Scariest Books and Movies?

[Sam Stone]

So, what were the most frightening books you ever read? I've read quite a bit of horror, and very little of it is truly chilling. How about Horror movies? Any that really scared you?

For books, Steven King's "The Shining" was pretty good. The scene in the Topiary was maybe the one that scared me the most.

For movies, the original version of "The Haunting" was pretty scary, as were "The Omen" and "The Exorcist"

[middsy]

Don't read books, but for movies, I reeckon Clownhouse wins, and 2nd must be An English Tale!

[kellibelli]

Salems Lot- Stephen king....I could actually hear the tap tap tap on my window at night...kept me awake for weeks.
oh, and The Amityville Horror...creepy, I kept waking up at exactly 3:14, laying on my stomach!!
and Jaws was a good read.
I read all these in my early teens, I was a voracious reader, I dont read alot of scary stuff now.Stephen King short stories...romantic suspense thats about all.

[MrKnowItAll]

I don't read very much horror. My fragile psyche can't handle it. I read The Shining, though I had to take a 2 week break in the middle of it so I could start getting some sleep. Curiously enough, I didn't find the big climactic ending nearly as scary as the eerier stuff in the middle of the book.

[Ukulele Ike]

Damn your eyes for mentioning THE HAUNTING...now I look unoriginal for citing, first off, Shirley Jackson's THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE (1959), the book on which the films were based.

CONJURE WIFE by Fritz Leiber (1943). Guess what; witchcraft is real, and ALL women use it. Including your spouse. Don't mess with those fetiches you find around the house, you could get the whole family in REAL trouble.

THE SOUND OF HIS HORN by Sarban (1952). Guess what...it's 2045, the Nazis won the Second World War, and you've just awakened from a 100-year coma. Gee, things are different...of course, you're only seeing a small part of the world, a massive hunting lodge and grounds staffed with untermenschen avaiable to be hunted down by party leaders. Steals a bit from "The Most Dangerous Game," but what atmosphere!

JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN by Dalton Trumbo (1939). Blind, deaf, no arms or legs. Yike.

THE KING IN YELLOW by Robert W. Chambers (1895). Five interconnected stories, the most nightmarish of which is "The Yellow Sign." Big influence on most 20th century weird fiction, due to its introduction of the concept of a mysterious, terrifying book that screws with peoples' heads. See Lovecraft's NECRONOMICON.

THE CONFIDENCE-MAN; HIS MASQUERADE by Herman Melville (1857). Deception, lies, obscure jests...the unsettleing laughter of the cosmos, and the joke's on you, sport.

HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad (1902). Have fun at the Inner Station.

And of course, any good collection by M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft. Sure, you read 'em as an adolescent, but try them again...you had pretty darn good taste for a little shaver. Especially "Count Magnus" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth."



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Uke

[Stevie Rave On]

Stephen King's "IT". Too bad the mini series sucked.

For movies, I'd have to say the Shining. That scene where the camera is following the little kid on the big wheel and then he sees the twins still scares me.

As you can tell I'm a huge Stephen King fan.

[gene]

I'd have to say the scariest story I ever read was E.A.Poe's "The Premature Burial". I read it at the age of 7-that one gave me bad dreams for a year.
Has anyone seen a really terrifying, low budget movie called the "Frozen Dead"?-it was about a Nazi doctor who revived the german troops who froze to death in Stalingrad (I don't know how he paid the electric bill to keep all of those corpses in the deap freeze all those years!).
Anyway, is this movie available on videotape? I'd like to see it again.

A very scary true-crime book is Severed, the story of the Black Dahlia killing. Yikes--I couldn't go into the bathroom with the lights out for MONTHS.

A very scary movie is The Vanishing, a 15-year-old (or so) Swedish film about a couple kidnapped by a psycho. The last five minutes will scare the living bejeebers out of you.

[Ukulele Ike]

For movies, I'd have to say REPLUSION (1965) and THE TENANT (1976), two variations on the theme of mental deterioration (something near and dear to all our hearts) by Roman Polanski.

Carl Dreyer's VAMPYR (1932) may be the most GHOSTLY film made in the post-sound era.

SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950) never fails to give me the creeps. And never fails to elicit envy for William Holden (Gloria Swanson at fifty, OH yeah, WAY over the hill).

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Uke

[Ike Witt]

The book The Hot Zone was pretty scary since it is true. When you read about people in the throes of ebola, you kind of wish you hadn't.

[kknick34]

Scariest Book: The Shining, it's the only book that ever scared me.

Scariest Movie: Nightmare on Elm St (the original, the sequals sucked as do most slasher movies.)

