Some of the movies already mentioned have been

The Creeping Unknown
X The Unknown
The Crawling Eye
5 Million Years to Earth
The Monolith Monsters
Village of the Damned

Heck, some have even gotten all misty eyed over the old syndicated Chiller Theatre and Creature Feature shows.

I would like to add Forbidden Planet to the mix. The footprints of the invisible Id monster going across the sand accompanied by that creepy sound gave me the shivers.

Angry Red Planet: when the giant amoeba comes out of the lake and chases the earthlings. Also that bat-rat-monkey-spider thing was pretty bizaar.

The Wax Museum. Watching all those wax figures melt when the place burned up somehow got to me.

AS A TEEN:
all the Halloween films (except poor old #3 and H20)
Scream 1 & 3
Alien
Stir of Echoes
The Blair Witch Project (for me, THE scariest movie I've ever seen)
any horror movie by Carpenter

There's some more I'm sure, but can't recall them right now.

NP: Hunter - "Title Theme" (.wav file)

I was a child of the 80s, so forgive me but Return to Oz scared the heck out of me! Really did!

Also, I was never partial to seeing Large Marge in Pee Wee's Big Adventure. You know, when she does the face thing? Ack!

Dan (UK)

NP - Ash's Waltz (Scherzo for Android) GOLDSMITH

I saw Large Marge, too, in my nightmares for about a week or so.

Also, the first Tremors was (at the time) one of THE scariest movies I had ever seen - hey, I was only 10 at the time. I was afraid to walk on the ground after seeing that one.

And Arachnaphobia or however it's spelled. Course, I have an eternal fear of spiders, though that movie creeps me out everytime I see it. But it's such a good movie, I watch it whenever it's on.

NP: The Young Riders - "Title Theme" (.wav file)

And the first time I saw Fire in the Sky, I couldn't sleep for a week.

House On Haunted Hill
The Tingler
Frankenstein 1970
Day of the Triffids

As an adult, again in a theater -

Halloween
Exorcist III

Others that scared me when I was a kid:

- JAWS 2
- THE SWARM
- DAMNATION ALLEY (those cocoroaches!!)
- THE HUMANOID
- and some other I can't remember now...

The Hideous Sun Demon
Carnival Of Souls
The Brain From Planet Arous (a clip appears in Malcolm in the Middle opening credits)
The Manster
Missile To The Moon
The Magnetic Monster
The Indestructible Man
The Daughter Of Dr. Jekyll
The Monster That Challenged The World
Beast of Hollow Mountain (actually, not that scary)
It! The Terror From Beyond Space
The Fly (late 1950s)
The Four Skulls Of Jonathan Drake
Invaders From Mars (1953)
The Thing (1951)

Some of this stuff was real cheesy, but you didn't know that as a kid. Even Plan 9! The last 2 above were the greatest. I sent a letter to Robert Cornthwaite ("Dr. Carrington" in The Thing) after seeing him in Matinee and then rolling in the aisles. He wrote back with a few anecdotes!

WHERE THE HECK'S THE DVD VERSION WITH ALL KINDS OF EXTRA GOODIES!?!?!?!?!

Also, the other part was when Dorothy opened a gate partway and the wheelers made an unexpected appearance. Still sends shivers down my spine thinking about it.

Another thing, is that I've always been afraid of vampires ie: Dracula. I dunno why, but even today, I wonder if the undead walk this world....

quote:

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Originally posted by HAL 2000:
yea, Trilogy of Terror. I forgot about that one. One of Dan Curtis' ABC movies of the week. That little doll was a scream. Kinda sounded like Snoopy.

There was another TV flick around that time called "Don't Wait Until Dark" with these little pointy headed gremlins that terrorized a woman in her own house. Talking about 70s TV, Night Gallery did me in on a weekly basis. That eerie theme. OOOOOh, scary stuff. And the Zanti Misfits from The Outer Limits had me freaked out for weeks (They went la-la-la-la or something like that).

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NP : Fantasia on a Theme By Thomas Tallis - R.Vaughan williams
For me personally,The best and most moving piece of music EVER written!!

dantoris,

What still scares me to this day? Several scenes from Carpenter's "In The Mouth Of Madness." The 'it was just a dream' sequence from the beginning of the film is creepy, but, I really hate to remember the bike scene while driving at night. *shivering*

To bring film music into this, the window music from the "Terror at 20,000 Feet" segment of Twilight Zone: TM used to scare the crap out of me. Now paying closer attention to it, I can really appreciate the genius of that whole segment's work.

Great topic, by the way!

ANYWAY, it involved a man who sat down to eat an egg in a tray. He tapped on it three times. Then three times again. Then he began to smash the shell, and a voice screamed. He smashed it a bit more, and the voice screamed a bit louder and longer. He smashed it more and more, and the voice kept screaming, until the man had completely destroyed the egg and there was no more voice. Suddenly, someone knocks on his door three times. He goes to answer it and finds no one there. Again, three knocks... and again, no one. Then his ceiling caves in a little, and the man screams a little. The ceiling caves a little more, and the man screams a little more. The ceiling caves in a little more at different intervals, and then walls start to cave, and the man keeps screaming. Until the entire ceiling and walls cave in on the man and he is squished and his house destroyed. The end.

