There’s an unwritten agreement when you sit down to watch a family film that nothing is going to properly terrify you. A bit of peril, maybe. A nasty villain. But nothing that’ll still be rattling around your head 30 years later. Filmmakers in the 70s and 80s, in particular, didn’t seem especially bothered by this agreement. Sometimes it was just one scene. Sometimes, it’s a character. Here are 10 examples of things that were much scarier than they should have been. 

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory

There’s quite a lot about Willy Wonka that feels weird when you watch it as an adult, but nothing comes close to that boat ride. One minute you’re touring a magical chocolate factory, the next you’re hurtling through a dark tunnel while increasingly horrible images flash up around you and Gene Wilder starts chanting like he’s finally snapped. Even the other characters look genuinely terrified. Then the boat stops, everyone gets out and nobody really mentions it again. I’m still not entirely sure what we were supposed to learn from any of this.

Return to Oz

Honestly, you could just put the whole film here. Dorothy starts off in a psychiatric hospital about to receive electroshock treatment because her aunt is worried she keeps talking about Oz. Things actually get worse from there. The Wheelers were bad enough, but Princess Mombi and that corridor full of interchangeable heads absolutely finished me off as a kid. One of them wakes up, spots Dorothy and starts screaming, which then makes all the other heads wake up and scream too. Lovely stuff. For children.

The Witches

I loved Roald Dahl as a kid, so I knew The Witches was supposed to be nasty. I’m not sure I was prepared for just how nasty. The hotel meeting is the moment: all these apparently normal women suddenly start taking off their wigs, gloves and shoes before Anjelica Huston removes what appears to be her entire face. The prosthetics are still disgusting now. Watching it as a child on a fuzzy VHS, they might as well have been documentary footage. Even Dahl apparently thought the film went too far in places, which is saying something.

Spider-Man 2

Most of Spider-Man 2 is exactly what you’d expect from a brilliant superhero film. Then Doctor Octopus ends up unconscious on an operating table and Sam Raimi apparently remembers he used to make horror movies. His mechanical arms suddenly come alive and start killing everyone in the room while doctors are dragged across floors, thrown into walls and generally dispatched like they’ve wandered into The Evil Dead. There’s even a shot of fingernails scraping across the floor. It lasts a few minutes, then Spider-Man 2 casually becomes Spider-Man 2 again.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Judge Doom is creepy enough before the ending. He’s already murdered that poor cartoon shoe, which remains one of the most upsetting deaths in cinema despite involving a piece of animated footwear. But then he gets flattened by a steamroller, gets back up, reinflates himself and reveals those enormous red Toon eyes. Christopher Lloyd’s voice gets higher and higher until he’s basically shrieking at the camera. I vividly remember thinking there was something deeply wrong about the whole thing. Which, considering this is a film co-starring Roger Rabbit, is quite an achievement.

Beetlejuice

Beetlejuice gets away with a lot because almost everything horrible in it is also funny. The attempted exorcism of Adam and Barbara isn’t. They’re forced into their wedding clothes and then start rapidly ageing and decomposing while begging everyone to stop. Their faces shrivel, their bodies collapse and suddenly these two characters you’ve spent the whole film liking look genuinely close to dying for good. I think that’s what makes it work: for a couple of minutes, the film stops winking at you. It’s actually quite horrible.

Ghostbusters II

I had completely forgotten how much Vigo the Carpathian bothered me until I saw the painting again years later. He’s basically just an angry bloke in an enormous portrait, but there’s something deeply unpleasant about him. His eyes seem to follow people around, his expression changes and eventually his head starts pushing out from inside the canvas. It’s the fact that the painting is just hanging there for most of the film that makes it worse. You’d absolutely refuse to work in that museum. I don’t care what the pension was like.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

Temple of Doom is already darker than the other Indiana Jones films, but the sacrifice scene is ridiculous. Mola Ram reaches directly into a man’s chest, pulls out his still-beating heart and proudly holds it above his head while the man somehow remains alive. He’s then lowered into a pit of fire, screaming, while his heart bursts into flames as well. I saw this far too young and can confirm that “but Indiana Jones is in it” is not, in fact, adequate preparation for watching someone have their heart manually removed.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

No monsters. No gore. No special effects. Just the Child Catcher. 

(Odd reminder: the book the film is based on was written by Ian Fleming, the bloke who wrote the James Bond novels. And the child catcher wasn’t even in the book.)

Superman III

For years I wondered whether I’d imagined this scene because it felt so completely out of place. Vera Webster gets pulled into a giant computer, wires start attaching themselves to her body and metal spreads across her face until she emerges as this blank-eyed, silver cyborg. It’s proper body horror, dropped without warning into the Superman film with Richard Pryor in it. The whole thing lasts about a minute, Superman eventually sorts it out and everybody moves on. I didn’t. Apparently I’m still talking about it four decades later.