Whether you’re a horror lover or a registered Halloweenie, one thing is probably true: As a child, you saw a film that utterly terrified you, evoking the sort of totalizing fear only a kid can feel. So to celebrate spooky season, we asked VF staffers to reach way back into their memory banks to reveal the very first movie that scared each of them silly. Our list is filled with demons, zombies, vampires, flying monkeys, and a surprising number of Kristy Swanson projects. Reader, beware: You’re in for a scare.
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
As a child, I had a very complicated relationship with The Wizard of Oz. On the one hand, it was one of my favorite films: I was completely obsessed with Dorothy. I wore my hair in braids and insisted on click-clacking in my very own ruby red slippers everywhere I went. On the other hand, I had to make sure I was feeling brave enough each time I sat down to watch it. I’d reach for the VHS on the shelf often, but the vision of the Wicked Witch of the West summoning her army of flying monkeys haunted me—and still does, honestly. I can still hear the sound of sweet Toto barking and Dorothy screaming as the terrifying, blue, human-size-mutant flock sweeps them away into the abyss. Talk about wicked! —Daniela Tijerina
The Shining (1980)
I’m a scaredy cat, which I learned the hard way while staying at an aunt and uncle’s when I was a child. I happened to wander into the TV room as they were watching The Shining (on RCA video disc, for anyone who remembers), and it was right at the moment when Jack Nicholson’s possessed caretaker buries a hatchet into Hallorann (Scatman Crothers). Eventually, I read the book, in which Hallorann actually survives! But I was already haunted by that scene, and by the twins’ eerie refrain: “Come play with us, Danny.” I also watched Poltergeist as a child and, like all sensible people, can no longer abide clown dolls nor static on television sets. —Radhika Jones
I Am Legend (2007)
I had cool (and maybe irresponsible) parents who let me watch rated-R movies far too young (see: The Shining at age seven) and built up my tolerance. So it wasn’t until middle school that I encountered my first sleep-with-the-lights-on-all-night flick in the form of an…action movie? It’s hard to say exactly what genre I Am Legend fits under. The movie’s set in a postapocalyptic Manhattan besieged by plague victims turned monsters, with an immune Will Smith trying to manufacture a cure. The pitter-patter of the vampire-ish monsters running through Washington Square Park still haunts me, as does the scene of city officials blowing the bridges and tunnels. Too real then, too real now post-COVID. —Jaime Archer
It (1990)
As a child, the two-VHS set of the It miniseries held a prominent place inside my uncle’s wooden entertainment system, and in my earliest memories, it was a totemic object. I wanted It, whatever It was. Once, when I was five or so, my older cousins were babysitting and decided to put it on. The other young kids fled the room a few minutes in, but I sat unmoving, eyes fixed to the television, saying nothing for hours, leaving everyone with the impression that I simply wasn’t afraid. Cue weeks of night terrors and a lasting sense of unease around clowns of all kinds. My mom was pissed. This story has taken on an apocryphal significance in my family—its veracity was a topic of discussion at both my 30th birthday party and my recent wedding—but I know it’s true for one reason: I love horror movies of all kinds and am rarely genuinely scared, but the 1990 It still really gets to me. —Erin Vanderhoof
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992)
When I went to my very first group sleepover, someone picked the VHS of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as our entertainment for the evening. I have been informed, as an adult, that this movie (which stars Kristy Swanson as a cheerleader who discovers she’s a vampire hunter) is a comedy, and having watched the trailer now, I guess I agree. But at the time, when I was maybe nine years old, this movie terrified me, and I spent weeks waking up at night afraid that vampires might find their way into my house. I was determined to learn how to use a wooden stake, just in case. I’ve never watched the movie again (or the TV show it spawned) and, honestly, doubt that will change anytime soon. —Rebecca Ford
Night of the Living Dead (1990)
My mom tells me that when she took me to see The Black Cauldron, I was so scared that I hid under the theater seat the entire movie—but that memory is lost in the haze of youth. I remember being creeped out by The Watcher in the Woods and The Changeling, only that was the giddy, fun kind of frightened. No, the movie that really freaked me out in a dreadful way that I can still viscerally recall was the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead, a grim and gunky and unrelenting descent into hell, the likes of which I’d never seen before. At about 9 or 10 years old, I was entirely too young to see the movie, but my sister (also too young to see it) insisted we watch it. And so we did, me shrinking ever more into the couch as poor Barbara Todd (Patricia Tallman) sought meager refuge from a horde of zombies in an old farmhouse.
