HumanChessgame Posted December 6, 2015 Share Posted December 6, 2015 Oh, X-Files, how you were so awesome when you abandoned alien bullshit and went totally fucking Kolshack: The Night Stalker. Yeah, I wasn't sleepy anyway. I will just stay up all night clutching this steak knife to my chest. I watched this episode when it first aired when I was 15. At the time I was still having to leave the house at 6 in the morning and walking a quarter mile through pitch black woods in order to catch the school bus in the morning. For about a week after I saw this, I would crank up the volume on my walkman all the way and carry a flashlight with me. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
odessasteps Posted December 6, 2015 Share Posted December 6, 2015 The BTAS episode that got to me was the first mad hatter: nerd tries to impress girl only have things go wrong, bad things happen, sadness. Same for heart of ice. --- Also, two words : zanti misfits Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kuetsar Posted December 6, 2015 Share Posted December 6, 2015 I remember the an episode of the old super friends cartoon freaked me out when I was little. It was the one where the super friends are lured under the swamp and then imprisoned or some such. Then again I would have been about four or less at the time. . . . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
odessasteps Posted December 6, 2015 Share Posted December 6, 2015 I remember the an episode of the old super friends cartoon freaked me out when I was little. It was the one where the super friends are lured under the swamp and then imprisoned or some such. Then again I would have been about four or less at the time. . . . The super friends ep for me was the one when the legion of doom used Dr Natas' crystal to kill all the JLA. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Comedian Posted December 6, 2015 Share Posted December 6, 2015 oh fpr goddamn fuck's sake ya'll hit the second page without mentioning the nightmare episode of MASH that shit traumatized me as a kid Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
piranesi Posted December 6, 2015 Share Posted December 6, 2015 Here you go: That show did more to shape my anxiety than probably any other. This got me hard too, but only because in 1983 I was right at the age where I would be having nuclear war nightmares regularly. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cool arrow Posted December 6, 2015 Share Posted December 6, 2015 The Vorvon was totally the fucking nightmare fuel episode of Buck Rogers. On a similar note, remember the Battlestar Galactica episode with Patrick Macnee playing (for all intents and purposes) Satan? Remember when Starbuck shot him and just for a split-second you could see what he really looked like? And he fucking looked like this? I'm 45 fucking years old and that still gives me the creeps. Whereas Space Nosferatu reminds me of nothing so much as Joe Flaherty's Count Floyd. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TimLivingston Posted December 6, 2015 Share Posted December 6, 2015 Not a TV show, but seriously, if this didn't scar you for life. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jingus Posted December 6, 2015 Share Posted December 6, 2015 Weird thing: I saw at least half of these as a kid, but they didn't really freak me out. Not much on any TV show did, considering that I was already watching some pretty far-out-there movies as a young kid. My "damn, that fucked with me" memories tend to be less This One Special Episode Of A Sitcom and more like That Time I Turned On The Climax Of The Wild Bunch And Had No Idea What The Hell I Had Found. Heck, I was already a big fan of the Rambo and Alien franchises by the time I was nine years old. So a lot of this thread's stuff just bounced off my pre-scarred hide like nerf bullets. (That one episode of Space: 1999 looked pretty cool, though; kudos for sharing that, it's finally convinced me that I need to watch that show sometime.) One exception would be The X-Files. It looks less revolutionary today since everyone has totally ripped off their style; but at the time, that was some remarkably effective horror filmmaking that was merely disguised as a cop procedural. At the time, I especially dug the monster-of-the-week episodes, with the duology featuring the nigh-immortal serial killer Tooms as the most memorably shudder-inducing. (Ironically, I never saw "Home", but the plot synopsis reads like a modern remake of Lovecraft's "The Lurking Fear".) And for such a relatively dry and sober show which so often had a large stick of pure dignity shoved right up its ass, Star Trek: TNG could occasionally clobber you with something unexpected. I don't mean just "monsters chasing you down a dark tunnel" kind of stuff (though it occasionally did that too), but more heady ideas that were philosophically terrifying. I'm especially thinking of the fucking creepy episode "Remember Me", where a bewildered Dr. Crusher discovers that people are vanishing into thin air on the