What TV show traumatized you as a kid?
When I was about 8 years old (2016) I woke up early while my parents were still asleep and turned on the TV to see what to watch. Superjail was on and I cried due to so much gore being on the TV, even if it was cartoon gore. I was 8.
Courage the Cowardly Dog. I know it's a kids' show, but I was terrified of entering the basement for months after seeing the episode with the floating white head
Also: Return the slab!
I only ever saw the episode with the UFO
Weirded me out enough that I have no interest to watch the other ones
The X Files inbred family episode almost feels like too easy of an answer.
Mine’s also x-files, but the cockroach wall one. I think it’s a much later season episode, scully may have been pregnant? But I have no interest in finding it. It gave me a roach phobia. And then when I was an adult, I learned in the south they are MUCH bigger than up north here, and they can fly, and I learned this because one flew into my apartment through the porch door and just crawled around on my wall by the lamp, and was extra horrified.
The one that always bothered me was like some insect alien creature. That was invisible. But it made insect noises.
I can't remember the details except that the noise really disturbed me.
Chittery sound.
I didn't see that until I was an adult and my stomach still turns upside down whenever I think of it. The mother.... Horrifying.
the way that she defended the way that her family "loved" each other rings in my ears when i hear a maga person.
I'm hongry.
The one that gets my wife is the Tooms episodes.
"The Animals of Farthing Wood". It's a cartoon about a group of animals who try to find a new home after humans destroy their forest. Many of them die horrible deaths along the way. Still vividly remember the hedgehog family being run over on the motorway. And yes, it was a kids show!
I loved that show as a kid. No idea why I connected with it so strongly but I always appreciated that it wouldn't shy away from darker themes.
Yeah, parts of it may have traumatized me, but I ultimately also quite liked the show as a child. I'm sure it helped me empathize with the suffering of wild animals and gave me an early idea of why we should protect the environment.
It definitely wouldn't fly as a kids show today, but I think it's an interesting discussion to have when and how much kids' media should explore darker topics. Ultimately the show was still very tame compared to some of the books my parents got to read as kids, which included things like kids getting ground up in a mill for playing a prank or getting their thumbs cut off for sucking on them.
That sounds like Struwelpeter. Yeah, quality entertainment there.
Yeah it's one of the shows I look forward to showing my kid one day. That and Avatar the Last Airbender. I don't know if they'll appreciate it the way I did but who knows, they might show me something contemporary that they feels same sort of connection to.
So I’m not particularly proud of this, but the emergency broadcasting tests used to scare the bejebus out of me when I was a little kid. Like run into another room and hide scared. I don’t even really know what they were or were for, but they just seemed scary.
They really should teach about those in school. Like I learned how those work from Linus Tech Tips, when I was in high school. Why are we so against teaching how basic infrastructure our society relies on work?
Yeah, same here. It's those damn alert tones. They aren't even meant to get people's attention, in America at least, they're just a handy side effect of the digitally encoded audio signal the system uses.
The extra siren for Amber alerts though, that's what would set me off.
Watership Down... The old one, not the newer remake. Just so much fucked up imagery and awful themes in that. Legitimately gave me nightmares as a kid.
Not really a kid's movie, but I remember seeing Darkman on TV when I was pretty young and having the image of his horribly burned, disfigured face burned into my memory.
Watership permanently affected my personality.
I was four and I caught a rerun of the Transformers movie where Optimus Prime dies. I was not okay for a few weeks.
My granddad had also died right about the same time, so it was a double whammy.
Not to mention the unceremonious murder of several other characters throughout, that part with the guys being dropped into the acid with a close up of them melting, the court with the "innocent" declaration followed up by throwing the innocent bot into a pool of shark(ticon)s and the "judge" laughing in evil delight about it, the world-devouring monster planet ... That movie did not mess around
(And it was friggin awesome)
It was the 1970s
I was ~5 years old
Land of the Lost
Dad standing on top of mountain, looks thru binoculars, sees backs of family's heads. "It's a closed world, son"
Holly (daughter) stumbles into a trippy Pylon touches a glowing crystal and phases into an alternate, insane reality.
Jesus Christ that was some acid-trip inspired existential crisis.
I was going to say the most traumatizing thing was hearing this kid was 8 in 2016 …
You're older than you've ever been
And now you're even older
And now you're even older And now you're older still
In the voice of Luke Skywalker: NOOoOoooooo!!!
The theme song to Unsolved Mysteries. My mom would be watching it just when Id goto bed and that song had me pissing myself.
The Are You Afraid of the Dark episode with the drain monster. Couldn't stand on the drain in the shower for about 8 years afterward.
I just remember the pinball episode. Actually I remember almost nothing about the episode except a giant pinball showing up at the end. I don't remember why that was so terrifying but it definitely left a mark for some reason.
