Six Films That Scared Me Shitless

Part of what makes horror so effective is how well it taps into deep-rooted trauma to scare you and, in some cases, scar you for life.

“The Caterpillar” from Night Gallery (Universal, 1972)

I have so many earworms and snippets from both motion pictures and real-life memories rolling around in my head at any given time that it’s a wonder I have room in there for anything else; on my worst days, I almost don’t.

Hyperfocusing causes a person to think about something in a rigid manner and keep going back to it, often at the exclusion of other, more important things. Though to describe it fairly, it seems more like the object of obsession keeps coming back to haunt the individual. People who suffer from OCD and similar diagnoses are keenly aware of this.

A couple of extreme examples would be the 1998 psychological thriller π (Pi), which involves a protagonist who sees “golden spirals” everywhere, or the dark Jim Carrey vehicle The Number 23, in which he plays a man who believes everything that exists is somehow tied to the titular number.

One of my favorite horror films, if not my favorite, is They, which involves shadow demons returning to claim adults who they tormented as children. Part of the “rules” is that “they” can get you, in any dark place, by entering our world through a portal, such as a mirror or closet.

If you truly believed such boogeymen existed, wouldn’t you begin to see them in every dark corner, behind every closet door, just waiting for the lights to go out?

One of the things that make it difficult to heal from trauma is the human psychological tendency to crystallize negative thoughts and store them for quick retrieval as an evolutionary defense mechanism. Your daughter may not think too often about the thousand times you called her a princess, but she will always remember the one time you called her a bitch.

That rustling sound in the tall grass may not be an apex predator about to claim you for its supper, but your brain isn’t going to let you forget about the time you sat shivering by the campfire as Thag recounted a story of witnessing just such a thing happen to Berf and Trog on a dark and stormy night.

“Reliving the experience” is one of the more pernicious symptoms of trauma and is central to the condition PTSD, which most of us wouldn’t wish on our worst enemy. The idea of having to revisit the worst moment of your life over and over and over is one of the worst fates imaginable.

If there’s any truth to the quote from Robin Williams’ underrated 1998 fantasy drama What Dreams May Come, “Hell is your life gone wrong,” then moments of your life you’d consider “gone wrong” spinning around the needle in your mind’s eye like a broken record is the stuff pure terror is made of.

Tales from the Darkside title screen (Syndicated, 1984-1988)

I spent many a late night in my youth watching syndicated episodes of the ‘80s horror anthology Tales From the Darkside, the opening and ending narration of which was scarier than most of the stories in the show. But there was one episode that has always stuck with me and seared itself into my subconscious like a face turning away from a wedding day kiss at the altar.

It was called “A Choice of Dreams” and starred Abe Vigoda as a mob boss who discovers he has terminal cancer.

After he is approached by a company called Afterlife, which promises to grant the wicked gangster a chance to relive his happiest memories after he dies, he spends his ill-gotten fortune on the procedure, only to discover that he is now a brain, trapped in a jar, being forced to relive his worst memories over and over. We then see that he is but one in a row of brains in jars doomed to the same fate stretching off into the distance. Over the moans and screams of the damned, we hear the small, sad voice of the mob boss proclaim, “I’m sorry.”

With that happy thought in mind, imagine, if you will, a scene from a movie that not only scares the shit out of you but continues to play on a short loop in your head for decades. Welcome to my personal hell. These are the six horror films that scarred me for life.

1. JAWS (1975)

I was born in 1975, a month after Jaws premiered to the largest movie audience ever at that time.

On November 4th, 1979, after weeks of ABC’s voice of doom, Ernie Anderson, heralding the network debut of “the movie that changed history”, my little four-year-old self cringed behind my parents’ recliners and took in the aquatic horror that would follow me for the rest of my days.

Like so many others then and since, whenever I find myself in a large body of water, I spare an at least fleeting thought for the big rubber shark that defined “summer blockbuster” and scared the living shit out of generations of little kids.

I later obsessed over the movie, becoming an avid collector of related memorabilia and making the pilgrimage to Martha’s Vineyard, where most of it was filmed. One of my prized possessions was an officially licensed, vintage gaff hook game from Ideal Toys signed on either side by Craig “Ben Gardner” Kingsbury (the famous head-popping-out-of-the-hole guy) and Lee “Mrs. Kintner” Fierro, the mother who slaps Chief Brody after her little Alex gets eaten.

