... does anyone remember it? Bernard Cribbins was in it. The scary bit, for my younger sister and myself, was at the end when Ursula Andress walked into a blue flame and turned from a beautiful woman into a wrinkly old hag - terrifying.

A Steven Spielberg directed Night Gallery story about a blind millionaire who has an eye transplant that should enable her to see for just a few hours.
I can't remember how old I was when I saw it but it gave me a fear of going blind that stayed with me for years.

was bloody terrifying. The basis of the programme was the following: a bizarre noise starts to be heard by the inhabitants of a small town and results in them smashing up all kinds of machinery. That is the beginning of the changes...

That noise really did freak the 6 year old me out in a major way. 'The Changes' was repeated once on UK Gold in the mid-1990s and when I heard that sound again I got goosebumps. It was fabulous, but sadly the BBC say they have no plans to release it on DVD, despite it having quite a cult status.

H R Puffenstuff, scary!

One of those horror anthologies. Robert Powell has to find out which patient at a lunatic asylum was the former doctor so he can get his job.

There's a chopped body that comes back to life, a sinister suit in a creepy tailor's and a woman with a dodgy imaginary friend.

But the story that spooked me was the one with Herbert Lom and his little mechanical friends who unexpectedly started moving. Jesus and Mary Chain, that was scary!

In an Outer Limits episode called 'The Man With The Power' from the early 60's. He only had to think stuff and it happened - all due to exposure to a nuclear explosion earlier in his life. I seem to remember his forehead glowed ominously when 'stuff' was about to happen. I had some difficulty with any of Donald's films for many years thereafter.

In another 60's OL episode, an 'all American' astronaut came back from space in a more 'elephantine' form after exposure to 'space germs' or somesuch . The powers that be kept him locked up but his poor wife eventually got a peek. Horrifying to the young Californian who is convinced that part of it lives on in dreams even these 40-odd years later. Even now.......

Jaws
Piranha
The Swarm
The Birds - nightmares galore
Omen - how scary is that music
Various old Dracula movies that were all on TV on a Saturday night

I seem to think I saw all of these around the late 70's / early 80's when I would have been about 10 years old. Stuff that I saw later, like the Exorcist, didn't have the same impact.

Here's a bit of the Omen.....

That dwarf scared the crap out of me.

The witchy laugh at the end of the Rentaghost credits-didn't take much to scare me....

Armchair Thriller in the late 70s. That bit where the main character goes up into the loft and confronts the nun. Scared the bejesus out of me - and made the hairs on the back of my neck rise up just remembering it.

During the Chariots Of The Gods and Uri Gellar-flavoured mid-70's, the other "supernatural phenomena" to capture the public imagination was The Bermuda Triangle, and of course there had a to be a crappy exploitation TV-movie about it.

"Satan's Triangle" should be the usual cheap-as-chips, wobbly walls TV fodder... with no budget and a no-name director & writer behind the camera, it stars the wooden-but-reliable man's-man Doug McClure as a coastguard pilot who comes across a becalmed yacht who's only living passenger is played by Kim Novak in her on-the-skids years.

All you really need to know is that somehow all the stars aligned to produce a minimalist horror gem with a final twist and image which scared the 12 year-old Mickey ****less. To my knowledge it's never been shown since or released on VHS/DVD, but my residual fear would probably make me avoid it even 35 years later... anyone else remember it?

that appeared in the closing credits of the original Star Trek, that used to freak me out.

That film really scared the c**p out of me when I was small. I haven't seen it for a while now but I'd like to think it would still have an effect and that the special effects would still seem impressive. Lots of scary bits - the giant guy who cmes out of the sea to hold up the rocks, the harpies, the skeletons. But it was that giant bronze statue that really go me diving for the cushions - Talos, apparently.

Couldn't watch it for months after they were on.

And for some reason this really got to me as well. Which is odd because I adored the original (maybe that was why ...)

At least, my mum says it scared me when I was very young and why would she lie to me?