ALWAYS gave me nightmares, and it was shown almost every day!

It was specifically the scene when that Wolf thingy's eyes glowed in the cave and then it was it's POV while it ran out the cave. I used to leave the room whenever that scene came up!

My earliest recollections of being truly SCARED WITLESS by a movie are:

When mom & dad stupidly took me along to the drive-in to see "Psycho" in 1960. I was 8, and they thought everything would be OK.

D-oh!

The next year (age 9) I discovered the Friday Night Chiller Theatre, and the very first movie was going to be "The Mummy's Hand". THE MUSIC SCARED ME SO MUCH, I DIDN'T MAKE IT THROUGH THE OPENING CREDITS! I turned the TV off, and RAN to bed. Thank God for COVERS!

The Original "The Thing" STILL gives me the shivers...especially when doc is listening to the sounds that the baby pods make...

YES, HOWARD! "Shuter" was the "monster's" name in "Frankenstein 1970" (released theatrically in 1958...on Chiller Theatre by 1962!). Even in this piece of crap, Karloff always managed to scare the sh-- out of me!

Just seeing the trailer for "The Premature Burial" in 1962 gave me recurring nightmares about being buried alive!

"The Haunting" showed up on TV in the mid 60's, and this one STILL scares me! (the remake has a great house - worth seeing - but no real chills.)

But the scariest movie I have seen recently is: "Everybody Says I Love You"...WOODY ALLEN "SINGS"!!! AAAIIIEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!

Creepy druid muttering in the cargo hold, weird weather as the plane desperately trys to climb and meet the sun. A murder stone unhappy with being moved to America. What more could you ask for?

Can anyone tell me the name of a Peter Cushing (Probably Hammer) movie about an unearthed skeleton that regenerates when it gets wet? The Dr. cuts off one bony finger and regenerates as an experiment or some such. Of course the skeleton gets drenched in the rain and comes looking for its missing finger!

BTW, down here in Houston, we didn't have Chiller Theatre. We had Saturday Sci-Fi Theatre. Every Saturday about 1:00 pm there was a great (Okay, mabye cheesy) Sci-Fi/Horror/Fantasy flick on.

Gosh, I must be getting old. Almost all these movies that were mentioned I saw as an adult.

Return to Oz - Loved it! Read all the books as a kid and all the characters in the movie were in the books. More Faithful then the MGM version.

The Peter Cushing film with the skeleton was "The Creeping Flesh" (1973).

Actually, and I almost hate to admit it, but the film that scared me most as a child wasn't a horror film--it was Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory!

I was like 6 or 7 years old and watching all these horrible things happen to this group of kids--one blows up like a balloon, another gets shrunk to ten inches. I was terrified! Like a bad trip, I was upset so much, my Mom had to talk me down from it.

But the classic story in our family comes from my uncle who saw Psycho as a teenager and asked his parents if he could sleep in their bed that night.

Yeah, I was another one who was tripped out on vampires when I was a kid. When I was seven my older brother and cousin took me to see The Brides Of Dracula at a matinee. The flick ran the whole gauntlet of ghoulish goings-on. Everytime one of the vampires made an entrance I jumped out of my seat and headed to the lobby. Must have made about a dozen trips back and forth. But, I got to see plenty enough to keep my imagination busy for a few months.

I saw Alien when I was 24 and it spooked me. If I had seen it at age 10... can't even imagine. Is that a picture of King Kong or what?!?

Great story about the egg and the appartment!

Howard, those Zanti Misfits STILL wake me up at night with their horrible snarling buzz.

But of course I don't get scared by movies anymore, especially the ones listed above.

I still won't watch NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE (the Klaus Kinski one) after dark. The original is just about as scary in parts, except because the film stock is so old and the editing/lost footage so jerky, that it doesn't exert the same effect on me. Herzog creates an almost indefinable sense of inexorable terror. (Joan, I've mentioned this one under "foreign films" before, haven't I? If not, consider it mentioned. Try and find the subtitled one.)

AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON still knocks me out. An ineffable tragedy as well as a completely scary movie. No real catharsis in that one, which somehow makes it even worse.

The scariest recent movies I saw were IN DREAMS and THE SIXTH SENSE. IN DREAMS was so upsetting in parts that I really wanted to leave the theater, but I couldn't (wasn't alone, and even if I was, I hate to squander a ticket.) Last time I felt that way was at the Michael Keaton vehicle MULTIPLICITY.

Rocco--if being paranoid of the authorities is part of the topic, I was really creeped out by Welles' The Trial. I just cannot watch it alone. Just too spooky. I felt totally helpless watching Perkins in over his head. I suppose in the same respect, I find Hitchcock's The Wrong Man a terrible nightmare situation as well. But the film itself doesn't affect me like The Trial does. As a story, Enemy of the State was just so-so. But as a depiction of what surveillance can do to your freedom--I just shuttered. The whole time I was thinking, what if the Nazis had had this technology. If some future totalitarians get ahold of this technology, we're screwed. How could you resist? Humans could lose their freedom for thousands of years. I find that big time scarier than monsters.