I am always looking for scary movies to watch. I prefer the kind that make you so scared you don’t want to walk around the house without a baseball bat (and only then for an emergency).
The ones that get me:
The Shining
Amityville Horror
Nightmare on Elm Street*
*I know it’s not that scary but the idea that something can get me in my bed is gets me. Your bed is supposed to be the safe place.
Zombie movies do it for me. Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project did too.
It’s the anticipation, not the actual creepy events that get me.
The Exorcist. It looks dated now because we’ve all come to expect what happens, but when it first came out (and years after that), it’d scare the heebie jeebies out of you.
The only movie to still scare me is the Witches (based on Roald Dahl’s book). It scared me when I was eight, and it STILL scares me and gives me the occasional nightmare. Freddy and Jason ain’t got nothing on the Grand High Witch.
Okay, the Exorcist scares me, too. To me it looks more real because it doesn’t use lots of high tech CGI stuff. The stuff that’s too clean looking just looks fake to me. This looks like it could actually happen. And the spiderwalk scene–that’s just too uncanny valley for words.
When I was a kid, the movie that scared the pants off me was Caltiki, The Immortal Monster. It’s pretty tame by today’s standards, but one scene in particular gave me nightmares for years:
One of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen was the original Aliens. It probably won’t make you worry around your house, though.
In that case, you may want to skip Poltergeist. But don’t! I love that movie and it still scares the tar out of me.
Saltire is absolutely right. Aliens was/is really scary.
After I saw* Silence of the Lambs * I was so scared I couldn’t sleep for a week, and I was 30 years old at the time 
Paradise Lost and Paradise Lost Revisited. They’re documentaries about the West Memphis 3 and they gave me nightmares.
John Carpenter’s The Thing is freaking terrifying.
“The Ring” is one of my all time favorites. So atmospheric and such a wonderfully haunting score. Plus, the portal of evil is an ordinary object (TV) that we all have in our own homes. I honestly had trouble looking at a turned off one for several days after I saw it.
'70s horror can be pretty effective. “Trilogy of Terror” is definitely dated but you’ll be surprised how unnerving it is after you’ve seen the very end. Same with “Burnt Offerings”. I saw that for the first time thrity-four years ago and many times since and I was still all tensed up for the ending when I watched it the other night.
I saw it a few years ago when they re-released it in the theaters. I knew the basic story line and how it was going to end and it still freaked me out! It’s the scariest movie I’ve ever seen.
I wish I could describe the kind of good, creepy, eerie feeling one gets when you see the character standing in the corner…why it’s so creepy and how. The world is made of two kinds of people. Those who think BWP is crap, and those who totally get that inexpicable chill when that scene happens.
I am so with you on this. I liked it overall, but even with its flaws, that last shot made the previous 90 minutes totally worth it. I had that image in my mind’s eye for weeks when I tried to go to sleep :eek:
The original Phantasm.
That scene totally made the movie. Also, whatever scene it was when they were inside the tent and heard something that sounds like children crying or screaming, and then the sides of their tent start trembling like little hands-like things are beating on the outside of the tent?
Sometimes, when I’m camping and wake up in the middle of the night, that scene comes back to me and I wig the fuck out.
It does make me worry whenever I’ve got an inexplicible cough, though.
Count me in the second camp. I loved that scene.
One movie that still scares me is 1980’s The Changeling. That is the only movie, before or since, that has ever made my husband jump in his seat. It gets a little hokey toward the end, but has some very spooky moments, and is based on a (supposedly) true story that happened at the Henry Treat-Rogers Mansion in Denver (since torn down).
Not a movie, but a TV show: Twin Peaks. Here it is, almost twenty years later, and I still get the creeps when I hear an owl hoot, see and hear fir tree limbs rustled by wind, or see a single traffic signal swaying in the breeze. Not to mention BOB, about whom I had a nightmare at the time.
It was mostly sizzle with little steak, but damn! Lynch rocked the atmospherics.
I saw that movie by myself at a drive-in, and it scared the hell out of me. (Hey, I was bored and wanted to see a movie. I’m really not that pathetic. Really).
The Grudge has to be the scariest movie I’ve seen in a long, long time. Japanese film makers seem to have the edge on scary movies these days.