..especially when his eyes suddenly re-open again as the activity on the brain scan reaches a peak

On Doctor Who. They terrified me. Also that episode of Star Trek in which Kirk etc land on a planet and a bunch of kids start throwing rocks down at them from rooftops. Very disturbing (and 30 years later pretty prescient!). I was extremely young, pre-10, and I think my Mum came into the lounge and saw what I was watching and the very white palour of my face and turned it off straightaway. I've never seen the episode since. I think that the BBC actually banned it. Does anyone out there know what I'm talking about and if this was in fact the case?

We've done this before, but this tale deserves re-telling.

Back in Diana Rigg days, if memory serves me right. The opening scenes are indelibly imprinted on my mind...

Picture this.

Opening credits. Fade to...

A public house, in a lonesome, desolate spot. A bearded, Faginesque figure playing bar skittles before leaving, hurriedly.

The night is dark. Our character's route takes him across a churchyard. A graveyard. As he passes through, there is movement at one of the graves - a tomb above the ground. The lid slips to one side and a ghostly apparition appears...

At this point young Paul decides that bedtime is infinitely preferable to his planned late night with the grownups...

40 years later, the memory still haunts me.

with Ray Milland

I recall I saw this when about 10 or 11 years old and was allowed to stay up late on a school night to watch it.

As far as I can remember the closing shot was of Mr Milland, after having severely over-medicated himself to achieve said effect, silently screaming as his eyes became two sightless black holes.

Freaked the shite right out of my pyjamas - just before I was sent up the wooden hill. What a calm and restful night that was.

'Sapphire and Steel' (no, don't laugh) which featured people getting trapped inside photographs.

One episode ended with a man with a completely blank face holding a photo he'd set fire of a little girl in a building and you could hear her calling for help

Stayed with me for years that un. TV was fucked up back then - even the theme music was frightsome

Now about as convincing as Oddbod from Carry on Screaming. But in the 70's a much different story

Went and saw it in the very early 80's with a double bill followed by Exorcist 2. The film scared the living daylights out me, when it came to the break before Exorcist 2, I was so close to sneaking out and going home, I didn't and of course was so let down by this flacid follow up.

Not being a Dr Who fan, cannot name the aliens, but when I was a nipper, remember being really terrified by the shop dummies that wrists dropped down to reveal lasers. Sea Devils were frightening as well

the Autons. Delightfully creepy

Children of the Stones scared me half to death: like The Whicker Man for kids

An episode of Star Trek called Charlie X also had me in bits. There's one scene in particular where Charlie stops someone from laughing by removing their face:

Totally freaked me out!

An M R James ghost story dating back to 1973 sticks in my mind, particularly a scene involving a boy ghost with long nails playing a hurdy-gurdy. I saw it again a few years ago and it was still scary.

No, really. Every time they came on TOTP I literally hid behind the couch. With my fingers in my ears. I think it was a combination of Noddy's dalek-inspired vocals and Dave Whatsisname's fringe.

...scared the cack outta me the most as a bairn. The worst was a 70's public information film called Apaches about a bunch of kids who go to play cowboys and indians on a farm and all die horrible accidents. The film was meant to scare us away from playing on farmyards, which they do by making the kids deaths look as horribly real as possible, giving the film the feel of a snuff movie. I checked the film again on Youtube and it still gave me shivers - the young girl screaming for her mummy as she dies from drinking weed killer is particularly unpleasant.

You'd never get away showing kids something this nasty now, and bloody right too:

I remember the BBC doing a short series when I was a kid that was like 'Jackanory', basically - 15 minute episodes with the presenter just telling the tale - but it was on a bit later in the evening and they focused on ghost stories. I'm 99% sure it was called 'Spine Chillers'. I think they read some of the greats, M R James, W W Jacobs.... but the one I've never forgotten is 'The Red Room', which I think was written by H G Wells.

(I don't know if it's a rule that to write a ghost story, you have to be known by your first two initials instead of a forename. Even Saki's real name is always listed as H H Munro. Did P G Wodehouse do one?)

Anyway, this was a 'classic' tale of an over-confident narrator who tries to spend a night in a supposedly haunted room, and fails spectacularly. The quote I remember is the warning an old servant gives him: '"It is your own choosing," said the man with the withered arm.'

[Shiver.]

Specifically Mr Sin, the Peking Homunculus. Scared me rigid at the time.

Still gives me the willies, frankly.

