Night of the Hunter
Waiting… Waiting…
Night of the Living Dead. That movie is just so damned scary, and with such a sad ending. The new George Romero flick comes out this summer, and it’s just a sign of the times how this new film compares to his old black and white film (judging by the trailer)… it’s like two seperate universes. Even his slow moving zombies of Day of the Dead in the color film in the 80’s seem miles away from how they’ll be portrayed in his new film.
The main reason to me the original b&w NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD is scarier than the color sequels, remakes & parodies-
you know in the color films, that latex organs are being gnawed upon & that red paint is gushing all over. In the B&W original, you don’t know what the hell the zombies are eating- could be actual organs for all you know!
I second NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (“Leaning, leaning…”)- the scene of Shelly WInters at the bottom of the lake with a strand of hair across her throat like a gash! JEEPERS!
Lest us also not forget something variously titled MASK OF THE DEMON, MASK OF SATAN or, as I knew it, BLACK SUNDAY starring Barbara Steele & directed by Mario Bava. The demon-nail-mask removed from her corpse-face revealing the critters crawling through the holes was HellaCreepy!
One last comment per THE MUMMY…
“He went for a little walk… You should have seen his face.”
For many younger people this will be a foreign concept but I watched many, many movies and cartoons growing up on my parent’s Sony Solidstate black and white TV in the 70’s. So in that spirit I’ll submit THE WIZARD OF OZ. I didn’t see it in color until something like 1977. Blew my mind, to see OZ in color. And as scary as Margaret Hamiliton is in color, to this day I find her more terrifying in grayscale.
That’s the one I would mention, and as a child I was scared by the flying monkeys and the woman on the bicycle in The Wizard of Oz.
For me it was “The Thing”. :eek: The one with James Arness. (Probably post '60’s though)
The first movie I remember seeing was The Day the Earth Stood Still I had nightmares for weeks.
After that, I ate up the B/W Sci-Fi/Horror B movies, until They Came From Outer Space The creatures were vaguely marine looking. They sucked people’s brains by biting them in the back of the neck.
I know, its sounds completely lame, but it scared me BAD.
**The Visit ** (1964) with Ingrid Bergman and Anthony Quinn was pretty shocking.
Shudder. Second this and raise you the scene where the governess looks out across the lake in the rain to see Miss Jessell sat amongst the reeds.
Also the bit where the beetle crawls out the mouth of the stone cherub near the beginning…
I’m not sure what year it was, but Frankenstein scared the heck out of me when I was a kid. It was that hand crawling across the floor that got me. I think I had to sleep with my sister for a week after watching that movie, since I was too scared to sleep alone.
1.) Psycho, of course.
2.) The Thing from Another World literally gave me a nightmare when I was a kid.
3.) The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus – I can’t believe that this showed up on a local TV channel in prime time in the early 1960s. It must have been a programming glitch, like the one that caused Night of the Living Dead to be shown at a kiddie matinee circa 1970 (and resulted in Roger Ebert’s column trashing the flick). THCoDF, AKA Eyes Without a Face, is a French horror flick that has, as its highlight, a rather clinical depiction of the skin being removed from as woman’s face. freaky stuff for an impressionable kid. (I just saw that there is a re-release of this flick on DVD last month).
The Thing from Another World
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Village of the Damned
For me, it was an old episode of Iron Horse,a TV wesetern, where the bad guy smashed a man’s hands with a big blacksmith’s hammer. Geez.
More recently, we were watching The Red Badge of Courage,and during the battle scene where our hero loses his nerve, my then-10-year-old daughter quavered, “Daddy, I don’t want to watch this any more.” I guess the movie effectively conveyed the confusion and terror of war.
This movie scared the crap outta me, and still does.
Also the original Frankenstein.
I didn’t see Psycho till I was in high school. The Birds, OTOH … :eek:
Mitchum’s part in that is still scary. The scene where he meets Gregory Peck in the bar sends chills up my spine.
And speaking of spines, The Tingler scared the hell out of me when I first saw it in the theatre. Unfortunately I didn’t get one of the seats with a tingler underneath. 
The Birds was shot in Technicolor, and released in same. 1963.
Still, major-league :eek:. The stuff in the upper room when she gets trapped and they break in? I don’t do so well in basements, especially when I think there might be a sub-sub-sub soundproof basement ( " It uses the cream to keep it’s skin soft !" ), but attics have upset me ever since The Birds.
Color? Really? I must have seen it on a black-and-white TV.
(As for what happens in the sub-sub-sub basement – well, let’s leave that alone, shall we?)
The Tingler (1959)
Scared the bejeebus out of me as a kid.
“SCREAM! SCREAM! SCREAM! IT’S THE ONLY WAY TO KILL THE TINGLER!”
Same here!The two that I remember scaring the poo out of me were “Carnival of Souls” (think M. Night Shyamalan stole Sixth Sense from this?) and “The Creeping Unknown”, aka “The Quatermass Experiment”–the first and, in my mind, the best of the Quatermass movies.