The first time my poor little two-year-old daughter saw it after I put it on display, her eyes widened into saucers, and she let out a blood-curdling scream.

I knew how she felt. I had caught Jaws 2 at the theater a few years before watching the OG on TV. One of the most memorable aspects of the premiere of the movie that added “just when you thought it was safe to (go back in the water)” to the vernacular was the giant display the theaters erected over the entryway doors so moviegoers would have to walk through the open jaws of the shark from the poster to get to their seats.

And yes, Mom and Dad carried me right through and into its belly.

Two-year-olds can’t really comprehend plots or fully wrap their heads around the concept of a movie. To them, movies are mostly just a jumble of images that convey concepts with which they are largely unfamiliar. At my first indoor movie experience after the opening cartoons (typical DePatie/Freling bunk), I saw a beautiful world of blue open before my innocent eyes only to be punctuated by a creature Jaws franchise fans would later dub “Brucette”.

I still vividly remember seeing the Phantom-of-the-Opera-esque shark gobbling down the annoying teens in what was basically a slasher movie with teeth. But by the time I was 4, I knew exactly what was going on (us kids in the late ‘70s were a lot smarter than these Barney brats, on account of Sesame Street and The Electric Company actually teachin’ us some shit).

I was so shocked by Peter Benchley’s novel come to life in my living room that when my dad asked what I thought of the movie and if I was looking forward to going to the beach the next day (we lived in San Diego at the time), all I could think of to say was “Jaws can’t swim.” Not a great answer, I know, especially considering all the evidence I’d just seen to the contrary, but it was the only hope I could muster up.

The next day, Pops took me to the beach and dragged me into the water, kicking and screaming, tossing me into the drink while laughing his sick, fucking ass off. Now, you may think, dude, that’s what traumatized you, not the movie, but you would be wrong. If I’d never seen the movie, I wouldn’t have known the fate that surely awaited me just a few precious yards away from the safety of the sand.

I maintain that JAWS is probably the film that has affected more people on a deep, psychological level than any other movie in history.

If it weren’t a stupid meme, I’d cap off that statement with “prove me wrong.” I’m not even completely comfortable in lakes, let alone the ocean.

Chew on this: What other soundtrack can you instantly recognize from only two notes? And what other two notes carry so much horrific weight? What other movie is able to compare to the phenomenon of instilling a sense of dread in any kid who went into the water after seeing it, hell, sometimes after having only seen Roger Kastel’s nightmare-inducing poster art for it?

Yeah. Fuck that movie. You’re gonna need a bigger therapy budget.

2. THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974)

The 1970s and early ‘80s were the perfect time for little kids to get traumatized by horror movies because drive-ins were all the rage. Like Grease and American Graffiti (both of which I caught at the drive-in), Happy Days, and Sha Na Na, they benefitted from a ‘50s nostalgia wave that nearly rivaled Disco.

And where else could a young couple with tiny brats in tow go to wind down and smoke some of the good stuff while still providing a hybrid of family fun and Date Night?

Drive-ins usually had playgrounds at the front where kiddos could burn off all their energy before dusk.

Right… I MIGHT have been five.

There was an understanding for most of us that once it got dark, we were to watch the opening cartoon (I always prayed for Looney Tunes but usually ended up with The Ant & the Aardvark) while scarfing our popcorn then lay down in the back and go to sleep (Car seats? Pfft!). If we failed to do so, it was at our peril.

My first peek at the forbidden world of shit my dad was determined to see was a Texas Chainsaw/Halloween double feature.

I’d recently stayed up for Meatballs and The Blues Brothers just to watch my stoner parents piss themselves laughing, so I wasn’t expecting… Leatherface.

Granted, I didn’t really watch much of the actual movie. I caught just enough to have my first foray through The Uncanny Valley — you know, that uncomfortable place in which you find yourself not quite able to accept that a face is human but still not totally convinced it isn’t.

The worst thing about the main antagonist from TCM was that his mask WAS a human face, which made the infamous Valley go that much deeper, especially for a kid without the full context.

Add the cacophony of the iconic instrument of death to the proceedings, and you really only need about a ten-second line of sight for a full, traumatic effect.

