And there's a plot involving chocolate, and I think counterfeiters, and I liked it.

The first movie I saw in the theater was Where the Red Fern Grows at age four, with my parents completely ignorant going in that the doggies die by the finish. This did not end well.

I don't know that I've really been freaked out by a movie in the theater as an adult, although Sunshine gave me such a claustrophobia/agoraphobia cocktail when I was already queasy from a migraine that I walked out halfway through. And I had a weird moment after seeing Ju-On when the stall door in a restaurant bathroom made the exact same noise as Kayako did in the movie when attacking one of her victims in a restroom.

The movies that disturbed me most, like Eraserhead and The Ring, were all home video experiences.

My biggest freakout was with Trainspotting, and that was on video, too.

I did see The Hitcher (the original) in the theater, but as much as the girl's death-by-truck was horrifying, it wasn't leave-the-theater level horrific.

The movie that freaked me out when I was really small (like 6) was Pinocchio. My dad took me by himself. This was in ye olden dayz when Disney rereleased movies every 7 years. My dad couldn't understand why I was flipping out but they turned into donkeys because they were bad and the whale ate them! I couldn't watch that damn movie again for the longest time and it's one that we do not own on DVD.

When I was a bit older, my dad was tending bar and would get home at around 2:00 a.m., during the summer every once in a while I could get up and watch TV with him while he had a snack before he went to bed. Uusally this involved "creature feature" type movies. I remember the first time I saw Attack of the Mushroom People I couldn't sleep and got in trouble. I remember one black/white movie where all I saw was severed hands crawling across the floor holding scissors... ugh!

The first R rated movie I saw was HAIR. The next day I went to 5th grade and told all my classmates how cool drugs are.

Whatever meal it was they had in Alien before the first chestbursting was what we had for lunch after watching it. Spaghetti? We stared balefully at it. And then my friend moved and her knee brushed mine under the table and I about died.

But mostly movies didn't freak me out as a kid. Real life shit weighed me down instead. Werewolves couldn't encroach on the space where cancer and leprosy held sway of terror.

Now that I think about it, I think that Hair was my first R rated film, too--it came out a year before Blues Brothers, right?

I think I was traumitized by every movie I saw as a child-- Sleeping Beauty scared the living daylights out of me, with that dragon. And on TV, I found The Wizard of Oz and The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe scary, too.

But the worst was Puff the Magic Dragon! I used to scream and carry on when forced to watch it, because it is so unbearably sad.Poor Puff. I never would hve abandoned him!

None of the animated Disney scared me as a kid. But watching Toy Story 3 with Sara, I thought, my god, that screaming monkey with cymbals was horrifying! I can't believe that didn't freak a lot of kids out.

My dad couldn't understand why I was flipping out but they turned into donkeys because they were bad and the whale ate them!

And yet, way less freaky than the book, in which donkey Pinocchio is tossed into the sea and nibbled to bits by little fishes -- he can feel them chomping away at him until they've eaten up all the donkey and there's nothing left but indigestible wooden boy. They abandon him to look for other tasty drowning victims, he bobs to the surface and floats ashore, and a new adventure begins. CREE. PEE.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang puzzled me as a very small child; in my brain, different sorts of books inhabited completely different universes, and it was dazzling and almost magical to find an actual working recipe for fudge sitting right there in a fiction book. Actual food you can actually cook, in a made-up story! I didn't know you were allowed to do that!