How to traumatize your children or: Scenes that scared the heck out of me.

Movies can sometimes scare your quite effectively. More so if you watch a movie that you aren’t really allowed to watch yet. Everybody has his or her own memory of ‘that’ movie that ruined their childhood and created the monsters under the bed. But still, no matter  whether you are twelve of twenty-five, some of these scenes are the stuff of nightmares. 

Here's my personal top-ten list of movie scenes that scared the heck out of me. Enjoy.

1- The Decent

Hello wanna talk?

Talk about unexpected. Normally you -the viewer- knows when a jump-scare is going to happen.  However, in this movie I -either didn't see it coming- or -Wasn't expecting it. Yet there it was.

At the time I was lying on my bed seeing the scene evolve before me. Then that bloody moment  happened and I literally levitated in fear. I jumped up...yards. I honestly believe I lost two years of my life due to this scene. Bloody hell.

2- It

Pennywise in the bathroom.

Remember when you were young. At around the age of five you are kindly remembered that being naked is a wrong thing to do. You are also remembered 'not to take candy from strangers’. This all happens around the same age.

Now imagine those two rules broken in a single scene. Moreover, the protagonist in question is a shy young boy all too conscious of his body.

This shy boy who doesn't like to shower with the other boys is forced to take a shower after gym class. During this intimate moment -WHAM- a freaking bloody psycho clown climbs up through the drain and starts threatening the boy.

I was eleven at the time. Watching the movie in the dark confides of my bedroom (I still had Disney wallpaper) it scared the heck out of me.

It is also fun to note that Tim Curry’s Pennywise made a whole generation terrified of clowns. That is a feat to be reckoned with.

3- Fortress

Santa Clause and the elderly man.

This is a big one. The jolliest fellow in the world is without a doubt Santa Clause. Nothing is wrong about the guy. You can trust him. You can play with him. He’ll even help you with your homework –if he is so inclined. So imagine the terror when a guy wearing a Santa Clause masks terrorizes children. And I don’t mean ‘terrorizing’ in the Disney-sense of ‘everything will be fine in the end’, or the ‘Home Alone’ sense of ‘he’s far too stupid to make a dent’. I mean real terror.

From the first moment you meet Santa Clause in the movie ‘Fortress’ you know that this is a guy who has no scruples against killing children. 

Thankfully the hostage-ed classroom is abandoned in a cave. They escape. Only to find that –once they reach a nearby farmstead that Santa Clause is there holding the owners hostage. When the old man tries to prevent Santa Clause from hurting a child he gets shot and killed (those poor fish). I never-ever-ever trusted that jolly Christmas fellow again.

Side note to this: the decapitation of daffy duck (see the movie, it’ll make sense) was what truly scarred me at that young age when I watched ‘Fortress’. Before that time I never realized that criminals might turn on each other, after that I knew.

4- Strange Brew 
Hello Daddy.

This is probably the weirdest entry in the list. It's a comedy after all. But somehow the genre escaped me when this scene happened.

Strange Brew is a great weird comedy about two alcoholic brothers blundering upon a conspiracy in a brewery. Heck, it even has a cape-wearing (flying) super dog. It is almost required that you drink during this movie.

So it is all fun and games when, suddenly, this scene happens. The daughter of the murdered owner of the brewery gets a message from the beyond from her father. Even though they (the filmmakers) cap it off with a "nice effects aren't they"-joke it still scared the heck out of me.

5- The silence of the lambs 
Build up.

This scare is the prime example of a -what I’d like to call- build up scare. You increase the tension and then you create climax. I’m talking about the first time Starling meets Hannibal

The scene starts with the institution’s chief psychiatrist warning Starling about the danger that Hannibal Lector is. Before we even meet the man he is already placed on a pedestal of villainy (including a photograph of a mutilated nurse). They even tell her not to get to close to the glass.

So we enter a dark cellar and Starling has to walk past all his merrily messed up  fellow inmates before she  meets him.

Amongst which a  jolly fellow named Miggs who tells her that he can "smell her cunt". Not a nice thing to say, thus immediately placing him in the realm of evil dangerous men. And then we meet Lector.