You may be thinking that my parents were selfish assholes — first throwing me into the ocean the day after my virgin viewing of Jaws, then having the audacity to take me to an R-rated double feature. But these were different times with different social norms. We hadn’t even graduated to the level of making Saturday morning shows and video games for kids based on adult fare like Robocop, Rambo, The Toxic Avenger, and The Terminator yet.

There seemed to be this prevailing idea that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and kids had been gradually introduced to violence and gore since the 1950s.

3. HALLOWEEN (1978)

What I can tell you about Halloween from the perspective of a preschooler who saw it around the time of its initial release is that, like Texas Chainsaw, it was a largely bloodless movie, which likely made my folks a little less worried about whether we watched it or not.

The horror was more from the sound and the soundtrack (respectively). To offer a little perspective, they marched us right out of The Fly in ’86 after the baboon got turned inside-out.

Also, like TCM, Halloween featured a mask perfectly suited for Uncanny-Valley-sensitive little squirts — based on a real guy’s face, painted white to give it a ghostly quality. Almost any time I shatnered myself from seeing my own reflection in a window, it was because, for a split second, I was sure it was Michael Fucking Myers.

The heavy breathing and closet rattling solidified PTMD (Post Traumatic Movie Disorder). But it was something else, I think, that went even a little deeper for me personally.

What bothered me most were all the beautiful women coming to bad ends.

Even during my formative years, I held the female form in such high regard that watching the pinnacle of creation suffer or die hit hard. It’s one of the reasons Jaws had such an impact – starting with a naked woman meeting a grisly fate, something the poster art froze in time perfectly. Oh, Chrissie and Annie, I hardly knew ye!

Decades later, when our tender sensibilities compel this fragile generation to cover up the Tumbling Woman sculpture as too tragic, too offensive, or too grotesque, I wonder if half those complaining have ever watched a horror movie… like really watched it.

4. THE RING (2002)

I never thought I’d be including a “modern” movie on this list. Truth be told, it’s not just me who was traumatized. My poor wife went to the premiere with me, thinking it was just gonna be a run-of-the-mill ghost story, and apart from some killer corpse FX, for the most part, it was.

We were in our mid-twenties, and I swear I hadn’t seen a great horror film in the theater in forever. The last one I could think of was Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which came out ten years earlier.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved Scream, The Frighteners, and Mimic, to name a few, but I thought ‘90s horror sucked for the most part, especially compared with the ‘80s, and hardly any of them were scary.

Then along came The Blair Witch Project, which wanted so badly to be great, but it sucked too (comparatively) till the last few minutes. However, what it did manage to do was put a taste in people’s mouths for supernatural horror. Over the next several years, audiences would become insatiable. What Lies Beneath, Stir of Echoes, The Others, and The Sixth Sense kicked things up a few welcome notches.

But there were two films that came out near the end of 2002 that perfected supernatural horror in my book: They and The Ring. The former got lost in the shuffle and is, in my humble opinion, the most underrated horror movie of all time. But the latter changed the tone and style of horror films for the next twenty years.

So yeah, the missus and I are about three-fourths of the way through The Ring, and we kinda look at each other and shrug as it goes into the final act and seems like it’s wrapping up nicely, and we’re like, “Okay, it wasn’t too bad.” Then the creepy little kid goes, “You did what? You weren’t supposed to help her!” We both get goosebumps. Then the finale starts, and we’re literally on the edge of our seats for the remainder of the film.

At the time, I made the declaration that I hadn’t seen a horror movie that fucking great in the theater since HALLOWEEN.

That may have been a slight overstatement, but not by much, and certainly not by the metric of actual scariness.

That evening we go home, and I, of course, being the asshole I am, put static on the TV as soon as we get settled, and she flips me the bird and goes to bed. I get to feelin’ guilty, so I go to check on her, and there she sits on the bed with the lights on and a pillow squeezed to her chest. I ask her if she’s okay, and she invites me to go perform an impossible act of masturbation.

I start to head back to the living room, and out of force of habit, I remember a little after the fact (because I’m kinda tired on account of it being late) to flip off the bedroom light. Well, that did it for her. I don’t think she even screamed that loud during childbirth. I quickly flip it back on and ask her what’s wrong, and she’s sobbing and says in this pathetic little girl voice, “You SCARED me!”

