10 Movies That Induced Childhood Trauma

I like being scared.

I grew up on horror movies, which isn’t to say they didn’t do some form of psychological damage to me. I’m sure that we’ve all seen movies as children that traumatized us in one form or another. Whether it’s the supernatural or the seemingly mundane, there are things in the films of our youth that jacked us up. As a nightmare-prone kid, I should have been kept far away from the 10 movies on this list, all of which I’ve also seen, with much more subdued results, as an adult. Yet the movie lover in me could find them on TV or in the movie theaters of the 1970’s.

Reading these, you may find some amusement in how tame they can be. In the days of Saw and Hostel, today’s kids probably have a tougher hide than I did at their age. But truth be told, Saw wouldn’t have bothered me at 5. It was the stuff they didn’t show that did me in. I knew all that gore was fake.

With that said, here are 10 movies that traumatized me as a kid.

10.) Trilogy of Terror

I remember laying on my Mom’s bed and watching this with her. It ran as the ABC movie of the week. The first two tales bored me senseless, but that last one kept me awake for days. You know the one: The late Karen Black does battle with the Zuni Fetish Doll, which looked like rapper Li’l Jon and had a tiny spear it could jab at 100 mph. Even before it sprang to life, I was scared of it. “You don’t have to look,” my mother told me when things grew too intense for a 4-year old. I covered my eyes, but kept my fingers open enough so I could see what was happening. I regretted that decision. I had nightmares about that doll jumping out from under my bed, nightmares that came back when, 14 years later, I put the VHS cassette box on the shelf at the video store where I worked. The manufacturers put the Zuni Fetish Doll on the cover. I kept turning the box around so I wouldn’t see it, which amused my co-workers. One day, I was alone in the store. I looked over at the box on the wall, and the doll wasn’t on it. It took me a second to realize this redesigned box was my co-worker’s idea of a joke. It also took about 10 years off my life.

9.) Old Yeller

Who in my generation HASN’T been traumatized by Walt Disney? Tom Hanks is about to play him in an upcoming movie, but considering how harrowing his productions sometimes got, they should have cast Johnny Depp. I had no idea what was going to happen to Old Yeller; my prior doggie movie experiences were with  Lassie, Rin Tin Tin and the most boring mutt in film history, Benji. Old Yeller’s fate never befell any of them, though Benji did eventually get to play the reincarnated version of Chevy Chase. That’s a fate worse than death. Speaking of death, it comes calling for Old Yeller, and the manner in which it did stunned me as a kid. I cried for days. Hell, I still do whenever I watch it.

8.) Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark

Damn you, ABC Movies of the Week! Here’s another one, this time with Kim Darby being tormented by little things that go bump in the night. The remake, with its R-rating and better special effects, can’t hold a candle to this. Granted, the creatures kind of look like raisins, but these were some scary-ass raisins. Very atmospheric, with creepy sound effects and music. The critters come out of an old fireplace, and my grandmother’s house not only had an old fireplace, it also had a coal furnace with a bottom section full of ashes. Darby, who was in True Grit, is very effective at being a terrified victim. The ending freaked me out big time.

7.) Pinocchio

Here’s Uncle Walt again. Most people would have Bambi on this list, but seeing a bad little boy turn into a donkey scared me worse than Bambi’s mother’s demise. As usual, Disney ratchets up the torment, with the newly-turned donkeys whining for their mothers before surrendering to their animal voices. The transformation of the pool playing pal of Pinocchio still packs a visceral wallop for the way it’s drawn and edited. I’ve always been a fan of werewolf movie transformations, but those were men who, to my young mind, probably deserved it. These were mischievous kids like me. It got to me so much that I gave second thought to visiting Pleasure Island when I was in Disney, and this was AFTER I’d turned into a figurative jackass of an adult.

6.) The Exorcist

You’d expect this to be much higher, but here’s why it’s down here. This is the first movie I remember seeing. I had no idea what it was about, because I was 4. All I knew was it had a LOT of cursing, which I loved hearing as  a kid. I didn’t fully get what this movie was selling until I was 17 and I saw it on video. And then I was horrified! You couldn’t get me to watch this movie nowadays, and even with my complete rejection of my Baptist upbringing, I still won’t sit through this thing. The psychological horror is so much worse than the physical nastiness (which I admit doesn’t bother me), and it’s one of the scariest sounding movies I’ve ever seen. How this didn’t warp my brain at 4 I’ll never know, but I do remember my cousin’s hair looking like Don King’s as we left the theater.