Hannibal is obviously very dangerous. The metal slide doesn’t help much as well. And the fact that his cell is the only one with glass instead of iron bars is also quite unsettling. It all increases the tension. But the climax doesn’t happen. Hannibal basically tells Starling to ‘piss off’.

But when she goes on her way his next door cellmate Miggs tells her he "just slit his wrists" and shows her by throwing the fluids towards her. In fact he throws semen at her (at the time I was too young to even realize what it was, I figured spit. Either way not pleasant.) and all hell breaks loose. All inmates start to scream and shout. Lector screams at her to return and gives her vital (to his own plan) information.

This is what scared me. This payoff. Hannibal talking to Starling in a direct commanding voice. But most of all Starling standing right up close to the glass. Her separated by a fiendishly dangerous criminal by two centimeters of glass.

Oh and yes, when you look at the butterfly on the poster you'll understand where the 'the decent' poster comes from. Or when you know you art history.

6- The Shining 
The guy in the bearsuit.

The shining has to be on this list –doesn’t it. It’s is -without a doubt- one of the greatest ghost stories ever put on film

I love reading theories about this movie. But I won’t bother you with them right now (read about them collativelearning. Especially the bear/incest connection which is almost too perfect to be true).

What scared the heck out of me was the fact that –in the end- Kubrick (the director) decided to spring some true ghosts upon us.

I assume we all know the story. But I wish to highlight the mental stability of the characters. Jack, from the first moment you (the viewer) meet him,  is a highly unstable character (reading a playgirl issue about incest…). His son is also a bit unstable. Talking to an imaginary friend. The only true pillar of stability in the household is the wife Wendy. And she basically goes through the story making the one logical deduction after the other. Somebody hurt her son: if it wasn’t her husband –logically- somebody else is in the hotel. Her husband tries to hurt her, she locks him up.

Now both Danny and Jack meet their share of ghosts but (we) the audience somehow ‘feel’ that this could all be part of their imagination. It could all be inside their minds.

So, what scared the heck out of me was when Wendy went through the hotel and is suddenly confronted by a ghost in a bear suit giving fellatio (cut to the core, that is what he did!) to a well dressed man. It is the first true time that (we) the audience truly receive a black-and-white statement that the ghosts in the hotel are real. Wendy realizes this and (we) the audience realize it with her.

It is sudden. It is shocking. It is cinematographically underlined (fast close-up). It is the moment in the film that (we) the audience shrieks “WTF”!. And it is even before those damn elevator doors open.

“Great party isn’t it!”

7- Burnt Offerings 
Oliver Reed being scared sh*tless.

Oliver Reed was an Alpha-male. Example: He shagged the secretaries of movie producers who handled casting choices of movies he wanted to be in. Only to -in the morning- place his own photo and  resume on the top of the pile.

Another example: He drank himself to death on the set of Gladiator. Alpha-male (I never said it was a good thing).

His whole composure speaks of a man, a guy in control. What scared the sh*t out of me was the end of Burnt Offerings.

In this movie (and probably the book it was based on. Never read it) a family rents a mansion for the summer holiday. And, naturally, there is a dark brooding ghost-thing present. It’s a horror movie after all. Now in the end the family wants to leave and Oliver Reed confronts the ghost basically asking it for permission to leave (this is not really true but I don’t want to spoil the story too much).

So here he is talking to the ghoul and he is scared sh*tless. He is absolutely terrified. The alpha male. Bleeding Bill Sykes from Oliver!. It is such a breakdown from his persona that you -the viewer- are terrified with him. Splendid stuff.

8- The omen 
"It's all for you Damien."

I love the decapitation-scene. And I wonder why we don’t do that more often. The whole idea behind that scene is that people tent to close their eyes when something horrible happens. So, by showing the same thing from multiple angles, the second they open their eyes again they are confronted by that single thing they closed their eyes to in the first place.

But what I want to talk about here is a children’s party. Kids playing around. Parents acting proud. And suddenly –out of the blue- a sweet caring babysitter decides to jump from a roof and strangle herself by gallow.