After I laughed for a couple of minutes, I gave her a hug and tried to calm her down, and she explained that my hand coming back around the corner and flipping off the light had looked like Samara’s hand coming up over the well. Over the next several days, I had to resist the idiot temptation to sneak up and whisper “seven days” in her ear, but it was actually I who would end up with what some might call karmic willies.

One of the reasons I love the movie They so much is that it involves night terrors, which are very rare in adults, but I had them well into my thirties. I also suffered from sleep paralysis, which goes hand-in-hand with night terrors, and I would often talk in my sleep, or, rather, in my between-sleep-and-awake state, and beg my wife or whoever was nearby to wake me up.

This time, however (a few weeks after spooking my old lady), instead of saying “Wake me up” as per usual, I started thrashing around, saying, “Get out of my fucking TV, you bitch!” I am happy to report that I chose fight mode over flight mode. But the point is: that slick, moody remake of the groundbreaking, novel Japanese ghost story absolutely terrified us and has remained a source of goosebumps well into our forties.

I know I shouldn’t, but I get personally offended by fellow horror fans who lump it in with other Asian-based horror movies as a silly fad. Um, no, it wasn’t. All that jump-scare ghost/demon stuff that came later (e.g., The Conjuring, Insidious, Sinister, It Follows, Smile) owe it a huge debt.

Want to know what lingered with me the most about THE RING, though? No, not Samara; it was those fucking faces of the people in the photographs who’d watched the tape and were marked for death. I’m getting chills just thinkin’ about ‘em now.

5. GHOST (1990)

Hey, it’s Six MOVIES, not Six HORROR Movies that scared me shitless; and if this one pisses you off, you’re really gonna hate my last one.

I was 15 in 1990. Hadn’t met my high school sweetheart yet. Hadn’t found Jesus (have you?). Hadn’t decided yet whether I really believed in heaven, hell, angels, demons, or the afterlife. I was content with cutesy stuff like The Kid with the Broken Halo (which morphed into the bizarre Gary Coleman Show circa 1982) and the irreverence of Beetlejuice (1988).

But Ghost, as sappy as it may have seemed on the surface, especially with The Righteous Brothers copulating with Maurice Jarre over the top of a (still) corny pottery wheel love scene, was much more than a romantic comedy or a “romantic fantasy film” as it’s so labeled in the Wikisphere.

Jarre, by the way, also scored a couple of movies you may have heard of (Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago) as well as one you may not, Dreamscape (1984), which almost made this list and features a rare synth score from the multi-Oscar-winner.

Somebody (uh, the guy who wrote Jacob’s Ladder, actually: Bruce Joel Rubin, who took the Oscar for penning Ghost) managed to sneak some utterly disturbing shit into an otherwise docile story.

I’ll start with the thing that haunted me more than traumatized me: The Subway Ghost, played to perfection by the inimitable Vincent Schiavelli.

His portrayal of a tortured soul terrorizing the subway as a disgruntled poltergeist who teaches Patrick Swayze’s character how to move corporeal objects now that he’s a spirit without a body was nothing short of Oscar-worthy. “Character actors” rarely get their due, and despite the film earning several nods from The Academy and winning in a couple of major categories, Schiavelli wasn’t even nominated.

(I like to think he’s haunting the Oscars and doing weird shit like possessing Will Smith these days.)

The character was so frightening to me because he clearly suffered from severe mental illness, with symptoms of emotional dysregulation and paranoia characterizing a schizoaffective personality and possibly bipolar disorder.

What’s so scary about a Psych 101 laundry list?

Imagine suffering from mental health issues your whole life, realizing during brief moments of clarity the nature of the problems that seem to plague you and your interactions with others like a curse, only to discover that even death cannot cure you – that you are damned for eternity to wander in a state of flux between sadness and paranoia, anger your only release. Fuck that shit.

But as deeply as the mad specter got under my skin, it was the deaths of the two main villains, Willie Lopez and Carl Bruner, that traumatized me.

I was not ready for “The Other Ones” to come, forcing their way into this mortal plane like something out of The Evil Dead to claim the souls of the bad guys.

These things were obviously some kind of shadow demons sent from hell to drag the villains off to eternal torment. I cried real tears the first time I watched it, not out of pity but sheer, unadulterated horror. Willie’s death was particularly bleak, thanks in large part to Rick Aviles’ incredibly convincing performance.

