie that scarred me more than any other was Dumbo. I simply could not process why they took him away from his mother, and I flat out lost my shit until my mother turned it off and cuddled me for the rest of the day.

I don't think I've ever seen the whole thing, I just have vague, terrifying memories of bits and pieces involving birds and firefighter clowns.

When I was about seven, I watched Excalibur on HBO thinking it would be normal knights in shining armor hack stuff up movie. Instead I got Gabriel Byrne in full armor violently dateraping some wench within the first 10 minutes. Yeah.

That Girls who brought up Dumbo reminded me of something...

Pinocchio.

The scene where the kids turn into Donkey's. And then he gets eaten by a monstrous whale...

That's some dark shit.

@myySharona YES! Watcher in the Woods scared the shit out of my when I was a kid! To make matters worse, I watched it while my parents were out of town and my grandparents were taking care of us. It's a Disney movie, for crying out loud!

I think I slept in my parents' bed for months after seeing that movie. I kept thinking I saw that little dead girl lying beside my bed, right before the bell falls on her. It's been at least 20 years since I saw it once, and it makes me shudder. My family still brings it up.