Humor and Memoirs

Horrific Childhood Fears from the ’80s That Never Happened

I share five childhood fears and a few honorable mentions. Can you guess them all?

Non-members can read this story for free with this friend link.

Ah…the ’80s, what a time to be alive in American history! Music, technology, movies, television, fashion, and toy mania defined an entire generation.

It was a cultural phenomenon that left an indelible mark on the world. So, it’s not surprising that we’re still fascinated by it today.

But it wasn’t all Members Only jackets, big hair, and Pac-Man. Oh no, it was much weirder and much scarier. If you grew up in the ’80s or find it fascinating, this story is for you!

Before I delve into childhood fears from the ’80s, we need to discuss the cultural phenomenon that led to our fears.

What made a generation of kids so scared that we thought these horrific things would happen to us at any moment?

Take a walk down memory lane with me and let’s dive leg warmers first into the ’80s!

What Made the ’80s a Cultural Phenomenon?

Kids in the ’80s had amazing toys like Beanie Babies, Teddy Ruxpin, Simon, Cabbage Patch Kids, Rubik’s Cube, Care Bears, Hungry Hungry Hippos, and more.

We enjoyed new and exciting personal electronics such as Nintendo Game Boy, Sony Walkman, arcade games, and the first computers.

We had after-school specials as babysitters since many of us came home to empty houses.

Yes, we were the first “latch-key kids.” We spent a lot of time alone in front of the television and unsupervised for most of the day.

Luckily, we had awesome cartoons on Saturday morning and all the music videos we could ever want on MTV. Can I get a shoutout for Headbanger’s Ball?

On top of that, we had television shows like Love Boat, Cheers, Who’s the Boss, Golden Girls, Three’s Company, MacGyver, Dallas, Knight Rider, and Magnum P.I. to name a few.

Back then, if we missed a television episode, we couldn’t binge it later. So, we had to be in front of the television when it aired.

We’d tell friends, “I have to go home now. Dallas is coming on soon and I have to find out who shot J.R.”

We had iconic movies such as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Airplane!, The Breakfast Club, Terminator, Sixteen Candles, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Red Dawn, Ghostbusters, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Goonies, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Back to the Future, and The Princess Bride.

The list of amazing movies could go on. It was so rad!

We had so much freedom as kids that we could leave in the morning and not return home until dark. No one wondered or cared where we’d been all day!

We could roller skate holding Roman candles in both hands and a knife between our teeth, and no one said a thing.

If we fell, got cut, or burned…well, we’d learn. We could jump from any height on our bike. We could throw dodgeballs to try to make the other kid cry or bleed.

We could do backflips off the high dive at five years old or shoot BB guns as much as we wanted.

It’s a wonder we made it out alive!

Despite our fearless attitude and no regard for personal safety, we were scared kids.

What Made Us Scared in the ‘80s?

Movies like Friday the 13th, Poltergeist, Nightmare on Elm Street, Children of the Corn, The Shining, Aliens, Fright Night, Day of the Dead, Return of the Living Dead, and Child’s Play made sure we did not sleep at night.

I cannot believe our parents let us watch them at the movie theatre (how did we even get in?). If we had HBO, which also began in the ’80s, we would watch horror movies alone.

But if those movies weren’t enough to keep us up at night, kids who grew up in the ’80s had five more horrifying fears.

These are the most horrific fears from a generation of kids that thankfully never happened.

5 Horrific Childhood Fears from the ’80s

If you grew up during that time, I’m sure you’ve already made a few guesses.

I’ve also added a few honorable mentions at the end for fun. Of course, my idea of fun might be different than yours! First on our list of childhood fears is the horrific…

1. Swarm of Killer Bees

During the ’80s, news outlets reported that Africanized killer bees would soon cross the border from Mexico into the United States.

They said killer bees would overtake all the good bees and a ferocious swarm would likely kill any human in its path.

Yeah, that little tidbit came straight from the evening news, friends.

I lived in North Texas as a kid in the ’80s. So, I was certain a crazed swarm of killer bees was on the way and I was toast.

One would think living in Texas I would worry about tornadoes or something logical. Au contraire!

As a kid, I was ready to make a run for it if a bee looked “too crazy.” I wish we would have known the facts to put it into perspective. According to an article from the Harvard School of Public Health, the chances of being stung by a bee of any kind is roughly 1 in 6 million.

I guess our Encyclopedia Britannica did not give us that tidbit of information.

2. Getting Stuck in Quicksand

This one seems funny, but it was a legitimate concern for ’80s kids. Go with me here!

In the ’80s, we were 100% convinced quicksand was everywhere. One wrong move in the desert (how often were we in the desert?), and we would sink into quicksand and die. Without question!

The Princess Bride movie showed us it could happen in a fire swamp, so we would need to be careful there too.

In our minds, quicksand was ready to pull us under at any moment. Books and even schools taught us what to do if we encountered quicksand.

Stay calm and don’t flail around, or you will sink faster. Try to find a branch so you can pull yourself out.

I mean, how much quicksand could there be?

You’ll be glad to know that there isn’t a statistic available for deaths caused by quicksand because it is so infrequent it’s difficult to quantify.

Should it happen (unlikely), you would sink to your waist at most.

But if you only stood waist-high as a kid in the ’80s, you could see how this would be problematic.

Okay, I’ll admit that this fear was not reality-based. But it was a widespread fear for many of us during that time. Go ask an ’80s kid!

3. Becoming a Victim of a Serial Killer

Now, this is an ’80s childhood fear based on reality. Thanks to evening news outlets regularly reporting on serial killers, ’80s kids planted in front of the television learned all about them.

I am starting to notice a trend with the evening news.

Also, I am not sure why we watched the evening news as kids, but many of us did. Weird!