[gary horaczek]

Scariest book/movie is the original Psycho. In the book Norman had 3 different personalities: Norma(mother), Norm(little boy) and Norman(adult).

[Sassy]

I have to vote for Helter Skelter... still gives me the willies all these years later.

Where can I find a copy of The King in Yellow? I've been looking for years. Would also like to find Seabury Quin's only novel, but I can't even find the name... just know there is one.

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The reason gentlemen prefer blondes is that there are not enough redheads to go around.

[dougie_monty]

I saw the flop movie The Thing (at a premiere in Hollywood, hosted by Elvira herself); really gory and gross.
As for older movies, my choices are The Fall of the House of Usher (Skeletons in coffins, and a horrifying dream sequence with dismembered bodies), and Psycho-- especially when Vera Miles goes into the basement and sees Mother Bates' dressed-up skeleton in a chair!
In the early 60s there was a foreign movie, Mill of the Stone Women, , pretty much a knockoff of House of Wax, which gave me nightmares for a week!

The scariest thing I can think of .....is that no statesman is ever regarded as insane by his countrymen, except retrospectively.

[No Me Ayudes Compadre]

I would say "gripping" more than scary, but I was put on edge by In Cold Blood.

[Bluepony]

It by Stephen King. I have a complex about clowns since I was a kid. It's a mixture of fear and revulsion over distorted features and faces. Simply, I hate clowns. Psych majors can have fun with me on this subject. When It came out, it was all my fears in one concept- evil, killer clowns. My parents saved a lot of money on me with circuses. They quit after a few, when they saw how freaked I got over the stupid clowns.

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"...send lawyers, guns, and money..."

Warren Zevon

[timmar68]

Ooooh, sassy, yes! I read Helter helter when I was babysitting overnight! I read it in bed before i went to sleep. Bad idea. I jumped at every little noise and i had a hellava time checking on the kids when it was time to.
And I agree on It. Normally i read non-fiction, but I did read that. Brrrr!

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MaryAnn
Sometimes life is so great you just gotta muss up your hair and quack like a duck!

[Kat]

I am not a big horror person, so I don't read or watch it that much.

With that said: The Relic. Do not watch it at 10:00 at night and then drive home.

[ChiefScott]

The Shining and It are my tops for horror genre books. The topiary at Longwood Gardens, Pa. now cause me to be wary. Pennywise has destroyed any pleasure I may have ever gotten from a clown. I still hold the mental picture of razor teeth, ripping Georgie to pieces in the sewers of Derry. ::Brrrr::
As for movies, it is maybe not true horror but for the truly disturbing, my nominee would have to be Freaks. The scene where they are dragging themselves through the rain and mud... EEEeeyaaa!!

[JoeBlank]

If you have children do NOT read King's Pet Sematary. If you fail to heed this be prepared to be scared.

P.S. Whether you have children or not, don't see the movie. It's just plain bad.

[Holly]

Definitely, It and The Shining. I also thought Bag of Bones was very creepy- a good ghost story. I read the Amityville Horror when I was seven; that scared me for a long time.

The movie that scared me more than any other was Jaws (though I was six when I first saw it, so it impressed me more deeply than it would an adult; I was terrified there might be sharks in the bathtub). Interestingly, when I read the book much more recently, I thought it was nowhere NEAR as good as the movie. Poltergeist was also great, at least until the end when things just turn weird. Remember the mom in the kitchen, and when she turns around, the chairs are stacked up on the kitchen table? And when the little boy is counting "one, one thousand, two, one thousand" while the thunder is approaching? (Those subtle things are scarier than any computerized special effects.) Between that movie and Pennywise, I don't care if I never see another clown again.

[Harmonious Discord]

The movie that kept me and my cousins indoors at night for a long time was Alien.

Snarkberry I remember Island of Terror from when I was a very young child. The monsters reminded me of turtles with snake heads. Didn't they use that magic thing of early science fiction called radiation to kill them.

[AuntiePam]

Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" is very frightening -- if you're not familiar with his work, please don't read it unless you can do so without distraction. His style isn't for everyone but if you're calm and relaxed, and not expecting 90's type blood and gore, you're in for a true chill.

I've read and collected horror for years, and sadly, can recall just a few real thrills. Like many of you, the topiary scene in The Shining stands out(and do you remember the uncoiling fire hose?), as well as a scene in Peter Straub's Ghost Story, in a car, and there's something in the back seat.

Movies! Haven't been scared since I had to walk home alone at age 9 after seeing "Them" (giant ants, James Whitmore, you remember).

Some nice touches in movies already mentioned here in The Haunting, Repulsion, Alien (the sense of claustrophobia).

A few movies made me jump -- "Carrie", "Evil Dead", "Nightmare on Elm Street", and some had awesome gross-outs -- what was that Cronenburg movie where the guy's head exploded?

