I was about 9 or 10 when I saw The Andromeda Strain - not even a frikkin horror movie! I swear, I didn’t sleep for 3 years. I had to keep getting up in the middle of the night to make sure my parents were still alive. The one shot of the dead guy in the car with the gash on his forehead from hitting the steering wheel…ugh!
I gathered the courage to rewatch it a few years ago, and nothing.
We watched The Ring for the first time last night, and I guess I didn’t get it.
It was sort of scary, more for my wife than me, but I thought there were a bunch of holes in the plot.
Spoilers -
[ul]
[li]They said Samara was not alone in the loft in the barn. Who was up there with her? My wife thought it was Darby, the doctor’s retarded grandson. I thought it was the evil entity that possessed Samara.[/li][li]The mother survived because she made a copy of the tape. But the discussion at the end was, “what will happen to the people we show it to?” Is the fact that she showed the video to other people what allowed her to survive? [/li][li]Was Samara just evil, or possessed? [/li][li]I assume the mother tried to kill Samara because she was evil, and killing horses. Did the mother have a birth child, and Samara killed her, or just Samara? [/li][li]Is the Japanese original better than the English language one?[/li][/ul]
Regards,
Shodan
The first scary movie I ever saw was Poltergeist. The tree thing outside the window always creeped me out! Always! It probably still would, but mostly for memory.
The scary face guy in the Exorcist-- Oh man that is SCARY! The fact that they added a couple more instances of him in the new version, just creeped me out that much more. Goodness gracious.
Since it’s been mentioned several times now… When Samara climbs out of the television in The Ring, I just about wet myself. I’m not even kidding, I had been holding it in, and that nearly made me lose control. (I’m glad I’m not the only person who was creeped by that movie.)
The Blair Witch Project creeped me out indirectly. I didn’t get scared by it while watching it. But it stuck with me, and the more I thought of it, the more creeped out I got.
End of Carrie gets my vote too.
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The TV
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She survived because she made a copy of the tape. That breaks the curse. As for other people, well, they’ll die unless they make a copy as well.
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The mother killed Samara because Samara kept putting images into her mind and driving her insane, as well as the horses (who kept committing suicide). Samara was the mother’s birth child. They went overseas and got herbs and stuff to help conceive. Evil voodoo or something.
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I think it all depends on which one you see first.
I saw Alien in the theater. I was four at the time. Consequently, very few horror movies work on me. A few that have found chinks in my armor (some Spoilers follow):
Blair Witch: Wasn’t all that scared in the theater. Thought it was a neat, atmospheric little film, and dismissed it pretty much as soon as I got home. Then I went to bed… I don’t remember much from the nightmare I had, but a brick wall with the bloody handprints of children featured prominently.
Event Horizon: This one got to me in a BIG way. Almost had to leave the theater, I was so stressed and freaked out. And then Sam Neil became evil and started kung-fu fighting Laurence Fishburne, and it all turned stupid.
Arachnophobia: This one’s a little unusual. I was watching this on video with a friend of mine, and the creepy-crawlies were starting to get to me. I was getting nervous, so I started fiddling with this pencil that had a toy bee on the end. The wings had come off, but the stinger was still attached. As I got more into the film, I forgot I had the pencil in my hand. On the screen, a spider is creeping up on an unsuspecting townsperson. It gets closer and closer, and the tension is getting tighter and tighter, and finally it jumps out and bites. Startled, my hand clutched reflexively on the pencil, driving the plastic stinger into my hand just as the spider sinks its venemous little fangs into the characters flesh. I screamed like a cheerleader.
Night of the Living Dead: Halloween night. I’m home alone, watching this for the first time. Right at the climax, when I’ve reached Terminal Fright Velocity, someone bangs on the sliding glass door right next to my head. Turns out, two of my friends had come over to visit, but instead of ringing the doorbell and waking up my parents, they jumped over my fence so they wouldn’t wake up my parents with the doorbell.