As for Carl… well, it was honestly kinda hard to feel bad for him; Tony Goldwyn could do “scummy” like nobody else (with the possible exception of Paul Reiser’s “Burke” in Aliens).

(I always wondered what happened to his career after he peaked with Friday the 13th, Part 6: Jason Lives and Ghost.)

My parents noticed I was pretty shaken after we popped the tape out of the VCR, and they asked me what was bothering me so much. I shouldn’t have told them because, like so many “reformed” stoners from the ‘60s & ‘70s, they got the guilties after the ‘80s petered out and tried to replace their perceived vices with religious virtue (with some success, I should add).

I didn’t really need a lecture on why I should be terrified of such a fate if I hadn’t yet received Jesus Christ as my Personal Lord & Savior (something told me Patrick Swayze hadn’t either), but I got one anyway. And if there’s anything that will give a horror scene teeth, it’s some real-life fire & brimstone theology to boot.

I dearly love my parents, but the Satanic Panic and too many Chick Tracts really did a number on them (and, subsequently, me); thankfully, they found a balance in time, but those early days were intense.

Someday, when I get up enough courage, I’ll tell you all about the movies I was forced to watch as an 8-year-old kid in church, which were far more traumatic and terrifying than anything on this list… but some things are too scary even for a horror publication.

For the longest time, my nightmares were of the last thing I heard before getting dragged off to hell being, “That dude is dead.”

I still get the willies (pun intended) when I see a body at a crash scene in a video or real life. It always makes me wonder: are they going into the light or meeting “the other ones”?

6. THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939)

Oh, come on now. Don’t act like you’ve never heard someone talk about how much the flying monkeys gave them nightmares as a kid.

Not me, though. I never could take a creature that bears such a striking resemblance to Wallace “Inconceivable” Shawn too seriously.

Be that as it may, if Jaws is responsible for having a deep psychological impact on more people than any other movie in history, then surely the MGM classic musical from 1939 takes the award for “Most Traumatic Children’s Movie of All Time.”

And it’s not a wonder. Just consider:

– the deadly tornado

– the flying house

– wilting witch feet (which I still say are partially responsible for Tim Burton’s signature style)

– trees that look suspiciously like a cross between something from The Evil Dead and those now defunct McDonaldland Apple Pie Trees

– Scarecrow getting disemboweled

– the Wizard’s illusion looking like something out of an H.G. Wells novel

– The Haunted Forest (I do, also believe in spooks)

But for me, it was the trauma of a witch with a killer look that Sam Raimi (ironically enough) brought back almost 75 years later in the criminally underrated Oz The Great & Powerful (2013) that continues to play hopscotch on my amygdala.

Maybe a grown-ass man nearly half a century old should be ashamed of getting the heebie-jeebies from the villainess in a children’s movie.

Or, maybe I’m just like a lot of horror buffs and am in touch with what scares me and willing to put it under a magnifying glass to see what’s boiling underneath its unnatural green skin.

In either case, it’s not just the witch but a specific scene during which she is up to some creepy-assed shenanigans that left a huge, cackling keloid on my tender mind flesh and gives me pause around crystal balls.

I’m talking about the part where Dorothy is locked in the witch’s personal chamber with the crystal ball and the sinister red-sand-filled hourglass just sifting by like the final seconds of her life as she cries for the one person in the world who has always been there for her – dear, old Auntie Em.

And who should appear in the witch’s orb but Auntie Em herself, desperately searching for Dorothy, who is, at present, hopelessly far, far away?

As if the dwindling time she has left to live weren’t frightening enough, Dorothy’s aunt starts to disappear, and in her place appears the witch, taunting the poor girl by mocking her pleas, in a snide voice dripping with sadistic glee.

“Auntie Em! Auntie Em! I’ll give you Auntie Em!” 

What traumatized me was that the witch should not have known who Auntie Em was. She shouldn’t have been able to pull that sacred image from Dorothy’s mind to torment her with it.

Then, as if to pound the final nail into my subconscious coffin, she starts cackling wildly and BREAKS THE FUCKING FOURTH WALL by staring directly at the camera and into my soul, daring me to imagine what it would be like to be in Dorothy’s place — a lost child trapped in a mind-reading monster’s tower with no hope of escape.

I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that scene still gives me chills and probably always will.

“My name is S. Michael Simms, and I am a Wizard of Oz survivor.”

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