What's the scariest movie you've ever seen?

Seeing as how we're on the eve of Easter, I figured--why not post a scary movie thread? "That makes no sense!" you'll say! No, you're right, it doesn't, but just go with me here.

For me, it was "Final Destination." Psychological warfare is often the scariest and most scarring type.

:hi:

Audrey Hepburn's in it--she plays a blind woman. Right?

http://www.firsttvdrama.com/show2/history/wait.php3

Here's a movie summary. It was scary as all get out.

I didn't think anyone here was old enough to have seen "Wait Until Dark." My husband and I saw it back in the sixties in the theater, and the scene of the "primal leap" made us both jump. I pulverized my poor husband's arm from clutching it! Absolutely hands down the scariest movie EVER!

:scared: :scared: :scared: :scared:

Myself, I have never been able to watch An American Werewolf in London, in its entirety, even during the middle of the afternoon.

Brrrr... It gives me shivers just thinking of it. :)

TlalocW

Some friends of mine rented it once and halfway through, I had to leave the house.

I and my friends went to see a movie. I didn't feel like seeing their choice, so I went to see the Hitcher. By myself.

It ended 20 minutes before theirs, and I had to sit in front of the mostly closed theatre waiting for them to come out in order to ride home. In a big, empty parking lot...

:scared:

"But they couldn't run ... because I cut their legs off ..."

<cue shot of motionless station wagon receding in rear-view mirror>


:scared:


MDN

So the original still ranks as the scariest

The scene where Travis Walton gets abducted by the aliens. That scene gave me nightmares for weeks.:scared:

And that junked out space-ship? You'd think a species from across the galaxy would have invented vacuum cleaners and trash cans.

and the only movie that I recall that freaked out my daughter. She's quite movie hardy, otherwise.

Alien. Followed not so closely with the first Nightmare on Elm Street. I never got into "slash and hack" movies, so I avoided any sequels.

I remember in high school (oh so long ago!) that everyone was terrified of The Exorcist. I didn't get very riled up about it, though--I laughed through some parts of it because it was funnier than it was supposed to be.

when I tell her I didn't think "The Exorcist" was very scary. I guess you have to be raised Catholic.

That movie probably caused me more long term disturbances than anything else, ever.
Interesting footnote---the real exorcist case happened to a Teenage boy in Mt. Rainier, MD not in the Georgetown section of DC like in the film. Mt. Rainier is a small city just across the DC-MD border. One of my mother's best friends grew up in Mt. Rainier, down the street from the house it actually happened in. It happened before she knew about it, but everyone knew the house, and everyone knew the guy, who was at least 15 years older than her.

and couldn't go to the bathroom at night alone (in a tiny apartment) but had to wake hubby up. And the cars going down the lane at night sounded like Devil Noises. Shit that thing really affected me, I laugh now, but sheeesh.

I was married, and my oldest daughter was a newborn. Totally creeped me out; I moved her crib into our bedroom from the nursery.

Due to the shape of media today you can never make someone who wasn't alive then understand how terrifying that movie was in those times, in context.

"Alien" is right up there as well...

I peed alone while reading the book, tho... heh.

That little voodoo fetish doll totally freaked me out. I had to leap onto my bed from 3 feet away for a year out of fear some little doll would slash my feet with a knife. Whoooo!

Wasn't Karen Black the star of that? I remember that was the talk of the school the next day...really creeped a lot of people out.

I ran for the bed from the doorway and took a flying leap into the middle of the bed.

When my second daughter was a toddler she went through a biting phase, and whenever she would come up behind me I would remember that doll. Poor Lori; I think I might have emotionally scarred her by my reaction to her.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
I didn't sleep for a month!!!

45 years later I watched it again and wondered why it ever scared me.

When I was a kid I saw "Invasion of the Flying Saucers" and slept with lights on for a year. This picture is so weak, it rarely gets shown on cable.

I find movies with evil puppets and dolls the most creepy. In terms of a good scare, "Jaws" did it for me. When the face appears in the hole in the boat, I jumped out of my seat.

--IMM

Seen in the theater in 1968.

Oh-mi-god.

that shit was uber-creepy, especially in B and W

That's for sure.

You beat me too it. I saw this as a child, gave me nightmares for YEARS.

And I was nearly 17 when I saw it for the first (and last) time.

My family saw it at a drive-in about 1966-68 or so. We left early because all three kids were freaked out.

