What's the scariest movie you've ever seen. Also, please point out whether it was at home or in the cinema. The right setting makes all the difference. I watched the original Haunting late at night, in my parents old house, out in the country, by myself, and it scared the crap out of me at the time.

What are your experiences and thoughts as to the scariest movie of them all? How about modern vs. classic?

This is tough...

7.) The Shining (home)
6.) Silence of the Lambs (theater)
5.) Jaws (home)
4.) Rosemary's Baby (home)
3.) Alien (Theater)
2.) Psycho (home)
1.) Poltergeist (home)

Dark Horizons in Theatre with not many people during the night
(started at 0.15 am - around 2.00 am or something).... not a fan
of horror or whatever, so this definitely left me with a strange
feeling to say the least.

In no paticular order

Psycho (Hitchock) saw in a small theater, late at night, gave me the creeps.

Jaws (Spielberg) I took a date to see this in the theater. She grabbed my arm at one point and I think I still have the marks. This one scarred everbody, at the time.

Wait until Dark (Terence Young) another one a saw in a small theater. The whole audience screamed at points.

The Birds (Hitchcock) The mass attack of birds on a screen is much different than on a TV set. Some people got up and left, it scarred them so much.

I don't remember anything that has scarred me on a TV set (well, OK the Nightly News).

Jeff

I was surprised, but I got scared by Resident Evil - long time since I was actually a little scared

Uzumaki was another one

I think modern scary movies are a dying breed - too many special effects and not enough suspense/horror. The Haunting was a good example of that (Catherine Zeta Jones, Liam Neeson)

A lot of dramas also show horror as part of the story line, so that regular horror movies can't keep up, for example, the Normandy beach invasion in Private Ryan was really horrifying to watch, more than any horror movie I've seen.

Like I mentioned above, Resident Evil was a pleasant surprise, Uzumaki gave me the creeps and Jeepers Creepers was okay worth renting just for fun

Otherwise: The Exorcist, The Shining, Nightmare on Elm Street, Hell Raiser

Mothman prophecies didn't do much for me though, I think with Richard Gear, you just knew everything was going to turn out "all right" I never got scared something "really bad" might happen, the mood of the film was pretty good though.

But definitely to enjoy a good horror movie it's all about setting the mood, big screen, nice sound system, dark, dark, dark, and quiet ... shhhhhh ...


BOO!

Just a couple more new ones: Joy Ride and Donny Darko

Didn't find Donny Darko scary or anything. Was a nice suspense
movie though. Really like mothman. Nice little weird movie.

I was particularly creeped out by Dario Argento's "Suspiria."

The first time around was at a midnight screening on Halloween at Hogg Auditorium on the UT-Austin campus back when I was in school. Of course, being in an altered state of conciousness at the time only elevated the fright factor! Would have been much "worse" had I been home alone.

I agree on Mothman, didn't mean to dis it, the suspense and images were really great, plus the actors did a good job, just that with Richard Gear, he always seems to "live happily ever after" so I expected that of him from this movie ... my problem though.

Mission Impossible! Scared the hell out of me that anyone would bother to watch it, Rates alongside.
Die hard 1/2/3/4

Peter

In 1951 when I was eight, I saw the original B&W "The Thing from Another World" aka "The Thing." Some of you may be more familiar with the more recent (and far inferior) clone by the same name. It was in one of those big, grand old movie houses that don't exist anymore, where just the flicker of the projector on the screen was damn scarry if there are only 4 people in the house! I thought I would never be able to find enough seats to hide behind that day.

But then when I was well into adulthood, along comes "Alien." I went home and looked under the beds and in the closets before retiring.

Those have to be at the top of my list.

I think the name is "The Miracle Mile" with anthony edwards, a nuclear missile is heading to L.A. from Russia, the city finally hears about it, looting, people trying to get out of the city. Seen at home on video. If you haven't seen it then don't read any futher since I'll mention the ending***************************

************************************

that stuff wasn't too scary, the scariest thing I found, was in the last scene, they are in the helicopter, it went down, they are sinking into the water, she tries to get them to go out and escape, but he says there is no where to escape to so they stay in the copter and sink down with it. Now that's scarry, no where to run to so you might as well die.

Here are my pics.
1) The Haunting (see my first postl)
2) Event Horizon (empty theater) This movie scared the **** out of me to the point where I don't want to see it again.
3) The Shining (at home, alone again) I love "All work and no play..." Genius.
4) Jaws (Goddamn you Spielburg, you ruined the ocean for me!)
Jaws might be my pic for movie with the best "jumps" in it. As in "jumps" you out of your seat. I think this might be the best horror movie of all time overall. Preys on our realest fears. Now I want to go rent it again.

