OldBoy

I’m not talking favorites of all time. They might be favorites, but the possibly lesser known that you saw on cable so many moons ago and still have some feelings or nostalgia toward them. The ones that ping a sense that you saw this many times over in youth either willingly or since only 5 or so stations had no choice They might not even be great movies, just ones you reflect fondly or hatred on for one reason or another.

1. The Hitcher
2. The Beastmaster
3. Dragonslayer
4. Where the Day Takes You
5. 48 Hours
6. The Neverending Story
7. The Dark Crystal
8. The Last Unicorn
9. Just One of the Guys
10. All the Right Moves
11. Taps
12. Toy Soldiers
13. White Water Summer
14. The Beast Within
15. Aliens
16. Star Trek: The Wrath of Kahn
17. C. H. U. D.
18. Casablanca
19. Cloak & Dagger
20. Convoy
21. The Last American Virgin
22. F/X
23. Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins
24. Quest for Fire
25. Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
26. Zapped!

more to come...

GoldenJCJ

A couple that come to mind, not necessarily for the whole movie but certain scenes:

Witness - The public restroom murder at the beginning terrified me and made me scared to use public restrooms for YEARS!

Invasion USA - The cocaine straw through the nose was a great drug deterrent. I’ve still never tried drugs.

Cloak and Dagger - That 3 fingered old lady gave me nightmares for days!

Most of the other movies were ones my dad would always watch on Saturday afternoons. A lot of Chuck Norris, Clint Eastwood, and John Wayne movies.

The Cow

Star Wars
Jaws
Saturday Night Fever
Alien
10
Airplane!
Smokey and the Bandit
Bad News Bears
Beastmaster
Animal House
Slap Shot
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory

PatD

Transformers: The Movie. It was the most violent film I had ever seen up to that point as a kid. After you see your favorite heroes getting systemically slaughtered at the beginning of the movie (that's aimed at kids), movies like Saving Private Ryan and United 93 don't really phase me as an adult.

Nick Danger

There are scenes that will be in my head until I die.

Snow White. The trees grabbing at Snow White. It scared me badly.
The Andromeda Strain. Investigating the empty town. Creak-creak.
Goldfinger. James Bond vs the laser. I must have seen it on TV.
The Gold Rush. Charlie Chaplin eats his shoes.
The Poseidon Adventure. During the long swim underwater, I realized that I was holding my breath. I looked around the theater. Everyone was holding their breaths. Awesome!
2001: A Space Odyssey. The bone thrown in the air. The monolith on the Moon. "I'm sorry, Dave." The white room. And much, much more.

andicus

Werewolf Shadow - Nudity
Race With The Devil - Scared the crap out of me

RichC2

Airplane!
Beetlejuice
Batman
Hook
Jurassic Park
A Christmas Story
Wonka
Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Career Opportunities
The Doom Generation

IBJoel

Troll 2 - I was flipping through stations and saw the scene where the kid dreams he's turning into a plant. Freaked me out a little, until I saw it again in college.

Edward Scissorhands - Especially all scenes set in the attic. I loved Burton's work aside from that, but the look on Depp's face and the lighting freaked me out. Still does.

Some movie I've never known the name of- Woman gets abducted by robot, guy sneaks through the vents and peers down to see her on an operating table, reaches down to save her, robot cuts his hand off. Woman then reveals the robot was actually trying to save her or something. Has always bugged me that I could never find the name of the film.

Mabuse

Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Great movie, that also inspired me to look at older animation of the 20’s and 30’s and made me realize that cartoons weren’t made just for kids under 10, but were a real art form, and as important a creative endeavor as the live action movies made at the same time.

Draven

Besides huge ones like Star Wars and Ghostbusters, these others stuck with me:
​​​​​​​

• The Beastmaster was my first real exposure to a "low budget" movie that had some genuinely thrilling and horrifying moments. The bat people have lived in my head for decades.
• The Rocky Horror Picture Show - the video rental section at our grocery store had something like "5 movies for 5 bucks" which my parents had no issues with me doing and never double-checked anything I rented. I had looked at those red lips on the cover and the title of the movie for months and I couldn't figure out what it could possibly be about. It was a blast to watch for the first time and every time since. As a little kid growing up in Iowa, something like "Sweet Transvestite" was a real eye-opener for me. I'm also a big musical theater fan and love the stage version too.
• The Goonies had a huge impact on my childhood as far as going on "adventures", like exploring the storm drains in the neighborhood, building a treehouse in the woods or jumping off the roof of our one-story house. It's amazing I didn't die.

DWilson

Keep in mind I'm an old, old man...

The Best Years Of Our Lives This is an old classic about WWII vets re-adjusting to life after the war. I was a kid who only watched Monster and Horror movies and this was the first "Adult" movie I was encouraged to watch by my parents, and I was completely absorbed with it. I felt very grown up.
Tales From The Crypt The British movie from the '70s. This was the first PG movie I saw in a theater and I just loved the more explicit gore, and I horrified one of my teachers when I was re-telling the story of the film to some classmates.
French Connection 2 This was my second R-Rated film (the first was Zardoz), but the first with extremely explicit language. We didn't curse at home and of course I heard some things at school, but this was the first time I saw a movie where people talked like that, and it made an impression.

