Daft things that scared you when you were little/still scare you now

[doppelkorn]

The horrible tubules on Gilbert the Alien's hands.

[The Boston Crab]

I dread flushing toilets on trains and planes. It's the noise and the suddenness, like opening a portal into another, vicious dimension. Thwack. Dead.

I always have to talk myself out of plugging the toilet bowl with my head and having the contents of my skull violently slurped away by the bog, then wandering back to my seat with half a head.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Get in there...get your head really close to the chute, nauseatingly proximate, so you can even see the mottled detail on its plastic finish.

Wait for the flush. Wait for it....

Take a deep breath, then go: scream in tandem with the flush.

Who here has really gone to the toilet, mano a mano, gripping the sides and sweating? One life: once chance. One goal.

[Ian Drunken Smurf]

I want to see noseybonk rise and chase Theresa May off a cliff with a scythe.

[Crisps?]

I mean it wrong-foots the censors *a little* with the images related to American imperialism on the TV set buuuuut not really that much. It's bracingly blatant! True of The Party and its Guests if you've seen that one too.

I haven't, but I appreciate your politeness in suggesting I might have done. I have read a bit about it now though. The (few) IMDB comments are quite interesting, one suggesting it may have been banned more for artistic reasons (I doubt that, and I can't decide if that just makes a ban worse, if anything), and another who interprets it more as a criticism/observation of people acquiescing than the state/oppressor itself.

[Jumblegraws]

Wow, thanks dude. I watched the link just long enough to identify  it, ha ha still scares me shirtless. You're the only person who has ever known what I mean when I've described it.

I think it's actually been discussed in a similar "stuff that terrified you as a kid" thread here before, possibly even had a thread to itself at one point.

T-shirt available here.

[phantom_power]

Oh yes, the opening sequence to that American sci fi programme The Invaders. The doomy tone about aliens disguised as humans and the way they died by turning red and disintegrating scared the living shit out of me. Proper hide behind the sofa shit.

I used to get freaked out by the idea that the only way you could tell them from humans was they couldn't bend their little finger. I used to look at people's hands all the time

[Clownbaby]

I've remembered another one. I don't think it was a straight up fear but I used to go into the pantry and stare warily at a jar of curry sauce that had Loyd Grossman's face on it. I was about 3. My mam said she went into the pantry once when I was in there, saw me eyeing up Grossman, asked me what was wrong and I said "I'm looking at the man-curry"

Shit quoted by mistake

[Small Man Big Horse]

It was the Blue Cat from The Magic Roundabout movie for me.



Not the visual element, but we had the record of the movie and the cat's voice used to deeply unsettle me. Which is odd as it's now one of my favourite films.

[holyzombiejesus]

Noisy motorbikes still frighten me.

I had a Guinness Book of Records when I was little and one page had a photo of a man with a beard of bees.The beard covered some of his chest and even his arms and the arms of the chair he was sitting in. It scared me so much but I had to try to look at it. I remember slowly turning the pages, knowing that soon I'd get to the dreaded bit and then try to look at it without screaming. Horrible.

[Norton Canes]

The sun exploding. I remember reading a book on the solar system when I was about five and it said the sun would explode in a billion billion years or whatever and I was petrified.

I don't sweat the small stuff.

[Norton Canes]

And I had another book about the formation of the planet Earth and the last pages were a double-spread painting of a desolate, barren, wind-scarred Earth of the far future. Couldn't look at that.


This one:

[Jumblegraws]

Noisy motorbikes still frighten me.

From ages 3-6 years I used to get freaked out by lorries being in the adjacent lane during car journeys. Huge, growling monsters they were. It must have been something very particular to how little I was because it's almost impossible for me to imagine what all the fuss was about now.

[AsparagusTrevor]

I think it's (Apaches) actually been discussed in a similar "stuff that terrified you as a kid" thread here before, possibly even had a thread to itself at one point.

I seem to remember a Public Information Film thread a while ago, which of course had some terrifying reminiscing about kids burning on pylons, drowning in slurry or losing most of their legs on train-tracks.

EDIT: Here's the thread in question, although it turns out there was also a dedicated Apaches thread.

[the hum]

An episode of Blake's 7 freaked out my child mind for a good while. The episode was entitled The Web and having watched it, relatively recently, brought back memories but is very dated now in the effects department, especially the character Saymon.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0500271/

The final scene of what appeared to the Decimas drinking Saymon and his pleading frightened me out of my wits.

Oh dear lord yes, that whole episode made me feel very queasy and unsettled, and still does. As well as what you mentioned, there's the Decimas stomping on the heads and dismembering the sinister couple in the lab. Then there's the look of both the Decimas and especially Saymon. On the whole it's very weird, yucky and macabre, in that way that only 70s sci-fi can be.

