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Some how ended up having a chat with my Dad about Doctor Who the other day, and he said he used to fear the Darleks as a kid.

When i was young the Borg used to scare me senseless, I think the Borg are much scarier than the Darleks...

Anyway, which alien menaces were you fearful of as a child?

Jeff Waynes chrysalises scared the piss out of me, for a period.Incidentally, the part of the London Park, mentioned, is it Hough End?

I have a nature preserve here in Chorlton called Hough End, thats all.

Triffids.  Hands down, no contest, the scariest aliens on TV.  Evah.

...sontarans...

...Pete Burns...

THE alien

though why i was allowed to watch it as a kid was beyond me...

...the plastic sofa of doom...

Though I think I must have seen it in a clip show or something because it was a bit before mey time.

The Moomins.

the moomins? the moomins were lovable and scandinavian. i was scared of the Hattifatteners when i was really young though.

Jaws.

Not really 'alien' I know- but the Wraiths in Ralph Bakshi's Lord Of The Rings
were fair frightening for me at seven.

Link: production stills & storyboards etc.

The Moomins on TV was darkly magical, were the  Hattifatteners frosty creatures who used to wander around outside and who everyone had to hide from? They were petrifying, especially the way it moved in the series, not exactly animated, just appearing and disappering in different places.

ADE

Jeff Wayne's Martians terrified me aged about 9 or 10. I used to listen to the record, fascinated, and afterwards try not to think about the sound of them shouting "ulla!" I sort of glimpsed one peering in our first floor living room window, and on another occasion I was left alone in the car for what seemed like an hour, and watching a field of green wheat waving in the wind I was trying not to imagine the red weed.

In Dr Who I found the skull in Image of the Fendahl a lot scary. The Wirrn had me hiding under the blankets at night. Genesis of the Daleks had plenty of scares, number one of which was Davros. The green slimy Dalek organisms were horrid too.

And bits of Watership Down had scary 'aliens' in too. Not so much General Woundwort, as Fiver's awful visions, and the words 'bones and wire' repeated over and over (there's a dog loose in the wood), and the terrible scene of the gassed rabbit warren with its exits blocked with bodies...

*ulp!*

Oh yeah, and the mutant in This Island Earth. That was scary. I hid under the blankets from that one too.

The bugs from hell in the film Bug.

>Triffids. Hands down, no contest, the scariest aliens on TV. Evah.


Triffids? Aliens? Are you quite mad? They were created on Earth, man! They only got to take over the world 'cause of a coincidental meteor strike that blinded everyone.

i was scared of the power rangers... but not of any aliens

"Genesis of the Daleks had plenty of scares, number one of which was Davros."

Davros brings out the cripple-phobic in us all.

ADE

The Moomins freaked me out.
As did some cartoon about a girl(I think) and her polar bear.  No idea what that was.
I once demanded to be let out of a Sooty stage show 'cos the ghosts frightened me.
And I'm starting to see a theme about white going on here.  Hmm.

Never scared by an alien as I recall, now if there had been a white furry one...

There was, and I do believe the monster in the cave in Empire did freak me a bit.

Weird.

I was a right wuss as a bairn and can't beleive some of the stuff that used to scare me, including... the Cadbury's Smash robots!

Pete.

My enormous wardrobe scared me, actually. It had a cardboard box on top, squarely in the middle, and looked like a giant square robot. I could have asked someone to move the box for me, but when you're a kid you don't think of things like that.

Triffids (BBC version) superb!
Zygons (because they whispered)
And a photo of a 'ghost' sitting in the back of a car leaving a funeral terrified me for many years...

I used to get nightmares of Daleks and Triffids.  

I thought Triffids were grown from 'seeds from space'...

'seeds from space'

Nah, that was just wild speculation in the book, I think. There were actually a hybrid monster created in Soviet laboratories to provide industrial lubricants and fuel oils.

Aliens, monsters, when you're a nipper and scared witless, what's the difference?

That and the giant rats nibbling at Dr. Who probably kept me awake for weeks.  Not alien rats, granted, but... (Talons of Wen Chiang was it?)

Watership Down was a scary film.

...The ones that used to sneak in through my cupboard door in the dead of night and stick probes up my ass...

"And a photo of a 'ghost' sitting in the back of a car leaving a funeral terrified me for many years..."

From the supposed Chidrens book/series "Mysteries of the Unknown"?

Truly freaky, with her evil glowing eyes!  Still looking to replace this book, as my sister destroyed it rather than face the sinister forces within!

bad! bad witch!