Forbidden Planet was just on TV last week -- for sci fi in the 50's, that was pretty creepy.

And the incest factor in Hellraiser certainly raised the ewwwwww level of that movie.

But I still prefer the older movies -- Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy and the Werewolf. If you didn't grow up with those, you missed out.

Phobia wrote:

Snarkberry I remember Island of Terror from when I was a very young child. The monsters reminded me of turtles with snake heads. Didn't they use that magic thing of early science fiction called radiation to kill them.

I can't remember how it ended, but I'm glad I'm not the only one who remembers it. Yep, turtles with snake heads are what they most resembled. They gave me nightmares for weeks.

Oh, one other old SF movie that scared me was Day of the Triffids.

For movies: Island of Terror, which I saw when I was a kid, about a bunch of vacuum-cleaner monsters who went around sucking people's bones out. Scared me to death. Also in the running was a movie where a dog got lost, the locals went looking for it and found a hole in the ground from which a groaning sound was issuing. They eventually lowered a man down into it, and when they brought him back up, he was driven crazy with fear and ran off into the woods, screaming. I don't remember the name of it, but it freaked me out.

Books: Christine by S. King. Also, House of Stairs, a juvenile book about a group of kids who wake up one day in a place where there are only stairs, and find themselves the subjects of a behavior-modification experiment. Creepy.

[Heath Doolin]

The movie was Scanners Auntie.

Books: I am Legend by Richard Matheson. Anyone who thinks they have read vampire stories and have not read this one is a idiot. Plus it has one of the uber cool endings. Scared the crap out of me

The Mist by King. My favorite and simple one of the best short stories I ever read. It has tension, breakdown of traditional humanism and one hell of a creepout enemy, a thick mist that houses horrors. My stomach went cold when they found the two soldiers from the military facility. Highly recommended also is the audio "3-d surround" where you are part of the story of "the Mist". Very Very Freaky.I dare you to listen to it in the dark.

Movies: Night of the Living Dead (original),
The Sixth Sense (serious-scared the crap out of me)

[Sam Stone]

BONE SUCKING TURTLES!!!

This is interesting - my wife and I were BOTH terrified by this movie ("Terror Island" or "Island of Terror") when we were kids. Two people here mentioned it as well. Yet, this is the cheesiest, schlockiest horror movie you're ever going to see. We recently found a copy and rented it. You know that scraping sound the monsters made when they moved? That sound is the plywood base of the prop being dragged across the studio floor...

So why is it that this movie scared so many kids? Is it because it was on TV a lot when we were young? Or is there something in the child psyche that is terrified of having its bones sucked out?

[Diane]

Books -

Pet Sematary (Originally, King was not going to release this movie. His editors wanted him to make it less grusome but he refused. Eventually, he won out and the book was released in the original version. He has said (a few years ago) that out of all his books, Pet Sematary scared him the most.)

Any and all true crime non-fiction (The Perfect Victim, Kids Who Kill, anything by Ann Rule.) I am addicted!

Movie -

Show Girls

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>^,,^<
KITTEN

Coarse and violent nudity. Occasional language.

[sunbear]

Really scary books, as are the buyers:
Astrology for idiots
Finance for Dummies

[AuntiePam]

Thanks, Heath -- I was thinking Reanminator but that didn't seem right.

Island of Terror -- saw it on release at a drive-in -- the stuff that oozed from the dead critters looked like chicken noodle soup.

Anyone here see The Boogens? A yappy little wannabe dog got it in that one. I think it was yanked through a heating vent or something.

King's short story The Raft was okay too.

[Diane]

King's short story The Raft was okay too. King's short story The Raft was okay too.

Certainly no Academy Award winner, but have a sick love for the Creapshow movies (The Raft is on one version). They are like a Tales From the Crypt, King-style.

"Thanks fer the ride, laaaaa-dy."


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>^,,^<
KITTEN

Coarse and violent nudity. Occasional language.

[Torgo]

"Thanks fer the ride, laaaaa-dy."

Jerry Lewis was in "Creepshow"?

Movie: "The Blair Witch Project", "The Abominable Dr. Phibes" (particularly the scene where the guy is put to death by scorpions), "The Legend of Boggy Creek."

Book: "The Amityville Horror"--read it as a boy and every night for months kept an eye out for red pig's eyes in my bedroom window.

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Tim
"My hovercraft is full of eels."

[Misha77]

My favorite scary books have already been listed, but as far as scary movies are concerned, did anyone see Prince of Darkness? (John Carpenter, 1980's, Alice Cooper had a bit part in it.) It was cheese, but the part with a video of the future, full of static, really gave me the chills.