me_irl

My mother used to make me watch scary movies with her to toughen me up.

Gave me nightmares for years.

My first "too scary" movie was the 1999 cinematic masterpiece The Mummy starring Brendan Fraser. For those unfamiliar: not very scary at all, but I was probably eight when I saw it.

My siblings and I would fight over who got to sleep with the cat - in the movie the mummy is scared away by cats. Anybody who owns a cat knows this is a pointless argument, and the cat sleeps with who it wants.

I begged to see Poltergeist when it came out in 1982, I was 11. One of my main arguments was that it was only rated PG, ET came out the same year and it was rated PG; the PG-13 rating didn't exist yet.

I did not sleep in my room for 3 months after that and when I finally was able to go back all my stuffed animals had to be out of the room.

I have never found another movie again that scared me so much and I have seen more horror movies than I could count.

My experience with this was event horizon, "where we're going, you won't need eyes to see". Man, I didn't sleep right for months. No horror movie has scared me as much as that one

Close Encounters of the Third Kind terrified me as a kid. Not because of the alien shit, but because the thought of a vacuum turning on and running by itself was just the most horrific thing I could imagine.

For me it was the original Poltergeist when I was 8 or so.

And later I found out the skeletons in the graveyard scene were actual dead bodies. Yum.

If you haven't seen this movie, and you have any tolerance for scary movies, stop reading and go watch this movie

Let's make a high stress movie in one of the scariest environments possible.

"Okay but what if the main character has legit psychological trauma that we watch" I mean sure.

"And what if we add some of the freakiest and most unexpected jump scares before they get to the scary part?". Okay..

"And what if this naturally scary environment also had monsters?". What sort of writer are you?

"And what if we didn't introduce the actors to the monsters until we were actually filming the scene, so their reactions are as legitimate as possible?" That would certainly be horrifying

"And what if the monsters were humanoid, and the humans were monstrous?" You seem to have some experience being a monstrous human.

"And what if we made multiple endings, each of them equally ambiguous about the main characters future?" Are you a monster? You are a monster aren't you.

DO NOT DO THIS.

Fuck, that someone needs to be told not to fuck up their child like this. We don’t have time to be this stupid

The Descent scared the sh*t out of me. That one jumpscare was so unexpected and so intense that my body couldn't even react to it, I just got massive chills all the way through without moving. It was surreal. Letting your kid watch this is just insane

Sometimes it works out, though!

From a very early age, my parents let me watch increasingly scary stuff thinking I'd eventually hit a limit on what I could handle, but I feel like even as a youngster I was pretty aware that it was not real. Never got nightmares or anything like that. Horror movies and scary sci-fi movies were always my favorites and I still love them to this day.

Descent and its sequel (though cursed by virtue of being a sequel) were great. In general, women-led horror movies are awesome when done right, like having women in characters who self actualize instead being used as a filler or sideshow.

Some others include Ginger Snaps (and its second movie), Alien (don’t like the sequels), Scream, and Piggy (2022). Evil Dead as a franchise does not have a female lead (I am not that familiar with this franchise), but Evil Dead Rise was executed really well, and worked on many levels.

The Descent is a fucked up scary movie, then the monster Falmer people show up and it's spooky too I guess

For me it was gremlins, I was like 8. The end scene with the one that pops out of the fountain, that shit scared the living fuck outta me.

Also being forced to go see Lost Boys with my sister at 10 years old while sick with the flu, because my parents had a date and didn't want to reschedule or some shit. That movie wasn't THAT scary, but when you already feel like absolute shit........

I was already a teenager, but The Blair Witch Project made me quite scared of the forest after dark. Didn't help that we lived right next to a completely overgrown property (it essentially was a forest... a whole family of foxes lived in there) with an old unused house in the middle of it.

Anyway... the psychological horror of that movie was intense. Jump scares I can get over, but the perceived fear of the actors and that ending in the cellar burned itself into my brain.

You might have done some emotional damage there lol

My parents took me to see aliens when I was a we lad. To this day I am terrified of the alien series.

There were two that really left me scarred in retrospect.

There was this weird 70s or early 80s movie and this scene with these doll things coming to life in this small quarters.. like a genie bottle or some alien ship.. I think there was like satin and shit.. and the doll things had these sharp teeth and started biting this woman trapped in there.. and they all swarm her and overcome her.. 35 yrs later.. if anyone knows the name.... Please help?

The Accused.. saw that way too early.

Oh, and the song Hungry Eyes...

My genius parents took my brother and I to see SCANNERS in the theater.

Watched the whole fucking thing.

But that was back when your parents could beat you for waking them up at night with nightmares so I don't think it ruined their night.

Me and my friends watched The Human Centepiede, when we we're 12 years old. God, sometimes I wish I could just go back in time.

Mine was Child's Play when I was 7.

Though by then, I was a little familiar with scary things from trying to play Doom and the like, so it was just a couple nights of bad sleep. Not that I wasn't a little scaredy cat. Took me in to my teens to beat Doom without cheat codes.

That reminds me that my most terrifying movie scene as a kid wasn't actually an scary movie.

It was a movie with a scene were the toilet talks or acts as he is going to eat the kid, can't quite remember the details. The trauma was serious I couldn't go to the bathroom to take a shit without feeling weird, terrified that it would bite my ass and all that, I tried to avoid going as long as possible....

I can't seem to find the movie or the scene, all I see is a scene from Look Who Is Talking but that's not it. I did see it like later on life and I think it was like in a public bathroom and maybe the kid kind of had a daydream.... But honestly no clue, I couldn't find it.

Split second is the horror movie I saw way too early in my life. I can't remember the circumstances but I may have been 4-5 seeing a particularly scary scene in the basement of my grandparents house.

Descent would have fucked me up, the claustrophobia messed with me seeing it as an adult.

I just watched this movie in it's entirety for the 1st time, a month ago. It took me 3 "Yea, NOPE"s to successfully get thru the scene where the two are stuck in the narrow passage and the Earth shifts. I still cringe thinking about it.

Watched Seven when I was 11 or 12, such a fucked up movie.

Whoa. This movie fucked me up as a grown-ass adult. Poor kid must have had nightmares for a whole year after that.

My first terror movie was The Shining when I was 5-7 and after that nothing was too scary to be honest. I remember my mum telling me that there was a whole bunch of people working behind what we see and that made it easier. I am still a fan of horror movies and I enjoy a good scare!

My son was 8 when we sat down to watch the first Jurassic Park movie. He was shaking at the end. I learned a great lesson that day.

Horror fans: Haha this traumatized me for years, wanna watch?