I saw it in the college cafeteria back in the day. For some unknown reason, it wasn't screened in the campus theatre so we had a small screen and a fairly small audience. Romero himself was there to speak after the film and despite his presence -- assuring us all that it wasn't a documentary -- my walk back to the dorm was filled with trepidation.
The only other horror movie that comes close was The Exorcist. I saw it in a movie theatre and actually smoked during some scenes, I was so nervous. So profoundly did it affect me that I didn't say the F word for hours afterward.

I remember seeing it on TV as a kid and having the shit scared out of me.

"Famous Monsters of Movieland" had a photo of Guy Rolfe's tortured smile and the image bothered me for a long time. When I finally saw the movie it wasn't so bad.

you'd have felt differently. That movie freaked me out.

:scared:

Scary cuz it's true.

:)

was Event Horizon. Try watching that one alone at night, it made me jittery.

than Final Destination. I seriously did not sleep for two nights and spent the rest of the week with the covers over my head. It fucked big-time with my head. If you've seen this movie, you'll know why.

especially when they heard the tapes of demons talking in Latin

Damn, I can be in another room and it will freak me out

A buddy of mine had a teacher in high school that was the ass't exorcist on the case the movie was based on. This guy, a PhD and MD, was convinced it was true.

Apparently the Catholic Church trains an elite SWAT team of priests to go around the countryside 'Exorcising' people that have been possessed. It's some really creepy shit.

edit: this post is only half tongue-in-cheek

Messed with my mind...the suspense drove me crazy.

secretly in the theater at the scariest part. We didn't even know our picture had been taken until all our school mates told us that we were on the front page of the movie section. HEE! We looked scarier than the movie. Definitely NOT complimentary pictures. Fear ain't pretty.

But before that movie, the scariest one I had seen was THE CRAWLING EYE!

The first Alien movie scared me the most as an adult. I had refused to see the Exorcist and Jaws until years after their initial releases.

The Ring was a close second, just because that videotape looked way too much like a real nightmare. I usually don't watch "scary" movies because most of them are just plain stupid.

Alien, The Sixth Sense and When A Stranger Calls.

I use to babysit a lot when I was in Junior and Senior High School and that movie(When A Stranger Calls) freaked me out.

My first theatre experience as a kid. Scared the blobs out of me.

Others:
Jacobs Ladder
Exorcist
The Ring creeped me out a bit and so do
Blair Witch One
and Mr Frost (Jeff Goldbloom movie) that one really disturbed me.

but that movie had a physical clinging smell on my mind for days.

I saw only one scene of that flick--the part where Elizabeth Pena's character is dancing, and all of a sudden that horn thing shoots out of her mouth. :scared:

but the freakiest part was that drug they were using on the monkeys and soldiers. BZ something. oiy. brutal and believable.

one of my all time favorites

a second time.

Horror has really lost its way these days.

Angus Scrimm gave me nightmares like nobody's business!

...the deaths just got too comical. The teacher, for example, was like the clumsy French waiter in the Simpsons, crashing through everything in the kitchen before plunging ten stories, head-first, into a truck filled with live rat traps.

Plus the only time I've ever been fired off a film was by the coked-out producer of Final Destination, so fuck them.

You knew they were going to die, but it wasn't like Leatherface or Freddy or Mike Myers or Jason was going to hack them to pieces. No--they were going to die, but you didn't know how, or when, or where it was going to happen.

For creepy, that psychological ooze that gets into your, well..psyche, The Exorcist

For being frightened as a kid "Something Wicked This Way Comes".

On on the edge of my seat scary thriller "Silence of the Lambs".

Rent it. You won't regret it.

Good gothic horror flick with George C. Scott.

Made in Canada, too! :D

Suspiria's pretty freaky
Don't Look Now had a scary ending
Freaks
The Exorcist
Halloween
Alice Sweet Alice messed me up
Black Christmas

"What if it was black people? What if it was jews?"

Damien is very creepy, as are the scenes where the first nanny commits suicide and the scenes with the black dog at the beginning. The last scene where Damien turns around and smiles at the camera is probably the worst. The score adds a nice touch of scariness, too.

damn scary.

I saw it when I was really little (I snuck into the living room at a babysitter's house after she was asleep) and watched it on HBO.

The part that got me was Damien making that truck back up with the sheet of glass in the bed of the truck, decapitating one of the men.

I woke up the next morning afraid to open my eyes because I wasn't sure my head was still attached and I figured that would be the only way to find out! It's funny now, but it was scary as hell then!

I re-watched the Omen a few years ago, and it wasn't as bad as I'd remembered.

I've Googled but can't find it.

