Frankenstein never scared me! Marsupials do… 
Scariest movie I’ve ever seen? The Thing.
The Thing scared me as a kid, but as an adult I enjoy it. Werewolf I saw as an adult so it didn’t scare me, but good god did his transformation look painful as hell.
I watch a lot of Horror movies so nothing really gets to me any more. Sometimes the way someone gets hurt makes me cringe, but the killing and jump scares don’t.
That said, Friday the 13th Part 2 scared me as a kid. I just rewatched it a could of months ago, and for some reason it creeped me the hell out. I don’t know if it was from when I was a kid or what, but it did get to me.
Alien. I was in high school when it came out. A friend and I went to see it at one of those wide screen 70mm theaters. We got there late and the only seats left were right up front under the screen. I just about lost it when the face hugger jumped out of the egg.
The Exorcist. I was in college, both roommates were gone for the weekend. I had just gotten off of work and decided to head up to campus for the midnight movie. OK you know how early on before all the possession stuff happens, when they hear what sounds like rats scratching around in the ceiling? I get home from the movie, already sufficiently freaked out and am trying to get to sleep, when my roommate’s cat starts scratching at my bedroom door. :eek:
This. Scared the poop out of me. No other movie since has affected so.
Halloween. I used to babysit for John Carpenter and he had a theater room in his house. I watched the movie there and it scared me so much that I didn’t try another horror movie for years. I didn’t realize for a long, long time that the version he had was different than the one that was released.
After giving this a reasonable amount of thought, and realizing that there are more recent examples that test the limits of my “being scared” by a movie, I’m going to have to say it was
Horror of Draculathat first impressed me as being a truly scary movie experience. Of course, I was in my teens when I saw it for the first time, so that has to be accounted for in a “for all time” sense. Still, it WAS a damned scary movie!
Whoa! you can’t just drop that little nugget in there and pretend nothing happened.
At least tell us that he kept a model severed head in the fridge or something.
On the subject of John Carpenter i’ll agree that “The Thing” is another great but I saw it after Alien so it didn’t quite reach those peaks. Top quality though.
If you are a bachelor older than thirty, Remains of the Day is terrifying.
As for actual horror movies, probably Jaws.
It didn’t scare me but it profoundly affected me. Glad I’ve seen it, shan’t be watching it again. Personally I think I probably could have done with a breezy drive home afterwards. A cold slap in the face to blow the bad shit away.
I was twelve when This House Possessed came on TV. The exploding mirror had me trying to avoid mirrors for a while.
I was both miserable and hypnotized by the movie. Ugh, it was so unsettling.
The Thing is a great movie to watch knowing nothing. I saw it not knowing what was coming and yeah, it’s still really freaky.
Oh hell, how could I forget Night of the Living Dead? I was standing lonely one-man on-call duty in the military one night in an empty building and was flipping through the few pre-cable channels available, and came across a movie already in progress. Two people walking through a cemetery. Hmmm, what’s this about? An hour later I was ready to start stacking furniture in front of the duty room door, and did NOT sleep at all that night.
I talked about Death Smiles on a Murderer in another thread about media that scared us as kids. When I think of nightmare inducing images I can’t get out of my head, and that had the most profound physical affect on me, that one wins hands down. A lot of that is due to my age at the time and over the years I remembered that feeling and kept building on it to the point where it took me 40 years to watch it again. And now I can see it’s more delightfully cheesy than scary but the lady with the rotting face still scares the shit out of me.
The movie that is scariest to me on its own merit, is either [The Ring[/] or * It Follows[/]. I love both these films’ use of sound, and atmosphere. Neither one is particularly gory but each has one brief, really disturbing image the dead girl on the beach and the girl in the closet, respectively.
I watched the Thing on HBO when I was about 15, late at night with the sound turned way down so I didn’t wake my parents up, sitting really close to the screen. When the guy got his arms bitten off trying to defibrillate the infected dude I about shit myself.
[REC] is right up there for me. Not for people who hate POV/shaky cam, but if you “liked” Blair Witch you should check it out.
I love horror movies, but they never scare me. I can’t seem to suspend enough disbelief to think of them as plausible. But a good psychological thriller can scare the pants off me. I think the scaredest I’ve ever been by a movie was Play Misty For Me, closely followed by the original Saw.
Exactly.
Not a horror movie, but intense.
The shinning.
And as already mentioned, the last scene of Carrie.
You mean, “The Shining.”
Another vote for The Thing. It scarred me for life. Granted I was only like 8 or 9 when I saw it. But it is still my favorite movie ever. It *still *gives me goosebumps when they are debating what to do to MacReady when he’s trapped outside and the doorknob starts turning.
Also another vote for The Shining. Those girls still creeps me the fuck out.
Aliens scared me for a long time too, but not anymore.
There are others, but mostly all from when I was a kid.
I haven’t seen much that comes anywhere close to scaring me anymore, though probably because I’ve grown up and become desensitized to the world and pretty much just a hollow shell of a human.
As a young teen, Vincent Price in Diary of a Madman was the scariest thing. It kept me awake for a month.