As part of their programming for the week leading up to Halloween, Bravo is showing a series, over four nights, called “The 100 Scariest Movie Moments.” The first 25 “moments” were on last night (Tuesday, 10/26/04).
Trouble is, these “moments” seem to be whole movies, rather than just certain scenes in movies. Here they are so far:
28 Days Later
Creepshow
Zombie
Cat People
The Birds
Jurassic Park
Child’s Play
Pacific Heights
Village of the Damned
Shallow Grave
Night of the Hunter
Alice Sweet Alice
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Black Christmas
Wizard of Oz
Blood & Black Lace
Blue Velvet
The Others
Terminator
The Howling
Poltergeist
Dracula
The Brood
Signs
Evil Dead
…right now I’m giving 100 to 1 odds of the Number One moment being the shower scene in Psycho.
Rather than make this a discussion of the scariest movies of all time, which has been done to death on these boards, let’s do the scariest scenes of all time. Therefore one movie may have multiple scenes on your list.
My top 9 (in no particular order, save for #1).
In Poltergeist, where Robbie looks at his chair and sees the clown there, then looks away, then looks back at the chair and the clown is not there :eek: ! The camera cuts to Robbie on his bed, and the clown is behind him, with this evil, maniacal grin. It’s giving me goose bumps just writing about it. (Made #80 on the Bravo list)
In Jaws, where Captain Brody is throwing chum off the back of the boat. The camera cuts away and then back to Capt. Brody, and the shark jumps out of the water right behind him.
In The Shining, where the wife looks over Jack’s manuscript, and she sees page after page after page of the words “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”
In Signs, where Joaquin Phoenix is watching the TV in the closet and he sees the video footage of the alien walking past the birthday party in Mexico. (Made #77 on the Bravo list)
In The Exorcist (re-release), where Reagan is at the doctor’s office. You see the look on her face all of a sudden go very grim: I interpret that as the point where Pazuza completely took posession of her.
In The Ring, where Samarra comes crawling out of the TV.
In Poltergeist, where the oldest daughter pulls up in the cab and screams “What’s happening!?!?!?!” That’s the best characterization of pure terror that I’ve ever seen in any movie.
In The Ring, where the two teenage girls are giggling and laughing. They go downstairs, and while Amber Tamblyn’s character is looking at the TV, you see a shadow dart across the reflection of the TV.
In Signs, where the boy is sitting by the coal chute and the alien’s hands reach through the grate and grab his head.
The ‘Jason jason jason jason’ thing in FT13th1, the old man screaming in pain in the beginning of the Blob and the music in the Omen creep me out, but as far as moments go…
Bronze: Dressed To Kill - The last scene Silver: Body Double - The attempt to halt the drilling Gold: - American Werewolf - The dream within a dream
I was going to start this thread myself … but I’m glad someone did!
For me, the scariest movie moment ever is in The Shining when Danny sees the two little girls in the hallway, and then the flashbacks of them on the floor. Freaks me out just thinking about it!
Well, it was a stupid, boring movie for the most part, but “the Exorcist III” (the one directed by Blatty) had one of the most genuinely frightening “shock” scenes I’d ever seen - the nurse on duty during the night-shift (If you’ve seen this, you know what I’m talking about.)
The re-release of the original “Exorcist” - spider-walk scene.
The original “Halloween” - when a supposedly-dead Michael Myers sits bolt upright behind Jamie Lee Curtis.
“Silence of the Lambs” - Jodie Foster stumbling around in the pitch-black basement, as seen through Buffalo Bill’s night-vision goggles.
“Carrie” - Amy Irving dreaming of visiting Carrie White’s grave.
Original “Nightmare on Elm Street” - when ‘Nancy’ falls asleep during class.
“Dawn of the Dead” remake - first ten minutes.
“Carnival of Souls” - when ‘Mary’ visits her psychiatrist, and his chair swings around to reveal he’s really her undead stalker.
One of the only movie scenes that ever gave me the chills (and still does no matter how often I watch it!) was from The Ring:
[spoiler]
Rachel has come home after finding Samara’s corpse in the well, and falls asleep on the bed with her son…he wakes up and asks about the girl, if she’s still in the dark place, and Rachel tells him that she set her free…
"Why did you do that? You weren’t supposed to help her! Don’t you understand…?
The cat being discovered in the locker in Alien. Just makes you jump out of your seat, and then feel very foolish for doing so.
Many others here I agree with, but the Exorcist just didn’t scare me in the slightest, though friends I was with shrieked at the spider walk, it just looked like cool gymnastics to me not scary at all.
Personally, I didn’t find that moment to be particularly scary. It was certainly creepy though. (“Uh-oh…”)[SPOILER]I have a number of friends who are authors and because of that scene, I have never, ever been tempted to peek at their manuscripts without permission. Why look for trouble, right?