It's the movie about the young woman who's babysitting and she gets these calls from some maniac asking her if she knows where the kids are. Then years alter, she's having dinner out with her husband and she gets a call at the restaurant - same maniac - asking if she knows where *her kids are. She passes out.

I was home alone one night during Halloween week waiting for hubby to get home. Figured he'd get home soon so I watched the damned thing. Then after the movie was over he calls to say he had to work overtime AAAAAGH!!!

'When A Stranger Calls' with Carol Kane

great movie :)

We don't have kids and it still freaks me out to think about it.

However, the last time I wanted to crawl under my seat and not look at the screen from fright was probably watching Apocalypse Now, when I was nine, alone in a movie theater.

My parents dropped me off at the movies one afternoon with ten bucks and said, "see what you want."

By the time the cow hatchet scene creeped up on me, I was scarred for life.

:) That IS a great movie!

I'm glad more people know about the movie. It's one helluva story. A story like that makes me happy we live in a smallish house. Not too many places for anyone to hide. And what corners and cubbies we do have - they're full from my packrat-itis.

Rosemary's Baby
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
Lost Highway
Jacob's Ladder

:scared:

I had nightmares for weeks. In retrospect, it was pure trash. :7

The Exorcist
The Ring
The Grudge
The Amityville Horror
Some TV movie called 'The haunted' that gave me nightmares
The Silence of the Lambs

I saw it at the movies when I was a kid---I still get goosebumps!

I don't watch much horror-the only thing I watched recently was Dog Soldiers, which had me a little scared.

On the other hand, if they ever make Simon R. Green's book Blue Moon Rising into a movie, I'm never going to see it. Read it one night and stayed up for hours, too fucking scared to sleep. It's also made me never, ever want to go underground.

So I've already posted that Night of the Living Dead scared me the most, followed by The Exorcist, but I saw them both when I was an adult, or at least a college student. When I was a kid, The Tingler scared me crazy. The premise was that a microscopic organism exists benignly on every human spinal cord until extreme terror causes it to grow and then break the host's back. The only thing that can stop this growth is a scream. In the movie, a mute woman is gaslighted by her husband to the point were the creature grows and kills her and then runs loose in a silent-movie theatre. Other Castle films that scared me were The House on Haunted Hill, I Saw What You Did, and the The Night Walker. :scared:

scares me every time :scared:

I Spit On Your Grave.

So she finally drags herself back to her cabin after being brutally raped multiple times (in glorious Technicolor!) And she gets hold of the phone (to call the cops, an ambulance, anybody? Please?!)

And they kick it out of her hand.... I actually screamed at that point. Only time I've ever done that.

Khash.

It was shown on the TLC program "Human Beings" some time ago. I don't recall the title and haven't been able to find a record of it anywhere. What scared me is that the film showed the guy's friends and even his parents, egging him on to do more dangerous stunts. Even the filmmakers appeared to be sucked into this (perhaps because they thought it would be a more exciting story?). They never show any time when he or anybody around him appear to have doubts. His parents appear to be willing to spend as much money as they've got, helping him in his quest for glory.

In the end, the implication is that he dies ... but they don't explain the context (whether it was related to one of his stunts), and they make it seem as if he's gone on to "a much better place". I started to understand some of the more disturbing aspects of media manipulation and "spin" after seeing this film.


The most frightening book I've read is Wambaugh's "Echoes in the Darkness", about an actual murder case in Pennsylvania. They did make a film out of it, but they understated what for me was the scariest part ... that several people knew about the plot but did nothing to intervene. What it seemed to come down to was that the victim wasn't popular -- and even afterwards, when people did express remorse for not having acted, it was mainly because her kids had also disappeared -- not because she was dead.

Redstone

Something is oddly unsettling about it. I think it's the idea of these walking corpses invading Anytown USA where you'd think you'd be safe from such a thing. Not only that, but the corpses are comprised of your friends and family, and even if you die you can't escape, because you'll just because one of them.

Thinking about it still gives me the shudders. Phones that ring, and you hear funny noises on the other end... It happens to me, sometimes, but I think it's telemarketers...

that was creepy as hell

Well, I never saw it at the movies. I used to read when I was in the bathtub. One night I started to read this book when I was taking a bath, I sat in the bathroom until the sun came up the next morning (I finished the book). Absolutely terrified me. I was too scared to go out to the dark hallway, so I just sat there.
As a side note: My sister saw Psycho when she was very young (don't ask, she was six), for years she couldn't take a shower without the door open and me sitting on the toilet seat while she took a shower!
Psycho and Wait Until Dark have to be the scariest movies ever.

so another kick.