Pulp Fiction, when Uma gets a shot in the heart.
I’ll have to agree with The Ring/Ringu, and the 1982 The Thing(what a great movie!)
My contributions are any of the vampire scenes in the 1979 Salem’s Lot. Saw it with the babysitter when it first aired on tv, and have loved it since. In south TX, there used to be (maybe still is) a car dealership called The Glick Twins. When I first saw those signs, I almost peed my pants.
A scene in Something Wicked This Way Comes, when the father reaches for The Bad Guy to stop him–the hand! THE HAND!!! It’s pretty low on the gross-out, but I still can’t watch that shot.
Aside from scenes already mentioned, these moments did a number on me when I saw them -
Blade Runner - When Rutger Hauer crushes a man’s head with his bare hands.
Rosemary’s Baby - Rosemary’s dream sequence when she’s drugged and subjected to the satanic ritual. (Roman Polanski has said that this was heavily influenced by a bad acid trip he took once.)
Murder on the Orient Express - The opening montage scene, showing the events of a (fictional) kidnapping based very closely on the Lindbergh kidnapping. A little bit of an odd one I know, but I was a wee young lad when I saw it, and the music was really creepy and kept me up for days.
The Shining—“Come play with us, Danny.” Those little girls kept me up at night for a week after I watched that movie for the first time.
I generally have a hard time watching gore, but the scene in Pan’s Labryinth where the rabbit hunter’s son gets stabbed repeatedly in the face by a fairly blunt object disturbs me still.
Two words: Flying Monkeys
Another that is (surprisingly) unmentioned:
Friday the 13th. It’s over. Our mentally and physically exhausted heroine has survived. She floats along in a canoe on a placid lake. Then sun is up. Birds are singing. But then…Jason attacks!!! Sent the entire theater into paroxysms of terror.
Hands down for me is the “peeking-around-the-dresser” scene towards the beginning of Whitley Strieber’s Communion.
The most terrifying, horrific two seconds of my childhood (repeated over and over, of course).
Even worse - at the end, when Roy Baty is chasing Deckard around, and Roy starts having some kind of pre-death convulsions, and sticks a roofing nail through his hand to control them. They did it perfectly - he starts the nail in his palm, and the skin on the back of his hand tents up around the nail until it’s finally taut enough to puncture.
I came in to post this very scene. Had me riveted to the screen - I could not move.
I’m not easily freaked out. I’ve seem most of the movies or scenes mentioned already in the thread and not too many of them really scared me, but the scene in the Exorcist III where the statue of Jesus opens it’s eyes still scares the whimpering shit out of me to this day.
Friday the 13th where Kevin Bacon is laying in the bed and the hand reaches out from under the bed, holds his head down and the arrow comes up through his neck.
The little girls in The Shining. My wife’s cousin has twin girls who look just like them. The stand next to each other when they are talking to you and sometimes finish each others sentences. They give me the creeps.
Oompa-Loompas.
That’s an incredibly difficult scene for me to watch, particularly because it’s so surprising (it’s the first really violent thing you see in the movie), direct, and cruel. The victim is still alive after having his face completely smashed in.
It perfectly sets up the character of the Capitan, but it really bothered me for a long time after first seeing it.
*Edit: Also horrible is when the doctor comes across the tortured rebel, whose hand has basically been cut in two.
Someone mentioned the curbing scene in American History X, and I’ll agree and add the later rape scene. The rape itself is bad enough, but there’s something about the large inmate smashing Ed Norton’s bald head against the tile of the bathroom wall that just about made me ill.
The twin girls from The Shining stuck with me for years as being just so… creepy. And the sound effects that coincide with their appearance makes it that much worse. Or better.
But the one scene that freaked me out like no other in my life, including many slasher/gorey/horror type movies, wasn’t from that type of movie at all. It was in Babel. The scene in which the nanny is wandering scared through the desert with the two kids. It had me hyperventilating, so frightened with fear for those kids, I had to leave the room. I’m not usually affected by movies to that extent, and even ‘child in peril’ type movies don’t typically bother me as I’m able to separate the fiction from reality. But that scene nearly turned me into a basket case.
This will seem tame to the more horror-related or gory examples above, but the moment when Pink (Bob Geldof) appears at the fogged glass after having shaved his eyebrows in Pink Floyd The Wall always gives me shivers. Love it!
The guy in the bag that suddenly jolts in Audition
All of the scary parts of The Ring especially at the beginning when they flash back really fast to what that teenage girl looked like in the closet when they found her. Also the tape of Samara at the mental hospital was really creepy.
The worst for me is the footage of what happened 7 years before to the crew on the Event Horizion The constant screaming is so scary. The blood down the faces and just ahhhhhh. No one screams that consistently in horror movies. I feel like in real life you would just keep on shrieking. Horrible.
Excluding everything I saw on The X-Files:
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The scene with the General stitching up his own face in Pan’s Labyrinth (nobody in that entire theatre could watch it),
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The scalping scene in Nurse Betty.
Liberate…tutame…ex…inferis
Maid Marian’s “ass to ass” scene in Requiem for a Dream. Jennifer Connelly is my one and only celebrity crush and that scene just killed me.