By Genevieve Dammery

We all have a film that we watched as kids and now can never watch again.

There is a particular kind of childhood trauma reserved for films that were supposed to be fun. You sit down expecting talking animals, magical adventures and family-friendly entertainment, only to be confronted with volcanoes, demonic-looking witches, existential crises and rabbits being violently murdered.

Looking back, some of these films were objectively terrifying. Others were completely harmless until one deeply unsettling scene lodged itself permanently in your brain.

We asked around the office at Close Up Culture for the films that terrified everyone most, and here are 10 films that had no right being that frightening.

1. The Polar Express

All aboard the Uncanny Valley Express…

Nothing says Merry Christmas quite like a group of children being kidnapped in the middle of the night by a giant train.

The Polar Express was supposed to be magical. Instead, its peculiar motion-capture animation gave us a cast of human beings who looked like they had been rendered by someone who had only ever heard a description of a human being. Then there was the conductor. Then the fact that the entire thing happens while the children are asleep.

Perhaps the real horror was discovering that Santa’s Christmas operation was essentially a very elaborate transport scam.

2. Watership Down

“Let’s watch a film about some cute rabbits!”

Famous last words.

Watership Down remains one of the great examples of adults dramatically underestimating what children can handle. The animation may look quaint, but the film contains violence, death, blood, persecution and an existential meditation on mortality.

And then there’s the Black Rabbit of Inlé, who looks less like a rabbit and more like the physical manifestation of every nightmare you’ve ever had. Nothing quite prepares a child for the realisation that a film about rabbits is actually about death.

3. Dante’s Peak

Watching Dante’s Peak as a child was essentially a 108-minute lesson in why you should never leave your house. And no, it isn’t actually a children’s film. But I watched it as a child and had nightmares for a decade, so it is on the list.

The water is boiling. The trees are dying. The roads are collapsing. The volcano is erupting. And somehow every adult in the film keeps insisting that everything is probably fine.

But the true nightmare fuel comes when the family attempts to escape and encounters increasingly horrifying obstacles. Rivers of lava, collapsing bridges and water so acidic it can dissolve things …do I need to say more?

4. Dumbo

Disney has always understood that children enjoy suffering. Dumbo begins with an adorable elephant being bullied for his enormous ears, before separating him from his mother and emotionally destroying everyone watching.

And then there are the Pink Elephants on Parade. What was presumably intended as a whimsical musical sequence instead became an early childhood introduction to psychedelic horror. Giant disembodied eyes. Melting elephants. Morphing faces. A soundtrack that sounds like the gates of hell opening.

It’s less Disney classic and more Salvador Dalí after three pints.

5. Mouse Hunt

On paper, Mouse Hunt sounds harmless: two brothers try to catch a mouse.

In practice, that mouse is an unstoppable agent of chaos who appears to possess the strategic intelligence of a military commander.

The house is destroyed. People are injured. Everything catches fire. The mouse repeatedly outsmarts two grown men. As a child, the logical conclusion was obvious: mice were not cute little creatures. They were evil masterminds waiting for their opportunity.

6. Spirited Away

Spirited Away is beautiful, enchanting and one of the greatest animated films ever made. It is also completely terrifying when you’re eight.

First, Chihiro’s parents turn into pigs. Then there’s No-Face, a silent, featureless creature who becomes increasingly unhinged. Then there’s the Stink Spirit. Then there’s the giant baby.

And somehow you’re expected to watch all this before going to bed and simply accept that you’ve had a lovely evening. The adults saw Miyazaki’s exploration of greed, identity and growing up. Children saw a giant faceless man eating everyone.

7. The Haunted Mansion

Disney apparently looked at its enormous catalogue of cheerful family entertainment and thought: “You know what children need? A haunted house.”

The 2003 Haunted Mansion has everything a child needs to develop an enduring fear of the supernatural: creepy portraits, possessed rooms, ghostly servants and an entire mansion full of dead people who are apparently still hanging around. The ballroom sequence alone was enough to make sleeping in a dark room feel like an unnecessarily risky decision.

8. Jumanji

Before Jumanji became a harmless franchise about teenagers playing video games, it was a deeply unsettling 1995 film about a board game that could literally manifest your worst nightmares.

Stampeding elephants. Giant spiders. Carnivorous plants. Monkeys running through the streets. And then there’s the idea at the centre of it all: what if your childhood board game actually happened?

9. The Witches

This one was particularly cruel because The Witches begins like a fairly ordinary children’s film, until Anjelica Huston takes off her face. That scene permanently altered the way an entire generation looked at glamorous women in fur coats.

The Grand High Witch’s transformation is still horrifying: the stretched face, the claws, the voice. And then there is the small matter of children being turned into mice.

Roald Dahl clearly understood that children enjoy being frightened. He perhaps just didn’t consider whether they’d ever be able to sleep again.

10. The Mask

Technically, The Mask is a comedy.

Tell that to the child watching Jim Carrey’s face stretch across the screen like a rubber Halloween decoration.

The film exists in that strange territory where everything is brightly coloured and supposedly funny, yet the central premise is essentially: put on a mysterious mask and become an uncontrollable green demon with cartoon physics. It was Looney Tunes for people who had never considered that Looney Tunes could also be deeply unsettling.

So, what exactly happened to children’s films?

Looking back, there’s a bizarre pattern here. We were given films about death, dismemberment, natural disasters, supernatural beings, psychological transformation and existential terror, and everyone seemed to agree that these were perfectly suitable for a Saturday afternoon.

Maybe children were simply expected to be more resilient, or maybe the 1990s and early 2000s had a different definition of “family entertainment”.

Either way, there was something uniquely terrifying about watching these films as a child. We didn’t have the context to understand why they were frightening, we just knew that something had gone horribly wrong and that we would probably be thinking about it at 2am.

And honestly? Some of them are still scary.