Courage the Cowardly Dog. I know it's a kids' show, but I was terrified of entering the basement for months after seeing the episode with the floating white head

The X Files inbred family episode almost feels like too easy of an answer.

"The Animals of Farthing Wood". It's a cartoon about a group of animals who try to find a new home after humans destroy their forest. Many of them die horrible deaths along the way. Still vividly remember the hedgehog family being run over on the motorway. And yes, it was a kids show!

So I’m not particularly proud of this, but the emergency broadcasting tests used to scare the bejebus out of me when I was a little kid. Like run into another room and hide scared. I don’t even really know what they were or were for, but they just seemed scary.

Watership Down... The old one, not the newer remake. Just so much fucked up imagery and awful themes in that. Legitimately gave me nightmares as a kid.

Not really a kid's movie, but I remember seeing Darkman on TV when I was pretty young and having the image of his horribly burned, disfigured face burned into my memory.

I was four and I caught a rerun of the Transformers movie where Optimus Prime dies. I was not okay for a few weeks.

My granddad had also died right about the same time, so it was a double whammy.

It was the 1970s
I was ~5 years old

Land of the Lost

Dad standing on top of mountain, looks thru binoculars, sees backs of family's heads. "It's a closed world, son"

Holly (daughter) stumbles into a trippy Pylon touches a glowing crystal and phases into an alternate, insane reality.

Jesus Christ that was some acid-trip inspired existential crisis.

The theme song to Unsolved Mysteries. My mom would be watching it just when Id goto bed and that song had me pissing myself.

Gollum from the animated Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings..freaked me the fuck out. My father would torment me with _my precious. while rubbing his hands.

The Are You Afraid of the Dark episode with the drain monster. Couldn't stand on the drain in the shower for about 8 years afterward.

I believe it was America's most wanted. Usually it ends with the criminal getting caught, but when they end with case gone cold and they add a phone number. It feels unsettling and sits with you.

Happy tree friends. No idea how they got the broadcast rights and why they showed it at 8pm.

This is embarrassing but Goosebumps. I think I watched an episode that just caught me off guard while I was in a strange place (first sleepover at a friend's house) and the super campy episode freaked me right out.

Runner up was poltergeist. My older sister thought it was very funny that it was rated PG and so I saw it when I was maybe 7 or 8. 😂

Twin Peaks. Way too young to see it, when I did.

The Chipmunks Movie, not the live action one but the animated one from the mid-80s. I had nightmares for years about a scene where their hot air balloon gets blown around by a hurricane, which I watched I guess around the same time as Hurricane Hugo.

It's also very possible that my brain invented the whole thing.

Invader Zim. The animation and shock humor was a little much for younger me, particularly the organ stealing episode.

Not a TV show specifically, but another thing I remember was there were these anti smoking ads with claymation figures that had creepy music and they ate dead birds and things.

PeeWees big adventure. Large Marge.

Wouldn't go as far as to say it "traumatised" me but In the Night Garden was a surreal, creepy fever dream of a show that still lives rent free in my head. The thing kid me found most weird was that I first saw it in Canada, but when we went back to China to visit family they were airing it there too in the imported shows segment right next to Spongebob and Doraemon. At that point I was really confused because I assumed for a show to be imported it would have to be really well written and acclaimed, but In the Night Garden was such a nonsensical cacophony that it left me wondering what it is about it my stupid kid brain had missed. Still don't know what was up with that show.

The show that really did traumatise me though was this ghost hunting show on Animal Planet about people's pets acting weird because they were "detecting" ghosts in their home. Freaked me the hell out because I assumed anything that aired on a documentary channel was real, and the fact that they involved animals in their "justification" of why the place is haunted added to the realism for me at the time. Took until I was an adult to realize that ghost hunting shows are all fake. This was right at the start of documentary channels deciding to sell out to pseudoscience bullshit AFAIK, so they still had a significant air of authority especially for kids.

Saw “Them!” when I was like 6. That was pretty bad.

