When I was a teenager, I loved horror movies. Loved them. In high school, I had a friend that worked at a video store and we would go in when he was working and pull movies off the shelf and watch them in the store for free. But before I was a fan of horror movies, I saw three movies when I was WAY too young to see them and they scared the hell out of me. I actually saw four: I saw The Exorcist when I was ten but scared the hell out of everyone so I’m not counting that. Here are the three that scared the hell out of me and why.
The Mysterious Monsters
This came out in 1975 but I saw it on TV in 1979 when I was nine years old. Hosted by Peter Graves, it’s all about Bigfoot and searching for proof that he was real. Full of stories and re-enactments of supposed first-hand accounts, I was freaked out by all of them. The one segment that freaked me out the most and stays with me TO THIS DAY was a re-enactment of a couple who lived in the country. The woman is sitting on her couch when she hears something on the porch. Suddenly a hairy arm smashes through a window and tries to grab her. She runs to get her husband who grabs his gun and opens the front door to check things out only to see Bigfoot standing there. The shot freezes on Bigfoot’s face and I saw that image in my head for years. YEARS. I would not sit or sleep next to a window for even longer (to be honest, that one may still be true). The entire movie can be found on YouTube and if you want to see the clip I mentioned you can fast-forward to the 1:01 segment.
The Legend of Boggy Creak
I saw this roughly around the same time as the previous movie. I saw them both with my cousins because they were obsessed with Bigfoot. This is a docudrama about the Fouke Monster seen in and around Fouke Arkansas since the 1940s. It was just more re-enactments and stories about the monster and just added to the terror of the first movie. This one involved more attacks on humans by the creature and creepy scenes of the monster stalking people through the woods. My cousins lived out in the country and we would regularly go traipsing through the woods for hours. Those creepy scenes would manifest themselves anytime we saw shadows or heard noises in the woods. I can’t find it anywhere but the trailer can be found here.
The Day After
This movie came out in 1983 when I was thirteen years old. It postulates a full-scale nuclear exchange between The United States and the Soviet Union. It was the height of the renewed Cold War and the arms race between the US and the USSR. The possibility of nuclear war was an oft-discussed topic. Several years before this movie came out, we were still having occasional drills at school on what to do if a nuclear attack happened.
More than 100 million people, in nearly 39 million households, watched the film during its initial broadcast. Including me. While, by today’s standards, it’s cheesy and unbelievable, in 1983 it was terrifying. And not just me. This movie scared a lot of people. It’s amazing how many people talked about it afterward. There was a disclaimer just before the end credits, stating that the film is fictional and that the real-life outcome of a nuclear war would be much worse than the events portrayed onscreen. If I wasn’t worried about nuclear war before watching this movie (which I was) I was definitely terrified of nuclear war after. The entire movie plus an ABC News special discussing the movie can be found on YouTube here. Again, it’s cheesy by today’s standards but if you do watch any part of it…watch it from the perspective of a thirteen-year-old from the early 80’s.