"It’s a scary a movie. I was not allowed to watch it."

January 30, 2015 6:46 PM

Nightmares in the Horror Aisle: Exploring the Movie Art That Traumatized You as a Child
posted by brundlefly (71 comments total)

Oh god, I remember every single cover from this link. I'm trying to remember if I wrote an article for ao9 and forgot about it.
posted by Windigo at 6:50 PM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Aww, I was hoping for Piranha (1978), as it's the one VHS we were never allowed to rent, and it was so deliciously scary looking.
posted by gemmy at 6:56 PM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Fantastic post. Scary VHS covers (and the compulsion to look at them in the video store despite getting crazy scared and not being able to sleep afterwards) probably had more to do with me being both a horror fan and my tastes in general than almost any other foundational childhood experience. I remember being a kid wandering the aisles and feeling like everything in the horror section was so forbidden and so cool.The cover of The Thing remains amazing even now.
posted by supercrayon at 7:03 PM on January 30, 2015 [5 favorites]

Oh god, I remember every single cover from this link.

Ditto - in the mid-80s, I used to ask my mom if I could go to the recently deceased Potomac Video while she was grocery shopping just so I could look at tape covers and read the copy on the backs. When I was slightly older and had my own card, one of the first things I rented was this one.
posted by ryanshepard at 7:03 PM on January 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

The one that got me as a kid was Argento's Suspiria. The VHS cover wasn't that terrible (several other variations as well), but the TV commercial for it _tripped my young self out_. Wouldn't sleep without my Fozzie Bear and my nightlight for years after that.

Of course, sometimes the movie or program was scary but the logo at the end of it was worse...
posted by delfin at 7:18 PM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

the recently deceased Potomac Video

Hey, I used to work there!
posted by teponaztli at 7:19 PM on January 30, 2015 [6 favorites]

I'm pretty sure that the movies 7 year old me imagined when I saw these VHS covers were significantly scarier than the movies themselves.

For some reason I have a specific memory of going to the video rental with my grandpa and "La Isla Bonita" is playing and I'm freaking myself out by looking at the covers of the horror movies. Still get the willies every time I hear that song.
posted by brevator at 7:25 PM on January 30, 2015 [9 favorites]

Oh man, this is great. Although I have just as little interest in looking at these things now as I did when I was little. I didn't have the experience of them being made cooler for being forbidden; I just did want to be around whatever horrible thing they were trying to tell me about. I just NOPE NOPE NOPE'd right out of there.
posted by bleep at 7:33 PM on January 30, 2015 [4 favorites]

I think the only VHS cover I can remember from my childhood was Dead Alive (aka Brain Dead).

I'm pretty sure that the movies 7 year old me imagined when I saw these VHS covers were significantly scarier than the movies themselves.

Yes! I still remember how disappointed I was when I finally discovered that most of them were really boring. That said, Slaughter High is still one of my favorites. What a ridiculous movie.
posted by teponaztli at 7:37 PM on January 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

I relate to this way too much.

I was a weird, anxious child with an overactive imagination. My parents didn't exactly shelter me but they didn't give me free reign to watch terrible things either (so, good parents, mostly). But I remember so much of the world feeling ... threatening, I guess. I can't remember any specific horror movie covers that traumatized me, but they all went into some weird file in my head and stuck there forever (I do remember being upset by the whole idea of Child's Play, though). It seemed to tell me the world was a place that was out to get me.

It's really only been within the past couple of years I've been OK with watching some horror (the good stuff, though). I'm still not great with gore (even cheesy, non-realistic gore) but I'm finally in a place where I can handle some of it and enjoy it.

It only took 25 years. Thanks, Blockbuster.
posted by darksong at 7:41 PM on January 30, 2015 [7 favorites]

I don't recall ever finding horror artwork scary, actually. But then I was a little kid who had a crush on the Crypt Keeper and at least two of the characters from the Nightmare/Atmosfear board game series, along with the Grim Reaper. Personifications of Death. I loved the undead cat in Pet Sematary. I wanted to paint my room black and orange. I was maybe nine years old. I cannot relate to your childhood fears. (To be fair, as an adult I can't watch torture porn.)

*bookmarks links to find more movies to watch*
posted by quiet earth at 7:42 PM on January 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

I scrolled until I saw Grizzly Adams and stopped. It's not going to get any better than that.
posted by Foam Pants at 7:59 PM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

The cover for Dead End Drive-In freaked me the fuck out as a kid. Then I had to watch it for work...