5.) The Mouse and His Child

Pardon my French, but this is a fucked up cartoon. Users on IMDB compare it to Miyazaki’s work, but I don’t buy that for a second. Miyazaki’s movies can certainly be creepy, but as a kid, I don’t think they would have traumatized me as much as seeing the toy mouse protagonist of this movie violently smashed to pieces by a rock. Or a donkey ripped to shreds. (What’s with the donkeys, Odie?) This is like torture porn with toys, and as a kid who loved my toys, I found it profoundly disturbing. Watership Down is probably more horrific, but that was rated PG. This was rated G by the same drunk at the MPAA who rated The Green Berets G. Two time Oscar winner Peter Ustinov plays the rat villain, whom he gives a sinister reading. One of the worst experiences I’ve ever had at a movie, and I still hold a grudge.

4.) Coma

By the time this movie was released, I’d been in the hospital over a dozen times, mostly for surgeries. So anything to do with surgical equipment gave me the creeps. Michael Crichton’s adaptation of Robin Cook’s novel almost made me faint. Its freaky poster, with bodies suspended from the ceiling, was ubiquitous in 1978; it made me shudder whenever I saw it. My panic only got worse when I discovered Richard Widmark’s intentions for those bodies. I remember sliding closer and closer to the movie theater floor during the race-against-time operating room climax. Crichton had done something similar to me a few years prior, with Westworld, but this movie scared me far worse than Yul Brynner taking his face off. I watched it again recently, and despite how tame the grisly stuff is, I still couldn’t stop squirming.

3.) Rosemary’s Baby

If this film had only shown the baby, as producer William Castle wanted Roman Polanski to do, it wouldn’t be here. Granted, the film is a horror masterpiece, with one of the greatest lead performances by an actress, but the film’s most traumatic aspect for me as a kid was the titular object. Unlike my first viewing of The Exorcist, I knew Rosemary’s Baby was about the Devil. I also knew Satan was Rosemary’s baby daddy, so when Mia Farrow asks that famous question, “what have you done to its eyes?” and the answer is “he has his father’s eyes” (and hands and feet too!), I conjured up all manner of horrible imagery. I would have been let off the hook had they just shown that damn baby, because nothing the F/X team could have done to it In 1968 could have matched what my brain did to it in 1975. Alas, no shot of the baby, except in my nightmares.

A few years after I watched this on CBS with my Mom, they made a TV movie called Look What’s Happened To Rosemary’s Baby. Oddly enough, my mother would NOT let me watch it, because it was “Parental Discretion Advised.”

2.) The Birds

Speaking of eyes, Alfred Hitchcock’s fine feathered friends had a Fulci-esque love of them. I wrote a longer piece about how much this movie terrified me as a kid, so all I’ll say here is that the open-ended ending and the film’s refusal to explain why the birds attacked both added to the fear factor for me. What took that factor to infinity was the scene where the children are attacked. I wore glasses as a kid, and I was (and still am) somewhat helpless without them. The Birds channeled my deep rooted fear that something would chase me and I wouldn’t see well enough to escape it. In my nightmares, my vision  is perfect, vivid enough to see all the horrible things. In real life, I’d be dead as a doornail if my contacts popped out. The Birds would dance the Hucklebuck on my helpless, blind ass.

1.) Poltergeist

Unlike the other 9 movies on this list, I saw Poltergeist when I was a far more seasoned horror filmgoer. I was 12, and had already met  Michael Myers, Jason and Jason’s Mom. The tagline for Poltergeist was “It Knows What Scares You.” It sure felt like it did, because this movie threw in my face everything that freaked me out. Ghosts, dead bodies, Hell, kids going “la-la-la” over scary orchestra music, creepy shadows on the wall, separation anxiety, extremely loud thunderstorms, skeletons, and worst of all, CLOWNS. Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg were relentless; I didn’t sleep at all the night I first saw Poltergeist. As terrified as I was, I went back to see it again and again. Knowing what happened before it did only made the movie scarier. But I’d grown to love that feeling by this time, like some sort of Stockholm Syndrome for that which, through cinematic means, kept me awake at night. When my adolescence rolled along, I never had that feeling from a movie again.

I miss it.