Heh. Not looked at that book for years, but i instantly knew the photo!

I remember being freaked by the 'faceless man' in Sapphire & Steel as a kid.
The only aliens ive ever found truly unsettling are the wierd elongated ones at the end of 'Close Encounters'.

annoying!annoying tripod!

Something Woolly said reminded me of this one. This used to scare the bejezus out of me when it regularly appeared in the end credits of Star Trek.

(from the episode titled The Corbomite Manoeuvre)

the trek film with the ear bugs... somehow i thought they were related to earwigs when i was a kid and my fear transferred to earwigs.

i thought they were gonna sneak in my ear and send me crazy. ( but then a little girl being scared of bugs isn't that weird, i was also scared of trams and stickers)

Dr Who (Tom Baker) had some story involving fomay stuff coming out his ears too- it scared the living shit out of me, the episode ended with these weird seahorse looking aliens ..growing out of his ears ...or something?

well i was  about 5

and terrifed

Was that a dream, rather than an episode as such?

;-)

hmm, tom baker lying on a table with white shit coming out of his ears

ah yes, that old recurring dream

i think it means I'm insecure or something

All of them in "Galaxy of Terror".

Although a 10 year old me was allowed to see that I don't know.

Humans! When will they learn to live together?

The invisible enemy by the sounds

QuoteFrom the supposed Chidrens book/series "Mysteries of the Unknown"?

That book was pure terror for me as a kid. hahahaha. I can't believe people know this photo...it must have made an impression on many people. I would love to see that photo again...have looked for it for years but no luck. I bet you if I saw it again though all that childhood trauma would come flooding back. Fake or not...still very scarey.

Off-topic, but what ex-fucking-lactly are tripod.com achieving by stopping people from looking at their hosted images, apart from being really irritating?

It's the internet, you scum - you're supposed to share.

[post sponsored by Thursday Afternoon Rant]

To prevent uneccesary sanity point damage...

Link: Back seat ghost

I remember the cover of a book I probably still have today, it had a really creepy ghost on the front... With a person being hung as it's pupils.

Needless to say - Scared the frag out of me. But then, pictures of ghosts always seemed to freak me out...

Not that creepy... who's to say it's not a person in the back, just because it said Ghost in the title...doesn't make it so!

alien 'foamy stuff' - that might explain the short period of fear I had with bubble bath when I was a kid!

:)

Off-topic, but what ex-fucking-lactly are tripod.com achieving by stopping people from looking at their hosted images, apart from being really irritating?

You're using their bandwidth.

M@

But thats what makes it so creepy!  That and the reflection on the glasses that make it look like the eyes are weirdy

The Tripods. Never seen the TV version.

Johnnystress, was it this?

aaaaieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee


(wets self)

It's certainly true that British television threw a number of really freaking alien monsters at kids to spark y'all's nightmares, but believe me, you've never had TV-launched frights anything near the ones that the Sleestak from the NBC Saturday morning show Land of the Lost inspired.  If you were five years old in 1976, you had nightmares *constantly* from these things.

We didn't get Doctor Who in Atlanta until I was 12, so I was a bit old to be terrified of it, but since I've been watching the original series with my kids, now aged 7 and 8, they've had a few awful frights.  Principal terrors: the Silurians, the Auton troll doll, the Axons, the Sea Devils, the Drashigs, the Loch Ness Monster and the robot mummies from Pyramids of Mars.  We finished "Arc of Infinity" last night, and the images of Omega's helmet collapsing and all that black goo pouring out had my daughter hiding behind the sofa.  Of course, the unquiet dead and the gas-masked empty child from the new series had 'em freaked out as well.

The Baltans from Ultraman also had my daughter screaming bloody murder a couple of years ago.  Man, she hates that show.

--Grant

Darn my web-fu.

Link: Sleestak images from Google

There was a Tom Baker Who story where he got flung down a hole and this big amorphous green blobby thing was about to crush him.

Can't remember what story it was and I think it turned out to be friendly in the next episode, but that's the only one I remmeber being scared by as a kid.

That and the Woodbeast from Flash!

I don't mind admitting that I found the "Where's My Mummy" episode from the new Who series darned scary.

Looks awfully familiar. I don't remember ever seeing it TV, but I do remember one piece of merchandise. As a child I was given a Land of the Lost sticker and colouring book. It had pages to colour, and a gummed sheet of decals that you had to tear out and lick the back of like postage stamps to stick on the appropriate page.

