14 Scary Movies, Books, and TV Series That Terrified the Nerdist Staff as Kids
Ask any ten people to name the scariest thing they can think of and you’ll likely wind up hearing ten different nightmare scenarios. Sure, there are veritable kingpins of the haunting game. You’ve got ghosts, clowns, spiders, dark rooms, staticky television sets, phone calls from unknown numbers, and the inability to quickly think of a polite follow-up question when someone you’ve just met tells you what they do for a living. But everyone’s got their own personal biggest fears. And in turn, their own personal picks for scariest thing they’ve ever watched or read. But certain scares hold a unique place in our psyches – the things that scared us as kids.
So as part of Nerdoween, we here at
Robbie’s Bedroom in Poltergeist
Eric Diaz: “
The Woman Without Eyeballs from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
Sophy Ziss: I think it’s a rite of passage for my generation to have been traumatized by
The Brutality of The Toxic Avenger
Kyle Anderson: “Cartoons were my lifeblood when I was a kid. And if it was action-adventure in nature, I inhaled it like a sweet hit of scented oxygen. In 1991, one of my new favorites was
See, back in the early ’90s, the USA Network was a cesspool of residual ’80s trash. And one fateful Saturday they showed a marathon of Troma’s
E.T.’s Near Death in E.T. The Extra Terrestrial
Kelly Knox: My first memory in a movie theater is actually the scariest one! In 1982, tiny me was watching
The Little Ghost Girl from Lady in White
Benjamin Bailey: As a kid,
Judge Doom Getting Flattened and Dipped in Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Dan Casey: “A protracted, high-pitched wail. Anguished cries of pain. Bulging red eyes that look as though they might burst at any moment. A horrible gurgling from the viscous, green ichor on the ground. These were the truly wretched sights and sounds of Christopher Lloyd’s Judge Doom, the imperious executioner of beloved cartoon characters in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Why my parents let me watch this hard-boiled tale of deception, mystery, and murders most foul I will never know. But the scene at the film’s climax where Judge Doom dies slowly and horribly in the fulminating green goo of his own creation left deep and lasting psychic scars. I always knew the scene was coming. But I couldn’t look away. My pulse quickened, my breath shortened, and time seemed to stand still as that interminable nightmare played out in excruciating detail. The scene only lasts for about a minute, but the effects have stayed with me for a lifetime.”
The Nuclear fallout of When the Wind Blows
Luke Y. Thompson: “When I was about eight years old, my parents got me Raymond Briggs’
To make matters worse, in trying to ‘explain’ things, my parents told me this could happen any day if nothing was done about it. (It was the Cold War still.) After reading the book twice I made them take it away. And it resurfaced in bad dreams for many years afterward. I performed a bit of self-exorcism by watching the animated adaptation as an adult with lots of cocktails nearby, seeing it now as just the sad story of a loving couple who die. I’m still a bit afraid to look at the book again though.”
The cube from Cube
Rosie Knight: “I remember watching
Rik Mayall’s Head Getting Squashed in Drop Dead Fred
Mica Arbeiter: “For something close to 20 years, I had no idea which movie it was that had lain a young me to psychological waste with images of a grown man writhing in anguish as his head was slowly squashed in a refrigerator door. I had run out of the room at Evan and Jason’s house the instant the scene got too graphic – that horrifying moment when Rik Mayall’s face flattened and neck turned to rubber. And was left battling unwelcome memories of the sequence without even the comfort of knowing the name of the film that had so scarred me.
The mystery of its origins made matters all the more grim when the trauma resurfaced thanks to the scene in the otherwise jolly
The Floating Child from Salem’s Lot
Todd Gilchrist: “When I was about five,
The scene was scary enough. But what was worse was the fact that I was staying at my grandmother’s house where every bedroom had floor to ceiling curtains that glowed in the moonlight at night. To this day I’ve never watched the whole movie or even the complete scene. And I was constantly reminded of it any time I ever visited my grandmother.”
The Man Who Attempts to Kill the Circus Freaks, and then himself, in Geek Love
Lindsey Romain: “The scariest thing I’ve ever read is actually one small snippet in a vast sea of weird prose. Katherine Dunn’s
After encountering the freak show on one of their stops, he grew enraged and disgusted at their deformities and attempted to assassinate them. He failed, his life fell apart, and years later he attempted suicide and instead blew off half of his face. He returns to the freak show, this time seeking acceptance, and becomes the secondhand man to one of its members who is slowly forming a cult. That may not sound scary. But the depictions of Bogner after his suicide attempt, coupled with the fact that he wears a cloth bag over his head and goes by the name Bag Man, have crawled under my skin and stayed in my head since I first read them.”
Vigo the Carpathian from Ghostbusters 2
Michael Walsh: “
The Shape from Halloween
Matthew Grosinger: “It’s the only recurring nightmare I have as an adult, and, much like my boogeyman’s methods, it’s a variation of the same thing every time. Michael Myers is stalking me, again. And I know that this time will be the last. I’m frantic, running hard. But it doesn’t make a difference against his metronomic approach. An exacting, steady threat. And just before he gets me, I jolt awake, almost in shock.
I have never decided what’s scarier about The Shape: his expressionlessness and black chasm eyeholes. Or his semi/sub human movements. Like he just learned to walk and pick up objects last week. What I do know is that I saw John Carpenter’s
Pretty Much Everything about Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland
Rachel Heine: “Picture this: you’re whisked away to a magical dreamland. You meet a cute princess who teaches you how to fly. The King takes you under his wing. What could go wrong? Well, in the case of
As a little girl, I instinctively knew that if I met a sassy, cigar-smoking clown who was clearly trouble, I would definitely listen to him and accidentally free the Nightmare King from his prison. When Nemo had to watch, helpless, as dark, tangled tentacles descended upon his coronation and swallowed poor King Morpheus up, I got my first taste of existential dread. That didn’t stop me from watching it over and over again, though. (Let’s not analyze that.)
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