Two more from friends of mine:
Aliens, also in the theater. I watching with my friend Shane, who was three years older than me, and subject to no little amount of hero worship from me (I was eleven at the time, and he was an actual teenager who still liked to hang out with me). Anyway, the marines find the lab with all the dead face-huggers under glass. Once of the marines leans in close to look a the 'hugger, and it suddenly lunges at him and scrabble against the glass. Shane jumped so bad he sprayed his peanut M&Ms over the three rows in front of him.
House: In the beginning, a teenaged kid is delivering groceries to an elderly woman’s home, but she’s not there. He goes through the big, creepy house looking for her, and finds her (in a very startling reveal) hanging from the rafters. I’d seen it before, and knew the scare was coming, but my friend had never seen it. So right when the camera suddenly pans onto her dangling corpse, I leaned over and grabbed his thigh as hard as I could. Got a good shriek out of him. 
I saw The Shining when I was WAY too young. I’ve tried to watch it recently, and I can’t even get through it. Amazingly scary. As far as a single scene… Beats me. I watched most of it with my eyes closed.
To me, Ring wasn’t so much scary as disturbing. It’s been a few months since I’ve seen it, and I still freak out if I think someone’s hair is over their face. And bean_shadow, I noticed the bit with Aiden’s video when I first saw it, but blocked it out until now. Thanks a million 
.
Other than that, I haven’t seen that many horror movies. I scared really easily as a child, so I avoided them until recently, and even now I don’t seek them out.
Wow, no one’s mentioned Pet Semetary yet. Oh. My. God. I saw it the first time when I was 11 or so. Scared the bejesus out of me… But not nearly as much as it did when I rented it and tried to watch it a year or two ago.
I got as far as the scene where the wife’s sister (can’t remember her name) shoots up in bed.
After getting ahold of myself and making certain I wasn’t going to puke right there, I stopped the tape.
IIRC, she scuttles across the floor at some point too. Aiiiiieeee!!
Also, there’s a scene from Excorcist III (I’ve never seen the others, I’m such a wuss) where you see a hallway and some…thing in white shoots past… the horror, the HORROR!!
Umm… Lets see… Sixth Sense, where the little girl reaches out from under her bed. HELLO! WE NEED TO WORK ON OUR COMMUNICATION SKILLS!
Stir of Echos and What Lies Beneath scared me the entire way through.
I’ve been scared by several movies, many listed here, but one stands out in my memory as a scare/shock combo.
I was a frosh in college and a group of us went to see Angel Heart at the student union. Overall a creepy, atmospheric movie, but not too bad until…
[spoiler] the very end when Mickey Rourke’s character realizes who he really is, he’s sold his soul to the devil, Lisa Bonet is really his daughter as well as lover, etc. Don’t remember the specifics, but Lisa Bonet’s character is found murdered, Mickey Rourke is responsible even though he doesn’t remember doing it.
Two cops are there, one holding LB’s toddler son. One cop tells Rourke “you’re gonna rot in hell.” Rourke says “I know.” Then a shot of the baby with FREAKING GLOWING EYES AND A DEMONIC EXPRESSION!!! Cut to credits, w/ MR decending into “hell” in an elevator. [/spoiler]
I guess it was because it was so unexpected. I had a single dorm room that year, and I made one of my friends stay over with me that night. She gave me so much grief.
The Blair Witch Project certainly did it for me, but I think the scene in The Vanishing (not the remake) where we find out what happened to Saskia has probably stayed with me the longest.
Yep, that one did it for me too. I watched it late at night on a black and white television in an empty house. As soon as the credits rolled I was switching lights on and finding something funky on the radio.
Oh, dear, I completely had forgotten The Vanishing. I saw it while I was in the hospital, and though I was exhausted from having had an operation, I couldn’t sleep the whole night. Freaked me out real bad.