Dennis Rader (the BTK Killer), Richard Ramirez (the Night Stalker), Larry Eyler (the Interstate Killer), and Gary Leon Ridgway (The Green River Killer) topped the serial killer list.

Of course, watching horror movies in the ’80s also fueled the serial killer fire. Jason Vorhees from Friday the 13th and Freddie Krueger from Nightmare on Elm Street took out swaths of people before our eyes on the big screen.

Let’s not forget the movie Halloween (1978), with the killer Michael Myers, was a hit on Showtime and HBO at the time.

And don’t get me started about serial killer clowns!

The book, It, by Stephen King came out in 1986. So, let’s add clowns in the sewer with razor-sharp teeth killing children to the list.

I wish we had known that in statistical terms the risk of falling victim to a serial killer is rare.

In the United States, according to FBI research, the likelihood of being a victim of a serial killer is less than 0.0000005%. And the number of active serial killers is decreasing. Whew!

4. Eaten Alive by a Shark

Let’s be honest, sharks are culpable, but Steven Spielberg gets most of the blame for this one. Sorry, dude!

Even though the movie Jaws hit theaters in the ’70s, Jaws 3-D came out in the early ’80s and completely horrified a new generation of kids.

We were watching Jaws and Jaws 2 on Showtime or HBO in our homes. So of course, we had to see the ’80s version of Jaws in theaters.

Like everything else in the ’80s, Hollywood upped the ante and made Jaws up close and personal with 3D effects.

Seriously, what was up with ’80s movies?

Unfortunately, Americans are still afraid of sharks or Galeophobia.

According to Wikipedia, looking at only people who go to beaches, the chance of getting attacked by a shark is 1 in 11.5 million, and the chance of getting killed by a shark is less than 1 in 264.1 million.

Those are good odds, but I think we’re going to need a bigger boat.

5. Nuclear War

Finally, no list of ’80s childhood fears would be complete without nuclear war. This one truly takes the cake for traumatizing a generation.

Nuclear war has been a common fear since its inception. But the Cold War standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union (now Russia) made it seem likely to happen at any moment.

Like everything else in the ’80s, Hollywood upped the nuclear war ante.

They took it to the “dodgeball to the eye” level of childhood fears!

Two movies in particular, War Games and The Day After led the pack and threw fuel on the thermonuclear fire.

In June 1983, MGM released the movie War Games. The movie focused on artificial intelligence taking over the U.S. nuclear arsenal to start a global thermonuclear war. Just like that, we went from clunky Commodore 64 personal computers to artificial intelligence starting a nuclear war.

Do you believe me now that Hollywood was trying to scare us?

However, the most horrific of the two movies was The Day After which aired on ABC in November 1983.

This made-for-television movie depicted a full-scale nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Yeah, it went there during the Cold War.

As kids, we anxiously awaited the ABC broadcast and sat cross-legged on the floor in front of our televisions ready to talk about it in class the next day. For many, watching The Day After was a classroom assignment.

Note to teachers: never assign something you haven’t seen yourself!

To our horror, the show depicted a high-altitude explosion over the United States. Incineration, radioactive fallout, and radiation poisoning came to life before our young eyes.

The Day After also included a disclaimer at the end stating the film was fictional but the real-life horrors of a nuclear war would be much worse. Oh, great!

I remember sitting in class the next day and no one knew what to say. Kids and teachers were crying, and everyone looked traumatized. But something good came out of this terrifying event.

President Ronald Reagan was one of the 100 million Americans watching The Day After at Camp David. He wrote about the movie in his Presidential diary.

He said, “It is powerfully done. It’s very effective and left me greatly depressed.”

Four years later, in 1987, Reagan flew to Iceland to negotiate a treaty with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to disarm thousands of nuclear missiles.

Horrible Honorable Mentions Just for Fun

Now that we covered some of the horrible childhood fears from the ’80s, I would be remiss if I did not add a few more just for fun.

Again, my idea of fun might be different than yours!

While ’80s kids weren’t worried that these could happen at any moment, these honorable mentions spelled certain doom if we weren’t careful.

• In the ’80s, if we didn’t wait 30 minutes before swimming, we would drown. I still do that!
• We didn’t talk on the phone during a lightning storm because we’d get electrocuted.
• Even taking a bath during a lightning storm was asking for it!
• Commercials told us that if we took drugs, our brains would fry like an egg, or our heads would explode. I am not joking.
• We always checked our shoelaces before getting on an escalator. We thought they’d get caught and we’d go through the escalator like a cheese grater. I have no idea where this came from but I still check my shoelaces before getting on an escalator!
• And finally, as ’80s kids we ran the risk of getting razor blades in our candy at Halloween. Like a boss, we ate our Halloween candy with reckless abandon while pretending to smoke our candy cigarettes.

Seriously, what were we thinking with the candy cigarettes?

Conclusions and Takeaways

Every generation has their horrible childhood fears, but those were ours in the ’80s. Thankfully, the likelihood of it happening was extremely remote.

Did you guess them all?

Of course, we still have all those today, plus a litany of new horrible ones. However, I’m convinced that every part of society in the ’80s deliberately tried to scare us as kids, especially Hollywood. Sadists!

If you weren’t lucky enough to grow up in the ’80s, remember this…

Watch out for bees that look too crazy. Stay away from quicksand. Watch out for serial killers. Get a bigger boat around sharks. And don’t create classroom assignments using nuclear war.

Also, wait 30 minutes before you swim. Watch out for lightning. Don’t take drugs. Tie your shoelaces before getting on an escalator. Always check your candy. And finally, candy cigarettes are just stupid!

And with that, this ’80s kid gotta bounce!

How about your generation? I’d love to read about them.