Why do I remember that specific visual from that episode and basically nothing else? The...mall was in the pinball machine?
There was the episode with Gilbert Gottfried who was a radio announcer, there was an episode about a ghost monster thing in the pool that the kid turned orange with chemicals....some 30 year old neurons are firing over here folks, and they ain't firing that bright.
It was this red kelpy blood clot that would come out of swimming pool drains and shower drains and kill children. I don't know anything else about it than that, but it got me good. I don't remember the pinball 😹
I remember the pinball one, but it was the one with the weird house with all the mirrors that got me.
Happy tree friends. No idea how they got the broadcast rights and why they showed it at 8pm.
Oh man I loved happy tree friends, but I definitely never saw it on tv, only their website and YouTube, and I was in highchool when it came out.
Yup. It was after something else little me was actually trying to watch. Couldn't unsee.
That scared the shit out of me as a kid
Happy Tree Friends on TV? You sure? Omg imagine if they were tricked by the cover and broadcasted it without reviewing 😆
Gollum from the animated Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings..freaked me the fuck out. My father would torment me with _my precious. while rubbing his hands.
Check out the Rankin/Bass Hobbit, that Gollum is a whole other monster.
Yes absolutely I watched it as a child
I believe it was America's most wanted. Usually it ends with the criminal getting caught, but when they end with case gone cold and they add a phone number. It feels unsettling and sits with you.
I agree. Those true crime documentary-style shows are probably the closest thing to traumatizing. All this other fake, fictional stuff other people are posting? That crap made me laugh.
But something about knowing that some lady got murdered near the lake we used to go swimming at? Yes, that would scare me.
The Chipmunks Movie, not the live action one but the animated one from the mid-80s. I had nightmares for years about a scene where their hot air balloon gets blown around by a hurricane, which I watched I guess around the same time as Hurricane Hugo.
It's also very possible that my brain invented the whole thing.
Invader Zim. The animation and shock humor was a little much for younger me, particularly the organ stealing episode.
Not a TV show specifically, but another thing I remember was there were these anti smoking ads with claymation figures that had creepy music and they ate dead birds and things.
Saw “Them!” when I was like 6. That was pretty bad.
And then Starship Troopers when I was like 10. That one really got me.
Huh. Never thought about how they’re both bug movies.
I was probably in middle school when I had my first contact with Starship Troopers and that messed with me. My first exposure was the scene of them defending the base on that big filled planet. As someone who doesn't get along with bugs, you can see why I originally hated the film.
Was that the "cat in the bag" movie?
No, it was giant radioactive ants.
But now I am actually not sure if what I saw was Them! or Matinee (which features a film that very well may be based on Them!)
no, no, you're right, them! is the ants one, I was thinking of something else
Not a tv show, I wasn't necessarily a kid but I remember stumbling on LiveLeak...
For those who want to know what it was.
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler It was a video of a guy getting dragged behind a car down the highway. :::
In my days the equivalent was rotten.com
Some of the images are charged into my brain
I also have two from 4chan.
::: spoiler Spoiler A cage with IS prisoners left down in a pool. A prisoner set on fire in a cage. :::
Twin Peaks. Way too young to see it, when I did.
Oof, yeah that would do it
PeeWees big adventure. Large Marge.
This is embarrassing but Goosebumps. I think I watched an episode that just caught me off guard while I was in a strange place (first sleepover at a friend's house) and the super campy episode freaked me right out.
Runner up was poltergeist. My older sister thought it was very funny that it was rated PG and so I saw it when I was maybe 7 or 8. 😂
I got got by a semi-campy Goosebumps episode as a kid and I was at home, no excuses. It was the one with the lawn gnomes that would move in the middle of the night, and it ended with them, off-camera, turning the mean neighbor into a lawn ornament version of himself. I still don't know what freaked me out so much, but I couldn't sleep for hours.
Wouldn't go as far as to say it "traumatised" me but In the Night Garden was a surreal, creepy fever dream of a show that still lives rent free in my head. The thing kid me found most weird was that I first saw it in Canada, but when we went back to China to visit family they were airing it there too in the imported shows segment right next to Spongebob and Doraemon. At that point I was really confused because I assumed for a show to be imported it would have to be really well written and acclaimed, but In the Night Garden was such a nonsensical cacophony that it left me wondering what it is about it my stupid kid brain had missed. Still don't know what was up with that show.
The show that really did traumatise me though was this ghost hunting show on Animal Planet about people's pets acting weird because they were "detecting" ghosts in their home. Freaked me the hell out because I assumed anything that aired on a documentary channel was real, and the fact that they involved animals in their "justification" of why the place is haunted added to the realism for me at the time. Took until I was an adult to realize that ghost hunting shows are all fake. This was right at the start of documentary channels deciding to sell out to pseudoscience bullshit AFAIK, so they still had a significant air of authority especially for kids.