Honourable mention "The Others" I can still get goosebumps remember certain parts of this movie. Not as scary as the above movies, but much, much creepier.

Didn't find Mothman scary. Very creepy, but in the end, I found it kind of pointless.

I see I screwed up... my movie was ofcourse Event Horizon as
well instead of Dark Horizons (which is a website that scares
me too sometimes, but that is a whole different thing... lol)....

I don't think I ever wanna/need to see Event Horizon too.

I saw "Halloween" in a theater in Lubbock, Texas when I was a teenager. It was scary enough as is...but there were about 10 teenage girls sitting nearby that screamed to raise the dead...that intensified the "fright factor" quite a bit. People practically bolted out of their seats when "he" suddenly sat up behind Jamie Lee Curtis.

To top it all off, came out of the theater and found that a heavy fog had rolled in (it was night). I dropped my date off and returned home...to find it empty. That was one of those "turn-every-light-in-the-house-on" nights.

"Sleeping Beauty", in a theatre, at age 3, was my scariest. I wouldn't eat an apple for a year. I had an older cousin who looked just like the wicked stepmother and I hid from her, everytime she came around. Did I have all those characters right? At that age, my imagination may have been at work.

Great recollection, Steve... I vaguely remember having the same reaction. The classic Disney stuff took some chances with how graphic it was; today's kid-friendly cute-cuddly stuff just doesn't compare. Ah, the good 'ol days, when Disney could actually scare a kid! Gone forever.

Well, not exactly gone forever. We have those movies in prestine
condition on DVD now! Just make sure your kids see them before
they see all the fluffy stuff that exists today!

I believe it was called "The Vanishing". . .Kiefer Sutherland and Sandra Bullock. Not so much scary, but really creepy and disturbing.

If we are going to talk disturbing might I add Requiem for a Dream.
That thing was really disturbing... wow. (not that scary though)

Well, I agree with pretty much everyone's picks. As far as new releases go, I (and everyone else in the theater) screamed our guts out with Signs. Very Hitchcock, full of suspense and very few special effects. Scared the crap out of me. Also, the first 30 minutes of the movie Jeepers Creepers were very scary, the rest was ok. I think the most effective at delivering the thrills is Jaws.

Also, forgot to mention Dead Again with Kenneth Brannagh, and Aliens (the moment you realize they're crawling above the ceiling panels... oh the tension!)

any one seen Cannibal Holocaust??
i had to do research after i saw it to make sure it wasn't real cannibalism.

Transformers, the movie... saw it when i was four, was crying my eyes out after 10 minutes when optimus prime died, and the whole movie just creeped me out.

I may have seen Cannibal Holocaust, is it Italian and may have a different name? Maybe I'm thinking of something else.

Requiem For A Dream was excellent. I didn't find it creepy though. Beautiful movie for such a dark subject.

Here's another movie, if I remember it correctly.

Phantoms. I think the first 10 minutes were in black and white, and had me holding my breath wating for ... s o m e t h i n g . . .
The rest of the movie wasn't nearly as good.

Nightmare on Elm St. was pretty scary when I was young.

If you just want to talk about creepy scenes, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. One scene repeats several times in the film. A scalpel slowly slices an eye. It's down in close up and just gave me the creeps. After a couple of times I had to turn away. In its day (1919) the film was probably very scary. Still its considered a classic.

Jeff

Nosferatu would be another classic horror. It's still creepy

Actually, I think the scariest movie ever made was also one of the first movies ever made. It was simply of a train chugging down the tracks. The point of view of the camera was straight down the tracks so the audience saw the train coming right at them. Never having seen a movie before, they thought it was a real train and many people ran screaming for their lives.
Or so the story goes, I don't know how true it is.

Seems we're mixing up "goriest" with "scariest." Do most of you find "gore" to be scary? I don't at all. Just disgusting...and a bit boring.

The teen slasher genre that started in the 80s (a la "Nightmare on Elm Street") is all about gore...the puke factor. Never found any of those to be "suspenseful" or "scary." You can look at the group of teenagers in the film in the opening shot, determine the order that they'll get slashed...which then just leaves you to sit back and wait for the inevitable special effects blood to start gushing and endure the poor storyline in between gore scenes. (You can also immediately pick which two will get axed while making out, which girl will show her breasts, and which "star" will be left for the final "I'm-trapped-in-a-room-with-a-serial-killer" scene. Yawn.)

If you want to see something that will really scare the hell out of you...and without special effects and without blood...try "The Shuttered Room." It's an Oliver Reed movie made in 1967. Watch THAT alone at night and tell me you don't get the willies!

