The Exorcist and The Amityville Horror. A bunch of Lovecraft’s stuff. Richard Matheson’s Hell House didn’t exactly scare me, but the depiction of the worship of evil just made me really uncomfortable. King’s “1408” is a doozy, too.
When I was a kid, I got a book from the library called Baleful Beasts and Eerie Creatures. It has a story called “The Patchwork Monkey” that scared the holy hell out of me. It was so bad that my mom asked the librarian to get rid of it. It’s long out of print, but I bought it online a year or so ago. Not nearly as scary as it was when I was seven, but there’s still something unsettling about it. (Not to mention the fact that, hand-to-God, my cat gets puffy at it every time he goes near it.)
The work Alan Moore et alia did on Swamp Think 30 and 31. I read it in the daylight and got scared. The rest of the work Moore, Veitch, Totelben, Woods, et alia did on Swamp Thing was brilliant, but not as scary as those two issues. Anton Arcane is back and the whole world is in trouble.
For books, The Family, a book about the Manson family, was so horrifying that I made sure all the doors and windows were locked.
Other books that I found pretty frightening and/or creepy were *The Talented Mr. Ripley *by Patricia Highsmith, Harris’ first three Hannibal Lecter novels (*Hannibal Rising *sucks canal water), and *Salem’s Lot *by King. Fritz Leiber’s novel *Conjure Wife *had a helluva jolt at the end of Chapter 14.
Generally, I think horror works best in shorter stories. M.R. James wrote some pretty scary ones, as did Poe, le Fanu, and Lovecraft and H. Russell Wakefield’s “The Frontier Guards” is the best horror story, IMO. Also, Ted Sturgeon may be most famous for his works about love, but he could scare the hell out of you when he wanted to; read “It” and "Bianca’s Hands.’
For movies, I would say the originals of Psycho and The Haunting. Silence of the Lambs is pretty good, too.
There’s one with a woman with no eyes and long stringy hair. BLECH!!!
And Harold. Oh, and this weird looking dumpy creature…okay, I can’t describe it, but they were all so off. Honestly, I’ve never seen pictures like that before. How did the illustrator achieve that effect? I love it, and am terrified by it…but how?!
Yeah! That was The Haunt. That one was particularly bad, and I can still picture it even today. I can’t believe these books were in the young readers section.
I remember a weird, dumpy cat in the story called When Martin Comes, or somesuch. That one actually had kind of a comedic ending, but the picture was still freaky. I don’t know how he drew pictures like that.
Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter. It was just so…real. But really, as a kid (and even moreso no as an adult), the idea that people could torture and kill you just because some madman gave the word was just scary.
ETA: I google imaged Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and as soon as that…that LADY thing from the Haunt came up, I could not suppress a shudder. I own these stories, I’ve seen them hundreds of times. She will never stop making me shudder. Also, the Thing? Do you guys remember this? I hate that I can’t look at it for too long without getting uncomfortable. I’m not seven anymore!
This was one of the scariest for me too. Something about the winter setting, and all of the ice and snow, seemed to contribute to the malevolent feeling.
Also, The List of Seven - especially the part where the heroes are trapped underground, and the mummies are coming after them …
I’ll second World War Z, Ted the Caver, and The New Mother.
While Richard Matheson’s Hell House didn’t scare me per se, the accounts of what MADE the haunted house haunted… well… HAUNT me. It certainly kept me up most of the night after reading the book.
In a similar vein to the Caver story, The Dionaea House had a creepifying effect on me when I first read it.
Scared isn’t exactly the right word but only one book has contained a passage that made me put the book down and walk away. It was the torture scene in William Goldman’s “Marathon Man”. I did go back to the book after a short break.
Thank you! I’ve been trying to remember the name of that for ages - it’s what led me to read House of Leaves.
I’ll add my vote to Communion, too. I’m inordinately scared by aliens, though, so it may just be me, but it creeped me out so bad that I didn’t finish it.
But really, as a kid (and even moreso no as an adult), the idea that people could torture and kill you just because some madman gave the word was just scary.