It is NOT a horror movie where innocent teenagers at a drive-in get killed, but some near-future Oz comedic-dystopic BULLSHIT.
posted by infinitewindow at 8:01 PM on January 30, 2015

Kindertrauma ...is definitely relevant to this thread!
posted by pepcorn at 8:09 PM on January 30, 2015 [5 favorites]

Man, there was an era when a Something Weird title was pretty much the cornerstone of the weekend. So many disappointments. The Sinful Dwarf in particular is a kind of personal landmark for nauseating and crushingly boring at the same time. I still have a vhs copy of Nailgun Massacre in a box somewhere...
posted by batfish at 8:12 PM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Oh, man, I used to stay for hours reading the backs of all of the movies I was too scared/not allowed to rent.

The image that used to absolutely haunt me was the cover of The Kindred. The oddly specific blurb about "Anthony" and the weird baby bottle motif just bothered me endlessly. Something about that little claw reaching up against the glass...
posted by Scattercat at 8:15 PM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

I remember one day in summer when I was 8 or 9 getting ice cream with my friend and his mom and sitting outside at a place next to a video store and that Brain Dead poster was in the window and just staring at me the whole damn time. Freaked me the hell out.
posted by mcmile at 8:31 PM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Original "Night of the Living Dead," in black and white, watched surreptitiously when I was about 10 or 11 .on like a 9 inch portable b&w TV . . .
posted by spitbull at 8:37 PM on January 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

When I was in about 5th grade, we lived in Escanaba, Michigan. There was a movie theater on the main downtown street. One afternoon, 12-year-old me was enjoying a lovely bike ride around town. As I tooled past the theater, lost in my own little world, I happened to glance up at the poster for the latest Coming Attraction, and was face-to-face with the creepy face in the middle of the Fright Night poster. Startled me so badly I crashed my bike. It's still one of my favorite scary-movie posters.
posted by sarcasticah at 8:53 PM on January 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

I saw a Freddy Krueger movie poster (probably at potomac video!) once, and I didn't sleep for the next 7 years. I never saw and still havent seen a single Freddy Krueger movie. I'm pretty sure I thought the movie was called "Freddy Kreugers".
posted by Potomac Avenue at 8:58 PM on January 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

The weird thing about the Dead Alive VHS cover is that the woman on it bears an uncanny resemblance to Moira Kelly. I can't even see the scariness, I just see Mandy from The West Wing.

Also, from the io9 link, VHS covers that terrified me as a kid:

OMG CHEERLEADER CAMP! There's something so chilling about a skeleton/zombie with... under-boob cleavage? What do you even call that?

Also, thanks to Ghoulies, I am still slightly afraid to flush the toilet late at night.

I saw so many of these at terrible slumber parties in the mid 90s.
posted by Sara C. at 9:50 PM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

By the time VHS hit it big, I was already a teenager, so these were not as traumatizing for me as they were for some others. I did learn from one of the links, however, that Brain Dead has a casting coup for aficionados of easily confused actors: top billed are Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton. This is like finding a buddy cop movie starring Dylan McDermott and Dermot Mulroney.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 10:07 PM on January 30, 2015 [9 favorites]

I don't think it was the best idea to watch X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes when I was an impressionable young lad -- the end of that one was pretty fucking freaky!
posted by Fuzzypumper at 10:10 PM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

The euro version of Street Trash was the worst.
posted by SageLeVoid at 12:07 AM on January 31, 2015

So when we finally got our VCR, there was a video store on the corner of our street, which was convenient.

While we didn't watch the scary horror movies, or really see the boxes, but they covered the walls with posters of the covers. I definitely remember The Mutilator and I could swear Color Me Blood Red was up there too.

We were in there to rent cartoons, man. I think everyone was happy when it closed down and we went to the Warehouse in Lakewood to rent instead.
posted by Katemonkey at 1:58 AM on January 31, 2015

Poor old Marty Feldman.
posted by Segundus at 4:30 AM on January 31, 2015 [2 favorites]

Awesome links, brundlefly. I totally fell into this trap as a kid, fascinated and repelled. My parents have always had great taste in movies, so they saw the really amazing stuff from that era, like The Fly and Aliens, and they wouldn't let me see them. But they did indulge my curious questions, and describe things that happened, which was probably not a good idea because again, I imagined it being much worse than it was.

