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!

For P-C Conan: The Musical [link]

Ha ha ha, DJ!! That's awesome. My friend—who will be in Agnes the Barbarian —was watching the movie last night and IMing me about how terrible it was, so this is perfect timing.

I'm with Dawn - Pinocchio freaked me badly. The dark shapes that take all the donkey boys onto the ship really gave me nightmares.

Also the child catcher in Chitty and the monksy in Oz.

I saw Santa Sangre but it didn't freak my shit. But I'd already seen his other movie, The Holy Mountain. So I knew what I was getting into and I like that kind of freaky. Also, it has interesting references to early Lon Chaney (Sr.) movies, like The Unknown.

For fans of The Great Race, it's on TCM in two hours.

The only movie I remember being freaked out by as a kid was The Odessa File...a movie about how an underground version of the SS was still exterminating people in modern day Europe. (My brother was babysitting me and we only had the one television.) I blame it for recurring nightmares about concentration camps that I've had all my life.

The Great Race

I just called my DH to set the tivo (he's home dealing with the bee guy) I love that movie.

And yet, way less freaky than the book

I would have lost it totally.

We watched Chitty Chitty Bang Bang over Christmas because my daughter had to do a paper on it for her study of film class. She kept looking at me and saying "what sort of movie is this???" she did not enjoy it at all. She doesn't like The Wizard of Oz either but she adored Wicked beyond the telling of it.

I remember being really freaked out by Pulse, which was about, basically, evil electricity. There was a scene where a woman was taking a hot shower and the water became scaldingly hot and she couldn't turn it off. That was my Psycho.

The Wicked Witch of the West and the flying monkeys didn't freak me out at all. The stripy feet of the Wicked Witch of the East curling up and vanishing under Dorothy's house? Endless nightmares.

And Poltergeist. I still won't re-watch it.