My parents told me that I could watch any movie in theatres for my 13th birthday. I didn’t know anything about it and picked The Devil’s Advocate. They took me, my older brother, and my two younger brothers.

On the way home they yelled at me for picking an inappropriate movie.

I’ve mentioned it elsewhere, but I saw Akira when I was four and my brother was three. Our dad picked it out because “animation is for children”.

I can’t remember much of it but it left me with a deep distate for body horror and nightmares for literal weeks.

Twilight Zone movie.

Watched alone on dark night.

The part when the lady visits the house, where the family is terrified of putting a foot out of line.

That has the most distasteful feeling of dread. Really well done, not for kids!

I saw a nasty horror movie as a kid of around 7-8. My friend had this weird uncle who was living with his mother house next to ours. He was the only one at street with VHS player. One day, instead of our favorite Tom & Jerry, he put a cassette with the movie into the player. It was some weird horror called “the spirit of the Forest” or something like that, about a cabin in the forest and a spirit possessing its visitors, making them kill each other. I had trouble getting back home in the middle of the day. Fortunately, no nightmares. Few years later, the uncle killed his mother, because voices told him to. He got locked up in the psychiatric ward and my friend moved in with his parents, yay.

I watched The Shining at a friend’s house when I was like 10. First and last time I ever watched that nightmare fuel.

Kentucky fried movie

When I was around 10-11 my dad sat me down to watch Mulholland Drive with him (because a coworker got it confused with another, more wholesome movie)

For the most part, my neurons were plastic enough to just accept the weird surreal dream logic, but for some reason my subconscious drew the line at sex. I must have been flushing, because my dad turned to me after the movie was over and started apologizing profusely.

The only time I remember feeling that much stunned embarassment/shame at watching a movie was when I got my sister Enter The Void as a gift, having never seen it. (Great movie, but the incestual implications make it hard to watch with family).

Now I’m a lesbian. Mulholland Drive got to me young enough to forever warp my sexuality. (Enter The Void, luckily, did not).

I was chaperoning on a school bus full of kindergarteners. They started chatting about the scariest movies they had ever seen. Some of them were talking about Goosebumps and some were talking about stuff in the realm of ET. The one little boy in my group looked up to me and said that stuff for babies that’s nothing. I said oh yeah? What are you watch. He said I like Jason I like Freddy I like Michael Myers. I asked him which scenes that he thought were the best and he actually seemed to have watched it all. I said so what did you think of IT by Stephen King. His eyes got wide and he said no no no no no no no. We’re not going to talk about that.

An American Werewolf in London.

I stayed up watching it on my brother’s black and white TV. My parents had no idea. I nearly shit the bed afterward when my brother jumped on me in the dark and yelled “raaaah.”

My brother showed me a movie from my dad’s hidden porno stash when I was 8. So probably that.

My family bought in to cable television very early on, and we had HBO as part of the service. My parents forbid me from watching it alone, but of course that just upped the intrigue and I would sneak viewings when they weren’t around.

The first mistake was The Thing. I had no idea what the movie was about, and so the first part of the film seemed unremarkable; they’re at an arctic base, there’s the shootout, all relatively tame. Then the dog scene. Holy crap that one is burned into my memory forever. I was utterly terrified but glued to the screen. That gave me screaming nightmares for a bit but I could never admit what the issue was, since I wasn’t supposed to have watched it!

The second a few years later was Aliens. Wasn’t nearly as bad of an experience but the scene with the people glued to the walls in the tunnel was a bit much. I recovered from that one much quicker than The Thing.

Faces of Death, Faces of Death 2, Faces of Death 3, Faces of Death 4, Faces of Death 5 and Faces of Death 6

I dunno what the movie was called, I was 7 and had fallen asleep in front of the TV. When I woke up there two ‘grey’ aliens of in hindsight terrible costumes crouching in some bushes.

I had never seen a depiction of a grey alien before that and my uncanny valley sensor peaked higher than ever at any other point in my life and I ran to my room without even shutting off the tv.

It’s funny to look back and remember that as a moment of legit fear, knowing what I do now.

The X-Files episode “Home”

Alien when I was about 4. That’s what happens when you make an uncle who is still in high school babysit.