When i was a kid, films were transitioning from reel-to-reel to VHS. Today this is difficult to imagine i am sure but there was a time when being able to watch something on a tape was pretty incredible. It was something that was almost unbelievable at the time and it was an unusual time to be alive, but i was alive when it was happening.

During those times it would take a long period of time between when movies were in cinemas and when they would finally make it to something you could rent or own in your house and because I was so young, a lot of these things were off limits to me

At the time i thought my parents were assholes for not allowing me to see these movies but later I would realize that, like a lot of things in life, they were correct because the films the didn't want me to see kind of screwed me up as a kid and one of those was A Nightmare on Elm Street

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For those of you that are younger and have always had streaming services and the internet, this might be difficult to comprehend, but when i was a little kid the only way you were going to see these things was if a friend of yours happened to have it on VHS or something that most people these days don't even know about called Betamax, which was superior to VHS in every possible way.

I had a friend in my neighborhood that had a father who collected BM tapes. He had a massive library. One of them was A Nightmare on Elm Street and at 8 years old or so, I didn't realize at the time how traumatizing a film like this could be. It haunted me for many years after I watched it and I later came to the conclusion that my parents were actually correct in barring me from watching it.

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While there were a lot of scary scenes in this film, especially for someone as young as I was, the one that really stuck in my mind and invaded my nightmares for a very long period of time was this one were a body bag was being drug through a school hallway... blood tracks and all.

As an 8 year old this was really scary even thought i look back on it and have watched it many times as a grown up and it seems relatively harmless.

Watch this now and it seems quite tame but it was really explicit given the time and I should have listened to my parents when they told me to not watch this and other films like it. I don't know if i was hoping for a boob scene - which was common in these same films - but it ended up traumatizing me for quite some time.

I think that was kind of the idea behind the Nightmare films and I'll tell ya, it worked. I was afraid to sleep for a long time after i watched this.

It actually took me years to recover from seeing this and i guess it was just a different time because these days, the Nightmare films are relatively tame. In the 80's though, it was crazy scary and it haunted me for years to follow.

Do you have any films that kind of messed you up, because for me, Freddy had me for probably around 5 years.