We’re watching Fail Safe (1964). It just ended. I’ve often thought that Johnny Got His Gun (1971) was the most depressing film I’ve seen. But I’ve always thought Fail Safe was the scariest’… and most bleak.
I really like Failsafe, but On the Beach, also packed quite the punch and was even more bleak.
I might have said Night of the Living Dead, because that movie scared the bejeebers out of me when I was 14. But I also just finished watching Fail Safe, and while it is a lot different than Living Dead, it is perhaps even more frightening.
While I truely appreciate Failsafe as being very damn scary, I am starting to come to the realization that a Dr. Strangelove type of situation is actually becoming more possible.
A irrationable person in power with oddball fanatical beliefs starting a nuclear war doesn’t seem too far fetched anymore.
I’ll go with the classic answer to this question, The Exorcist. It’s scary but not realistic, which in my book means it’s scary in an enjoyable way. Horror movies that are overly realistic just don’t do it for me.
As far as my initial reaction, and not with hindsight, definitely has to be the 1982 version of the Thing. Midnight TV showing.
Suffice it to say I didn’t get much sleep afterwards.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was not only always possible, much of the premise of the story and piercing dialogue was actually based on the lectures of RAND Corporation nuclear strategist and later Hudson Institute founder Herman Kahn (and satirist Terry Southern, who introduced the sexual innuendo that permeates the movie) despite being ostensibly based on Peter George’s novel Red Alert. From the binder labeled “World Targets in Megadeaths” to the Russians implementing a “Doomsday Device” that they didn’t bother to inform anyone about, the film was incredibly incisive and shockingly prescient.
I didn’t sleep soundly for years after watching that movie as a ten(?) year old. The fantastic practical effects on that film still squig me out––especially the dog, and the spider-head––far more than any CGI tentacles, and certainly more than the quasi-prequel/remake/whatever that was tragically unconvincing.
But the bleakest film I’ve ever seen is Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, N.Y.
Stranger
While watching The Wizard of Oz sometime in the 1980s, my father told me when he was my age the flying monkeys scared the hell out of him. I was perplexed because nothing in that movie was frightening. I first saw NotLD circa 1986 and I was 9 or 10. Was it scary? Not in the least.
Roger Ebert helped me put it into context. He wrote that when he saw NotLD there were a lot of children in the theater. A lot of horror movies back then were schlock films that really weren’t all that inappropriate for kids. But then you have this new movie where the deaths are fairly violent and gruesome (for the time) and the heroes die. It was like a slap in the face to those kids.
I sometimes wonder what movies that scared me as a kid would cause a 12 year old to look at me and say, “You were a wimp, Uncle Odesio.”
Scary? Depressing? Or both?
Come and See
Hereditary
Scariest and most distressing is Carrie, but mostly because of the final scene. The lone surviving girl goes to Carrie’s grave with flowers, full of sympathy and sorrow. But it ends in total shock and terror when Carrie’s hand grabs her from the grave, and her dream becomes a nightmare. The girl’s mother tries to calm her hysterically screaming daughter, but that’s her life from now on: haunted by nightmares of Carrie the rest of her days. Eek!
I agree that Exorcist is in the hunt.
Wait until Dark …my gf at time landed in my lap.
Hepburn was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama, while Zimbalist was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture.
No spoilers 
On the Beach - bleak beauty - the book is even better.
The Day After for real life scaring
Oh yeah Bambi at a certain age
The 1970s remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Scary and depressing.
I have to admit that Come and See is one of the few movies I have ever walked out of a theater on; not because it is a bad movie but because it was so intense and horrifying, especially as you are seeing it from the perspective of a young boy experiencing the horrors of war.
Stranger
Blue Velvet. Every time Dennis Hopper comes on the screen, I want to leave the room.
The thing about horror movies is that they’re fantasy. Yes, Monsters From Outer Space, Zombies, and Demons From Hell are scary, but you know they can’t happen. Fail Safe, and yes, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb are frightening on an existential level because they could actually happen.
Saw it once. Bored the hell out of me (and my friend who was so anxious to see it). At this stage, I couldn’t tell you what it was about.
So I’m sensing a pattern here…
I don’t think you can underestimate the effect of growing up with the fear of instant nuclear destruction.
My personal entry in that genre…
There is no way to describe how terrifying that was to a kid growing up in the UK in the 80s. Whether its still terrifying i couldn’t say as I’ve never had any desire to rewatch it.
Agree that this is the scariest movie ever, but for different reasons.
I married right out of grad school, and while I perceived of myself as an independent, fearless woman, the truth was that I had zero experience being totally alone at night, since I had always lived with my parents, in a dorm, or with my boyfriend/husband.
Hubbie’s job involved considerable overnight travel, so I found myself alone in our DC-area house many nights. In a routine that cracks up the older me, whenever I was home alone I would move the dresser in front of the bedroom door so that no criminals could get into the room where I was sleeping.
Anyway, one night while alone (in the early days of cable, nothing like the streaming services we have now, but still full of choices) I decided to watch The Exorcist. Remember how I said we were living in the DC area? Well. The shots of Georgetown in the movie were completely familiar to me. That was super close to where I lived.
I turned off the movie, I was so scared.
I first saw it around age 4. They terrified me and I even had nightmares. At age 7 or 8, I doubt they would have fazed me.
I think the movie that scared me the most the first time I saw it was The Shining. I was literally shaking with fear. But I was pretty high, which may have contributed.
I think I must have seen the Exorcist parodied so many times that when I finally saw it I really didn’t think it was that scary.
I’m gonna say The Ring (American version) is one of the few films I really found scary.