Horror Fans Are Naming Their First Scares — Scream, Alien, and Nightmare on Elm Street Dominate
First scares cut deepest. Which horror film initiated you—Psycho, The Exorcist, Scream, or a deep cut that still stalks your sleep? Share your origin scare.
Every horror fan has an origin story. Not the cool masked-killer kind, the smaller one where you picked a movie, hit play, and discovered you either loved this stuff or made a huge mistake. A recent Reddit thread asked the simple, dangerous question: what was your first horror movie? The answers spanned decades, subgenres, and at least one angry parent.
The spark: a Reddit thread and a gateway slasher
The original poster went with Scream and tossed it to the crowd with a straight-up prompt: what was your first horror movie? Turns out, that 1996 Wes Craven meta-slasher is still a gateway drug. Plenty of replies echoed the same story: no interest in horror, watched Scream, suddenly mainlining the genre like it was oxygen.
"Mine was Scream as well. I initially had no interest in horror whatsoever until I watched this movie. Now I am obsessed with the genre. But this is still my all-time fave."
Different decades, same trauma
Not everyone started with 90s quips and a Ghostface mask. A lot of people traced their first scare back to the classics, with the first Freddy Krueger outing getting a ton of love. One person saw A Nightmare on Elm Street around age 12. Another admitted they watched it at 9, had nightmares for years, and their parents were, quote, not impressed. Yeah, that tracks.
Sci-fi scares count too
A few folks came in through the science-fiction door: Ridley Scott's Alien from 1979 (the chest-burster is basically a rite of passage) and M. Night Shyamalan's Signs from 2002. If your brain just replayed the backyard footage of that tall green figure strolling past the birthday party, same.
The roll call: first horror watches people named
- Scream (1996, Wes Craven) – repeated as a first taste that turned non-fans into lifers
- A Nightmare on Elm Street – multiple fans started here; one at 12, another at 9, complete with years of nightmares and unimpressed parents
- Alien (1979) – the chest-bursting classic that makes you fear your own torso
- Signs (2002) – the blink-and-you-scream backyard alien cameo that sticks forever
- The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper's original) – the grimy granddaddy of bad road trips
- The Exorcist – still spinning heads and wrecking sleep schedules
- Pet Sematary – the one that makes you side-eye pets and burial grounds
- Jaws – technically a shark movie, spiritually a horror movie, absolutely a childhood ruiner for beaches
- Friday the 13th – the camp classic that made summer jobs look deadly
- Child's Play – one fan remembers this as their first: it scared them so much they avoided it for years after, possibly because Andy was a kid and they were, too
- A Quiet Place – for younger fans, silence was their first scare language
- The Conjuring – modern haunted-house horror that opened the door for a lot of newbies
What it all says about horror fans
The thread basically splits along generations: some of us imprinted on the classics and paid for it with a few sleepless nights, and some started with newer, slicker studio scares like A Quiet Place or The Conjuring. Either way, that first hit tends to lock you in. You recover from the initial trauma, then spend the rest of your life chasing it.
Got your own first-fright story? I want to hear it. And if you're looking to fill in the gaps, check out my guide to the best horror movies and keep an eye on the upcoming releases headed our way.