For Dylan Couper, that is a true story, the film was "The Arrival of a Train" by the Lumiere brothers, about four minutes long, circa 1895 or so. It was exhibited in a Paris cafe and caused a bit of a panic because it was such a disconcerting and frightening experience to see photographic images move. Some people dove under the tables, others scrambled to get out of the way.

For Jeff Donald, sorry but you're confusing Robert Weine's "Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari" from Germany, 1920, with Luis Bunuel's "Un Chein Andalou" (An Andalusian Dog) from Spain, 1929. Caligari is a feature-length horror film, Andalusian Dog is a shorter avant-garde piece. Both are excellent "scary movies."

Andalusian Dog contains the scene you refer to. A medium shot of a woman sitting in a chair, a close-up a scalpel being sharpened, a close-up of a man's hand holding her face and stretching the skin around her eye, a medium shot as he places the scalpel in line with her eye, a close-up of the scalpel slicing an eyeball.

Spoiler follows...

It is not *her* eyeball actually, but a goat's eye. Still pretty disturbing and the scene is repeated later in the film. It is not slow motion but real time, done slowly.

In the late 1980's, MTV ran a colorized version of Andalusian Dog without the graphic slicing close-up.

I have another thread going on this forum about "Requiem for a Dream." Darren Aronofsky is one of my favorite new directors. Definitely one of the most beautifully haunting and most depressing films I've ever seen. An incredible experience.

This is a great list going so far. Films that have been scariest to me are ones where the cinematography and lighting just get under my skin...and stay there long after The End.

"Nosferatu", as Dylan mentioned, is definitely on my list of creepy films.

"The Haunting" (the 1960's version) definitely crawled up my back...and still does.

But for utter bumps, "Vampyr" is my vote. This old, silent German flick probably had a budget comparable to a family of 4's weekly grocery bill today. But it uses some extremely creative techniques to build a sense of foreboding and terror that few films today can match. I believe that most of it was shot with a day-for-night technique, although the film is so old it's hard to tell. In one scene, for example, the moonlight shadow of an old, 1-legged soldier walks away and into a building...without the soldier. Vampyr is widely available on DVD today and is absolutely worth a look both for its entertainment value as well as for ideas that you might be able to apply in your own work. Guaranteed to linger in your mind. Yeesh...I get the creeps just thinking about it!

Chris, your right. I had forgotten that Andalusian Dog was shown first that evening. I'm going back close to 30 years ago. The other thing that made the scene so unsettling was the scalpel cutting the eye was cut with a shot of clouds passing in front of a full moon, then back to the eye. I saw the B & W version, probably on 16mm. Thanks for helping me remember a little of my youth.

Jeff

Thanks Jeff, I had completely forgotten about the clouds passing in front of the moon... definitely sets the stage for the gruesome scene which follows. I have a copy somewhere on VHS, sometime maybe I'll work up the nerve to see it again.

The original version of The Haunting remains the single most frightening experience for me. I got to interview the director Robert Wise a few years ago and I was surprised to learn that he was surprised at well it turned out. Sometimes all the planets just line up. The remake was simply awful.

The slicing of the eye is certainly one of my greatest shocks sitting in a theatre, along with the infamous shower scene, I saw the Dali/Bunuel short on a co-bill with Psycho in college (what a night).

Here's my list:

1) The Haunting (1964)
2) The Innocence (1963)
3) Alien (1979)*
4) The Terminator (1984)*
5) Psycho (1960)

*movie theatre

That's actually The Innocents from 1961. It starred Deborah Kerr and was directed by Jack Clayton. If you loved the original The Haunting, you'll love The Innocents.

I mentioned this thread to my colleagues working the Canon booth here at WEVA in Las Vegas. My very good friend Jon Sagud said that the scariest movie he saw in a theatre as a kid was George Pal's "War Of The Worlds." Early on when the preacher gets vaporized, you knew all bets were off and this was serious. I had the same reaction when I saw "Panic In The Year Zero" with Ray Milland. Kid stuff, but when you see it as a kid, that's when it really counts.

Un Chien Andalou was great, I think the eye they used was actually a cow's eye, I lent my Bunuel book to a friend but I'm pretty sure it was a cow they used. Found my copy of L'age d'or, now if I could only find the other tape. Anybody read the book by Bunuel, My Last Sigh. Great stuff.

My scariest was Deer Hunter. man that was one scary movie. not the horror type of movie though.
12ed

"Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte". I was about 6 years old and my sisters were babysitting while my parents were out. I could here that they were watching a movie in the living room while I was supposed to be sleeping, fat chance. They finally gave in to my incessant whining, I wish they hadn't! Woa! I wasn't ready for that flick. New meaning to "Betty Davis Eyes".