Those early synths really worked..it just sounded weird and wrong to me.

and then there's this, I know it's only recently been declassified, but we all remember "Threads" don't we?

cinema's used to show trailers for X films before children's films.
The trailer for Twice Told Tales starring Vincent Price scared the bejasus out of me. Ceiling of creepy room splits open, blood pours out. Aaaaaaargh!

There were glowing red eyes and a poltergeist let loose in a school gymnasium which put the wind up me, at least as an eight year old.

Then a show called the Nightmare man - one scene in which a camera and tape recorder improbably captured someone's demise at the hands of the mutant spaceman (or whatever it was), very effectively shown as a series of stills with agonised voiceover

A Hammer horror TV show called "Charlie Boy" (I think) about a posessed Doll which offed each new owner - I remember someone being gorily propelled through a windscreen

Scariest Dr Who would be the autonomous hand that scuttled around...though Evil Dead II took the sting out of that one a bit.

Blimey, it all comes flooding back. 1983, living in Hannover, 50 miles from the Inner German Border, the Soviet 12th Shock Army massed behind it, a state of heightened tension as the Kremlin Old Guard die off one by one, to be replaced by even more decrepit old codgers with their fingers on the nuclear trigger...and how does the televison service of British Forces Broadcasting attempt to soothe us? It shows, on consecutive evenings The War Game, black and white, bleak, believable, The Day After, Hollywood's take on atomic armageddon and Threads, abso-bloody-lutely withering in its despairing message. Have never seen it since, and don't want to

The one with the giant spiders. Scared the absolute fertiliser out of me.

Also, a half hour play featuring four men talking in a railway carriage about two young girls, one who possessed the other. Based on an Agatha Christie, I think, and featured a scene of one girl making the other eat a candle. Can't remember the title, but the sensation of being freaked out has never left me...

http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/The_Daemons

was pretty scary iirc

Because mine was actually the plaster heads of pirates(?) which were stuck on the wall down the stairs in my aunties flat. I couldnt go to the toilet for fear of them bastards giving me the evil eye as I walked back down!

The film which ended up with everyone hunting the giant ants in Los Angeles drains. Nightmares for months.

And a Dr Who which had a small homonoculus which got thrown in the back of a car. It started wriggling as the car was driven away. I didn't like that as a small boy.

I saw this movie early one morning shorty before X-mas in 2001, I think; it's full of Hollywood stars, Cary Grant etc - sort of panto-thing. I was very hungover and paranoid as hell, and even though it was daylight (7am or thereabouts) it totally, totally freaked me out. Really. I still think about it and get the willies. The characters make up is like papiermache and in b/w it looks absolutely gruesome.

Alice is about 35. It's like a depression era porno without sex. Eeeeeuuuugh.

I saw this movie early one morning shorty before X-mas in 2001, I think; it's full of Hollywood stars, Cary Grant etc - sort of panto-thing. I was very hungover and paranoid as hell, and even though it was daylight (7am or thereabouts) it totally, totally freaked me out. Really. I still think about it and get the willies. The characters make up is like papiermache and in b/w it looks absolutely gruesome.

Alice is about 35. It's like a depression era porno without sex. Eeeeeuuuugh.

As a youngster I was scared witless by Luby Lou on this programme and no I am not winding anyone up.

You watch this and tell me that face on the intro isn't the most sinister thing you've seen in years. Come to think of it, the whole thing is pretty spooky.

That came through twice there... see this bloody machine... But since I'm here - must agree with you Retro Man about Darby O'Gill.

It was a big hit over here in Norn Ireland - so much so that us kids were taken by our parents to the little cinema, just up the main road. It was the first time I can remember being out after dark, and even though there were grown-ups with us, I was absolutely fecking terrfied, more frightened than I'd ever been in my entire life.

We lived in a little terraced street (no gardens, just flagstones and front steps, real Hovis type place, cobbled road etc - cue brass band music) and these streets were separated by alleys (we called them entries).

Now, there was a cheeky uncle with us (you know the type, not a blood relative just a friend of my father's) and he thought it would be funny to run on ahead - put a sheet over his head and then jump out of the entry when we got to the bottom of our street - screeching like the Darby O'Gill banshee!

I was so scared, I made wee-wees in my shorts.

For days afterwards, older girls followed me round and called me pissy pants.It took me years to live it down.

