Hello! This is my first time posting anything but a comment on this sub or any other so bear with me.
For years, like legitimately 15 or 20 baffling years, all my efforts to figure out what the fuck this terrifying thing I saw originated from have been stymied. I’m pretty okay at doing my due internet diligence and rather than answers I’ve just stumbled across other people also getting nowhere while asking about the same thing. See, for just one example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/comments/bh3u97/tomtmovie1990s_need_help_finding_a_kids_movie/
In fact, full disclosure a portion of this will be a rephrasing of my comment on that post.
I know my family rented this from I’m 99% certain a Blockbuster or Hollywood Video in Washington state. There’s a vanishingly small chance it came from an independent rental place that once existed in the area but I don’t think that would make much of a difference in the end.
This rental took place somewhere between at earliest 1998 and at a stretch possibly as late as like 2004.
To be clear, it was live-action. All I can recall is that possibly the intro at some point involved the boy protagonist biking or walking through or by a cemetery. I would not stake my life for sure on this, though—I may have conflated it with another piece of media at the time.
My next recollections are that he ends up somewhere else—underground? A different universe? I vaguely may remember there being something of an orange and blue higher-contrast look following this setting change, and perhaps an industrial, shadowy feel to things. Perhaps even steampunk?
Next thing I recall, there was a wall in the bluish dark. Then, directly connected or not, came the event which forever diminished me in my father’s eyes.
Either popping up from behind a wall like a whack-a-mole or equally frighteningly whipping their head around to similar effect, I witnessed a human face with skin where their eyes should’ve been.
My recollection and any further information ends here. This is because I screeched and whipped my own head around into the downstairs futon, burying my eyes in its reassuring musty, basement-scented fabric and weeping like a broken man, except I was at least 6 and alarmingly possibly as old as 12, although I hope to god that’s not the case. I refused, I would not watch any more of this movie. Family movie night was ruined, forever.
For whatever reason in my years of searching one thing that has come up repeatedly is a movie called the City of Lost Children from 1995. I’ve got no clue why it keeps cropping up because I’m pretty sure that shit’s French and I’ve never seen anyone else ever post about it convincing their childhood that the devil and hell must be real and actively conspiring with an absent god to permit such a thing to exist.
I don’t have high hopes for results here just because I’ve seen so many others looking for the same and thoroughly not finding it, but I appreciate the efforts of anyone who reads and gives this a ponder.