Movies That Freaked Us Out As Kids | Group Chat

Monsters and monkeys and megalosaurus, oh my!

From time to time, Cinemantic’s four main contributors — Tyler MacQueen, Graham Piro, Caleb Boyer, and Daniel Mitchell — will jump on a call to chat about anything and everything movies. This month, in honor of Spooky Season, we break down the movies that scared the bejesus outta us as kids.

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CALEB: There are many moments in movies that scared me as a kid. The horrible yellow eyes and terrifying smile of Jim Carrey’s Grinch. The Wampa jumping into frame and attacking Luke Skywalker in Empire Strikes Back. The wicked witch in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Lots of things in movies are scary when you are a kid, but there was one film that freaked me out and disturbs me to this day.

I grew up watching Turner Classic Movies, old films that most people have never seen or heard of from the early age of Hollywood. My parents considered these old films to be safe for us kids, and that was generally true. You never had to worry about explicit adult themes and content because times were different back then. 

Violence was subdued and offscreen, sex was a passionate kiss between lovers, and coarse language was no more than the verbal jousting you might encounter in a Jane Austen novel. If and when these old films touched upon mature themes, it was often subtle and implied, but there is an exception to every rule.

Robert Osbourne introduced Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) like any other film. It is about a beautiful trapeze artist, Cleopatra, who agrees to marry a dwarf, Hans, the leader of a carnival sideshow. When Han’s sideshow friends discover that Cleopatra intends to marry Hans only to murder him and claim his inheritance, they seek revenge. Cleopatra is captured by the “freaks” and later shown on display at the carnival as a deformed, human duck. It looks a bit ridiculous now, but it was truly terrifying as a kid!

TYLER: One night, my family drove a few miles down the road to Perrysville (population 726) to meet up with our friends, the Brown family. It was October, I think, and I was probably seven or eight years old at the time. Night had already fallen, and my parents told me we would have a movie night with the Browns’: Young Frankenstein (dir. Mel Brooks, 1974). They claimed it was a comedy. But I wasn’t laughing.

What I recognize now as the brilliance of that movie utterly terrified me as a child: the black-and-white cinematography, the practical sets, the haunting violin theme. Evoking so much of the mood of the classic Boris Karloff pictures is what sets it apart from many of the genre parodies. Brooks and Gene Wilder’s decision to place a comedy into that eerie, creative atmosphere threw me off my game. Shouldn’t a comedy be about light-hearted matters, like slipping on a banana peel, not resurrecting the dead?

My parents and the Browns’—Gary and Karen— were laughing up a storm. I sat there terrified and confused. What was so funny? The humor was over my head, and as I tried to go to bed at night, all I could think of was that haunting violin theme played against a full moon. In my dreams, Peter Boyle’s Monster emerged from the misty shadows. Not doing a tap dance, mind you, but menacingly. To this day, that violin theme scares the absolute bejesus outta me—even if I can now laugh at this:

GRAHAM: IMDB designates Jurassic Park (1993, dir. Spielberg) as fitting into the “Dinosaur Adventure,” “Jungle Adventure,” “Action,” “Adventure,” “Sci-Fi,” and “Thriller” genres. I would include “Horror” for a young me.

I’ll stand by that today — from its opening moments, Jurassic Park is a very frightening movie. It’s also a perfectly calibrated film that remains one of my most formative movies — and I think it’s because of the opening scene, which still produces a tightness in my chest every time I watch it.

Everything about it is perfectly taut. There are the silent gazes of the men in construction hats standing perfectly still in anticipation. There’s the slow zoom on Robert Peck’s Muldoon holding a look of fear and an appropriately intimidating gun. Then there’s the opening misdirection. The branches of the tree shake, signaling the early arrival of a show-stopping dinosaur for the hungry audience, but all that’s revealed is a crane holding a massive crate as Spielberg pulls out to reveal the location of the action on Isla Nublar. The tension and mystery slowly build as Spielberg gives us just glimpses of the raptor in the box — and he also lets the sound design do the work.

By the time the raptor lunges at the gate and frees itself, the tension — built in a span of maybe a dozen shots — is at a fever pitch. Spielberg never lets the viewer actually see the raptor grab the gatekeeper. But by focusing on the panic of Muldoon and the ineffectiveness of the security guards trying to “work her back,” Spielberg establishes the relentlessness and horror of the creature. And there’s not a drop of blood in the whole scene. Our imaginations — my young imagination — fill in the blanks.

Jurassic Park is the best example of how to do setup and payoff on a movie-wide scale. The T-Rex breakout scene occurs almost exactly halfway through the movie, and the second half of the film is spent paying off every bit of setup from the first. It’s a perfect summer blockbuster that I revisit at least once a year. And my heart will always start racing when I hear those opening notes of John Williams’s score.

DANIEL: Growing up, I certainly avoided scary movies. My parents told me that, as a child, the wolves in Beauty and the Beast made me terribly upset. No kidding – they have yellow eyes.

We will stick with the animal genre and move to the microgenre of --- Sad-things-happening-to-dogs. Homeward Bound (“Peter”) and Old Yeller are clear choices here and they have burned me good. However, my main choice is a lesser known 90s Disney movie called Summer of the Monkeys.

I do not remember the plot of it, but it starred Wilford Brimley and there was a boy with a dog. And monkeys that needed rescuing. I vaguely remember the dog getting hurt and I know I ran upstairs sobbing when I was a child, so I blocked that movie from my memory. I also have a clear avoidance of primates, so this movie must have done a number on me.

A quick Google search and the Summer of the Monkeys poster says, “Own Disney’s All-New Heartwarming Adventure.” Nice try, Disney – I know a pull quote when I see one. Let us move far outside of Disney movies to true horror movies now.

Our college dorm was home to many conversations, study sessions, and movie experiences. Regrettably, we watched Human Centipede in our shared communal area, I think on a weeknight. I will save you the synopsis, but it is a body horror movie with three people being sewn together. And it spawned sequels. That’s a no for me, dawg.

Normally I would not choose to see Paranormal Activity in a theatre, but FOMO won out. It ended up being one of the most memorable experiences in a movie theatre – friends holding each other, trying not to scream, screaming. The jump scares – the stuff of nightmares.

But those moments are cinema. Especially the ones that keep us up at night.

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Reader, what movies spooked you out as a kid? Let us know in the comments below!

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