Traumatised by a horror film as a child...

I remember Village of the Damned. 

I used to have a colleague who had pictures of her kids on her desk. 

They all looked like the Midwich children

I remamber being really scared by a mid 60's episode of "The Avengers" where a gigantic bird of prey (it actually turned out to be a mad scientist disguised as one, but I didn't know that at the time) scaled the walls of buildings, smashed windows and clawed various unsuspecting victims to death. It gave me nightmares for days !

At around the same time, I also used to find an american sci-fi series called "Lost in space" very scary at times. Unless I'm imaging it, I seem to remember that one of the original "Star Trek" episodes was deemed so disturbing, it was never repeated (but I may be mixing it up with something else).

Crispybug - I think you mean a drama called "Threads" that was screened around about the mid-80's. It was about the after-effects of a nuclear bomb on a large UK city (Sheffield I think) and was actually very,very good indeed.

I remember seeing Threads in the 80's, think I was about 15 at the time. Pretty shocking, and no wonder they have never re-shown it. Next day in school everyone was talking about it, I think a bit like the 80's Aids campaign it scared the sh!t out of a lot of us, thinking we were all about to die at any minute!! I remember the first class at school next morning was Maths, and the teacher had to spend about 45mins having a big debate about Nuclear War, and his message was basically, 'Well try to live for the day because it could happen at any time....but in the meantime you lot are not getting out of your maths homework'!!

I can remember Threads having a major impact too ... just found out you can watch the whole thing on YouTube to relive the whole 80's end of the world feel again !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MCbTvoNrAg

Another very effective TV chiller from the '70's I remember was a play called "The Stone Tape". We were all talking about it the next day at school.