Whether you’re a horror lover or a registered Halloweenie, one thing is probably true: As a child, you saw a film that utterly terrified you, evoking the sort of totalizing fear only a kid can feel. So to celebrate spooky season, we asked VF’s staff to reach way back into their memory banks to reveal the very first movie that scared each of them silly. Our list is filled with demons, zombies, vampires, flying monkeys, and a surprising number of Kristy Swanson projects. Reader, beware: You’re in for a scare.
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
As a child, I had a very complicated relationship with The Wizard of Oz. On the one hand, it was one of my favorite films: I was completely obsessed with Dorothy. I wore my hair in braids and insisted on click-clacking in my very own ruby red slippers everywhere I went. On the other hand, I had to make sure I was feeling brave enough each time I sat down to watch it. I’d reach for the VHS on the shelf often, but the vision of the Wicked Witch of the West summoning her army of flying monkeys haunted me—and still does, honestly. I can still hear the sound of sweet Toto barking and Dorothy screaming as the terrifying, blue, human-size-mutant flock sweeps them away into the abyss. Talk about wicked! —Daniela Tijerina
The Shining (1980)
I’m a scaredy cat, which I learned the hard way while staying at an aunt and uncle’s when I was a child. I happened to wander into the TV room as they were watching The Shining (on RCA video disc, for anyone who remembers), and it was right at the moment when Jack Nicholson’s possessed caretaker buries a hatchet into Hallorann (Scatman Crothers). Eventually, I read the book, in which Hallorann actually survives! But I was already haunted by that scene, and by the twins’ eerie refrain: “Come play with us, Danny.” I also watched Poltergeist as a child and, like all sensible people, can no longer abide clown dolls nor static on television sets. —Radhika Jones
I Am Legend (2007)
I had cool (and maybe irresponsible) parents who let me watch rated-R movies far too young (see: The Shining at age seven) and built up my tolerance. So it wasn’t until middle school that I encountered my first sleep-with-the-lights-on-all-night flick in the form of an…action movie? It’s hard to say exactly what genre I Am Legend fits under. The movie’s set in a postapocalyptic Manhattan besieged by plague victims turned monsters, with an immune Will Smith trying to manufacture a cure. The pitter-patter of the vampire-ish monsters running through Washington Square Park still haunts me, as does the scene of city officials blowing the bridges and tunnels. Too real then, too real now post-COVID. —Jaime Archer
It (1990)
As a child, the two-VHS set of the It miniseries held a prominent place inside my uncle’s wooden entertainment system, and in my earliest memories, it was a totemic object. I wanted It, whatever It was. Once, when I was five or so, my older cousins were babysitting and decided to put it on. The other young kids fled the room a few minutes in, but I sat unmoving, eyes fixed to the television, saying nothing for hours, leaving everyone with the impression that I simply wasn’t afraid. Cue weeks of night terrors and a lasting sense of unease around clowns of all kinds. My mom was pissed. This story has taken on an apocryphal significance in my family—its veracity was a topic of discussion at both my 30th birthday party and my recent wedding—but I know it’s true for one reason: I love horror movies of all kinds and am rarely genuinely scared, but the 1990 It still really gets to me. —Erin Vanderhoof
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992)
When I went to my very first group sleepover, someone picked the VHS of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as our entertainment for the evening. I have been informed, as an adult, that this movie (which stars Kristy Swanson as a cheerleader who discovers she’s a vampire hunter) is a comedy, and watching the trailer now, I guess it is. But at the time, when I was maybe nine years old, this movie terrified me, and I spent weeks waking up at night afraid that vampires might find their way into my house. I was determined to learn how to use a wooden stake, just in case. I’ve never watched the movie again (or the TV show it spawned) and, honestly, doubt that will change anytime soon. —Rebecca Ford
Night of the Living Dead (1990)
My mom tells me that when she took me to see The Black Cauldron, I was so scared that I hid under the theater seat the entire movie—but that memory is lost in the haze of youth. I remember being creeped out by The Watcher in the Woods and The Changeling, only that was the giddy, fun kind of frightened. No, the movie that really freaked me out in a dreadful way that I can still viscerally recall was the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead, a grim and gunky and unrelenting descent into hell, the likes of which I’d never seen before. At about 9 or 10 years old, I was entirely too young to see the movie, but my sister (also too young to see it) insisted we watch. And so we did, me shrinking ever more into the couch as poor Barbara Todd (Patricia Tallman) sought meager refuge from a horde of zombies in an old farmhouse.