Enterprise... and nobody else remembers those people ever existed. After anyone disappears (always offscreen, which is even creepier than some showy effect would've been) there's never any record of that person having ever been born, and Crusher is appropriately horrified by the idea that either she's going insane, or... well, or the universe is going insane. THAT'S the kind of thing I find truly disturbing, the idea that the cosmos is fucking with you for its own inexplicable amusement and there's not a single goddamned thing you can possibly do about it. But still... those shows mostly followed their own internal rules, right? I mean, X-Files made it clear right from the start that its intention was to shock and awe you with a bunch of that-can't-possibly-be-true...-can-it? kind of mysteries and thrills. Star Trek as an overall franchise makes its mission statement to boldly poke into every dark corner of mankind's psychology; and The Next Generation made it clear early on that they're not fucking around when they so coldly killed off Tasha Yar right the fuck outta nowhere. So, in those shows, you know that serious shit might happen and you can brace yourself. In all the other shows I'm familiar with that have already been mentioned, they had their own routines of doing things. Batman: TAS might freak you out with some hideous shit that happens to the villains, but we know that Bruce and his allies are going to be fine by the end of the episode. The various Very Special Episodes threaten horrors, but our heroes are always rescued just in time. Even as a young child, I knew damn well that Macguyver was never actually going to get killed by whatever unsettling madman he was fighting this time. There's a certain Way Things Are Done, and those rules are never broken. One little problem: J. Michael Straczynski does not give even the most microscopic fucks about the Way Things Are Done. Not even back when he was working on toy commercials. Welcome to Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, one of the most schizophrenic shows I've ever seen in my life. Like most 1980s action shows for children, this one was invented to sell toys. We've got a bunch of superheroes who transform into shiny plastic costume, looking all the world like any given Super Sentai ripoff. The action is stiff and full of those sparky little explosions they do on TV budgets, the dialogue is even stiffer and full of terrible one-liners, the acting can best be described as "bless their hearts, they're trying so hard!", and the special effects (though surprisingly copious in number) have aged like a dead skunk in a hot swamp. All that makes it more surprising when you realize how ambitious and how legitimately DARK this show is. It's basically set in future-Terminator land; the machines have won the war against organic life, and a tiny handful of humans are desperately fighting a never-ending guerrilla war against the infinite forces of darkness. All the sets are dingy and shadowy, with much of it being set in random piles of rubble or half-repaired ruins. Although the heroes usually win the battle against the robots at the end of each episode, it's clear that they're never any closer to winning the overall war. The best they ever manage to do is to stay alive another day. And then, in the last episode, they can't even do THAT: Due to slow toy sales and high production costs, the network cancelled Captain Power after just one season. The too-depressing-to-be-called-a-cliffhanger finale featured one of the main heroes, the token female member of our five-person superteam, dying. And not just dying a little, or in a sudden or swift manner. We're talking "shot three times, gasping in agony, bleeding internally, clearly dying, and THEN detonating a suicide bomb to take some bad guys with her". And her final moments are spent with her on the radio with her commander/vaguely implied love interest, with both of them whimpering about all the things they never got to say, and then BOOM she's fucking dead. And that's how the entire show ends! It would literally be as if Power Rangers ended with the Pink Ranger getting decapitated by Lord Zedd, while all the other rangers impotently cry and moan from the sideline; or if He-Man's finale had Hordak cut Teela in half and then ran away laughing while Prince Adam wept over her corpse. Even in a show with a grim "are you sure this is really for kids?" tone to it, that stuck out as one of the most nihilistic things I've ever seen in my life. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
