Not surprisingly, Halloween week gets people talking about horror movies. Dorothy Snarker recounted the horror background of various actresses this week. And recently, Jamie Lynn got hoards of you reminiscing about the horror films of yesteryear. I'm not a big horror aficionado — I blame a babysitter who, in an ill-advised move, allowed me to watch Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things. However, I stumbled across a horror movie “best of” list this week that intrigued me.

Time.com counted the 25 Best Horror Movies from 1896 to the present. I was surprised to note that I had seen 10 of the movies. I was even more surprised to note that Bambi was one of them. Not Bambi Meets Godzilla. Bambi. You know, “You can call me Flower if you want to.”

I'm pretty sure Bambi's inclusion was the result of a double dog dare, but here's what the list-maker had to say:

“Amazing that the first movies parents took their tots to in the '30s and '40s were the early Disney features. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Dumbo all exploited childhood traumas. Parents disappear or die; stepmothers plot the murder of their charges; a boy skips school and turns into a donkey. Kids were so frightened by these films that they wet themselves in terror. Bambi, directed by David Hand, has a primal shock that still haunts oldsters who saw it 40, 50, 65 years ago.”

While I don't buy that Bambi is legitimately a horror movie, I do agree that elements of it are horrifying — and haunting. The movie certainly gets at some primal childhood fears: loss of a parent, violence, fire, etc…. And the images stay with kids long after they leave the theater. So that got me thinking about other movies that are haunting without actually being horror movies. (And, yes, I could, but will not, delve in a discussion of how the supernatural or over-the-top dangers in horror movies symbolize real dangers, blah, blah…) So I conducted a thoroughly unscientific poll and asked some friends and colleagues what movies haunted — or still haunt them.

Here are the results, plus a little glimpse of some of my neuroses. Some of these are deliberately creepy or contain intentionally scary elements, but none are traditional horror films.

1. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) … continue reading