What’s a book or movie that genuinely scared you?
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I don’t usually watch scary movies. I’ve never been particularly interested in paying good money to have the daylights scared out of me. I do remember being genuinely freaked out by the final scene of A Nightmare on Elm Street, but one of the most frightening movie experiences of my life involved a film that wasn’t really a horror movie at all.
It was Helter Skelter, the story of Charles Manson and the murders committed by his followers. And for one night, I was absolutely convinced that the Manson family had found its way to suburban Atlanta.
I think it was 1994. I was living with my folks for a few months before getting married, and they had a five-acre place in Cobb County, Georgia. The house sat well off the road, fairly secluded from the outside world. There were neighbors on either side, but their houses were also on five-acre lots, so we weren’t exactly living in a subdivision where you could reach out the window and borrow a cup of sugar.
My parents were out of town for a conference, or something like that, leaving me alone for a couple of days. One evening, I discovered that Helter Skelter was on television and decided to watch it. Eventually, I’d had about all the Charles Manson I could stand, so I turned off the television and went to bed.
That should have been the end of it. It wasn’t.
Sometime around midnight, I began hearing voices outside my bedroom window. My room was on the first floor, and the voices were unmistakable. There weren’t just one or two people out there. There were eight or ten, at least, and they seemed to be getting louder.
This made absolutely no sense. We were a long way from the road, and nobody had any business wandering around our property at midnight. Yet there they were, apparently gathering outside my bedroom window.
Naturally, my mind went straight to the movie I’d just been watching. Charles Manson had come to Cobb County.
Or, more likely, some new collection of homicidal lunatics had decided to recreate his greatest hits, and I was about to become the opening act. I was alone in a secluded house with no real way to defend myself, and there appeared to be enough people outside to field a respectable softball team.
After several minutes, I was approaching full-blown panic. But I also knew I needed to find out what I was dealing with. Maybe if I could get a look at them, I could figure out some kind of escape plan.
So I rolled out of bed, dropped to the floor and Army-crawled toward the window. I wasn’t about to stand up and provide the murderers with an easy target. Slowly and carefully, I raised my head just enough to peek outside.
And there they were. About 60 feet away. In the neighbor’s driveway.
You see, the house next door was a little unusual. From our property, you could see only the garage. Most of the house was built underground, apparently opening onto the property from the opposite direction. We called it the mole house because, as far as we could tell, the people who lived there were practically subterranean.
The owner had a couple of sons, and apparently one of them had brought a group of friends home after a party. They were standing around in the driveway, talking and having a good time, blissfully unaware that the idiot next door was crawling across his bedroom floor preparing for a home invasion.
There was no Manson family. There were no murderers. There wasn’t even anybody on our property. There was just a bunch of young people talking in a driveway, and one grown man whose imagination had gotten completely out of control.
I’ve watched plenty of movies since then, including some that were considerably more frightening than Helter Skelter. But I don’t think any of them has ever scared me quite as much as that night in Georgia.
It turns out the scariest part of a movie isn’t always what’s on the screen. Sometimes it’s what follows you to bed.
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Copyright © 2026 Doug DeBolt.