caley Posted December 6, 2015 Share Posted December 6, 2015 Anything narrated by Robert Stack This week on Unsolved Mysteries I was just telling my mother the other day how I never should have been allowed to watch this when I was little and I traced four separate incidents back to my watching this show: 1. One night, when my dad was out of town and it was me, my four-year-old sister and my pregnant mother and she was reading to us and the neighbour started trying to slam the trunk of his car shut (We lived in a condo) and I jumped up on the bed and screamed "OH MY GOD SOMEONE IS TRYING TO BREAK IN!" 2. Another time I heard my then-infant sister laughing in her bed and decided that a burglar was trying to get in and making faces at her (for some reason!) even though we were, you know, on the second floor of the building. 3. Also had a consuming fear that someone was going to plant a bomb outside our condo on the one side with no windows. 4. Was terrified that if I layed up next to the wall in my bed that a burglar under the bed would try to stab me up through that little crack between the bed and wall. My mom was not aware I had seen any 'Unsolved Mysteries' and agreed that no, I should not have seen any of it. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Execproducer Posted December 6, 2015 Share Posted December 6, 2015 As far as weirding me out goes, aside from the end of Trilogy of Terror and all of Salem's Lot, there is this little gem that wasn't made for tv, but showed up there not long after its theatrical release. And when it comes to ripping my heart out, doggie death destroys me every time. Just finding this on dailymotion had me bawling like it was 1977 all over again. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xbzouu_the-little-house-jack-s-death-la-pe_shortfilms Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
odessasteps Posted December 6, 2015 Share Posted December 6, 2015 Speaking of the In Search Of genre, i was wigged out by UFO stuff as a kid and this show, especially the credits, creeped me out. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt D Posted December 6, 2015 Share Posted December 6, 2015 Also the worst fever dream I had as a kid was based on Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, I think: 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cliff Hanger Posted December 6, 2015 Share Posted December 6, 2015 Someone beat me to Captain Power, dammit. The entire idea of Lord Dred and his robots "digitizing" people for computer storage terrified me beyond reason. Also dark as fuck and obscure because of it: Spiral Zone! So a mad scientist creates an energy-gas-field kind of thing that turns people into zombie-esque slaves and uses generators to cut a huge, spiral-shaped path around the world and enslave huge segments of humanity. Only he and a few goons are allowed to retain individuality, and they all have horrible scars and disfigurement because of whatever he did to protect them. The materials needed to make Zone-proof suits for the "good guys" are incredibly rare--we basically have six soldiers who can survive, that's it. So the Zone Riders are fighting a frequently-hopeless battle against a slowly expanding tide of conquest. And for those who didn't watch the video, right after the credits you get the bad guys using a calliope to lure a small child over the laughably ineffective barricades, so they can kidnap him into the Zone right in front of his shrieking mother. It's got all the corn of any 80s toy-ad action show, but waaaay bleaker. Couldn't find Inhumanoids clips; it's generally campier than Spiral Zone but full of freaky body horror. Generally, I was freaked out by any appearance of Medusa, any kid-level body horror (the Superfriends short where Batman gets briefly turned into a monster made of junk by pollution terrified me) and any "spread by touch" plague. Purple Smurfs, the Hate Plague on Transformers, etc etc. ETA: Care Bears villains were always the scariest thing in the world. And Return to Oz upset me so badly that I went to the bathroom and wouldn't come out until a grown-up came to get me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
J.T. Posted December 6, 2015 Author Share Posted December 6, 2015 This got me hard too, but only because in 1983 I was right at the age where I would be having nuclear war nightmares regularly. Oh, when it came to nuclear war nightmares the BBC movie, Threads, left me sleepless for days. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cool arrow Posted December 6, 2015 Share Posted December 6, 2015 One word... SLEESTAKS! 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
odessasteps Posted December 6, 2015 Share Posted December 6, 2015 One word... SLEESTAKS! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8VmJXcTTmk Imagine if we had known then one of them was bill laimbeer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
