Bad taste. My brother got a copy but didn’t let me watch, so I waited until he was out before I put it on.

I can still remember the guy putting his brains back in his head and carrying on.

Then I heard the director was making some fantasy movies and lost respect for him.

There’s a shitty horror flick called The Hand from the early eighties. Michael Caine is in it, hamming it for the paycheck I suppose but still kinda cool even if the movie is pretty bad. Anyway, there’s a terrible effects shot of the titular crawling hand pushing its way through the plumbing in a shower, and I still sometimes have nightmares of that scene decades later. 5 year old me was not ready.

Grave of the Fireflies. I was around 24 years old.

A Nightmare on Elm Street.

I was 8, my Mom said I wasn’t allowed to watch it. I watched it at a friend’s house.

I was so sure that night that Freddy was going to grab me through the bed like he did to Johnny Depp that I went to my Mom in her room and admitted to her that I watched it then promptly vomited on her due to the accumulated fear.

Kids, the movie from the mid 90s where a New York teen is trying to bang virgins and spreading HIV. Freaked me out.

“Akira” when I was 10-ish. Wanted to check what this anime thing was about, was not prepared for nuclear blasts, and people becoming giant body-horror amoebas. Still, it was a good intro into anime, along with Dominion Tank Police (another hilariously not-for-10-year-olds number). And set the bar way too high for most other ones I watched later.

I wasn’t too young but I am Legend left me depressed for days. I even read the book because I needed to process it. I still have flashbacks to will Smith talking along with Shrek. I should probably go watch it again now that I’m older and see if it hits differently. It was not the zombies but the deep deep loneliness that got me.

So…yeah, I was watching Tales from the Crypt when I was like 9.

Arachnophobia

This is gunna sound stupid, but “Tales from the Hood.” At the end of that movie, where you learned all the guys are already dead, in hell and the guy telling the stories is satan just scared the absolute shit outta me.

American History X. Curb stomping was a lot for 13 year old me to process.

Edward Scissorhands.

Don’t know why. And I didn’t even see it for that long, but something about the makeup, music, general ambiance, the scene when he’s offered normal hands, it affected my child self profoundly. To this day, I can’t watch the movie without feeling very anxious. My partner has tried to watch it with me a couple of times and I just can’t.

Final destination

Saw

My friend found a bunch of vhs tapes that his dad hid, and we would watch them together. We were both around 8 or 9, and we watched various porn tapes, and stuff like Heavy Metal and other R rated stuff. The stuff that really gave a lasting impression in my mind’s eye though was a collection of actual deaths caught on tape called “Faces of Death” and a movie called “Pink Flamingos”. Ill always remember aligators ripping a paraglider apart, and the chicken scene from pink flamingos. I rematched it when I was older and it didn’t seem as bad as I remembered, but it’s not a great scene to have stuck in your head…

Now I specialize in making horror illustrations lol.

Event Horizon. I saw the first half as part of the second half of a double feature at the drive-in theater with my family. I think Men in Black was the first feature. I was 9 when I saw that topless dead woman scene. It’s such an underrated movie.