Burnt Offerings did me some serious damage when I first saw it many years ago. The scene in the swimming pool was especially upsetting, as was the ending.
When I was a little tike I watched Poltergeist with my brothers - certainly the scarest thing I saw as kid.
As an adult it Mulholland Drive. That image of the devil (burn) coming out from behind the restaurant is just. . .
every time I go to a Denny’s I look away from the rear of the building, half expecting the devil to pop out and get me.
I’m just not scared by horror films. I find them boring. But there is something about Lynch’s images that haunt me.
Maybe I’m misremembering it. I thought I had it right, but it’s been a long time (30+ years).
Back when I was a kid, the old Alabama theater used to do a Saturday morning Fun Club. Everything was a quarter: ticket, drinks, popcorn, candy, you name it. And you got to watch a boatload of cartoons, a Flash Gordon reel or two, and then a feature-length movie.
One day they showed The House on Haunted Hill starring Vincent Price. That movie scared me so bad I nearly pissed on myself, and I had bad dreams for a week afterwards. Twenty some-odd years later, I saw it listed on some late night creature-feature show, so I settled in and watched it again, ready to be scared shitless once more.
It’s a freaking comedy! :eek:
I have no idea what was going on in my life at the time that made me so terrified when I saw it the first time.
The only other movie that has ever given me a good scare was (the first) Alien.
“Jaws” was the first movie to really scare me badly. Even to this day, if I have a dream that has any sort of water in it, and I am submerged, it is a fair bet that a giant shark will appear. The movie does not scare me as much anymore, and in fact I enjoy watching it, but I do have a real fear of deep water.
“Arachnophobia” also scared me really badly. I have a fear of large spiders and even though that movie was not entirely serious and had many humorous scenes, the spiders freaked me out completely. I really cannot watch that movie again because of it.
Ditto “Misery.” One scene in particular freaked me out to the point I had to turn off the TV. That is another one I will not watch ever again.
Surprisingly, the other movie to really scare me was “The Ring.” Normally paranormal stuff does not scare me in the slightest. But for some reason that greasy haired little girl was terrifying. Go figure.
Candyman was a really bad one for me, but the absolute worst was The Amityville Horror.
Walloon - I should have heeded your warning - I just made a HUGE mistake and watched that trailer AND looked at the picture. I don’t think I’m gonna be right for awhile.
Was it the scene with the sledgehammer? Because that scene scared me so freakin’ bad!
You dirty bird!
I was actually coming back to claim this one. It wasn’t until 2-3 years ago that I was able to re-watch it (a good 20+ years after seeing it the first time), and those scenes STILL scared the hell out of me. The pool scene was one of the contributing factors to my ongoing fear of water. And at the end-
They killed the kid! They’re NEVER supposed to kill the kid! :eek:
Oddly, the movie itself didn’t scare me, but after watching The Exorcism of Emily Rose I had one of those “holy shit- please can we sleep with the lights on” moments. I was thisclose to falling asleep, and opened my eyes to see something dark moving near the ceiling. Laying perfectly still, wondering how to alert my husband, feeling my heart trying to work its way out of my chest, I suddenly realized it was
My thumb; my hand was resting on top of my head, with my thumb barely in my line-of-sight, and my normal slight tremor was causing my thumb to look like a scary dark shape moving back and forth on the ceiling.
:smack: Boy, did I feel stooooopid. But props to the “Emily Rose” folks for coming up with a subtly scary movie.
Going back a ways (though not as far back as Psycho), I recall a 60s thriller that kept me awake nights as a wee pre-teen: Wait Until Dark. Audrey Hepburn, Alan Arkin, hunting for the blind lady in a dark apartment . . . scary! Gasoline, fire, him jumping out and grabbing her ankle–guess it pales in comparison to the likes of movies like Hostel and Saw (neither of which I’ve seen), but the suspense was killer!
But I think the most scared I ever was while watching a movie was during the original Halloween. Okay, my scared-shitless threshold is low, and I don’t seek out movies that scare me on purpose (will never willingly see one of those torture porn abominations), but a good thriller that tweaks me just enough to make me have to peek through my fingers is always welcome.
There was another ‘blind lady’ thriller starring Mia Farrow in the same era as Wait Until Dark–she rode horses and someone’s boots (hers or the scary killer’s) were a key plot point. What’s that movie? Yeah, I know, IMDB is my friend.