In The Night Garden is designed specifically to get kids to chill the fuck out and it works so well. I remember having to babysit my nephew once and he was getting worked up by a show called Yo Gabba Gabba which seems to be specifically designed to cause seizures. The next day, oh, that's weird, that channel is broken and, well, damn, I guess we'll have to watch In The Night Garden on CBBC instead. It was like a totally different kid.
That mummy episode of courage the cowardly dog. Scared the piss outta me.
Upvote for PLIF!
As much as I love it, that first Batman: TAS Clayface episode.
Gleefully tormenting a clearly desperate man with the thing he wanted most left me mortified.
The Bone Chillers episode where their lunchlady gets replace by someone feeding them food with larvae that can be thrown up if they consume mustard also left a mark but only for a matter of days; I remember foregoing ketchup and getting mustard on my school lunch, the next day. I think I was in elementary school, at the time.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ObscureMedia/comments/mdsdbi/bone_chillers_1996_abc_saturday_morning_kids_show/, for those curious.
I loved horror even as a kid (I'm a millennial and seems common in my gen).
Since I never complained of nightmares my mom would let me watch pretty much any horror movie I wanted. As long as it didn't have titties.
Anywho.
I remember watching something. Idk if it was a movie or TV show. Or anthology. (I've searched all over the internet and can't find it).
In the show there are some boys or kids. And there was this bully at school. Real asshole.
And in one scene the boys are in the bathroom and the bully is being a bully and this big nasty monster creature comes out of the vent in the ceiling and kills the bully.
This is slightly embarrassing to admit, because I'm a rational woman of science and I don't believe in monster creatures. But.
I would get anxiety every time I used a public toilet with a vent above the toilet. To the point I would not use that toilet.
And if there was a ceiling vent and I was the only person in the restroom (even in the stall farthest from the vent), my heart would race and sometimes id leave until someone else came in.
I was also unhappy about the fact that a stupid show did this to me.
I tried to find the show , so that I could watch it with my adult mind and "get over it", see how fake the monster looked, but I never found it.
So I decided I was going to fix it myself. I first started forcing myself to use the stall next to the stall with the vent. And then to use the vent stall when others were around. And then use it when alone.
Only took about 2 weeks to fully get over it. I worked in a big office at the time so lots of opportunities to test myself.
But yeah. Isn't that ridiculous that some cheap horror show made me scared of public restrooms with vents for over a decade. ?
Never had bad effects from Stephen king movies or slashers. Just this one scene in something I can't even find.
Out of curiosity, was the monster humanoid and it dragged a teacher into the ceiling?
I can't remember details very well but yeah I think whoever the victim was , was pulled up into the vent. Maybe it was a teacher and not a bully.
The monster was likely a man in a suit so probably humanoid.
When I try to imagine it , I feel like it was dark brown and black. Maybe slimy or wet. But I can't say for sure.
I think I must have seen this movie when I was like 10-12 ish.
So that would have been 1995-1997. Show could have came out around then or earlier.
I assume some of my memory details aren't quite right since Ive never been able to find it.
Do you have a lead?
I have spent numerous occasions searching. Even watching full reviews of every tales of the crypt episode, thinking it had to be one of those.
The only other lead I have is this. I recall this other horror show or short anthology episode. And I thought maybe it was from the same show /anthology.
In the scene was a weird kid who collected dead flies and made little diorama like scenes with them. Glued to wires or something. Or maybe it was cockroaches.
And the kid was chubby. Dorky looking.
I can't remember anything else. But the dead insects being made into little scenes was disturbing.
Idk that's my only other possible clue.
Shot in the dark here: "The Willies". It's kids telling horror stories and there's one story about a bully killing monster "Bad Apples" is the story.
Really young Sean Astin.
Edit: found a trailer, excuse the youtube.
https://youtu.be/yT6lRRuMZyQ
Omg. I think that's it.
Wow.
All these years. .... Monster is in the bathroom. Brownish. I guess they used toilet humor there to design it.
I always assumed it was an adult show. But I forget how much horror was in kids shows in the late 80s and early 90s.
I still can't believe you knew what I was talking about.
Wow.
Also I guess the kid with the flies WAS from the same show.
I was right about that.
Also explains why I kept thinking it was an anthology. I guess cause it was.
I'm actually surprised by how much I did get right and yet could not find it on the internet for nothing.
Neat! I am glad to have helped connect some dots! Your description fired some neurons and I had to think back to a Halloween party in maybe 1993 or so.