I thought it was interesting that the first link mentioned Monkey Shines. I was terrified of that movie as a kid, too, not having seen it either. But I can tell you what year it was--it was 1988. I vividly remember that they suddenly started advertising horror movies on the local pop radio station that year; there were really scary narrative spots for both Monkey Shines and The Blob. So one minute, you were listening to Casey's Top 40, and the next, this guy is describing the blob sneaking across the walls behind you, where you can't see. It was waaaay too much for my little mind. I moved over to the easy listening station for a while just to avoid those ads.
posted by heatvision at 4:35 AM on January 31, 2015

It's Alive is the poster that freaked me out as a kid. Mutant hand out of baby carriage with little rattle. Imagination ran wild with that one.
posted by leotrotsky at 4:50 AM on January 31, 2015 [4 favorites]

Hey, I used to work there!

This was at the Potomac, MD location, which was stocked almost exclusively with Hollywood hits, grindhouse fare, and softcore porn (the last in an alcove hidden by a beaded curtain). Connecticut Ave. was always much more hip.
posted by ryanshepard at 5:20 AM on January 31, 2015 [2 favorites]

I was young, nine or ten and the movie Prophecy was out. There was no chance of me seeing it but the commercials scared me to death. My family and I were having dinner on the back porch in our suburban Atlanta neighborhood one night when this horrific sound came from the woods right behind us. I'm talking loud and the blood stopped cold in my body. My mother looked at me and said, "it's the prophecy!". I almost died right there. Seriously frozen in abject terror. Then the sound came again..... I couldn't even scream. I remember that fear like it was yesterday. I couldn't understand why my prents weren't getting me and my brother the hell out of there. All of a sudden, a brilliant, hot air balloon rose from the trees right over our house. Only a few hundred feet above us. We ran out and talked to the passengers. Amazing to see. The strangest juxtaposition of complete terror to complete awe and wonder I've ever had.
posted by pearlybob at 5:41 AM on January 31, 2015 [13 favorites]

It was this VHS cover for Carrie that always flipped me out as a kid when I passed by it at the grocery store (for a brief time in the early 80's, Kroger's had a video rental shelf, then a tiny store).

The thing that was so upsetting to me is that the cover told a kind of story, but raised so many questions for me. What happened between the two pictures on the cover? Why had Carrie gone from being so normal to being so twisted? Who had she killed? Why was there so much blood?!
posted by Alex Goldman at 7:01 AM on January 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

Scary movies terrified me as a kid. I was afraid of the dark for a long time growing up, because I was convinced the supernatural was true, but also because the supernatural was given a pretty creepy texture based on the images of these VHS covers. And I was never actually allowed to watch one.

Between seeing these covers in the video store and hearing about them from my friends, for years, my imagination visualized things that were about a thousand times more graphic than the movies ever turned out to be. Later in life when I finally watched one or two, I was surprised how tame they were compared to what I thought they would be like. My imagination often far outpaced reality.

This was also during a time that I had a paper route that required me to deliver papers before dawn in the middle of winter in Wisconsin. I have memories of being pretty freaked out going up to some larger houses with all of the lights out, because I was up late the night before at a wedding, hearing my friends and relatives talk about the Nightmare on Elmstreet movies.
posted by SpacemanStix at 7:29 AM on January 31, 2015 [2 favorites]

Ghoulies. Definitely.

(I do remember thinking the tag line was funny, even if the premise filled me with horror. Also, I didn't know that "goolies" was British slang for balls at that point. Now that I do know that, it's even funnier.)
posted by dlugoczaj at 7:29 AM on January 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

Problem is I was allowed to watch it (approx. age ten to twelve is my guess). *hides under blanket, but with a nightlight thank you very much*

Mine wasn't even a real scary movie, just some random prime time crime show with a mystery child trauma story.

There was this young woman being haunted by "visions" of a water corpse and intense fear of the ocean/beach. The water corpse turned up anywhere. Everybody was like "Yeah, she is crazy".

The investigator didn't buy it. The estranged mother of the woman obviously held a dark secret: The young woman had a repressed childhood trauma about "causing" her older sister to drown in the ocean while playing tag, and her mother flipping out and almost beating her to death for it with a wet blanket. There was also an actual watercorpse/murder of course that brought this all to the surface.

So, so creeped out. I'm still afraid of a green slimy watercorpse in my bed sometimes and I'll turn 39 in two days.
posted by ZeroAmbition at 7:34 AM on January 31, 2015

I'm pretty sure that the movies 7 year old me imagined when I saw these VHS covers were significantly scarier than the movies themselves.