I was thoroughly rattled. And then, to make matters worse, my parents got home from work and drove us down to the old farmhouse where we spent part of every summer—and where I spent many a night staring out the window of my little bedroom, convinced I was going to see some ghoul, or many ghouls, staggering out of the woods. It was the beginning of an embarrassingly yearslong fear of zombies that persisted into my 20s, exacerbated by the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. There I was—a college student who should have been more concerned with boys and parties and, uh, my studies—absolutely convinced that every thud and creak in my off-campus apartment was a zombie finally coming to get me, some 12 years after Night of the Living Dead first lodged itself in the fear receptors of my brain. I eventually got over it, even survived a few seasons of The Walking Dead. But I will never watch Tom Savini’s film ever again, lest I find myself cowering in my bedroom in my 40s, listening for the shuffling of rotting feet all over again. —Richard Lawson
The Goonies (1985) and The Lost Boys (1987)
Even though these movies came out two years apart, in my mind, I was concurrently terrified of both of them. I didn’t actually watch The Goonies the whole way through until this decade of my life, which says something about how scared I was of it, despite my friends finding this ludicrous. Why? The underground-ness; the Fratellis. And The Lost Boys? Vampires; divorce. I’m easily scared, I guess. I’ve still never seen Child’s Play or It because the mere sight of the VHS boxes at Take Two Video scared me so badly. The ’80s were a very scary time. —Claire Howorth
Don’t Look Under the Bed (1999)
While Disney Channel perfected the art of nonspooky seasonal viewing with Halloweentown and Twitches, the network also made one of the most outright terrifying movies ever targeted toward kids. I can’t remember if I actually soldiered through the entire movie about a boogeyman living beneath a girl’s bed—but I do recall periodically taking a look underneath my own to ensure that no creatures had slinked into my room in the middle of the night. My elementary-school-aged self wasn’t alone. “There were a number of meetings where we’d talked about the tone and what [Disney] wanted it to be–scary but not too scary,” director Kenneth Johnson told Entertainment Weekly in 2017. “That’s the bar we kept trying to find. Everybody thought we had hit it until they started getting derogatory mail after it aired.” —Savannah Walsh
101 Dalmatians (1996)
There are few villains in cinematic history as iconic or as terrifying as Cruella de Vil—a chic and wicked cross between Miranda Priestly and the Child Catcher. There’s a reason her titular song goes, “If she doesn’t scare you, no evil thing will”—and as a child, I really took those lyrics to heart. But I wasn’t afraid of the Cruella from the 1961 animated film One Hundred and One Dalmatians. I was very specifically terrified of Glenn Close’s interpretation of Cruella de Vil in the 1996 live-action film. Close’s powdered face, her black-and-white aesthetic with shocks of red (like blood!) and, most importantly, her ungodly cackle struck a certain fear in me, the likes of which I had never felt. In retrospect, I can see it for what it was—an indelible performance by one of our finest screen actors—but at the time, Close really scared the bejeezus out of me.