And then Starship Troopers when I was like 10. That one really got me.

Huh. Never thought about how they’re both bug movies.

Dr Who !!!!

That mummy episode of courage the cowardly dog. Scared the piss outta me.

I loved horror even as a kid (I'm a millennial and seems common in my gen).

Since I never complained of nightmares my mom would let me watch pretty much any horror movie I wanted. As long as it didn't have titties.

Anywho.

I remember watching something. Idk if it was a movie or TV show. Or anthology. (I've searched all over the internet and can't find it).

In the show there are some boys or kids. And there was this bully at school. Real asshole.

And in one scene the boys are in the bathroom and the bully is being a bully and this big nasty monster creature comes out of the vent in the ceiling and kills the bully.

This is slightly embarrassing to admit, because I'm a rational woman of science and I don't believe in monster creatures. But.

I would get anxiety every time I used a public toilet with a vent above the toilet. To the point I would not use that toilet.

And if there was a ceiling vent and I was the only person in the restroom (even in the stall farthest from the vent), my heart would race and sometimes id leave until someone else came in.

I was also unhappy about the fact that a stupid show did this to me.

I tried to find the show , so that I could watch it with my adult mind and "get over it", see how fake the monster looked, but I never found it.

So I decided I was going to fix it myself. I first started forcing myself to use the stall next to the stall with the vent. And then to use the vent stall when others were around. And then use it when alone.

Only took about 2 weeks to fully get over it. I worked in a big office at the time so lots of opportunities to test myself.

But yeah. Isn't that ridiculous that some cheap horror show made me scared of public restrooms with vents for over a decade. ?

Never had bad effects from Stephen king movies or slashers. Just this one scene in something I can't even find.

Not a tv show, I wasn't necessarily a kid but I remember stumbling on LiveLeak...

For those who want to know what it was.

MacGyver.

Yeah yeah, that one episode with the fire ants (S01E05) and the other one with the fast aging scientist (S03E11) gave me nightmares as a kid.

I should try to watch them today just to see how cool was the young O’Neill with two L.

As much as I love it, that first Batman: TAS Clayface episode.

Gleefully tormenting a clearly desperate man with the thing he wanted most left me mortified.

One of the space documentaries from the 90's showed the Apollo 1 fire hatch footage at the beginning. That was quite a bit for a very young child.

The other two are a set of ad's/psa I have not been able to relocate:

One had a girl in a petal car on a country road with an incoming semi, the other a toddler steps off the curb into traffic, while a frantic mother realizes she lost track of them.

They had a tagline like "would you risk your life for this child" or some such. Mid 90's cable.

A holiday special, Twas the Night Before Christmas.

These mice are experts at fixing clocks, and have to fix the town square clock for some reason? Animation of humans and santa was terrifying. Then in the end I just remembered they did this weird switching back from the town square clocktower from below to the face of the clock superimposed while loud banging clock rolling was happening. It keeping in on giant hands of the clock and back out.

Later in life I learned this was the cause of my megalophobia. Giant clock tower from the perspective of mice.

Back in the mid-80s: CHUD. Cannibalistic Underground Humanoid Dwellers.

Being on the spectrum, this really messed me up, even though the special effects were cheesy even for that era. And I mean heck, I was also 15 at the time, and had never seen any kind of a horror movie before..

Just learned a short while ago that the term has been co-opted to describe conservatives in general, and white conservative men specifically. I now find myself in awe at how well-applied that term is.

Honourable mention to The Last Unicorn completely tearing me up with its ending, and throwing me into a two-month existential crisis bender that I don’t think I ever fully recovered from.

Unsolved Mysteries. Theme song will do it by itself, but the episode with the Queen Mary ship and the ghostly wet foot prints of a child walking the pool deck ruined me.

edit: here it is

I was 12 years old and my parents were watching the Ghost Ship movie on TV. I happened to be in the room during the scene where the line slices through the huge crowd of people and everyone is dismembered or cut in half.... That scene stuck with me for a while.