By the way, the trivia page on the IMDB for The Shining says The book that Jack was writing contained the one sentence (“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”) repeated over and over. Kubrick had each page individually typed. For the Italian version of the film, Kubrick used the phrase “Il mattino ha l’ oro in bocca” (“He who wakes up early meets a golden day”). For the German version, it was “Was Du heute kannst besorgen, das verschiebe nicht auf Morgen” (“Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today”) For the Spanish version, it was “No por mucho madrugar amanece más temprano” (“Although one will rise early, it won’t dawn sooner.”)
Can you imagine being the production assistant on that set?
“So what did you do today?”
“I typed the same damned sentence in Italian over and over and over again. I hate Kubrick!”[/SPOILER]
What is it about little girls in stories that’s so freaky? A ghost of an adult man? Yawn. A ghost of an adult woman? Boring. A ghost of a little boy? Snore. A ghost of a little girl? Chills down my spine.
Thanks for the link, Agrippina. I’m going to spend some time on that one.
I don’t know what it is about these two little girls that freaks me out so much, tdn, but I think it’s the use of children in general in horror films that gets us deep down. Sometimes I think it’s because children are so innocent and you don’t want to see them get hurt (like in Poltergeist). Other times I think it’s because children are supposed to be innocent, and they aren’t (The Omen).
I got to thinking about that, too. I’m not very good with horror movies in general. In fact, that just might count as the understatement of the year. (After my boyfriend and I watched Ringu while lying on his bed, he snuck the remote control behind me and turned the TV on right as I was getting ready for bed. He then spent the next 15 minutes banging on the bathroom door and apologizing profusely while I freaked out inside. Boy did I feel stupid afterwards.) Nevertheless, Halloween, Friday the 13th and Alien aren’t the movies that freak me out. Slash and gore gets boring after a while, and the “scarymusicscarymusicscarymusicBOO!”-thing is quite a cliché by now.
It’s stuff like The Ring, The Exorcist, or Salem’s Lot. Anything with an evil child just makes me horribly uncomfortable. I think it’s the thought of “children = innocent and good” that has been ingrained so deeply into us. Little Timmy should be riding his tricycle up and down the sidewalk, not coming after you with glowing red eyes and bits falling off him. My mom once commented on the same subject: When you have kids, you want to worry about stuff like “skinned knees” and “first day of school” and “please don’t pick your nose and loudly slurp the contents into your mouth in public”, not “my child has evil supernatural powers and wants to kill everyone”.
Exactly. The most excruciatingly scary horror moments are vignettes from the mundane world gone twisted. As Stephen King put it, “It has to be Mom eating snakes in the living room.” For me, one of the scariest moments in a horror film is the very end of Rosemary’s Baby, when Rosemary has been seduced by her maternal instinct into nurturing the infant Antichrist. That’s why the verious versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers are so frightening; it’s not the pod scenes that are horrifying, but the scenes when we realize that a loved one has lost, for lack of a better word, his soul.
Here is the Bravo list, updated to include 75 through 32 (revealed Wednesday and Thursday). Note that the list includes whole movies, but refers only to certain scenes within those movies.
Candyman
Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory
Blood Simple
Them!
The Sixth Sense
The Stepfather
Re-Animator
The Black Cat
Duel
The Tenant
Marathon Man
Near Dark
Deliverance
The Wolf Man
The Devil’s Backbone
The Beyond
Fatal Attraction
Cujo
House of Wax
Single White Female
The Vanishing
The Changeling
Demons
The Phantom of the Opera
The Dead Zone
The Last House on the Left
Diabolique
The Thing
Nosferatu
The Sentinel
The Wicker Man
The Game
It’s Alive!
An American Werewolf in London
The Hills Have Eyes
Black Sunday
Dawn of the Dead
Peeping Tom
House on Haunted Hill
Cape Fear (the older version; not the 1990’s one)
Aliens
The Hitcher
The Fly
Pet Sematary
I note that many of these movies aren’t really “horror” films in the classic sense (Willy Wonka???) but have some creepy scenes or a general creepiness about them?
Tonight and Saturday are going to be the payoff, obviously, so I suspect that the images we’re seeing in the intro (that pinhead guy from that movie, what the hell… I can’t think of the name of it; Jack sticking his head through the door in The Shining, etc.) are going to be shown soon.
While we’re on the subject, can someone please spoil Burnt Offerings for me? I’ve seen bits & pieces of it here and there, and I remember the tag line from the trailer like it was yesterday.
But I’ve never seen it from beginning to end. What was behind the door? IIRC, it was
That, and the unknown. The scariest part of The Exorcist was the pan-in shot of the door to Regan’s room. You knew something terrible was behind that door. Thus, the door itself becomes scary. Had they hung a sign on the door that read “Warning: Very frightening pea soup inside”, that would have removed all fright factor.