One of my earliest, most visceral childhood memories is having a nightmare that Cruella was coming to get me and waking up my father in the dead of night. I then made him find our VHS copy of 101 Dalmatians, throw it in the trash, and take that trash bag and put it in the garbage outside of our house. I couldn’t sleep another wink knowing that Close’s Cruella was lurking somewhere in our home. Even today, to see her is to take a sudden chill. —Chris Murphy
Poltergeist (1982) and Deadly Friend (1986)
Never underestimate the terrifying power of the kid whisper network. The two movies that generated the most fear in me when I was in elementary school were the suburban haunted-house blockbuster Poltergeist, which is still a classic today, and the psycho-killer girl-robot movie Deadly Friend, which preceded M3GAN by decades. Both freaked me out well before I saw them thanks to the intense descriptions I heard (and sometimes misunderstood) from my classmates.
I first encountered the term poltergeist when my best friend, Joey Mitchell, told me that he was going to watch the eponymous movie on a new thing his family had called H-B-O. First-grader me didn’t know what either of those things were, so Joey helpfully explained that it was this movie in which ghosts came out of the TV. That night, I went home and told my mom that our family absolutely had to get this thing called H-B-O too—somehow it had this ability to make ghosts come out of your TV!
In seventh grade, all the girls were abuzz about Deadly Friend, which some of them had apparently watched on tape during a sleepover. I remember them one-upping each other as they recounted the most heinous kills of the robot who looked like a human girl (Kristy Swanson again!). Most unsettling was their description of a scene in which she throws a basketball so hard that a mean old lady’s head explodes. My mind reeled: My God…could a basketball do that? One of them heard the filmmakers blew up the head of a real dead body. (Again, I thought: Could they do that?) When I eventually saw both films, no specters emerged from the screen, and the robo-kill looked more like someone threw a basketball at a fresh strawberry pie. The distressing possibilities I imagined still get under my skin, though. —Anthony Breznican
Time Bandits (1981)
I turned six in 1981, and it’s weird how many movies I can think of from that year that really disturbed me. I remember seeing the swords-and-sandals epic Clash of the Titans in the theater and being both transfixed and terrified by the snake-headed Medusa, whose glowing gaze turned people to stone. Taps, the Timothy Hutton drama about a military school gone haywire, had a scene involving the death of a young boy that downright traumatized me. And then there was Time Bandits, Terry Gilliam’s ostensibly family-themed fantasy about a group of dwarves who rampage through history on a quest for treasure. I was about the same age as the boy in the leading role, and felt a weird mixture of joy and horror at seeing a child’s imagination brought so vividly to life onscreen. But there is a twist at the very end of the film, which I won’t spoil, that absolutely did my head in—and gave me an early inkling that happy endings are far from guaranteed, in cinema and in life. —Mike Hogan
Leprechaun (1993)
I’m nothing if not the stereotypical younger sister, so whatever my big brother watched, I wanted to watch. That meant that as a kindergartener, despite the fact that I was a known scaredy cat, I watched Leprechaun through squeezed-shut eyes, insisting that, nope, I wasn’t scared, not at all, nooooo way. Spoiler: I was. Very.
Reading the summary of the movie now, I have almost zero recall of the plot, and am offended on behalf of my child self that it’s actually classified as a horror comedy. I’m sure it’s campy, but I haven’t revisited the film for childhood-trauma reasons. Even now, more than 30 years later, I have the indelible image of that g-d leprechaun stroking Jennifer Aniston’s leg under the table with one talon-like fingernail, which horrified me as a kid and, I’m a little embarrassed to admit, still sometimes makes me glance under tables before I sit down. Better safe than sorry: You just never know when there’s going to be a horny, evil leprechaun down there. —Kase Wickman
Fantasia (1940)
“Night on Bald Mountain” is the Fantasia segment that’s most often cited as nightmare fuel; it’s crawling with glowing-eyed demons and grimacing skeletons, things of that nature. The part that really got me, though, is “The Rite of Spring”—a 20-minute epic about the origins of life that begins with the Big Bang and ends with an agonizing coda that shows the gradual death of the dinosaurs. I still shudder when I think about those animated triceratops and Tyrannosauruses lurching to the ground, gasping out their last, shuddering breaths to Stravinsky’s pounding rhythms. Teach your kids about classical music, they said! —Hillary Busis
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