Movies: What scares the crap out of you?

Cafe Society
21

Any suspense film that is wholly unpredictable (I’m thinking of **Blue Velvet ** specifically) sets me on edge. It’s the fear of what might happen; I remember being scared because I kept expecting Frank Booth to rape Jeffrey.

Another quality that makes a movie scary is the suspension of disbelief; I know that sounds painfully obvious but it is a rare quality in any film, especially horror flicks. I may be disgusted by the gore in your typical slasher picture but I never believe for a minute that I’m really there and it’s really happening. Not so with The Blair Witch Project; the more lost those kids became in the woods, the more lost, disoriented and scared I became.

22

I gotta go along with the mirror thing and the quick-glimpse.

23

I just saw the Extended Edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. There is a sequence there that wasn’t in the theatrical release with a character called The Mouth of Sauron. His own mouth is, well, deformed, like his face is rotting away but he is still alive. I found the effect extremely creepy, and for me it was probably the scariest image out of any in those three long films.

24

Dude, I was worried about that too! Blue Velvet works so well at being scary because you have NO idea what Frank was going to do next. When Dean Stockwell came out in makeup and started crooning, I could’ve pissed myself. Similar scenes for me include Michael Madsen’s Mr. Blonde torturing the cop in Reservoir Dogs, and Butch and Marsellus being at the mercy of the hillbilly kidnapper/rapists (and their Gimp) in Pulp Fiction. Those scenes convey such obscene levels of horror because there’s NO WAY the audience expects any of that. I hear Takashi Miike’s film Audition ends up going in that direction as well.

25

Yes, yes it does. Miike’s Ichi The Killer also does, especially in one particular torture scene.

I just looked over my shoulder while reading this thread.

26

Normal things that aren’t.

See Ringu.

For some reason, spooky things with hair are really bad to me.

27

I saw this thread, and opened it specifically to post Trilogy of Terror.

I saw that flick on the tube… and slept that night with my lights on. I was twenty-five at the time.

28

I saw a movie when I was about 11 that freaked me out completely, and still causes me to check the door locks at night. I believe it is titled When a Stranger Calls Back. This movie isn’t a horror film at all, but the suspense is incredible! What is freakier than being stalked by a ventriliquist?

29

The faces thing really bothered me about 6 months ago, for a period of a month or two. I can’t even imagine now why it freaked me out so much, but during that period – egads.

Combine that with freaky little girls, clowns, and things unseen, and you have part of the plot of a Tales From the Dark Side episode that kept my lights on for about three nights straight. I don’t remember it much but it was about a mother and daughter living alone in a creepy house filled with carnivalesque antiques, getting occasional visits from hapless victims. The daughter was a sickly-sweet little girl of impeccable niceness and unbounded evil. She looked completlely darling and innocent, except she wore a clown mask to hide some horrible disfigurement. One of the scariest things I’ve ever seen.

Religious imagery done in just the wrong way can do it to me too. The first trip scene in Altered States freaked me right out. Flashing images of an old man dying while holding a burning Bible, interlaced with the ritual sacrifice of a crucified man with a goat’s head – which had an overabundance of eyes and horns. An insomnia special!

Why do some things freak us out? We can rationalize and intellectualize all we want, but I think that would be missing the point. A really good horror movie bypasses all reason and goes straight for our primal, irrational fears. We can’t think our way out of it. It goes straight to our primitive lizard brains.

30

What’s funny is that the first two segments are so incredibly not scary that you have to wonder why they were ever included.

31

Many of mine have been mentioned but one thing that gets me is rocking chairs moving by themselves.

Especially if it is in a nursery.
For me one of the scariest bits in Poltergeist was the kid tracking the storm.

One one thousand, Two one thousand Three one BOOOOOOM

One One thousnad, Two one thou BOOOOOMMMM
One ON BOOOOOOOMMMMMMM

32

I wish things in movies would scare me. Every time somebody raves about how scary a move is, I make it a point to watch it. And I wait, and I wait, and I wait…and I wait…

And then the movie is over and I’m left thinking “Um…ok…”

I will never stop searching for the movie that scares the shit out of me…or at least makes me jump. It’s become I’m Holy Grail.

33

I’m most affected by things that are subtly weird to the point where you want to shit your pants. The best example I can think of is the “Red Room Scene” in Twin Peaks (episode #2, aka “The Backwards-Talking Midget part”), where everything about it is inexplicable, weird, and comes off just as creepy as hell. From the weird backwards speech of the midget and dead Laura Palmer (“Let’s rock!” - “Where we’re from, the birds sing a pretty song…” - “Sometimes my arms bend back”), the bizarre decor of the room, Dale being inexplicably 25 years older - the entire effect is “so weird that it’s scary.”

