For those of you old enough to remember, there was a certain spell of time where an animated children’s film had a good to fair chance of including one or three scenes that would go on to form the basis of many a child’s nightmares for the better part of their young life; Dumbo‘s wine-induced hallucination sequence comes to mind, as does the entire runtime of The Secret of NIMH.
Of course, this has never been limited to children’s animated movies (although it is peculiar that such a genre is the standout); there have been plenty of films over the years that, while they weren’t marketed as horror movies, still managed to carry out such an effect on its viewers, and r/horror has taken to naming some of the most heinous offenders.
The original poster offered up The Brave Little Toaster and its infamous clown scene as a chief suspect for the crime of subsequent night terrors. Plenty of others readily nodded in agreement, with one, in particular, pointing an extra finger at the film’s junkyard scene.
One user made the jump to live-action and admitted that A24’s 1917 got to them in bone-chilling ways; a warzone on its own is nothing warm and fuzzy, but the sequence in No Man’s Land could certainly launch it into the even more disturbing heights.
Another responder found themselves in a joking mood and suggested Suicide Squad, not because the film itself was scary, but because knowing that someone in the world was willing to release it, was scary.
And meeting in the middle with a live-action children’s film, one other user pointed to The NeverEnding Story; stop-motion on its own can elicit some shudders in a few viewers, but this classic family film is all too happy to tango with our trauma directly.
Usually, one might be happy with the scenario of a film catching them off-guard, but non-horror films that give the gift of cold sweats might just be the exception to that.