It was an odd form of collage in that often the sticker would be a character's arm or head, or hat, and the rest of him would have to be coloured in using pencils.

But that's beside the point. I do recall I thought it looked cool, and wished I knew more about it and where it came from.

The Creature From the Pit

Is he kissing it, or what?

That thing in Flash Gordon, on the Swampworld,was a nightmarish thing too. Combined with Duncans acting and the bit with Flash falling in the big swamp mousse, it all made for terrifying REM!

There's a summary of the Flash Gordon 'treemen' ritual here:

Link: a Movie Deaths database...

Not an alien as such, but the beginning of American Werewolf in London scared the bejesus out of me.  Watched it when I was about twelve or so, and all alone in the house.  Then - then - I had to take the dog for a walk, in the dark, way out in the countryside, on my own.  

Bricking it every step of the way, to say the least.  

No, The crowd were not impressed with that move. :)

The Horror!

i never really got the comfortable with the freindly aspect of et. like dogs, i was always expecting him to attack the kids randomly.

I was too scared to go and watch Superman at the pictures with my sisters as the 12 or PG rating made me think it was a teenhorror. I even trembled to think what the S symbol stood for!

Hes an alien too, right?

To prevent uneccesary sanity point damage...

Huh, lightweights...

I'll see your 'Woman in Back of Car' and raise you 'Shape in Church'...

Blake's 7. There was an episode (probably The Web, from series 1?) where there's a little guy in a fish tank (who's evil, yeah?); and there are creatures outside that he wants to wipe out, but they break in a kick the shit out of him. Horrible!

...and in another episode, people's heads were turning to scrambled egg, with a really gross special effect (as a kind of torture/execution?). I didn't like that one myself, but it's all my girlfriend could remember of Blake's 7 and she never watched it again until we saw the repeats on UK Gold.

>little guy in a fish tank

That shit me up too...

Sleepness night came from some doc about Bigfoot and a very obscure Jackanory called The Nargon and the Stars about this horrible rock thing.

It's not a monster but let's just say 'hitch-hiker in yellow coat'... well I saw it again recently and it's still pretty damn scary....

Hmm, Daleks yes I'd think, till Tom sorted them out. Davros was very creepy.

The cloth frog that was in the kids programme I can never remember the name of. It appeared really big in the screen by virtue of early video effects and that was just crazy. Hmm, might have evoked a few repressed fears there with that one.

And no, it wasn't Gabriel.

Oh yeah, Aliens wasn't it. Erm, Greedo, the first time.

The huge plant monsters in Doctor Who and the Brain of Mobius creature.

Triffids for sure. Intelligent walking killer plants, aaargh.

Definitely NOT the Tripods.

Now only humans scare me. Speaking as an encephalopod.

This thing from invaders from mars still shits me up.

See? So scary it's terrified the internet into censoring the horror with a red cross!

Anyway, it's that silver bloke in the bottle with a tentacled little body and a big head.

Shape in Church was in the book too - and is pretty scary, but is so clear and obviously scary that its easy to dismiss it as a fake - the horror of woman in back of car is the fact that someone is passing that off as a ghost - well, why would they, if it isn't true?  Plus, "modernish day woman leaving her own funeral" has got that close to home feeling that "monk in old church I'll never visit" just doesn't.

Tom Bakers teeth...

Not scarey, but while we're on the subject of classic faked photos - here's a topical one for y'all:

yeah! He was much scarier than his minions- who appeared to have suspiciously earth-like zippers up their backs

though this IS pretty cool
http://www.xofacto.com/justin19/invaders-from-mars.jpg


I remember C4 did a whole series of old sci-fi movies in the mid-80s- great stuff

Looking at it now...the shape in church is the more authentic photograph as it is clearly someone taking a photo of a church....the ghost is fake but the photo could be genuine.

Woman in car....who on earth takes photographs at funerals or even has a camera?

Still the only 'ghost' picture that had me leaving the light on hahahahah

... the prehistoric horror that gets revealed in Nigel Kneale's The Stone Tape scared the crap out of me as a kid-- you don't really see anything but there's an amazing sense of dread and unforgiving evil.

When they repeated it last year on BBC3 (or 4?) still scared me....

Dr Who (Tom Baker) had some story involving fomay stuff coming out his ears too- it scared the living shit out of me, the episode ended with these weird seahorse looking aliens ..growing out of his ears ...or something?

The weird seahorse looking aliens were in [backslash]'Project UFO[backslash]', I think...