Absolutely, yeah. I had basically the same relationship in early adulthood with (a) horror movies and (b) heavy metal bands: I'd spent years of my childhood looking at the cover art and imagining something so dark and awesome and heavy and scary that I was half glad and half sad that I hadn't been exposed to the actual work, and then once I basically had the agency to just consume whatever I wanted whenever I wanted it turned out that most it was a huge let-down compared to my imagination.

I wanted an e.g. Iron Maiden album to be some brutal industrial hellscape of grinding gears and flesh-tearing zombies, and it turned out to be relatively goofy guitar rock; I wanted House to be a movie about floating, rotting zombie hands, and it turned out to be The Greatest American Hero having a nervous breakdown while being ghost-bothered by Bull from Nightcourt.

Part of it is I think, on both counts really, I'd sort of extrapolated backward from the most contemporary and raw/gross/edgy/nasty/heavy stuff I'd seen and heard back to everything I hadn't, as if for some reason both metal and horror movies would have been getting tamer over time, the scariness levels abating or something. I didn't think of it in those explicit terms, but it's the only thing that makes sense as a general conception. I'd seen some scary movies; clearly the movies I hadn't seen, the ones with the iconic cover art from the video store, were scarier still; I'd heard some pretty fuckin' heavy metal noise, surely the classics were even heavier. I had no real context for the 70s and 80s in either scene, nor the sense to go looking for stuff based on art criticism rather than remembering seeing some cool art as a kid.

But the other part I'm sure is it's just a lot easier to make an awesome fuckin' scary VHS cover than it is to make an awesome fuckin' scary movie, so there was a lot of the former attached to a lot of not-so-much the latter.

But you don't know that when you're eight and your parents are having a boring discussion about what to watch in the Drama section, so you just go memorize the horror films and run your fingers over the topography of the molded relief covers and dream about shit that'd give you bad dreams.
posted by cortex at 7:35 AM on January 31, 2015 [10 favorites]

Oh, turns out I didn't read the post properly (too long on fark, sorry) as this is just about cover art. Hm. Can't think of anything too scary there. But I avoid scary movies like the plague anyways.
posted by ZeroAmbition at 7:43 AM on January 31, 2015

My parents would barely let us watch cartoons, hated horror movies, and forbid MASH because it was too risque joke-wise, but somehow my dad thought it was appropriate to let us watch Once Upon A Time In America, a beautiful, terrifying gangster epic where the preteen protagonist loses his virginity to a hooker in the first 5 minutes and then goes on to murder and rape a bunch of people. That was confusing to say the least.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:45 AM on January 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

my cohort was about 10 years old when "Jaws" came out and that covered all our traumatizing needs
posted by thelonius at 8:02 AM on January 31, 2015 [3 favorites]

Our neighbours ran a video shop in the 80s (RIP Trax) so we were in it constantly. I was - and am - a total wuss when it comes to horror films because I'm really jumpy. (I mean I walked up the stairs two nights ago and screamed at what looked like a person but which was in fact a dressing gown I'd left draped over the bannister). But I couldn't help staring at all the covers in the horror section and scaring the knickers off myself. This is the one that I remember the most, because it made me afraid of the shower for ages and I'm sure I was 12 or so at the time. (Although I'm not sure it counts as it wasn't actually made in the 80s. Note to Mr McC circa 30 years ago - update your stock.)
posted by billiebee at 8:09 AM on January 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

The box for Spasms at Erol's.

Of course, the film itself is an 86-minute yawn and all the extras say "eh?" quite often.
posted by sonascope at 8:17 AM on January 31, 2015

Looking at these covers still makes me feel sort of gross and uncomfortable - in part, I suppose, because I'm still a wimp about gore and bad things, and in part because I can still feel what it was like to hold one of those boxes at the rental store. Somehow the boxes in the horror section always felt extra unsavory to me, although that was probably at least partly psychological and really ALL the VHS rental boxes were terrible. Still, I look at the covers in these links and can feel that faintly tacky, greasy sheen and now I have to go wash my hands in very hot water.
posted by DingoMutt at 8:18 AM on January 31, 2015 [2 favorites]

My single digit years were unsettled by Max Fleischer's 1940 classic, Ants in the Plants. (Speaking, as we were, of ants.)
posted by BWA at 8:19 AM on January 31, 2015

Once again, the Internet confirms that many of the things my parents considered evidence of my extraordinary neurosis and lameness (see also, fear of television logos) was actually basically a rite of passage for huge swaths of people my age.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:21 AM on January 31, 2015 [3 favorites]

BillieBee: I rewatched Squirm a few years ago after being TOTALLY TERRIFIED of it and worms since I was about 7. It's still terrifying.
posted by activitystory at 8:33 AM on January 31, 2015 [2 favorites]

The most frightening thing that I saw was the 2 Day Rental sticker.

