The Movies that Traumatised Us...
What were the films you watched as a child that still haunt you?
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Yara & Gillian
The Child Catcher beckoning you with gloved fingers, Pennywise the clown grinning up from the drain, the ominous two Jaws notes that play in your mind any time you’re in the sea…
We’ve all got those terrifying movie moments that left their mark on us as kids. Maybe it was something that nudged a personal fear, maybe the performance was so effective that it all felt too real, or maybe your parents took you to see Alien?!
We were reading this newsletter from the brilliant Popped Substack a couple of months ago about the original release of Alien in 1979, which opens with the reactions of some unassuming parents who happened to take their children along to the film’s first showings.
It got us thinking about scenes and characters that haunted us. So, here are five of our traumatic (but somehow still much-loved) film moments - with a little backstory of course - and we’d love to hear yours.
(I haven’t seen these films in decades so bear with me on any hazy memories. Maybe it’s time I actually watched them again!)
5. The horse scene in The NeverEnding Story
If you saw this film, chances are this will be on your list, too.
The cult classic The NeverEnding Story is a 1984 fantasy film based on the Michael Ende novel. It told the story of Bastian, a shy boy who’s chased into a bookstore by bullies and stumbles upon a mysterious old book. Inside the pages, he finds the magical world of Fantasia and meets a young warrior called Atreyu, who’s on a grand quest.
A beautiful white horse called Artax is Atreyu's loyal companion … until Artax loses all hope in the Swamp of Sadness and sinks into the mud to his death. (Stress knots, anyone?)
In a 2019 interview, actor Noah Hathaway, who played Atreyu, explained the time and care they took to film the scene in a pre-CGI era:
“I feel like I sent people to therapy over that scene with Artax. The horse they used was really wonderful and they spent a couple of months teaching her to be ok with being up to her neck with water. That's something unfamiliar for them. So, the way they did that scene was that they had this little elevator under the water that slowly dropped the horse lower and lower. When it got to its chin area, we'd cut the scene. That one scene took over two and a half weeks.”
There were rumours for years that the horse died during the making of the film, but this wasn’t true. Two horses were actually used and both were fine - Noah was even given one of them as a wrap gift! He left it in Germany with his riding double, and the horse lived with him happily on his ranch for over 20 years.
4. The Wheelers in Return to Oz
Forget the Winged Monkeys in The Wizard of Oz - if you really wanted sleepless nights, the best material was in the film’s 1985 sequel, Return to Oz. And there was nothing more terrifying than the Wheelers, the human-like characters on wheels who chased Dorothy and her friends in service of Princess Mombi (played far too well by British actress Jean Marsh).
The Lead Wheeler was played by American actor and puppeteer Pons Maar (we’ve seen him in a recent interview and he seems like a perfectly nice man!) who was the ‘Mime Movement Advisor’ in charge of working out how the Wheeler actors could move and look natural in the back-breaking costumes.
Have a quick look at the opening of this clip from a behind-the-scenes documentary to see how the Wheeler actors trained:
3. The elevator scene in Towering Inferno
Jaws may not be on this list, but another film scored by John Williams is…
Have you seen The Towering Inferno (1974)? It’s worth it to see Steve McQueen and Paul Newman with joint top billing. In fact, it’s an all-star cast. Fred Astaire’s in it too - in his only Oscar-nominated role (without a tap shoe in sight).
It’s about the world’s tallest building and some faulty wiring - bad guys cutting corners, of course - that leads to a deadly fire. There’s a scenic elevator scene that gets pretty tense and results in a shock death. (For years I had to guess what was happening because my dad would cover my eyes! Probably not a film for the kids…)
The film might not have been the success it was without an astute collaboration. It began with two books: Warner Bros. had bought the rights to Richard Martin Stern’s The Tower, and soon after, Fox bought The Glass Inferno by Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson. The stories were so similar that the studios didn’t want to compete. They joined forces and took incidents and character names from both books to make one blockbuster.
2. Pinocchio’s transformation on Pleasure Island
A cursed island, headed by a deranged Coachman, where young, mischievous boys are turned into donkeys and sold for labour… easy-watching for children, right Disney?
Pleasure Island in Pinocchio (based on the “Land of Toys” from the original Italian novel) is where boys who turn their backs on school and authority figures come to play. They’re encouraged to indulge themselves in adult vices such as smoking, drinking and gambling. And a bit of vandalism for good measure.
But the Disney moral code is about to catch up with them. The more the boys indulge in immoral behaviour, the closer they get to (literally) making jackasses out of themselves. Remember the transformation of Pinocchio’s friend Lampwick? It was cleverly done through shadow and his calls for help were horrifying!
Did you ever spot the donkey carved into the back of the chair Pinocchio was sitting on? It was a hint from animators at what was to come…
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1. The eeriness of The Watcher in the Woods
I actually remember very little about the storyline of this film, but there are scenes and still images that are seared into my brain forever. It’s been called “a generation’s Halloween nightmare” by Vulture - did you ever see it?
The Watcher in the Woods is a 1980 supernatural horror film for young adults, based on a 1976 novel by Florence Engel Randall and produced by Disney. It stars Bette Davis and her incredible eyes, and Kyle Richards, who was a young Disney star and is now famous as one of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. In the story, a teenage girl and her little sister move to the English countryside with their parents and get caught up in a supernatural mystery regarding a missing girl in the woods.
I remember the teen girl seeing a haunted image of a blindfolded girl in mirrors around the house… and a scene where she falls into a lake and a witch-like Bette Davis is pushing her down with a stick… but when I read articles about it now, I’m more interested in the scary stories about plotline and editing issues!
After negative initial responses from critics and audiences, executives pulled the film from cinemas and starting cutting. They ended up with three different endings - one with a stop-motion alien and ‘other world’ footage (dropped when they ran out of time); one where the audience doesn’t see the ‘other world’ and they forget to tell us what’s happening; and a final ending cobbled together from hasty re-shoots where an added speech clears up loose ends.
I suppose it’s a bonus that I was so busy recovering from the terror - I have no memory of a problem with the ending!
I always thought Pinocchio was a horror film.
Really interesting, and yes, I could remember some of those harrowing moments. The child catcher yes, of course!
There are some pretty harrowing moments in Dumbo, where Dumbo and his mum are separated and the circus masters are mean to her. Sob!
I was occasionally allowed to stay up and watch some of the late night horror films when I was nine, and so was genuinely freaked out for good reason by some of those, especially The Haunting. I read Shirley the Jackson novel it's based on a while ago (The Haunting of Hill House), and that helped dispel any residual trauma!