Okay, this one scared me big time. And when I went to the library to borrow Doctor Who novelisations I knew this one was on the shelf and had to avoid looking at it while I was choosing which ones to read.

The Malus from Doctor Who. Scary face in a church wall.

Incidentally, anyone ever been to a Dr Who exhibition where they[backslash]'ve got all the costumes of the monsters? Very creepy.

Not an alien, but this guy "Mr Noseybonk" from igsaw really used to panic me...

M@

Does anyone remember a 'for schools' English programme from the '70s where the were some kids living in the countryside, and they find an ancient skull in some sand dunes, and there's a wasp's nest in the roof of their house? That was a bit creepy, which is not to say really scary, because it wasn't exactly, just a bit... brrrr!

OMG! Mr Noseybonk WAS creepy. In fact that whole programme was odd. 70s TV was quite strange. 'Charley says' don't go with strangers was creepy as were the Donald Pleasence 'don't go swimming' info films. Both worked very effectively for me...scarred me for life they did hahahahah I still can't live within 25 miles of a 'Deep Water' sing ;)

I realise this has nothing to do with aliens. sorry.

meant to be : deep water sign

curses. [edit] ahhh, if only

There was some serial on when I was kid that was an adaptation of some classic books about kids getting evacuated in the war and it ended with a big house being burnt down (and it was all a dream or something equally crap).

Massive un-pc bit... well there was this mentally disabled bloke in it who used to really creep me out as a kid. I think, being the 70s and everything it was supposed to creep you out.

I remember reading a book called 'Grinny' as a kid about some children who are visited by their nice old grandma... who turned out to be an alien android replacement (that glowed in the dark). How can anything so stupid souding be so frightning... it was so bad I never finished the book.

"Where you goin' now, then?"

Was that The Machine Gunners you're thinking of?

I read "Grinny". And its sequel. They were both shit. Teachers made us read it. They didn't make us read War of the Worlds though, because everyone complained (not me) that it was "boring". Even the smart kids. Wankers.

Gary, you're thinking of Carrie's War. It was filmed as a BBC serial in 1974 and again as a BBC drama film in 2003. The guy you are talking about is known as Mr Johnny.

Seeing the 2003 version recently, I did wonder if that was the thing I'd seen as a kid, because that too has a skull in it. But it didn't have a wasp's nest that I know of, and I don't remember anything about evacuees in the thing I saw in the for schools English programme. I think they were 1970s children in that. Curses. Wonder what it was?

grinny was too aweful to be scary.

Most evil book ever

I actually wouldn't mind reading that Watch.

Aww, Struwwelpeter's lovely! I treasure my copy, which I bought in a charity shop and must be a little older than me.

I must admit though, the fully painted Peter in the front of that specimen looks less friendly than the line drawing in my version.

The Tale of Little Suck-a-Thumb is a bit of mean thing to tell to children who suck their thimbs though.

Follow this link and you can read the whole thing.

Link: Struwwelpeter

I actually saw some of 2003 version of Carrie's War by accident (think it was repeated at Christmas or something). 'Mr Johnny' had been toned down a hell of a lot from the original...

Naughty, romping girls and boys
Tear their clothes and make a noise,

BAN THIS FILTH!

On the contrary, it is full of sound lessons for the education and improvement of young persons as regards their hygiene and manners!

;-)

there was some kids book about a wood and a big black panter monster being in it. there was some girl as the main character, i remember she hid under her cloak from him.

there was many a times when i was a kid on holiday in sweden where i was left to walk home alone at dusk through the woods and was fffing terrified.

also my mum had some kids book about this cat and a boy ( the boy rode about on the cats back), at one point they ate too much saft and bulla and their tummies exploded and had to be sew up.

what kinda imagery is that for kids?

Some of Edward Lear's poems are well nasty... it's now all Owl and the Pussycat. I particularly remember one that was a warning about playing with matches that had a little girl burning herself to death. With illustrations. And another about playing with scissors that involved fingers being chopped off.

Obscurely there was a Q.E.D. on Spontaneous Human Combustion that freaked me out, along with Ghostwatch and...

Wurzel Gumidge.

Space 1999 episode with Ian McShane.  He was this horribly burned up thing with glowing eyes- freaked me right out.

This barbarism is certainly high on the, 'chilling one out of bad habits' scale.

On a par with showing smokers a dismembered lung!

Classic, I remember the old ones whispering it to me in conspiring tones as a child.