Five Scariest Movies From My Childhood

Every now and again I come up with a list of things I recall as being those things having guided my life. Whether it has been childhood books I've read, iPhone apps I love, or antagonists I admire, I enjoy sharing these things, hoping my readers will take the time to seek out opportunities to experience the same.

Yet another area I want to share is the 5 scariest movies I've experienced. Watch these and know, your life will never be the same afterward. I dare you.



Let's Scare Jessica to Death   1971

This movie is so old, I can barely recall why it scared me so much, but I wasn't very old when my sister and I watched it as a televised movie on HBO years after it came out. I think we were babysitting my younger brother while our parents were out on their weekly Friday night bowling league.

I recall screaming when this drowned, pale-white body emerged from the lake. The special effects and makeup back then were horrible, but they didn't need all that stuff to shoot a scary movie. Scary movies were scary because of the situations, not the gore.

Burnt Offerings  1976

I loved Bettie Davis in her black and white movies. The young Davis was such a beauty. When I watched her in Burnt Offerings, I was horrified. Still a great actress, she made my skin crawl in this movie. She played the elder Aunt Elizabeth, all things centering around her health and well-being as I recall it.

When the father and son play in the pool, there's some rough housing and the father holds the kid under water, attempting to drown him. The look on the father's face, his obvious violent pleasures, scared the crap out of me. The premise of the movie is that this run down old house restores itself to its glorious beauty, little by little, as people die on the property. Spooky, right?

The Sentinel  1977

I'm not certain why this movie stuck with me after all these years, but I remember the priest fascinated me. It's the introduction of after the fact information that scared me with this movie.

The main character attends a birthday party and you think nothing of it, because it's pretty ordinary. But later, she discovers that everyone in attendance at said party were dead criminals and she'd been hanging out in a sort of purgatory to hell. WTF??

The Shining  1980

The spooky twins murdered years ago in this hotel? Didn't bother me they were twins, didn't bother me they were murdered, and didn't bother me they showed up as aberrations. What bothered me? The look on their faces. It was like fish on land, but not struggling for air. The idea of it just spooked the hell out of me.

When you can create a scene where the characters behave super ordinary from the expected, that's pretty freaky to me! Jack Nicholson going after his wife the way he did wasn't as scary to me as when she'd discovered all the writing he'd been doing which consisted of lines and lines of "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."

Ghost Story  1981

Spooky because it connects with our sense of past ghosts seeking vengeance upon us. There are so many ways we experience the past, and this movie touches upon the psyche playing on each. It's something how the producers and directors years ago connected with our sense of foreboding, so much unlike movies today.

Each character in this movie who deals with their past does so in a situation which will make your skin crawl.

Do you have a favorite childhood horror movie you'd like to share here? I love it when you can go back at least 30 years and experience technology then vs. now. You didn't have a whole lot of gore in horror years ago, but they weren't lacking in the creative art of scaring the bejeezies out of you.