The horror! The horror!
posted by Splunge at 9:40 AM on January 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

I was never that traumatized by gory movie art - it always looked too silly. Instead, this poster for The Changling terrified me for years.

If we're talking lasting, scarring trauma, I don't think I've ever gotten over seeing the trailer for Magic, which some idiot aired during the freaking Brady Bunch, if I remember correctly.
posted by bibliowench at 9:53 AM on January 31, 2015 [2 favorites]

There's only one thing wrong with the Davis baby.
posted by sonascope at 9:57 AM on January 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

I have to say that i thought Pumpkinhead had the best cover-to-viewing-satisfaction ratio in my entire experience of VHS rentals.
posted by cleroy at 10:54 AM on January 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

Let's not forget the box for Frankenhooker.
posted by K.P. at 11:15 AM on January 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

So many memories...
There's only one thing wrong with the Davis baby
That ad was the best! I was so mad that Mom wouldn't take me to see that movie! I was eight at the time, and whatever was wrong with that kid is still wrong with me today. Bob Wilkins broke my mind.
posted by Trinity-Gehenna at 11:33 AM on January 31, 2015

ryanshepard: This was at the Potomac, MD location, which was stocked almost exclusively with Hollywood hits, grindhouse fare, and softcore porn (the last in an alcove hidden by a beaded curtain). Connecticut Ave. was always much more hip.

Yeah, I worked at the Conn Ave one, but I knew a bunch of people who worked at Potomac. Out of all the locations (and over the years I think there were up to 15 locations), Potomac was by far the most laid back. Conn Ave was kind of the flagship, so we were watched pretty closely. Potomac could get away with a lot: The register's broken? Let's set up a table outside because it's such a nice day!

Aw, I miss video stores, and Potomac Video in particular...
posted by teponaztli at 11:36 AM on January 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

My _gradeschool_ library inexplicably had a copy of this book, which was always in high demand and which I checked out at least once a year for a few years running, based solely on the deeply flawed kid logic that if everyone else was doing it I should do it too. It scared the beejeeebers out of me every single time.

I can remember seeing the poster (and weirdly, the trailer on TV?) for "The Boogens" and it just made me want to floodlight the house and block the doors with poured concrete. I watched it years later....yawn, of course.
posted by hearthpig at 12:19 PM on January 31, 2015

There's only one thing wrong with the Davis baby.

Holy shit, I had forgotten about that movie, and now I have unsubmerged so much nightmare fuel.

As far as I'm concerned, all the knives and chainsaws and viscera can't hold a candle to any horror movie that features evil children. That might be because of my age, though. By the time VHS stores became common in small-town Virginia, I was old enough to think the splatter genre was more funny than scary. But all those evil child movies in the 70s - The Omen, The Changeling, The Shining, The Exorcist - were non-graphic enough to be promoted on commercial tv, and they did a number on my psyche. To this day, The Devil's Backbone remains my most terrifying movie experience, and one of the last horror films I've watched.

Kids, man.
posted by bibliowench at 1:54 PM on January 31, 2015 [3 favorites]

I don't even know how I ever even watched movies as a kid, considering I spent the whole time at the video peering at horror movies I couldn't rent (and/or XXX movie boxes if we were at the neighborhood spot instead of Blockbuster).

This is probably how I ended up renting the same movie (Flight of the Navigator) approximately 7 billion times
posted by elr at 1:57 PM on January 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

Three On A Meathook did it for 12-year-old me in so many different ways....
posted by kuanes at 2:31 PM on January 31, 2015

Kids, man.

You're going to want to avoid The Brood, I think.
posted by sonascope at 3:00 PM on January 31, 2015 [2 favorites]

I was about to say. The Brood? Not for you.
posted by brundlefly at 3:30 PM on January 31, 2015 [2 favorites]

quiet earth: But then I was a little kid who had a crush on the Crypt Keeper and at least two of the characters from the Nightmare/Atmosfear board game series, along with the Grim Reaper. Personifications of Death.

Thanos? Is that you?
posted by brundlefly at 3:37 PM on January 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

Potomac was by far the most laid back. Conn Ave was kind of the flagship, so we were watched pretty closely. Potomac could get away with a lot: The register's broken? Let's set up a table outside because it's such a nice day!