Great scene. Well, fraction of a scene; it’s less than a second.
[But they’re not garden shears …]
and only one special effect. My vote for number one.
Since my favorites have been taken, I’ll bring up ‘The Third Man’. All social commentary and myth-inversion [there must be a word for that] aside, that was one creepy movie. The lighting, the camera angles, the foreign language … even ferris wheels look creepy to me now.
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I liked that the four Alien movies were all of different genre.
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Mine is weird, but thinking about still gives me the heebie-jeebies. It was a screen adaptation of “Alice in Wonderland”. It was a made for TV movie for “The Wonderful World of Disney”. It was not the cartoon, but live action. I still don’t know why but I had nightmares for weeks after that involving disappearing cats and giant worms that wanted to eat me. Haven’t gotten over that one yet.
Ugh yes. I didnt write it out because I didnt want to even think about it. Thanks!!!
I saw The Shining (the Kubrick one) when it was an ABC Friday Night Movie or some such in the early 80’s. I would have been nine or ten. Many of my nightmares up to then had consisted of me being alone in a big house with huge, looming hallways and lots of places for the monsters to hide.
Just the scenes of Danny riding his Big Wheel down the halls were enough to freak me out completely, let alone the rest of the movie.
Another one that didn’t scare me so much as left me feeling creeped out and unsettled for quite a while after. I can’t remember the name, but it was a TV movie in the early 90’s that was closely modeled on the Orson Welles War of the Worlds broadcast, in that it was played as a straight newscast from beginning to end. It involved an unknown and unseen alien civilization that had hurtled three asteroids toward earth, aimed at Moscow, Beijing and Washington, and big enough to destroy each. Most of the report was from a newscaster at NASA Mission Control. I remember it good job building up the suspense.
At the end, everyone is cheering and celebrating because they’ve managed to destroy all the asteroids just before it was too late, when suddenly the cheering dies down and all the Mission Control people start staring in silence at the big board. The cameraman jostles to an open space so he can get a shot of what they’re looking at: hundreds of asteroids aimed at every part of the world are now coming down. The movie ends with the feed cutting out and turning to static.
Anyone recall the name?
It was Please Stand By, or This Broadcast Will Not Be Interrupted or something. I remember laughing at it. They had a ‘This is fiction, not a real newscast’ disclaimer several times during the show.
I read a Stephen King book once (probably over 30 at the time). Nightmares for a month. I have avoided his works ever since. My response to the OP:
Jaws. On first and maybe second viewing. Now I just love it.
Wizard of Oz, preschool at the time. The flying monkeys. Had to leave the room on subsequent airings for several years.
Trying to think of a third.
I watched it around midday just before I went in to work the evening shift. When I got home I couldn’t go to bed til the sun came up.
Particularly bad bits were watching the spirit walk down the corridor under the security camera and then suddenly appearing looking right at the camera, and when the woman is so terrified she tries to hide in her bed…and it’s IN her bed. Oh, and when she is going up in the elevator and you can see the little boy standing on every floor looking in at her.
And japanese killer pain spirits can come out in broad daylight!!! Aaaagh!
I later watched the the original japanese film and it just wasn’t as scarey, possibly due to the lower budget.
Comedy my Aunt Fanny! I saw this on cable at my grandmother’s house when I was very small. That scene where the girl is in the basement, and she’s bending over doing something, and then she straightens up and that freaky old crone is standing behind her with her old crone’s claws up in the air, and then she levitates out of the room…I screamed like a little girl. Which I was, but still, that was some scary stuff.
Years later, watching it as an adult, I knew what was coming but I screamed anyway.
But the movie that scares me the most is Night of the Living Dead. I don’t like zombies, not one bit. The way they just keep coming, and if one so much as scratches you you’ll become one yourself and start chewing on your nearest and dearest, and then Michael Jackson shows up and forces you to dance…ugh. It’s not fun-scary. It’s just scary-scary.
My mother really, really, really hated the whole build up and ad campaign for the movie Rosemary’s Baby. She found it quite disturbing. And had no intention of seeing the movie.
Of course, her name is Rosemary, and I was born a month before the movie was released. But, except for that time my parents went out to lunch with that nun I was a perfect angel. Really.
Jaws. Definitely Jaws. I was 8 or 9. I didn’t swim at all that summer, and I lived on a tiny freshwater lake.
I’ve posted it before and I’ll post it again: Jacob’s Ladder with Tim Robbins.