One of the space documentaries from the 90's showed the Apollo 1 fire hatch footage at the beginning. That was quite a bit for a very young child.
The other two are a set of ad's/psa I have not been able to relocate:
One had a girl in a petal car on a country road with an incoming semi, the other a toddler steps off the curb into traffic, while a frantic mother realizes she lost track of them.
They had a tagline like "would you risk your life for this child" or some such. Mid 90's cable.
Back in the mid-80s: CHUD. Cannibalistic Underground Humanoid Dwellers.
Being on the spectrum, this really messed me up, even though the special effects were cheesy even for that era. And I mean heck, I was also 15 at the time, and had never seen any kind of a horror movie before..
Just learned a short while ago that the term has been co-opted to describe conservatives in general, and white conservative men specifically. I now find myself in awe at how well-applied that term is.
Honourable mention to The Last Unicorn completely tearing me up with its ending, and throwing me into a two-month existential crisis bender that I don’t think I ever fully recovered from.
MacGyver.
Yeah yeah, that one episode with the fire ants (S01E05) and the other one with the fast aging scientist (S03E11) gave me nightmares as a kid.
I should try to watch them today just to see how cool was the young O’Neill with two L.
I was 12 years old and my parents were watching the Ghost Ship movie on TV. I happened to be in the room during the scene where the line slices through the huge crowd of people and everyone is dismembered or cut in half.... That scene stuck with me for a while.
This was one of my first horror movies and it scared the shit out of me lol
A holiday special, Twas the Night Before Christmas.
These mice are experts at fixing clocks, and have to fix the town square clock for some reason? Animation of humans and santa was terrifying. Then in the end I just remembered they did this weird switching back from the town square clocktower from below to the face of the clock superimposed while loud banging clock rolling was happening. It keeping in on giant hands of the clock and back out.
Later in life I learned this was the cause of my megalophobia. Giant clock tower from the perspective of mice.
Dr Who !!!!
Unsolved Mysteries. Theme song will do it by itself, but the episode with the Queen Mary ship and the ghostly wet foot prints of a child walking the pool deck ruined me.
edit: here it is
I was too young to watch V when I watched V
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_(1984_TV_series)
100 ways to die
I think there was a POW scene in Magnum P.I. that was a lot for little me. Not sure episode/season.
Honestly, though, coming to the realization at abput 13 that the "General Lee" and the prominent placement for Confederate flags the Dukes of Hazzard represent an American South that promotes white supremacy, Jim Crow laws, and segregation — all antithetical to my BIPOC existence.
The cognitive dissonance involved in the song, pre-programming me to lend them the excuse that they're "just a good ol' boys..." — yeah, my parents should've known better.
The thoughts I had for Daisy Duke would've had me lynched, like Emmitt Till, under that flag. Still might.
Yeah, they were hanging in cages and one got shot in the leg. "put your finger in it!" as he bled out.
It wasn't a TV show, it was a commercial. For acrylic nails.
So I was like 5, this would have been in 1991 or so, there was a commercial on daytime television among the blue star ointment and dirt devil vacuums for some brand of acrylic nails that were easy to put on and take off, and they contrasted this against the "other brand" that showed a woman peeling it off and it had this stringy yellow goo underneath. I didn't understand what fake nails were, so I thought it was just a woman casually tearing her fingernail off.
To this day I compulsively trim my nails very short, I cannot stand the thought of bending my fingernails back.
this will be a deep cut because I'm talking early 80s in Hungary, but
Futrinka utca and Varjúdombi mesék let's see how many others are sharing this trauma :)
The News.
American Gothic.
"Someone's at the door."
i forgot this show existed.
was the sheriff supposed to be the devil?
I barely remember the details, but yeah something like that. But I was just a little kid, and that repeated mantra of "Someone's at the door" fucked me right up.
I was shocked to see the little kid grown up in the fast and the furious
Tales from the crypt.
Unsolved Mysteries made me terrified of being abducted by aliens. I had night terrors a few times from it and anytime a weird light flashed through my bedroom at night I screamed my head off.
Face of death
There's a specific episode of that, IMO, horrible 3D Garfield and Friends cartoon from maybe the very late 2000s or early 2010s that made me hate the show. As someone who hates spiders, I hated an episode where Garfield takes an alien's space car to an alternate universe where it's John's head on a giant spider body.
Hated it so much I couldn't even eat something like a hot pocket without worrying about the fuckers being in it.
Edit:
That episode basically killed my enjoyment of the 3D animated Garfield movies with the superheroes, Garfield going on a quest to become funny again, and having to find a way back into comic strip land ( or whatever it's called ). I'd probably be fine watching them now, but no way I'd enjoy them like I did, not by a long shot. Even as an animation lover.