Actually, most of Lynch’s movies are predicated on this effect, like the “Silencio” scene in Mulholland Drive, the entirety of Eraserhead, and the best scenes in Blue Velvet. Another movie that springs to mind is the very Lynchian Jacob’s Ladder, which does things to this effect throughout the entire movie.

But it’s a very fine line - the second something just seems contrived, or “Weird for the sake of being weird,” the entire effect is shattered.

34

Just a slight hijack rant - I absolutely despise the attempt to use “creepy children” or “scary nursery rhymes” in order to make a movie “scary.” Something about it just seems to incredibly cheap and obvious to me, and this trend actually seems to be on the rise rather than on the decline. There’s like 3 movies out right now that use “spookee nursery rhymes” in the commercials, and it just makes me roll my eyes.

35

I’ll give this more thought at work tomorrow to form a better list of things, but this will have to suffice as I’ll probably forget it tomorrow.

First, I’ve posted a few times how The Ring is right up there in the top 5 and probably the scariest I’ve seen in a few years.

To explain that and the following, you have to know this: I hate scenarios where what isn’t supposed to happen, happens. And happens only to frighten/harm normal carbon-based oxygen converters. Generically ghost stories, but not limited to ghosts.

A few come to mind.

Dolls. Friggin dolls come to life to kill people. :shudder: I’m not talking Chuckie-style dolls. We’re looking at cold, emotionless dolls. Some eerily reminicent of Karen Black. My sisters lost a few Barbies that night. I’m not kidding. I was going Bill Cosby Chicken Heart on them. (Bonus points if you know the bit I’m referring to.) :wink:

The Woman in Black. I started a thread just to find this on DVD. Not many conventional scare scenes, but you’re shown just enough to know there’s a pissed off ghost out to hurt anyone she can. And sometimes the anticipation of a scare can be just as good as something suddenly appearing. Though, that’s covered as well. I’ll never be able to stay at a B&B in London.

Anything with wierd movements. This one isn’t really about movies, just those that have these kind of scenes. Gothika used this technique pretty well in a few scenes. And The Ring was masterful, IMO, showing the deadie crawling from the TV screen.

Also, 2 Twilight Zone episodes come to mind. One was on last night. In that one, a woman was in a dept store to shop for a gift for her mother. Nothing was right about it. Turns out later she was a mannequin given life once a year for a month. I hated when all the other dolls came to life and seemed to follow her too closely before being let in on her being one of them.

The second (I think it was the one where an astronaut was in a sensory deprivation chamber) was a guy that found himself alone in a town, but filled with mannequins. (I wonder if this was a bad year for studios to pay union scale?) :smiley: Anyway, none of them came alive, but you just knew that at any minute they could. Eesh.

In the Night Gallery episode The Cemetary, Roddy MacDowall murders his uncle, then watches a painting near the staircase change to show the corpse dig out, walk to the house and knock on the front door, just as there’s a knowck on the front door. A lot like Monkeyshines and the 3 wishes. Good stuff.

36

Complete agreement here.
And:
The River Wild–nasty Kevin Bacon and the white water dangers.

Open Water–not just the sharks, but the idea of being totally alone out there.

37

The Nastiest Thing Ever Made. Do not click the link if you have not seen The Ring and/or value your soul. It is less horrible in still-life than in full motion video, but this does not make it any less the Nastiest Thing Ever Made.

38

For me its getting a glimpse of something thats out of place: Signs while a pretty average movie had some great examples of this (the figure on the roof of the barn, the leg disappearing into the corn-field) or not quite being able to make out enough detail to determine an object: In the French film Brotherhood of the Wolf the first shot of the beast moving in the fog.

39

That part scared me so bad that I’m surprised I didn’t shit my pants - literally. The combination of the quick cut to it with the high-pitched frequency squeal startled me so bad that I had an anxiety attack and had to take a tranquilizer!

40

I watched it for the first time on DVD, while alone, at night. When that happened, I did a double-take, at which point my brain tried to rationalize that that thing could not possibly have been as nasty as I interpreted it to be; it must have been the combination of the quickness and the element of surprise that did it. So, I picked up the remote, rewound, paused on it, and stared at it in gaping horror for a full five seconds.

Let me assure you: it ain’t any better in freeze-frame. The quickness of the shot was actually a service on the part of the director; he didn’t want the entire audience to have heart attacks and die.