As kids, we were exposed to a lot of scary things. Many classic TV, movies, and books, including the ones not specifically horror based, were borderline traumatizing for kids. But the mark of a good horror ANYTHING is when you can look back on the memory of it and say, “Yo. That was fucked up as a kid, but now that I’m grown, it’s even more fucked up.”

The entirety of “CatDogula” (CatDog)

To quickly recap this Halloween episode of CatDog, CatDog goes out trick or treating while the city of Nearburg is dealing with an invasion of vampire ticks. One by one, the townspeople are bitten by the ticks, and become vampires themselves, including Dog. It falls to Cat to save Nearburg by finding a cure of the vampirism before midnight.

The concept of vampire ticks is already scary. Something you can barely see in the dark attacks you, and before you have a chance to process what happened, you lose your humanity and start attacking the neighbors. Then, there’s the whole “being the only person (or cat?) taking on an army of vampires” thing. But perhaps the scariest thing to think about is a vampire being attached to you. The only thing preventing Dog from attacking Cat is a lei made of garlic bulbs, and eventually it stops being effective.

The Scream Extractor (Monsters, Inc.)

In Monsters, Inc., permanently second-best scarer Randall comes up with a machine that will allegedly make the monster world’s scream-energy crisis a thing of the past. He unveils the Scream Extractor, essentially a giant high-powered vacuum with energy canisters waiting for deposit. He nearly succeeds in demonstrating it on Mike, but after some mishaps and shenanigans, Randall’s minion gets put in the machine instead. You can see it quickly sucking the scream from his throat and the air from his lungs. Fungus looks like this when the machine gets turned off.

That was going to happen to children. Little children were going to either be abducted from their beds, or have their rooms invaded, by monsters. A big vacuum was going to be clamped onto their faces. And the end result is asphyxiation.

Fungus got better, though.

Being trapped in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber (Dragon Ball Z)

In Dragon Ball Z, the Hyperbolic Time Chamber is a dimension outside the bounds of the universe. In the chamber is a massive white void that goes on forever, and time slows to a crawl. The gravity is 10 times that of Earth’s, and the temperature and air pressure are random in different spots in the void. There is an area near the door where there are the necessities, like a bathroom and a supply of food and water. But other than that, there is just a blinding white expanse of nothing.

During the Buu saga, it falls to the youngest Super Saiyans, Goten and Trunks, and their ability to fuse bodies, to defeat the nigh-unstoppable Majin Buu. During the battle, things are looking bleak, and it seems like no one will be able to stop Buu’s rampage. As a last resort, Piccolo destroys the door leading to the outside world, trapping himself, the fused warrior Gotenks, and Buu inside.

Imagine, for the benefit of the entire universe, you are trapped in the void. The void where it feels like days have passed, but it has only been an hour on Earth. The void where depending on where you walk, you’re either boiling, freezing, struggling to breathe, or some combination of the three. The void that no longer has food or a working toilet because those things happened to be too close to the door that just exploded.

Not to mention, one of the other occupants of the void was trying to kill you 10 seconds ago.

Scarabs (The Mummy)

The scarab beetles in The Mummy are introduced pretty early on, looking like little blue jewels. People are tempted into taking them, holding them in their hands or putting them into their bags. Then, the “jewels” hatch into hangry scarab beetles that burrow into people’s bodies and eat them from the inside out. Even in the scenes where we’re not shown the full “process,” we can still hear chittering, chewing, and screaming. 

As a kid, I wasn’t scared of bugs. I thought beetles in particular were pretty cool, since they had horns and shiny shells. But after watching that shit? Hell no. Nightmares for weeks. Even thinking about them now makes me feel weird and itchy. Questionable CGI quality aside, there are people who will say that the scarabs were much scarier than the titular mummy. Even the people who have seen the movie dozens of times will say the only part of The Mummy that is hard for them to sit through are the scenes with the scarabs.