DWilson

Some movies that made an impression before I saw them....

I remember hearing about Psycho in Famous Monsters (magazine) and it was going to be on CBS for the first time one Friday night. However, a girl from a prominent family was murdered days before and so they pre-empted the film out of sensitivity. It eventually played on a local station five nights in a row. I couldn't stay up to see it until Friday night. My father watched it Monday night and, of course, explained the whole movie to me the next day, and I never got the surprise of seeing it for the first time.

I remember being at my grandmother's house and reading a copy of Reader's Digest. It re-printed Roger Ebert's infamous article about Night of the Living Dead which described the film in shocking detail, and asked parents if they knew about this terrible, shocking film that was being shown to our youth (I believe he apologized for it later). I was truly shocked by the film he described, -that someone could make such a horrible film. I wouldn't actually see the film until a decade or so later.

I was sitting on the school bus and the senior behind me was telling his friend, -scene by scene, -about this movie he had just seen at a theater. It was "Last House On The Left". Listening to him I played the film he described in my head, and it scared me to death. I eventually saw the film on the bottom bill of a double feature years later and it wasn't nearly as frightening as the version I imagined.

rexinnih

Jaws - don't believe there's explanation needed but didn't frequent the beach much.

Night of the Living Dead - saw this when I was very young and until Walking Dead desensitized me to zombies, that was a #1 fear in my life.

The Antipodean

Incredible Shrinking Woman - I don’t know why but the garbage disposal scene in this really got me, plus the whole scary notion of shrinking away

War Games - computers just becoming a part of everyday life and this seemed to foreshadow what might happen

Time Bandits - It seemed INCREDIBLY weird to me at age 11 or so but also kind of blew my mind with scenes like the giant rising out of the water or the horribly dark ending.

jpcamb

I'm surprised nobody mentioned being terrified by Flying monkeys from Wizard of Oz yet...

Star Wars and Back to the Future also made big marks on me.

Crocker Jarmen

I've never forgotten this cartoon movie called The Last Unicorn. I would have been six or seven when my parents rented it, and me and me sister kept it running over and over the entire weekend. I recognized that it was different from TV cartoons, probably assumed it was rated-R and believed that we shouldn't be watching it. It made me feel a way a movie never had before, and I'm still having difficulty naming the emotion, not quite depressed or sad, but very close to it.

To this day I remember the music. The scene of the monster killing the wicked circus owner and Schmendrick telling who ever he was with not to look. The skeleton demanded an empty bottle of wine because he could "remember" what it was like to drink it.

But the scene that stuck with me the most is when the one woman sees the unicorn and breaks down, yelling at it, asking why it couldn't have come to her when she was young, what good was this now she was old and her life had been miserable. It seems like a heavy concept for a young child to get, but I got the sense of what a wasted life must feel like, to have such heavy regret and it being impossible to make right.

I know it's readily available to watch again, but it was so powerful I'm in no rush to dilute my old memories.

Draven

I think about the eggshells in the garbage disposal in that movie every single time I put eggshells down the drain.

GoldenJCJ

Maybe because many of us also watched Return to Oz as kids too and the flying monkeys are nothing compared to the nightmare fuel that is Return to Oz!

Hazel Motes

No movie has ever made an impression on me like Halloween did when I was 11, when I saw it on vhs at a sleepover for my friends birthday, in the summer of 1995.

Kevin Phillips

The Wizard of Oz and the flying monkeys definitely made an impression on me.

The other movie was the 1971 version of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I saw it when I was about 7 years old. It scared the shit out of me. I didn't get the humor and saw all those bad things happening to children and thought they were all going to die horrible deaths.

d2cheer

I saw Food of the Gods when it came out in 1976 or so

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074540/?ref_=fn_al_tt_9

when I was a kid in the theater and it scared the shit out of me. I remember my heart was pounding like crazy. Nothing did that again until seeing Halloween when I was in 6th grade when my older cousin took me to it. I should have stayed home. I was traumatized for weeks.

Vipper II

Return to Oz
Clue
The Possessed
The Elm-Chanted Forest
The Gate

Ash Ketchum

The Russian animated film, THE SNOW QUEEN, which showed in theaters in the U.S. in 1960, struck me as a kid as offering a very different emotional tone than the Disney features I was also seeing in theaters at the time (SNOW WHITE, PINOCCHIO, SLEEPING BEAUTY, etc.). There was an undercurrent of melancholy, tragedy and suffering that, for some reason, really connected with me. I believe it was that experience that later motivated me to seek out Japanese animation, which also had a darker quality.

DWilson

My father belonged to a fraternal organization and every year at Christmas the families were invited for a party. I guess one of the guys got saddled with entertaining the kids while the men went about their usual business before the dinner. He brought out a projector and ran "The Snow Queen" (which I think I was shown in school) and when it got to the end of Reel One, the guy realized he didn't have Reel Two, which left all of us hanging.

jpcamb

that reminds me of 2000 leagues under the sea, in 5th grade, we had an overnight camp in town during school, we started the movie but were really only slightly rowdy. One of the teachers got really pissed and stopped the movie and sent us to our rooms. I did not see the end of that movie until we got Disney+ last year or something along those lines. Made an impression on me that I never liked that teacher again after that.