Last night as I was staring up at the ceiling waiting for some sleepiness to happen, I started thinking about my top three scariest movies. Why this was supposed to help me sleep I don’t know. But in the dark of the room, I was noticing how things you can see out of the corners of your eyes seem to disappear when you try to look directly at them and can therefore seem like they are moving. Anyway I began to think about the movie Communion, which while not particularly bloody or violent was probably the scariest movie I have ever seen, if only for one scene. Christopher Walken is laying in bed at night, then sits up and squints over to a darkened corner of the room - when suddenly an alien peeps around the corner. Scared the ever living shit out of me! I guess just because I have done the same thing so many times - what is that over there in the dark? Bleaharehrueugeghrgregh!
My other top two are Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (despite having never watched the TV series, for some reason I understood what was going on the whole time and it scared the crap out of me! I guess I just felt like if demons were going to possess people that stuff would be exactly the kind of thing they would do) and Pet Sematery (thank you Stephen King for making the most comforting thing in that movie the hideous mangled ghost of an accident victim!) I still get chills thinking about these three movies.
I have seen lots of horror movies and I love zombie movies, but for some reason Jamie Lee Curtis being stalked by an unrelenting unkillable psychotic murderer in a hockey mask is less scary to me than an alien peeping around the corner of one’s bedroom. Go figure.
Well, if you go by how scared by them I was at the time, the first one would be one of the Omen movies. There’s a scene where a scientist has a sample of Damien’s blood, and it’s not human blood. He compares it to pictures of slides of other types of blood and discovers that Damien’s blood is wolf blood.
So, he leaves the building - or TRIES to leave the building - to alert the authorities or something. On his way down in the elevator, something fails, and the elevator falls just enough to knock him off his feet. As he’s lying on the floor, there’s this sound, kind of a rasping, running sound. It’s the elevator cable, and it falls with the weights attached, so it slices completely through the elevator car and the man, cutting him in half at the waist.
I think I was in fourth or fifth grade when I saw that, and it freaked me out so badly I could not go to sleep until I figured out what to do if I were ever in a similar situation (elevator, that is, not antiChrist). I finally decided that I would get into one of the corners and cower there. Thinking about it still gives me the willies.
The Exorcist. To me, religious themes have the potential to be far scarier than some masked boogyman or slasher du jour. When this movie first came out its effect was absolutely sensational on the public, myself included. Many of us knew little of the full story behind Revelations and this seemed mystically terrifying, even if we knew better. People were barfing at the appearance of the subliminal face, that ghastly, putrid, submerged for a couple of weeks w/ leaches face. I’ve not seen the movie since, nor do I care to. Everything else has, in my mind, paled in comparison.
My parents once let my sisters and me stay up waaaaaaaaaay later than usual one night to watch the Christopher Lee movie Dracula on TV. I couldn’t have been older than seven or so. It scared the heebie jeebies out of me… especially Dracula climbing up a wall and looking right at Jonathan Harker, and the “bloofer lady” in the cemetery preying on local kids. ::shudder:: I didn’t get to sleep for a long time after the final credits rolled.
Ghanima, do you mean “Jamie Lee Curtis being stalked by an unrelenting unkillable psychotic murderer in a *Captain Kirk *mask?” (from Halloween?) I believe it was the Friday the 13th series that had the hockey mask.
Anyway, the movies that freaked me out, for some reason was “Poltergeist” and “Fire in the Sky.” I was 15 when Poltergeist came out.
Darn. I always get my fictional psychotic mass murderers mixed up. Was it a Captain Kirk mask? That makes it even more frightening, doesn’t it?
Both of those movies are pretty terrifying. I just asked my coworker this question, and she is a HUGE horror fan, and her top two scariest movies? Death Becomes Her and 50 First Dates. That made me laugh.
I had forgotten it til you mentioned it, but yeah Communion was pretty scary. I think Poltergeist or Amityville Horror probably did the most frightening for me, possibly because they involved children. There was also some zombie movie I caught 5 minutes of on TV that gave me nightmares as a kid but I don’t know what it was.
There was that made-for-TV movie about terrorists who blew up Charleston, SC with an atomic bomb. I’m 99% certain that it was a Ted Turner (TBS? TNT? It was back in the 80s) production and about 80% certain that it was called “We Interrupt This Broadcast…”
For me it was Carrie. I was 12 and it was my first horror movie that had no monsters in it. I went to see it with my friend and her mother because John Travolta (then known as Vinnie Barbarino) was in it. I had nightmares for about 3 months afterwards. It took 25 years for me to see it again… still jumped at the end, though this time I was expecting it!!!
Trilogy of Terror (last segment only).
The Eyes of Charles Sand (probably terribly hokey but it freaked me out as a child).
Carrie.
Parts of The Shining - I’ll never pull back a shower curtain on a dripping faucet again.
Jaws - still won’t go in water over my head.
Anyone seen basket case? Lord have mercy :eek: I guess it might be funny seeing it as an adult, but as a wee lad round your mate’s house it gave me sleepless nights for years.
Though I didn’t see the movie when it first came out, the *commercial * for Suspiria could send me running out of the room. Does anyone else remember it? All you could see was the back of a woman’s head as she sang some creepyass song, (something like . . . roses are red, violets are blue . . . ) and then she turns around and her face is a skull :eek: When I finally saw the movie years later it still didn’t freak me out as much as that commercial. Hell, I can’t even search for it on Youtube because I might, ya know, *find * it.