Woohoo, good one Eric, this one can be found occasionally on Turner Classic Movies. Sweet Charlotte is a really bizarre, totally wierd southern-style experience. Not a horror movie but, eh, definitely disconcerting.

I'll throw in another, a cheesy made-for-TV-in-the-70's that got my goat when I was about ten or eleven years old or so: "Bad Ronald" -- see http://home1.gte.net/res0a2u7/reelreviews/reviews/badronald.htm -- this is a great website by the way.

I went to see "The Kid Stays in the Picture" today, and I was reminded of the film that probably got to me the most back in film school (when I thought I couldn't be scared by anything). Rosemary's Baby scared the crap out of me, I think because the satanists win. But for pure creepy, twisted, strangeness, Polanski's earlier "Repulsion" takes the cake. Catherine Deneuve as a sexually-confused shut-in paranoic. Do a double feature with his little seen "The Tenant" and you'll probably not want to be spending much time around the house for awhile.

Barry

The original Diabolique where the guy sits up in the bathtub after being supposedly drownd. Fantastic. The whole theater in Santa Barbara, filled with college students like me, freaked. Just a few years ago. :-)

Definitely wasn't "Salem's Lot"- that movied sucked. (but not as bad as, "Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things")

I don't agree that Salem's Lot sucked. In fact, the scene in the kitchen was a real shocker for me. There is a European version that's even darker but I think the TV version, directed by Tobe Hooper. was well down (so does Stephen King).

Make that "well done" not "welll down". Its early here...

What about the last shot in "Invasion of the body snatchers" where Donald Sutherland points and screams..?

This was one of the scariest moments I have ever seen on screen.

The scariest movie overall I have seen was Halloween. Home alone at the age of 15 at 11pm it scared me shitless.

Cheers, Peter

What about the last shot in "Invasion of the body snatchers" where Donald Sutherland points and screams..?

I agree that that was one of the most chilling moments in horror movies. A great twist at the last minute. Sure got me too! :)

Anyone ever see "Trog"? probably doesn't hold up now, but when I was like eight, it scared the heck outta me. I saw the first "Friday the thirteenth" in an old buck-a-ticket theater. Again, doesn't really hold up now. There was also one called "Don't be affraid of the dark", where these little mushroom people were tormenting this poor girl and *****spoiler alert*****seal her into a fireplace. The original "vanishing" was a bit slow at times, but what an ending!!! But my alltime creepy still has to be "Trilogy of Terror". The one with that little african doll with the knife and big teeth:)

Last night, IFC ran "Taxas Chainsaw Massacre." Not only is it fairly weird, creepy, gross and disturbing, but it's also a great example of highly effective moviemaking on a very small budget. Down here Tobe Hooper's still quite a legend, and "Texas Chainsaw" tops a lot of people's freak-out lists in this area.

Agustin Villaronga's film "In a Glass Cage" was both frightening and disturbing. When I saw it at Chicago's Music Box Theater the night of its premier in the summer of 1989, over 50% of the audience walked out after just half an hour.

The first season of the original (b/w) "Outer Limits" tv series from 1963 had some very frightening episodes. I recall "It Crawled Out of the Woodwork," "The Invisibles," and "Architects of Fear" as being some of the best examples. The show was produced by Joseph Stefano, writer of the screenplay for Hitchcock's "Psycho" - and photographed by the amazing Conrad Hall.

Sadly, with the exception of the episodes Harlan Ellison penned and very few others, the second season of "Outer Limits" was rather poor.

When I was very young nothing frightened me more than the evil Daleks, and their creator, Davros, on the BBC series "Dr. Who."
EXTERMINATE!!!!

Has anybody here ever seen the original BBC "Quatermass" serials ny Nigel Kneal? Or perhaps the "Quatermass" Hammer-produced film from the late 60s called "Five Million Years to Earth" or, alternately, "Quatermass and the Pit"? Great stuff.

Chris, I'm with you on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I had always sort of dismissed it as gory, z-grade stuff until I actually saw it a few years ago on laserdisc. It's really well-made! Very intense! Not really gory at all. I'm now a believer. And man, that opening scene of Suspiria... Wow. I do think it goes downhill from there and that the ending is pretty ridiculous, though.

Yay to whomever mentioned Polanski's Repulsion! That's an all-time favorite of mine. The Tenant is also great stuff in parts... And of course someone already mentioned his Rosemary's Baby.

Anyone seen Don't Look Now? Nic Roeg, 70s, Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie, Venice... Just recently re-released in WS on DVD... Worth a look if you like interesting filmmaking and creepiness.

The Wicker Man is kinda cool...