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Jaws? Jumanji? Superman III? Movies that most traumatized us as kids

Watching a scary movie at a tender age can still haunt us as adults. People share which films gave them childhood nightmares.

Bonnie Burton
Journalist Bonnie Burton writes about movies, TV shows, comics, science and robots. She is the author of the books Live or Die: Survival Hacks, Wizarding World: Movie Magic Amazing Artifacts, The Star Wars Craft Book, Girls Against Girls, Draw Star Wars, Planets in Peril and more! E-mail Bonnie.
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Bonnie Burton
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Remember the first scary movie you watched as a kid where you had to view it through your fingers covering your face? Perhaps younger you thought they were in for a fun time at a friend's slumber party, but instead you all ended up watching A Nightmare on Elm Street, which led to years of bad dreams?

On Tuesday, production assistant Ashley Bower tweeted the question "What movie traumatized you as a kid?", and it went viral, with everyone from director Edgar Wright to actors Olivia Wilde and Zach Braff chiming in about their own childhood movie regrets.

For Bower, it was the 1995 movie Jumanji starring the late Robin Williams.

Wilde mentioned the 1995 dark coming-of-age film Kids. "Kids. I was 10," Wilde tweeted. "Someone stocked those Blockbuster shelves incorrectly. #notakidsmovie"

Braff picked 1984's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom starring Harrison Ford. "When they pulled the heart out I asked my mom if I could go play arcade games in the lobby," Braff tweeted.

Wright tweeted that 1977 UK public service movie Apaches directed by John Mackenzie traumatized him. The film is about a group of kids who play a kind of cowboys and Indians game on an English farm, but when they ignore safety warnings, they die one by one in different gruesome ways.

For me personally, the 1978 animated film Watership Down. My babysitter at the time glanced at the description in the TV Guide as an animated film about rabbits and probably thought it would be a cute story about rabbits moving to a new home.

Seven-year-old me sat in front of the TV as I watched it on HBO. It was animated and it was about rabbits, but what I didn't expect was how depressing, violent and horrifying it was.

Rabbits viciously killed one another in a weird power struggle. They ran from dogs, rats, owls, humans and other evil encounters. I still get chills thinking about it. When one of the rabbits has a vision and says, "The field, it's covered in blood," you know you're in for some very creepy visuals.

Other movies like Jaws, Dark Crystal and The Secret of NIMH gave me nightmares as a kid, but Watership Down continues to creep into my adult brain when I sleep to give me rabbit-themed nightmares.

I'm not alone in my childhood movie trauma. Others on Twitter shared their own memories of movies -- ranging from classic horror gems like Jaws to unexpected picks like Superman III -- that tormented them as children.

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