The first time I remember ever really being scared while watching a movie was during the scene in the 1962 “To Kill a Mockingbird” when the dog, ravaged with rabies, is growling and barking its way up the street. (Before Gregory Peck / Atticus Finch shoots it down)
When I was nine, I was at a sleepover at a friends house. Bigscreen TV, and something possessed her parents to let us (who both still scare waaay to easily) watch ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’. Now, a totally unscary movie. It really sucked. But it was the first horror movie I saw. We were sleeping in my friends living room, which has a huge sliding glass door that opens to their backyard. The very last scene in the movie - where the guy jumps through the window at the girl - scared me so bad. Later that night, as my friend and I tried to sleep, her dog started scratching against the glass door. Couldn’t sleep for a week.
The shower scene in Pyscho got me, of course, and I’ve yet to be able to watch The SHining. And the Sixth Sense creeped me out - the first time my parents left me at home at night (they were out at a party til late), I watched it, and got freaked.
On a slight hijack, over winter break, I was having this exact discussion with my mom and a cousin and uncle Christmas Eve. Grandmother and various other relatives got back from mass. Somehow, aunt overhears our discussion - we were in the glassed-in sun room, and talking loudly. She sneaks up in the dark, and all the sudden, rakes her nails against the glass and screams like a dying cheerleader. I seriously spilled my water all over.
Ok, truthfully, that’s the scariest movie I’ve ever seen, and the reason I’m afraid of clowns. However, I saw it when I was four so I don’t count it. Boy, did my parents ever pick the wrong movie to take me to that night…
Jaws is my favorite movie. I saw it in the theatre during its first release when I was six years old and was petrified. I watched it again at every opportunity, esp after we got HBO. But I could never keep my eyes open again to see the head until I was sixteen or so.
This scene is actually a reshoot. After Spielberg observed a sneak preview’s audience reaction, he decided he could do better with this scene and had his team back into the pool again.
Mine is definitely, without question, the “bear-job” scene in The Shining. The movie has been creepy and disturbing up to that point, what with the general insanity simmering away, and the shock-cuts, and the blood coming out of elevators, but that one scene was where it just went careening over the edge. My reaction was pretty much the same as Shelley Duvall’s – “Holy crap I did not just see that.”
The final shot in The Blair Witch Project, with the guy standing in the corner, gave me the creeps like I can’t describe.
The beginings of The Ring and Scream both got me more than anything else in the movie, because I was all anxious about what horrible things were going to happen. Both movies kind of petered out after the openings, IMO, because they blew their suspense wad at the beginning.
And about Psycho – I first saw it when I was in college, long long after I’d seen the shower scene dissected shot-by-shot in all kinds of film classes and “best of” compilations and such. So I was all anxious and nervous and heart-thumping until the scene, and then of course when it played out it didn’t do much for me. But the scariest scene in that movie, at least for us “second generation” viewers, is a little bit later, when Mother just runs out of the room and somewhat casually stabs a knife into the private investigator’s head, sending him careening down the stairs. I totally didn’t expect that, and it was at least as masterfully done as the shower scene. There’s the build-up of suspense as he’s climbing the stairs, the disorienting overhead shot as she silently runs out of her room, the shock value of the violent stabbing as you’re wondering what just happened, and the slower, disorienting shot of him falling down the stairs. And then you’re left with the creepy feeling that they’ve just killed off all the protagonists in the movie – what could possibly happen next?
In no particular order:
Jaws - Floating head
The Ring - Ending scene (not gonna spoil it)
The Exorcist - Rotating head
Blair Witch Project - Standing in the corner
Anything with spiders will keep me awake for two days.
My mom was so scared of the shower scene in “Psycho” that she had a clear shower curtain for years.
My friend Jewell and I went to see “Signs” one night, and we both were so scared that we grabbed each other and screamed through the entire movie–even though it had huge plot holes. It was scary.
A couple weeks later, we were over at my neighbor’s house babysitting, and we had to close all the drapes because we were talking about “Signs” and we got creeped out. Pathetic, but true.