Back when I was very young, like still in elementary school, I started playing Super Metroid for the first time. I was running around Norfair, generally having a good time, when I opened an innocuous-looking super missile door and encountered… Crocomire.
If you’re familiar with that game, you might be thinking “Oh, you got scared when Crocomire’s skeleton popped out of the lava, right?” No, I never even made it that far. Instead, on finding myself suddenly confronted by this huge, grotesque monster to a background of intense, blaring music, I freaked out. I didn’t even think of aiming for his mouth, instead just firing all my missile and super missiles in a blind panic as he slowly pushed me toward the spiked wall at the far end of the room. At the time, I didn’t know you could hurt bosses with the charge beam, so once I was out of missiles, I used the only other weapon I thought might work: a power bomb. Turns out that’s the worst possible thing you can do. Power bombs make Crocomire go apeshit, charging at you and quickly smashing you into the rear wall, at which point you’re basically guaranteed to die. Sure enough, I did.
I didn’t quit the game forever, but I did put it give up on progressing further until I was older, wiser, and generally better at video games. And even then, for years afterward, I played the Crocomire fight with the volume off.
I dunno if “it wasn’t supposed to”, but the Bilbo/Galadriel ring scenes from The Fellowship of the Ring lived rent-free in my head and continued to haunt me throughout childhood
big same
Courage the cowardly dog scared the shit out of me, but specifically there was an episode where anthropomorphic eggplant try to take over the world. I couldn’t eat eggplant for years after that, and I still mostly avoid it
Return the slab was my one. Would scare me to tears lol.
The monsters in Minecraft. They always freaked me out but they’re manageable with sound off. So, I listen to podcast and stuff instead of the sounds of the game
There were multiple times when a younger me got spooked by cave noises enough to put the game down. I still turn cave ambience down to zero lol
In Ocarina of Time, the scene after you get the Master Sword and walk out of the Temple of Time and see the ruins of Castle Town infested with ReDeads scared me so much, I didn’t play the game for 4 more years.
Oh yeah, that was terrifying. ReDeads were the absolute worst.
My sibling and I ran screaming from the room when my family was watching a presidential debate in 1992. We were about five and were convinced that Ross Perot was an extraterrestrial. Which, to be fair, he was.
There was a commercial for funding for PBS that ran when I was a kid, and in the middle it said something like, “If we run out of funding, the channel will go” and then the screen just went black. It freaked me out so much as a kid that, in front of my whole family, I stood up and turned off the tv before it got to that part. I just stood there and glared down my fam for about a minute before I turned the tv back on.
Motherfucking ET that was one disgusting looking creature
I’m 35 and still haven’t finished the movie
The ending of Assassin’s Creed 2 where
spoiler
the camera zooms in on the goddess and she breaks the 3.5th wall and stares right into your soul
I was spared that by being really bad at assassins creed I never managed the tutorial mission where you have to race someone to learn the parkour mechanics I just kept losing the race and gave up in frustration. I wish there was an option to say “yeah I get the mechanic I’m bad at it though can I please move on with the game”
That really annoyed me as I had saved up to buy the game and hate racing games because I’ve never been any good at them - comically so I was once playing need for speed at a friends house and I managed to be so bad at it I escaped the racetrack and got into the open world without finishing the race
Oh my god, I had the exact same problem on the parkour tutorial lol. Ironically all you have to do is keep holding the “run” and “sprint” buttons at the same time forever, and you will just automatically parkour up anything at max speed. Don’t know if you have unlocked it at that point in the game, but you should be able to just ignore the “race track” and climb up the church wall immediately. 10/10 game, def recommend giving it another shot
thanks I don’t have my copy or even the console I played it anymore though. So thank you on behalf of 12 year old me for trying to help but I long ago made peace with not getting to play assassins creed 2
🏴☠️
my parents told me that creepy james and the giant peach movie from 1996 have me nightmares as a kid, to be fair all of roald dhal media is pretty terrifying (and sketchy as heck)
please dont let this thread be the cia gathering info on how to torture children lol
I never watched it but I always saw the trailers and felt something unsettling about it
That was creepy.
If you’ve managed to catch The play that goes wrong they mention that their previous productions was, due to budget cuts…James and the Peach, and after an unfortunate accident in previews James…wheres your…peach?
Oh, also, something seemed really off about Danny, Champion of the world as a kid that only became apparent to me after. I’d brushed it off as Danny being Traveller or Roma and then when I read it again as an adult realising, no, Danny’s dad is just kind of an asshole.
That 3 eyed monkey from the production company logo at the end of Jimmy Neutron credits gave me nightmares for some reason.
I still remember getting so freaked out by the music in the Ocarina of Time Forest Temple that I had to put the game down. The ghosts and spiders didn’t bother me, but those ceiling hands did.
I was going to leave the game running overnight to save my progress but the music made me so scared I had to turn it off, but I was too scared to touch the controller so I just ran up and shut the GameCube off
Same, the sounds of the hands falling and the increasing shadows is horrifying to the young mind.
The Weeping Willow screen from the NES version of Kings Quest V. Something about the face and the music terrified me.
A lot of the discordant music in the original Metroid freaked me out too. The series has an amazing soundtrack.
There’s a lot of good unsettling music and triumphant music from Metroid
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Okay reply guy.
@HexReplyBot@hexbear.net should have a Jeff Tiedrech profile picture
There was a TV skits show for kids on Fox I watched as a kid in the 90’s, God knows what the fuck it was called, but I remember there was one scene with puppet animals playing poker in a dark room and I don’t remember the point of the scene nor why but as the different characters spoke it was very tense—probably for comedic effect that was lost on me—and then it just cut to the next scene/skit, but that bit remains stuck in my head as High Horror.
Also, many old timey black and white cartoons creeped me the fuck out.
PBS had this program called Nova when I was a kid and it had an episode about epidemics and the black death and the hantavirus. Gave me a panic attack or something close to it. The music was super ominous.
The final part of when Luke was fighting Vader in the cave in Empire Strikes Back and the head explodes and Luke’s face is in Vader’s helmet
