Filmgaming

Scarred for Life - Most traumatic movie memories

In less than 200 words, share your most scarring movie memory in this thread. We'll pick the most traumatic experience, announce the winner on Filmspotting and send them some Spout swag.

I'll be the first divulge dark secrets with my most scarring memory...

Even more than watching Luke’s hand get axed by Darth Vader, was E.T. I was six years old watching what I felt was the greatest movie ever conceived, when E.T. gets sick, he goes missing and Elliot’s older brother goes to find him. Find him he does, unconscious laying next to a drainage ditch in the LA suburbs, all pink and fleshy looking like a skinned cow carcass sculpted to look like an alien. I burst into tears and climbed in my mom’s lap. I wanted to go home. Even the messianic resurrection and E.T.’s pick up by the homeboys on the mother ship didn’t undo the damage.

I was literally a full grown adult living on my own before I finally stopped getting butterflies in my stomach each time the lights went down in a movie theater. If I could hang words on that instinctive feeling, they would be, “What the f@#k am I about to get myself into? Another E.T.?”

Are you sure you want to do this?

What happens if you get any stories that venture away from the funny/ironic stories of childhood?

"Whoa. Sorry The Accused caused you to relive your rape trauma. Um... here's a T-Shirt. Hope everything's cool now."

Re:Scarred for Life - Most traumatic movie memories

I've always been something of a fradie-cat when it comes to classic movies. Whether it was my older brother chasing me around with a 12-inch C-3PO doll (yes, I was afraid of C-3PO) or him going trick-or-treating as ET one year, causing me to opt out of having to look at his frightening visage in the low-lit night. 

But leave it to Pee Wee Herman to scare me so badly that I will not even revisit the scene as an adult to face my demons. If you have witnessed Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, then you know exactly the scene I am about to reference.

Here I was, sitting in the basement with my older brother and his friends – feeling so cool that they would let me hang out with them and enjoying some offbeat (pre-“beat off”) Herman antics. The Large Marge scene comes and I was on the edge of my seat - waiting for the joke - when Large Marge transform into the grotesque, claymation monster, my heart felt like it was going to burst out of my chest, I started hyperventilating, and trying to scream in terror – all while the older gang around me laughed at my expense.

My God, the feet...

I wasn’t afraid of the dark until I saw The Wizard of Oz, and then I slept with a nightlight until I was (this is embarrassing) twelve years old. It all started with those witches, and one image in particular: the feet! Aside from how they wither and curl (which is enough to give me the willies every time) just those feet BEING THERE frightened me beyond reason.

Imagine you accidentally harmed something mysterious and far more powerful than you. Even though it was an accident, something’s going to come and get you for doing it. That’s part of what the feet conjure for me.

Oz inflicted some other neurotic habits on me: I began sleeping with my entire body and head covered by my sheets, leaving a little air hole near my face. I kept my eyes directed towards the door while I dozed off, so I’d be more likely to see if a witch entered in secret. I started practicing holding my breath, too, thinking that if I didn’t stir and could hold my breath long enough, maybe an intruding witch would be fooled and leave.

Re:Scarred for Life - Most traumatic movie memories

PlantPage55:

I've always been something of a fradie-cat when it comes to classic movies. Whether it was my older brother chasing me around with a 12-inch C-3PO doll (yes, I was afraid of C-3PO) or him going trick-or-treating as ET one year, causing me to opt out of having to look at his frightening visage in the low-lit night. 

But leave it to Pee Wee Herman to scare me so badly that I will not even revisit the scene as an adult to face my demons. If you have witnessed Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, then you know exactly the scene I am about to reference.

Here I was, sitting in the basement with my older brother and his friends – feeling so cool that they would let me hang out with them and enjoying some offbeat (pre-“beat off”) Herman antics. The Large Marge scene comes and I was on the edge of my seat - waiting for the joke - when Large Marge transform into the grotesque, claymation monster, my heart felt like it was going to burst out of my chest, I started hyperventilating, and trying to scream in terror – all while the older gang around me laughed at my expense.

