If you should chance to search "movies that scared us as kids" or "traumatized us as kids" you'll find a whole bunch of lists people have compiled. I ran across one of them on Apple News and it triggered a childhood memory.
Perhaps the first film I ever saw in a theater was a black and white talkie based on the novel Les Miserables. An Internet check suggests it was probably the 1935 version with quite a notable cast. When I saw it it wasn't a recent release. Whatever Disney films of the era were, Les Miserables was the polar opposite.
This was in the pre-TV era so I'd never seen much in the way of actual moving pictures. What moved my parents to take me to that particular film I cannot fathom to this day. If you know the story, you know it is about a morally wrongful persecution that goes on and on.
I do know I was young enough not to understand what I was seeing was fiction. I remember it as bleak and unremitting. It scared the living hell out of me and we left in the middle of the film.
I don't know if my folks ever did see it. I seem to remember it was a couple more years before they could get me to go back to a theater.