True story.

When i was little I always petrified while watching the TV version of Lost in Space.

on reflection, the sudden descent into hell via a tomb in A Christmas Carol (1971 version-I was 9) is something I could have done without ...

Although the film was given a very mild "U" (Universal Audience) rating in the UK and a "G" (General Audience) rating in the U.S., one rather original [sic] aspect of this version of the story is a departure from the novel during the visit of The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in an unusual extension of the graveyard scene. In a nightmarish sequence, the ghost shows its face (the face of Death) to Scrooge who falls backwards, screaming, through his own open grave, through a seemingly bottomless shaft, and into the very bowels of Hell. He wakes up in a coffin-shaped crater and meets Marley, who tells him of his appointment as Lucifer's personal clerk and shows him to his icy, rat-infested office. The frightened Scrooge's massive chain then arrives on the backs of several burly, hooded "demons" who wrap it around him, fairly immobilizing him, amid his futile cries to Marley for help. This scene is often edited or censored from television airings (and even some home video releases of the film, though the current Region 1 and Region 2 DVDs retain the sequence).

However, as frightening as the scene sounds, Alec Guinness's performance as Marley here is dryly comic, and lends an aspect of humor to it (e.g. Marley's answer to Scrooge asking him if he is dead "as a coffin nail", of where they are: "I should have thought it was obvious", of why he is there to welcome him: "Nobody else wanted to", of his comments on Scrooge's chain: "It's even bigger than I thought." and "That's quite a ponderous chain." and Scrooge's pleas for help: a deadpan "Bah humbug" and a "Merry Christmas" before the door is shut).

-Wikipedia

I don't remember any Guinessian dry humour ...

You are a rutting young teenager with a Clearasil habit and a permanent hard-on. You are looking forward to your first intimate encounters with the opposite sex. Your guide is the Rachel Papers, the History Man and DH Lawrence. You only hope the girls have been reading the same material.

And then the Government does this:

Almost overnight it seems, women start dressing like Andrea Dworkin and calling all men 'potential rapists', while testicles bulge, birthrates plummet and a generation misses out on the casual sex enjoyed by its forbears and successors.

when I was a kid I went to see CCBB for the whole week, I thought it was brill, stll do. But even though evry scene is burned onto me brain, I always thought that it was Victor Spinetti playing the Child Catcher - it was only recently when I saw it after a long gap, that I realised I was wrong!

Anybody else have an experience like that? In the days before the interweb was active and you've argued til you were blue in the face only to be totally wrong?

Like that Michael Caine - he was brilliant in Van Der Valk and Frenzy. Or, that David Mitchell is really funny in those Go Compare adverts...

The one with the funny eyes and sideburns.

I didn't like him when I was three.

Dibble or Grubb?

Sorry...couldn't resist!

Can't remember the name. Half-hour episodes, I think. Two stand out as BTS moments - one with some people stuck in a house under siege from what appears to be rats. We never see them, just the noise - constant & growing noise of scratching and scraping as the rats get closer. Another was a family who've just moved into a house - blood runs from the taps, drips from ceilings. I think there'd been a murder in the house in the past. Proper shat me up, I tell you. Was it Tales of the Unexpected?? Don't think so.

Worzel Gummidge's sweet nature as made flesh by Jon Pertwee was the sugar to the bitter pill that was the TV show.

Geoffrey Bayldon's Mr Crowman always had an air of menace but more than that was the evil scarecrow (Stupidhead?) that used to turn up from time to time. With a stitched cloth bag head he truly was the thing of nightmares

Also 'The Enchanted Castle' BBC asaptation of the early 80's featured a whole group of torch waving Nazi stormtrooper like scarecrows called 'The Uglie Wuglies'. Shitting hell!!!

- when not menacing Dr Who, they lived in the airing cupboard in the bedroom my little sister and I shared (she was the one who used to scare me with tales of what was behind the door).

And the Medusa, also from Dr Who. Don't know why it freaked me out as I loved Greek & Roman mythology at school, but telly made it so much more real.

Scarier in black and white with the terrific music

All of it but especially the black and white bits.

I watched it again just before Christmas with my two year old niece - she loved it. I wasn't so keen.