It is the first moment in the film that you realize that there is something very (very) wrong with Damien and it happens at a moment of relative calmness and joy.

Then the ape-scene happens and everything turns apesh*t (pun intended).

9- Chitty Chitty Bang Bang 
The Childcatcher.

 

It was having a hard time choosing between this one or Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory (you know the scene). I went with the true villain of the two.
The actor who played the Childcatcher (Robert Helpmann) was actually a professional dancer. So –one day- when, by accident, the cart fell over at full speed this man agilely walked across the tumbling cart without a care in the world and nimbly jumped off before it wrecked itself against the ground. 

It is exactly this characteristic that scared me as a child. This thin, in control of his body, man with a prominent nose to smell out children and catch them. The actor became the fear.

Naturally I never knew of anybody who’d want to hurt a child –let alone catch them. The whole concept was new to me. But what Chitty Chitty Bang Bang offered was not only a nemesis. But also somebody who was more than capable of his job.

The kids in the movie fall into his trap quite easily. But –in the back of my mind- I knew, for a fact, that this man was capable of far more elaborate traps than I could even imagine.

10- The secret of Nihm

Murder, death, kill.

 
The secret of Nihm is quite a sweet story. A mother wants to help her child get better. She’s also mourning the loss of her husband. The mother is a mouse by the way. It is a cartoon.

‘Till that time I only watched Disney cartoons. Donald Duck. That awfully perfect Mickey Mouse. And the perfectly ordinary and clumsy Goofy (remember those Goofy cartoons in which he portrays an ordinary man - who happens to bring a mountain-lion to his penthouse apartment?).

So –in short- I never witnessed cartoon characters fighting each other to the death (this was before anime or even 'The great mouse detective'). And now here we had this scene in which the villain lost the fight, decides to stab to hero in the back and his –former- friend kills him by throwing a knife in HIS back.

Suddenly cartoons became a whole lot more mature. And the horrendous facial expression of the rat throwing that knife wasn’t helping.

*And I willfully neglect to mention the owl-scene because I had my eyes closed all the time during that ordeal. 

Honorable mentions:

Caravan of Courage/ The battle of Endor

They did what?

 
When I was young I watched the two ewok’s movies back to back. No commercials, not interruptions. Side A and Side B.

Caravan of courage is about a family who crashes their spaceship on Endor. Immediately after the crash the parents are kidnapped by and angry giant. The fourteen year-old son and his five year-old sister meet the furry ewoks and together they decided to rescue their parents.

The plan works marvelously. During the entire movie only one ewok dies. That’s it. Everybody is happy ever afte…

The battle of Endor.

The first five minutes of the movie. Mom dies, Dad dies, fourteen year-old brother dies, countless ewoks die. All that’s left is one five year-old girl and one ewok, that’s it.

Remember, no commercial break. Back-to-back. Everybody’s happy/ everybody’s dead!.

*Open mouthed staring at the screen*

 

Alfred Jodocus Kwak

Vehicular manslaughter.

I was seven years old and I was sick. I had the flu.

Now, one of the benefits of being sick at that age is that your are excused to eat dinner with your family at the table. Another benefit is that you can spend your day in your pajama’s.

So there I was –seven years old- in front of the telly while the rest of the family was having supper. A new cartoon was to be on, called Alfred Jodocus Kwak. It was about a Dutch duck having adventures.

‘Cool, I’m game for anything’. Then the episode happened. Mother and father duck give birth to their children. They take them along across the road and *BLAMB* each and every one of them get’s killed by the mayor’s car. Only Alfred remains who is then raised by a family friend mole.

I was clutching my teddybear wide-eyed.  I just witnessed vehicle-manslaughter in cartoon form and the perpetrator (being the mayor and all) never got prosecuted.

“MOMMY!”

* For those who don’t know the cartoon it is fun to mention that Alfred’s best friend –half crow, half blackbird- grows up to become the leader of the crow party. Who –when you look at it- has quite the resemblance to Adolf Hitler (now there’s a name to end an article with).