J.T. Posted December 6, 2015 Author Share Posted December 6, 2015 One word... SLEESTAKS! The Sleestaks scared the shit out of my brother when he was a kid. For years, I could prank him simply by mimicking the noise they made. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jingus Posted December 6, 2015 Share Posted December 6, 2015 Spiral Zone Inhumanoids Good call on both of those. I vaguely remember loving Spiral Zone as a kid, but for the life of me could never recall its name until you mentioned it now. And damn, but when you look at it, so many of those late-80s shows had stuff which was basically body horror: like C.O.P.S., a cutesy show about future cops versus future villains in which every single character was an unholy man-machine cyborg hybrid along the lines of Robocop. Several of them even had the exact same "horribly almost-murdered in the line of duty, then barely kept alive by mechanical body parts" backstory! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bee of ephesus Posted December 6, 2015 Share Posted December 6, 2015 children of green knowe , it was on cbbc sometime in the late 80s. was a victorian drama type deal but was very dark and moody. anyway in one episode a tree came alive n chased the kid, scared me to death and has stuck with me my entire life. another was a show called chocky on itv wierd alien type thing over a kids bed realy effected me Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bee of ephesus Posted December 6, 2015 Share Posted December 6, 2015 children of green knowe , it was on cbbc sometime in the late 80s. was a victorian drama type deal but was very dark and moody. anyway in one episode a tree came alive n chased the kid, scared me to death and has stuck with me my entire life. another was a show called chocky on itv wierd alien type thing over a kids bed realy effected me Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MADCAP Posted December 6, 2015 Share Posted December 6, 2015 What the fuck was wrong with Tex Avery??? Just watch the last minute Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phantom Lord Posted December 6, 2015 Share Posted December 6, 2015 This got me hard too, but only because in 1983 I was right at the age where I would be having nuclear war nightmares regularly. Oh, when it came to nuclear war nightmares the BBC movie, Threads, left me sleepless for days. I tried watching Threads a couple of years ago. Bare in mine I'm fairly desensitized to most things. I made it up to the attack and I was like I can't go any further. There's an hour left to this movie. I'll try again later. That was like three years ago I think. I watched Special Bulletin and some of the other made for tv mocumentary's that are on youtube from the mid 80's. This is another pretty good one called "Countdown to Looking Glass" Anyway I'm trying to think of tv shows that tramatized me and perhaps it's because I'm really good at blocking things out I just can't remember them. One was on some Unsolved Mystery's knockoff on CBS (I think). Some story about a woman checking into a haunted hotel and the ghost of some woman murdered 100 years before appears in the television screen in her hotel room. I don't know why but it scared the hell out of me. I wish I could remember some more. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jingus Posted December 7, 2015 Share Posted December 7, 2015 A couple of mid-90s examples just came to mind. One was "So-Called Angels", the bizarre Christmas episode of the criminally short-lived My So-Called Life. Most of the show was comprised of fairly typical grunge-era teen melodrama (although it might've been the first major mainstream show to have one of the main characters be openly gay), but on this one Very Special Episode they went full-on supernatural. The episode features this weird homeless girl who keeps running into our heroes at improbable moments, delivering cryptic advice; and at the end, it's revealed that she's either a ghost or an angel. Totally unambiguous, no other possible explanation, it's "yeah, she's a noncorporeal spirit" and it's totally jarring in a show which is otherwise about teenagers being all emo about how much ennui they feel about their friends and family. Another one is no particular episode, just ALL of it: Picket Fences. This one flew under the radar because so much of the legitimately disturbing shit in the show is either treated comedically (like the running joke about how they keep finding murdered bodies in freezers) or made the subject of the various sociopolitical soapbox speeches that the show was best known for. Since it was treated as either being funny or as being fuel for the didactic monologues, nobody noticed how horrific so much of the material genuinely was. Heck, just for example, the show did not one but TWO separate episodes about people being in brain-dead comas and whether or not it's right to remove life support. The first one ended up pussing out with a cheap deus-ex-machina, so later the show went back and was all like "okay, no cutesy bullshit this time around, we're gonna pull the plug and this chick is gonna die slow" complete with a NAUSEATINGLY graphic verbal description which detailed (at great length) exactly what happens to the human body in this situation and what is the eventual specific cause of death. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Burgundy LaRue Posted December 7, 2015 Share Posted December 7, 2015 I'm not finding a good clip from it so far, but the Garfield Halloween Special was a lot creepier than it should have been. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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