I do remember there being a distinctly stoner/rock dude vibe to the staff in the 80s, which I was both fascinated and intimidated by as a disaffected preteen spazz. That place, John Bellairs novels from the nearby public library, Channel 20's "Creature Feature", and 1960s/70s comics picked up at yard sales were pretty much my entire cultural universe from age 11-15 or so. Whatever trajectory they set me on, I'm still on it.
posted by ryanshepard at 6:29 PM on January 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

Oh, god. Leotrotsky is right: It's Alive. That one sheet scared the F out of me.
posted by BlahLaLa at 7:37 PM on January 31, 2015

For me it was the cover of Scanners, and the thing about Cronenberg films is that the actual film (seen 20 years later) was just as fucking creepy as the VHS cover.
posted by savetheclocktower at 8:44 PM on January 31, 2015 [3 favorites]

I am gratified to know, thanks to the internet, that I was not the only child to suffer chronic constipation because of that Ghoulies poster. I only saw a glimpse of the actual movie as a child -- a small stopmotion creature emerging from a bowl of mayonnaise sauce at a dinner party. That was nearly as terrifying as the prospect of the toilet goblin.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:07 PM on January 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

and the thing about Cronenberg films is that the actual film (seen 20 years later) was just as fucking creepy as the VHS cover.

I just rewatched The Fly for the first time in probably twenty years, since me and griphus are doing it for our next podcast episode. And, yeah, exactly this: it holds up. Guy has such a fondness for goopy fleshy practical effects, and even though you know they're just practical effects they still work really great as body-horror grossouts. The whole film's second half is a feature-length masterclass on the werewolf transformation sequence, without any wolves.

that Ghoulies poster

I never had any toilet trouble from that that I can recall (though Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3 did put me off using a shower that had the same sort of fixtures that Freddy's claws came out of in one of the dream sequences), but it was one of the movies that I always imagined was a lot scarier than it actually was. One time as a kid I almost ended up seeing it because of my parents goofing: they'd gone to the video store for Goonies and either misspoke or were misheard or someone just misgrabbed behind the counter, because Goonies is not what they brought home.

I can't remember whether they figured it out before the movie started or from whatever happened in the first few minutes, but I remember being sort of thrilled by the possibility and then a little crushed when they made the sensible declaration that, no, we do not get to watch it.
posted by cortex at 10:36 PM on January 31, 2015 [3 favorites]

That's basically how my friends and I were able to rent Kids in eighth grade, so I, for one, am all for parental befuddlement at misunderstood film titles.
posted by Sara C. at 11:16 PM on January 31, 2015

I just rewatched The Fly for the first time in probably twenty years, since me and griphus are doing it for our next podcast episode. And, yeah, exactly this: it holds up.

Yup. There's a reason I named myself after that fucking movie. So brilliant.
posted by brundlefly at 2:33 AM on February 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

Oh, and I look forward to that episode.
posted by brundlefly at 2:34 AM on February 1, 2015

Oh god, The Brood. My mom watched that when I was 3 or 4 and wouldn't stop even when I begged her to turn it off, I left the room but could still hear it. I had nightmares for years.

I found it a few years ago and watched the whole thing for the first time and yep, it is as scary as I remember.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 6:19 PM on February 1, 2015

This is going to sound weird, but this is one of those things that makes me feel like I was a little less weird as a child. I felt like everyone else in the world was reveling in watching these movies, and here I was, alone in my room, being petrified for years of things that I never even got to watch.

I sometimes wonder if the powers that be at Blockbuster ever had a clue regarding the nightmares they were creating just by choosing to stock certain movies, and the locations that they happened to place them in in the store.
posted by SpacemanStix at 5:33 PM on February 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

bibliowench: "I was never that traumatized by gory movie art - it always looked too silly. Instead, this poster for The Changling terrified me for years."

That's actually a good and scary movie too, though, as opposed to most of the ones that come up here. (Except for The Brood. Man, fuck those kids.)
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 6:09 PM on February 2, 2015

I remember a lot of traumatizing covers, but I can't remember the titles, although I'm sure I'd remember them if I saw the covers.

I do remember being traumatized by The Curse (aka. The Farm), though, especially the mother going nuts and sewing her hands, and I remember the cover art, and the fact that it (along with certain other horror movies in the local store) came in a special coffin-shaped VHS cover. I don't know if the coffin cover movies were a special collection or what, but 12-13 year old me assumed it was a sign of particularly horrible, hardcore stuff.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 6:12 PM on February 2, 2015

Oh, and I look forward to that episode.

BAM
posted by cortex at 11:06 AM on February 3, 2015 [1 favorite]