Stuff that used to scare you as a kid

Please keep the thread reasonably lighthearted.No dark and genuinely traumatic stuff.

Anyway, I used to be terrified of X-Files. My parents watched it all the time in the 90s but even just hearing the X-Files theme would send me cowering behind the couch/bed. I ended up rewatching the series in my late teens and liked it, but from ages 5-10 aliens scared the hell out of me.

Christian eschatology also terrified me. I wasn't raised in a "fire and brimstone" Southern Baptist type family but the Bible was still taken seriously and Revelations was just awful. Kids should not be subjected to that type of stuff.

And lastly, supermarket magazines. I thought Weekly World News was actual news and every time I'd wait in line with my mom at the checkout I'd see crap about Batboy, Roswell aliens, Bigfoot, and stuff like this:

• Nicholson's Joker. It pretty much felt like a horror movie to me.
• Unsolved Mysteries. Used to watch that at like 1:00-3:00am an it scared the hell out of me.
• It. Frankly, it gives the jitters still.

I was a fucked up child - so as early as like six I can remember being unable to sleep because I was afraid of death...not like the reaper...just simply the fact that we all die. Also spiders.

Well, depends on what you want to know. There are the "normal" things to be scared about as a kid and stuff that's not really reasonable.

For example, my neighbor had a sort of Mastiff dog (probably not a purebreed Tibetan since they're insanely expensive but the same size) who was "secure" behind a knee-high fence and he just loved to jump out, chase and bite children so having been bitten by him more than once I was terrified of walking home alone when I was 5. The police would do nothing because the dog was extremely docile to adults or when adults were around, it was just kids alone he couldn't stand.

He looked like this

On the not-so-reasonable fears I remember that when I was 3 I was terrified of a series of AIDS commercials that we had in Portugal...it was basically stuff like you could only see a huge sheet of grey opaque latex and then someone trying to push through it, which looked like some sort of monster, then he'd scream his lungs off and make all sorts of animal-like roars with Pink Floyd's "Is There Anybody Out There?" playing in the background. Had nightmares for years!

It looked something like this.

I also hated the X Files theme. The ER theme was creepy, but the X Files blows it out of the water in the creepy department.

Speaking of creepy theme songs...did you know that The Exorcist theme is used as the theme song of a kid's show in the Netherlands? I was really confused the first time I heard it here XD

Kane from Robocop 2 was very scary.

@korvus: Wow, whoever came up with that idea is a dick. :(

@gamerguru100: The commercial or using the theme for the kids show?

@korvus: kids show theme

@gamerguru100: Yeah, I first heard it here coming out of a circus tent, so when I approached one of the workers there and asked why Tubular Bells was playing in a circus she just tells me "oh, it's our clown's theme song...just like the tv clown"...err, ok? After asking around it seems that most people associate this music with the clown and not The Exorcist...

Well, using that theme song alongside clown acts will probably scar kids for life. Clowns by themselves are creepy enough.

@gamerguru100: Weirdly enough, all kids I asked about it classify the song as "happy". I guess it depends on what you associate it with.

Yikes! D:

@gamerguru100: Don't mess with me or I'll send you Dutch children!! Mwahahaha!

@korvus: LOL

When i was a child 6 or 7 this scared the shit out of me. LoL I can now appreciate the series but some if not all of the stories were messed mainly the endings.

My mom finding out.

^^^^^ :D

My father was pretty scary. Nothing really scares me now... maybe Thomas the Train because of his stupid creepy smile.

bassie & adriaan!

Yep =D

that tv movie with this in it.

Snakes, the depths of the ocean and the vast emptiness of outer space... pretty much the same things that I'm deeply fearful of now.

Actually I also remember if I slept in my parents' bed for whatever reason, with the darkness I could make out their facial features but with little detail, and it made it look to me like they were asleep but with their eyes open and no iris or pupils, just a white eyeball. That also gave me the creeps.

The scene in Stand By Me where the fat guy eats the blueberry pie and vomits all over everybody in the crowd creating a chain reaction of vomiting.

Had to leave the room when the scene came up everytime the movie was on.

The only thing I was afraid of as a kid were heights and tornadoes.

Nosferatu's shadow

Cougars, wolves and bears