[petril]

There was nothing more chilling than your normal ITV viewing being interrupted by the jarring arrival of the Crimestoppers sting and that horrible montage of disembodied mouths coming at you out of nowhere

Dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun BAHH BUHH BAHH!

Here's a couple of classics:

"Women In Black" robs a Building Society in Somerset
Man randomly beaten to death in the street in West Norwood.

at the age of about four, my brother managed to fart at the perfect moment at the end of that jingle. Crimestoppers was our go-to prelude to flatulence for a few years after. Sums up Thatcher's Britain quite well.

[JesusAndYourBush]

Might not be the song you heard, but it reminds me of John Foxx's No-One Driving.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4quBLWvzGQ

This was the song I heard which evoked the memory of that eerie keyboard:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6PXm34OBP8&t=47s
(the bit from 0:49 - 1:02).  They played it in the Celeb Big Brother (the one with James Whale) aftershow show thingy when they brought out all the contestants.  Midomi was able to identify it despite the cheering audience (although knowing what it was wasn't any help in working out what it reminded me of).

[Fisher Goes Berserk]

Castrol GTI, Crimestoppers, Apaches: yup, yup, yup. *shudder*

I've got a real thing for old TV presentation, but there are a couple of idents that used to scare the crap out of me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asZ6jnA-8HA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg6RzbUlv0s

Also, Smurfs.

[hedgehog90]

The bizarre mismatch between performing Wombles and wild Wombles, and the strangeness that entailed.
They wanted us to believe they were one and the same, but the massive ones seemed like alien imposters from another planet.

[fucking ponderous]

that sound that goes spaceman. like spaceman i always wanted to to know spaceman intergalactic something. that one. i would cry and leave the room as soon as it started. never heard more than the first few seconds.

edit
song. not just the sound that goes spaceman

If you're talking about the Babylon Zoo song, I'd actually never heard it before tonight, and I don't think I can take it seriously (or at least not enough to be scared of it) because of the interview with Babylon Zoo Lad in Brass Eye. The song is quite good though, I always assumed the band were meant to be shit.

As far as daft things that scare(d) me, most production logos and idents aired directly before/after TV shows. Take the Thames logo for instance. There is nothing to suggest another human being made it. It is not of this world. This is the case with all production logos.

[fucking ponderous]

It's still like that now.  Relentless war drums under the rolling headlines. Roaring for blood and misery.

I find it's very appropriate for a news intro. Sets a tone of dread, a mood of "this music and the glaring newsreader convey how fucked you and everything else are before a single word is spoken."

[Norton Canes]

Big slides, they always scare me. Big metal slides, in playgrounds. These days it's all modular, multicoloured plastic adventure castles, but playgrounds used to have huge metal slides with about fifteen steps and a cage on top. They must have been about twenty five foot high, and the metal was always so cold, even in the summer. They practically hummed with a baleful, malevolent energy

[Norton Canes]

And having my hair washed. Used to hate the water constantly running over my face so I'd hold up a flannel which obviously got soaked anyway and only made me fell more claustrophobic. I'd sit in the bath for half an hour staring up at the shower head knowing it would soon be time for the ordeal.

[Norton Canes]

Oh yeah and there was that time I was staying with relatives and in bed before going to sleep I started reading a book they had about the apocalyptic prophecies of Nostradamus.

[Fisher Goes Berserk]

I'd hold up a flannel which obviously got soaked anyway and only made me fell more claustrophobic

No wonder you were terrified, you were basically self-waterboarding.

[Jumblegraws]

Oh yeah and there was that time I was staying with relatives and in bed before going to sleep I started reading a book they had about the apocalyptic prophecies of Nostradamus.

I stayed with my aunt and cousin when i was about seven, we went to the cinema to see Don Bluth's awful Thumbelina adaptation. Anyway, at the cinema I spent a few minutes examining a pinball machine that was based on Coppola's Dracula from a year or two earlier. The imagery haunted me and I could hardly sleep that night (in contravention of a personal pyschological rule that, for some reason, I wasn't usually bothered by nighttime fears when staying over at a friend or relative's).

I actually played the game itself about ten years later. I'm no connoisseur but it seemed above-average.

[Clownbaby]

That pinball machine looks fuckin rad

[bgmnts]

Women.

[Jumblegraws]

That pinball machine looks fuckin rad

Yeah, I think it's pretty highly-rated amongst pinball enthusiasts. I remember there was an effect you could trigger where the ball "floated" across the board by way of a magnet, accompanied by the snarls made by Dracula when in his weird, hairy, orange, Sadie Frost-fucking demon form from the film. Also, Tom Waits, in his role as Renfield, is depicted in the artwork. I'm not aware of any other pinball machine where he features.

[Norton Canes]

Tom Waits played Renfield? Cool, I'd forgotten that.