There's a specific episode of that, IMO, horrible 3D Garfield and Friends cartoon from maybe the very late 2000s or early 2010s that made me hate the show. As someone who hates spiders, I hated an episode where Garfield takes an alien's space car to an alternate universe where it's John's head on a giant spider body.

Hated it so much I couldn't even eat something like a hot pocket without worrying about the fuckers being in it.

Edit:

That episode basically killed my enjoyment of the 3D animated Garfield movies with the superheroes, Garfield going on a quest to become funny again, and having to find a way back into comic strip land ( or whatever it's called ). I'd probably be fine watching them now, but no way I'd enjoy them like I did, not by a long shot. Even as an animation lover.

I think there was a POW scene in Magnum P.I. that was a lot for little me. Not sure episode/season.

Honestly, though, coming to the realization at abput 13 that the "General Lee" and the prominent placement for Confederate flags the Dukes of Hazzard represent an American South that promotes white supremacy, Jim Crow laws, and segregation — all antithetical to my BIPOC existence.

The cognitive dissonance involved in the song, pre-programming me to lend them the excuse that they're "just a good ol' boys..." — yeah, my parents should've known better.

The thoughts I had for Daisy Duke would've had me lynched, like Emmitt Till, under that flag. Still might.

this will be a deep cut because I'm talking early 80s in Hungary, but

Futrinka utca and Varjúdombi mesék let's see how many others are sharing this trauma :)

The Julekalender

This is a Danish advent calendar that was released in the early 90s and making fun of different Danish dialects and especially making fun of Danes who were splicing more and more English words into their Danish vocabulary at the time.

The story is basically about three gnomes or nisser, who crash their airplane in Jutland, Denmark and they are stranded there until they fix the plane. They have to get back home because their old papa is dying and needs to read from a very special book to get better. This book is wanted by a copenhagener stereotype by the name of Benny who turns into a goofy vampire when he drinks alcohol. He's stuck with a couple of jutlandic farmers who are completely oblivious about everything going on.

I was 2 years old when this show first aired on TV and I remember we were watching it together as a family when Benny turned into the goofy vampire and I started screaming. The scariest part was the fact that my family was laughing at the TV. I guess the adult version of that would be to witness a horrific car crash or a violent crime and everybody around you is just laughing. It was such a surreal and terrifying experience and I was way too little to understand the context of why this scene was so funny and why my family was laughing. All I knew was that I had seen danger and evil and that those who were supposed to protect me weren't reacting the right way and that made it so much worse.

I had to sleep with the lights on for a long time after that because I was so scared the goofy vampire would come and hiss at me and kill me in the dark.

This is the exact scene that sent me into a fit of fear all those years ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0D1Cnf5OFdc

And yes, I probably shouldn't be able to remember stuff like this from the age of 2, but I have several verified memories from my earliest childhood that I can't really explain. I guess the trade-off is that my short term memory is shit and I cannot remember verbal instructions without visual aid.

The Julekalender is great, but it is impossible for non-Danes to fully appreciate since it's so specifically making fun of Danish language and the differnet stereotypes attached to differnet dialects.

Unsolved Mysteries made me terrified of being abducted by aliens. I had night terrors a few times from it and anytime a weird light flashed through my bedroom at night I screamed my head off.

The News.

I was too young to watch V when I watched V
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_(1984_TV_series)

100 ways to die

Tales from the crypt.

Face of death

It wasn't a TV show, it was a commercial. For acrylic nails.

So I was like 5, this would have been in 1991 or so, there was a commercial on daytime television among the blue star ointment and dirt devil vacuums for some brand of acrylic nails that were easy to put on and take off, and they contrasted this against the "other brand" that showed a woman peeling it off and it had this stringy yellow goo underneath. I didn't understand what fake nails were, so I thought it was just a woman casually tearing her fingernail off.

To this day I compulsively trim my nails very short, I cannot stand the thought of bending my fingernails back.

American Gothic.

"Someone's at the door."