Their sense of smell is very acute and he has no chance of escaping before being turned into a mouse. The scene in which Luke is trapped in a conference room with the witches is horribly tense. Luckily, Luke and his grandma help to foil them. This adaptation of Roald Dahl’s book is funny but the witches are necessarily frightening.

However, maybe you’ve forgotten about the malevolent scrapyard magnet who chases the group of friends, depositing them (along with their human master) on the conveyor belt to be crushed into cubes. You may think that this tale of enterprising household objects going on a journey to find their master is rather sweet. Dorothy escapes from a sinister mental hospital and to a scarier version of Oz, encountering the Wheelers (a cross between clowns and hyenas, with wheels instead of hands and feet), headless Princess Mombi (who has a stylish collection of heads to wear and is lusting after Dorothy’s) and rocks with faces. The worst part is at the end when as a fitting punishment he’s sucked into the cauldron and seems to lose everything except his bones in the process. Fallen warriors are reanimated by the creepy Horned King using an evil cauldron, allowing him to command an army of zombie skeletons. Unless you’re terrified of clowns, then the scene which frightened you most is probably the notorious ‘Pink Elephants on Parade’ sequence, in which everyone’s favourite flying elephant drinks champagne (spiked with something, surely) and hallucinates freaky ‘technicoloured pachyderms’. Crocodiles, hippos in tutus, Zeus, enchanted brooms, volcanoes, the T-Rex, earthquakes and of course all the demons and ghouls who dance to Mussorgsky’s ‘Night on Bald Mountain’.ĭumbo (1941). There’s a lot to be scared of in this pioneering pairing of classical music and animation. Let me know if you agree with this list or if you’d add any!įantasia (1940). There may be many other scary ones that I haven’t seen. Here are the films for children which have always scared me (see also my post about children’s TV programmes).

The brave little toaster scary scene