This is a great one and I had a similar experience with Large Marge.  My most traumatic movie experience, however, would be watching Jaws when I was 6. It actually had nothing to do with the shark but was when the body floats out from the sunken ship. I maintain that it's one of the scariest moments I've seen in film because it was so unexpected.

Oh, and seeing Kathy Bates naked in About Schmidt.

Re:Scarred for Life - Most traumatic movie memories

PlantPage55:

Here I was, sitting in the basement with my older brother and his friends – feeling so cool that they would let me hang out with them and enjoying some offbeat (pre-“beat off”) Herman antics. ... when Large Marge transform into the grotesque, claymation monster, my heart felt like it was going to burst out of my chest, I started hyperventilating, and trying to scream in terror – all while the older gang around me laughed at my expense.

Oh man, terror and humiliation at the same time... this is rough.

Re:Scarred for Life - Most traumatic movie memories

My mom claims not to be a movie person nor a good Catholic, but I'm not so sure. Case in point:

One day when I was five, I learned how to make my voice hoarse. I was teasing my mom with it, who kept asking me to stop. She said it freaked her out, and even threatened to punish me. The brat I was, I didn't. So she did. My punishment? Not a grounding, but a showing of "The Exorcist", which my mom had told me the voice reminded her of. So at the tender age of five, I was exposed to Reagan and her spinning head, pea soup vomit, and crucifix vagina-stabbing. Needless to say, I never used that voice again, AND had the fear of God put into me at an early age.

Second place: me, at the age of six, wanting to hang out with my older and therefore cool cousins. I find them in the basement, watching a movie. I watch it for a moment, say, "Ooh, a doll!" and sit down with them. They, being teenage boys, let me watch the movie with them. The movie they were watching? "Child's Play." Gah!

Scarred for Life - Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel do me in...

When I was 16 in 1979, I got to spend 4 months in Rotterdam for a summer.  I was fascinated with Dali from a book I found in the library, and my exchange family took me to an exhibit.  Un Chien Andalou started up, and two minutes in the sight of straight razor slicing through a human eyeball was burned onto my psyche for eternity. The nightmares began immediately.

But, oddly enough, it was the last image that really terrified me--a placard that read: "In the spring...", then showed two lifeless torsos buried from the waist down in a bleak seascape. I think this robbed me of all joy for about a week.  It's important to remember that this movie so shocked its audience that it caused a riot at its original screening, and inspired Frank Black to write "Debaser."

While I've seen much, much worse since then, nothing could ever match the immediate scar this left on my personality, and a lifetime fascination with surrealism.

Re:Scarred for Life - Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel do me in...

Growing up on the California coast had an immensely adverse effect on me as a child, especially the fact that I had an older brother that despised my very birth. At the age of 7 he exposed me to Jaws and used his gargantuan older-brother hands to keep me planted on the couch to view the film despite my repeated attempts at escaping the horror on screen. I have no recollection of going into the ocean before this but vividly recall every attempt thereafter. When my family’s weekly Sunday brunches in Carmel, CA culminated in a walk to the beaches of the coast, I remember bursting into tears and crying until my parents allowed me to stay isolated in the backseat of the family station wagon. Approximately 28 months later my father felt compelled to break me of my fear and drag me 1 ½ miles from the coast into the sea and leave me alone to “break” me of my fear. I was subsequently dragged into the undertow after an hour of dog-paddling and taken further out from sea where I was subsequently rescued by a lifeguard and given CPR back on the shore. I didn’t talk to my father for about a year afterward. From that point on I have been unable to enter any body of water alone and only have nightmares of Great White Sharks attacking me. 

A little more than 200 words but had to explain it all. Hopefully it still counts.

Re:Scarred for Life - Most traumatic movie memories

I was 12 or 13 when I snuck into the original "Dawn of the Dead" at the local multiplex.  When I saw that head explode during the apartment assault scene, I felt for the very first time that perhaps I shouldn't have come and that ratings existed for a good reason.  When a biker's intestines were pulled out later, I was sure of it.  I had a similar experience the same or following year with the film "Alien" just because of the sheer tension.