Does anyone recognise this film/TV programme?

[Cakewineorgin]

I have just read a FB post about traumatic scenes in children’s films and remembered seeing something that haunted me for years. It would have probably been early 80’s and I woke up late one night and went downstairs. Dad was fast asleep in front of the TV and there was a fuzzy picture of a grey alien, similar to ET but with long tentacles. It was facing out of the TV and speaking directly to camera, but I couldn’t understand what was being said. The sound was very crackly and it didn’t seem to be in English. It terrified me and I was convinced it was a real alien broadcast I had seen! As an adult I know it was just a film/TV programme, but I can still feel the fear when I think about it, all these years later, and would love to know what it was I saw.

Something from the Twilight zone?

Can't help you OP but I've just had a flashback to my tv trauma!
Like you, I came downstairs while Dad was watching something. A man had killed his wife (?), chopped her up and wrapped the bits in brown paper and put them in the freezer. I came in just as her head made its way upstairs to him :-O Would love to know what that was so I can avoid it forever.

@EnidBlyton thank you but can’t find an episode that matches what I saw.

A Dr Who?

@PlatinumBrunette It’s scary how these things stay with you forever. A bit like finding Lassie dead at the vets when looking in places I shouldn’t have been!

@EnidBlyton I love Doctor Who so would have come across it if it was.

star trek?

or was it Alien?

Quatermass?

Close encounters of the third kind?

Poltergist?

I remember being traumatised by a film, think it was called "She" where Aztec type slaves were being thrown into a hole filled with molten lava.
Still remember it all these years later.

And also a girl was locked in a glass cabinet and drowned. May have been Fu Manchu.

Day of the Triffids? It’s an old black & white film, but the Triffids very roughly fit your memory, as they had long poisonous tentacles.

X-Files?

V?

How long ago are we talking might help to narrow it down.
I had nightmares for ages after one episode of the onedin line, where somebody fell in the hold and ‘drowned’ in the grain they had stored there.

Your description sounds like I always imagined the Psammead from The Five Children and It.

Oddly the thing I was most terrified of as a child was Zapp - the artist one . Shit scared of it even now . I think it was the miming and exaggerated movements .

Thanks everyone, it’s definitely not Poltergeist or Close Encounters as I loved them. Quarter mass doesn’t seem likely and I used to watch star trek & V, and I’ve seen Alien so not that. It was in colour so not Day of the Triffids and X-Files is too recent. @Lllot5 it was probably in the early 80’s.

There was a BBC version of Day of the Triffids in colour, probably mid eighties. It made me scared to go in the garden for a long time.

As an adult I know it was just a film/TV programme

Are you 100% sure, OP?

Because if Mumsnet can't find it, you know there's only one other explanation...

@PlatinumBrunette I remember that film, it was a Hammer House of Horror one. It was about the inmates of an asylum and the stories behind why they were there. I think it might have been called Asylum.

OMFG @missyB1 That's it! I don't know whether to thank you or not.

And yes, I googled, and yes all the hairs on my neck went up and no, I will probably never sleep again >.

@LonginesPrime well I did believe it was real for a long time, perhaps they came back and brainwashed me to stop me revealing the truth! 😳

The broadcast was from inside a cockpit type place, I believed it to be on a spaceship and not on Earth. It was quite brightly backlit too.

Ha ha I watched Asylum when I was about 10 years old - far too young! Scared me to death!

Was it Quatermass and the Pit OP.