I was thoroughly rattled. And then, to make matters worse, my parents got home from work and drove us down to the old farmhouse where we spent part of every summer—and where I spent many a night staring out the window of my little bedroom, convinced I was going to see some ghoul, or many ghouls, staggering out of the woods. It was the beginning of an embarrassingly yearslong fear of zombies that persisted into my 20s, exacerbated by the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. There I was—a college student who should have been more concerned with boys and parties and, uh, my studies—absolutely convinced that every thud and creak in my off-campus apartment was a zombie finally coming to get me, some 12 years after Night of the Living Dead first lodged itself in the fear receptors of my brain. I eventually got over it, even survived a few seasons of The Walking Dead. But I will never watch Tom Savini’s film ever again, lest I find myself cowering in my bedroom in my 40s, listening for the shuffling of rotting feet all over again. —Richard Lawson
The Goonies (1985) and The Lost Boys (1987)
Even though these movies came out two years apart, in my mind, I was concurrently terrified of both of them. I didn’t actually watch The Goonies the whole way through until this decade of my life, which says something about how scared I was of it, despite my friends finding this ludicrous. Why? The underground-ness; the Fratellis. And The Lost Boys? Vampires; divorce. I’m easily scared, I guess. I’ve still never seen Child’s Play or It because the mere sight of the VHS boxes at Take Two Video scared me so badly. The ’80s were a very scary time. —Claire Howorth
Don’t Look Under the Bed (1999)
While Disney Channel perfected the art of nonspooky seasonal viewing with Halloweentown and Twitches, the network also made one of the most outright terrifying movies ever targeted toward kids. I can’t remember if I actually soldiered through the entire movie about a boogeyman living beneath a girl’s bed—but I do recall periodically taking a look underneath my own to ensure that no creatures had slinked into my room in the middle of the night. My elementary-school-aged self wasn’t alone. “There were a number of meetings where we’d talked about the tone and what [Disney] wanted it to be–scary but not too scary,” director Kenneth Johnson told Entertainment Weekly in 2017. “That’s the bar we kept trying to find. Everybody thought we had hit it until they started getting derogatory mail after it aired.” —Savannah Walsh
101 Dalmatians (1996)
There are few villains in cinematic history as iconic or as terrifying as Cruella de Ville—a chic and wicked cross between Miranda Priestly and the Child Catcher. There’s a reason her titular song goes, “If she doesn’t scare you, no evil thing will”—and as a child, I really took those lyrics to heart. But I wasn’t afraid of the Cruella from the 1961 animated film One Hundred and One Dalmatians. I was very specifically terrified of Glenn Close’s interpretation of Cruella de Vil in the 1996 live-action film. Close’s powdered face, her black-and-white aesthetic with shocks of red (like blood!) and, most importantly, her ungodly cackle struck a certain fear in me, the likes of which I had never felt. In retrospect, I can see it for what it was—an indelible performance by one of our finest screen actors—but at the time, Close really scared the bejeezus out of me.
One of my earliest, most visceral childhood memories is having a nightmare that Cruella was coming to get me and waking up my father in the dead of night. I then made him find our VHS copy of 101 Dalmatians, throw it in the trash, and take that trash bag and put it in the garbage outside of our house. I couldn’t sleep another wink knowing that Close’s Cruella was lurking somewhere in our home. Even today, to see her is to take a sudden chill. —Chris Murphy
Poltergeist (1982) and Deadly Friend (1986)
Never underestimate the terrifying power of the kid whisper network. The two movies that generated the most fear in me when I was in elementary school were the suburban haunted-house blockbuster Poltergeist, which is still a classic today, and the psycho-killer girl-robot movie Deadly Friend, which preceded M3GAN by a generation. Both freaked me out well before I saw them thanks to the intense descriptions I heard (and sometimes misunderstood) from my classmates.
)
English (US) ·