I seem to remember seeing 'The Hand' on TV when reasonably young and fairly freaked out. Watched it through though.

...on Doctor Who scared the willies out of me - all that business in dark corners on the oil rig at the beginning.

So, for some reason did Peter Glaze on Crackerjack. Never anything other than strangely marrow-chilling.

The part in American Werewolf in London where he hallucinates a zombie coming through the window behind the curtain.

Luckily though, I developed a special zombie-proof method of closing the curtains and I've been free from zombie attacks ever since.

the 1970's version of 'salems lot' the jail and the window scene's

'psss psss open the window'

Continuity Announcers on TV (remember the days when you used to have in-vision announcers before programmes?) used to really freak me out as a small child. For some reason, I used to think that not only were they talking to me directly, but that they could see me through the television.

Strangely, I never had this with any other TV presenters, just the announcers...

In a book about horror movie monsters that I had as a kid, there was a still of Max Schreck as the vampire, from "Nosferatu", the German 1922 silent film that pirated the "Dracula" story. The image literally gave me nightmares for months afterwards.

ITV used to have a program on in the early 70s, around lunchtime. I think it may have been a courtroom series -- though I'm not sure about that. What I remember about it was a credit sequence where a white bust of a head sprouts hairline cracks, out of which ants start to appear, crawling over the head and face...

Describing it now I can't figure out why it disturbed my 4/5/6-year old self so much. Maybe the idea of cracks appearing in a head -- let alone ants coming out of them!

Does anyone else remember this?

I remember an episode where Kirk and gang discovered a tribe of children deserted by their parents on a planet, and took them back on to the Enterprise.

The children were under the control of an angelic looking alien lifeforce, who directed them to carry out various evil acts. The finale had Kirk confronting the angel (somehow appearing on screen on the bridge) in front of the children - as Kirk exposed his true villainous nature with his powers of oratory, its face melted, voice slurred and turned into a hideous looking creature, cue much crying from the children, and several sleepless nights for this viewer.

Also, an old Hammer horror film, the Gorgon. The monster (a Marti Caine lookalike with snakes for hair) wasn't particularly scary, but the scenes where unsuspecting victims were lured into a ruined church by the Gorgon's siren call and were then turned to stone as soon as they caught sight of her creeped my brother and I out for months...

Oops, new to the site. sorry for double post

had this picture in it...Nightmares for years. I didn't even like to look at the book cover.

It's *probably* a spider monkey. But given that only 4 of the 20 strong expedition actually survived, would they really fake a picture...?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ameranthropoides_loysi

They used to make us watch it at school when it was raining at dinner time.....tried to source some from youtube but the process was just too painful!!

but an episode of "The Waltons" had a poltergeist storyline. At one point a rag doll sat up and looked directly at the camera, an image which has stayed distressingly fresh over the ensuing 30 years.

We go as a family to see a kiddie-friendly Disney double bill.

Following the usual ads for King Cones and the news that from now on one does not need to go to India to enjoy an Indian curry, can you imagine the effect seeing the following 'coming attractions' had the mind of a six year old?

Sometime in the late 70's, BBC2 started screening a horror movie season on early evenings. Most of the films were classic old b+w films like Frankenstein and Dracula, but one film shown was the Legend Of Boggy Creek - the supposedly true story of a Bigfoot creature that terrorised Arkansas rednecks.

This low budget badly-acted movie scared the beejeezus outta me.
It looks a bit rubbish now, but the documentary style and the shaky handheld camerwork makes it look a forerunner of the Blair Witch Project:

I was absolutely terrified of the "Space Probe", in "The Six Million Dollar Man" - essentially an upturned skip on castors. I genuinely couldn't watch, and hid whenever it was on.

No, no-one else ever heard of it neither.
Seems when I was little I used to go around to my friends house and watch TV. I would then go home and talk to my mum about what had happened in 'Murder in the War Tent' and they couldn't work out what I had been watching!
Eventually it was worked out that I meant 'Emergency Ward 10'!!!

The episode where Commander Straker is involved in a race against time to save his son's life...and he loses. I mean, kid's TV - WTF?

And the Captain Scarlet episode where everyone gets killed by the Mysterons but - hey - it's all only a dream. Unfortunately, I was already scared for life by that point.