This one’s fresh in my mind: Until this past Fourth of July, I’d never seen Jaws. And while this was my first official visit to Amity Island, you don’t get into this line of work without at least absorbing the basic building blocks of The Movie That Changed Summers Forever by osmosis: The initial attack, the panicked beachgoers, “you’re gonna need a bigger boat,” etc. But I was unprepared for the surprise waiting for Hooper in the hull of Ben Gardner’s boat, an ingenious jump scare engineered from misdirection, the suspense of John Williams’ instrumental score, an alarming sound effect, and one disturbing prop. The jolt caused me to clench the beer can I was holding—splashing some of its contents on my wife. Not exactly , though we had a good laugh about it once Richard Dreyfuss returned to the surface. [Erik Adams]
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/scrolls down, scrolls down, scrolls down…”Large Marge Large Marge Lar…Woo-hoo! Large Marge!”
Mine was also the Jaws boat scene. I was six and my uncle took me to see it. We fished a lot on the coast and I was terrified of sharks for years afterward. I kept thinking I would hook something big, be pulled overboard, and get eaten.
The biggest scare I ever had in the theater? It would have to be The Exorcist. Followed by The Omen. There are those who would say that this is the lame, obvious choice. And I guess it is. But there are reasons why songs like Stairway to Heaven and Freebird always come out on top for Best Rock n’ Roll Song of All-Time. Even though neither one of them ever gets played on the radio any more. Now, if we could just retire the Queen catalog too…I would rather shove ice picks into my ears than listen to We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions one more time.
I watched The Omen on TV for the first time – I think it was on HBO several years after its release. When Gregory Peck and David Warner are in the Italian cemetery pulling the lids off tombs – I couldn’t stop watching & I freaked out. I was maybe 11 at the time.
I was 15 when this movie came out in 1976 but I got into the theater somehow anyway despite the fact that it was rated R. And it scared the living fuck out of me! The scene where the priest is trying to get back into the church and gets impaled during the lightning storm? Between this and The Exorcist, I slept with a light on and a Bible under my pillow for a few days!
I’m gonna fight you partially on Queen.
Only partially cause I will agree that those two need to be pulled from the rotation, but there’s a lot of genuinely great tracks from them that don’t get anywhere near enough radio play.
Incidentally, I’m also that guy that finds it annoying how most radio stations never seem to acknowledge Warren Zevon beyond Werewolves of London and the occasional rare play of Lawyers, Guns, and Money, so do with that what you will.
I just burned out on Queen. Besides the 2 already mentioned, my blood boils and I want to kill whenever I hear I Want It All. It seems that multiple different companies use this song in their TV commercials and you are almost guaranteed to hear it on every show, on every channel during every commercial break. It’s maddening!And I’ve had my fill of Killer Queen, Bohemian Rhapsody and Crazy Little Thing Called Love.I’m not familiar at all with Warren Zevon outside of Werewolves of London and Lawyers, Guns and Money. I didn’t care for what little I did hear from him outside of those two so he’s just not my cup of tea.
It’s like that “I Want it Now” (hotel?) Ad using the song from Willy Wonka. Either they don’t get the irony, or they’re too cynical to care.
I wrote elsewhere at the trailer fucked me up as a kid. His picking the fingers off the nanny from the railing. The music. What was up with the screaming monkeys?Saw it as an adult. I was right to be afraid. Crazy good movie. (I’m now getting chills when his nanny hangs herself at his birthday party, crying out to him that she loves him!).
I was eight, watching Attack of the Crab Monsters, a Roger Corman opus*. Atomic tests embiggen some crabs, who eat everything in sight. In one scene The Girl™ is in bed asleep, and a giant crab claw comes in through the window and grabs her. I nearly jumped out of my skin, and for a long time after I carefully closed and locked my window at bedtime.Attack of the Crab Monsters, Allied Artists 1957“From the depths of the sea… A TIDAL WAVE OF TERROR!”*I saw it in first run; yes, I’m really that old.
you made roger corman very happy!
Good ol’ Roger!
Crab people, Crab people. Taste like crab, talk like people.
Haha, yes! MST3K!
I grew up in the 70s, when peak parental neglect coincided with TV stations buying cheap movie rights by the boatload — I watched that by myself when I was four and had some vivid nightmares about it for quite a while afterward.
The defibrillator scene from John Carpenter’s The Thing. I went at age 22 with a few friends. We had heard the movie’s special effects were pretty outstanding and we all had seen the 1951 original a few times and we were big fans so we were ready to get scared. When that scene played out we all screamed like little girls.
Ah, yes, the good old days when there were no sneak peaks and teaser footage/photos on line so that when you saw the movie you were actually shocked and scared.
“Dafuck is this doing opening in June?” ~ Kids who snuck in from E.T.
Some of my friends saw it soon after it opened — in a dying shopping mall, in an otherwise empty theater with out-of-control air conditioning. Really made the Antarctic isolation come to life…Also amusingly, they were hassled by the box office attendant over whether their ID was sufficient for attending an “R”-rated movie… I think clearly the staff were hoping they could just go home early.
Just showed my already jaded 9 year old son The Thing. Thought it would rock his world, but the only moment that truly made him jump was the blood test scene. And yes, I’m obviously a horrible parent.
Ha ha, I watched that on VHS with my doctor dad, and the tension of that scene was totally deflated by his complaints that slashing the hands the way they do to get the blood is totally ridiculous! You risk infection and render that hand pretty much useless. His grousing kind of undercut the whole OH MY GOD ALIEN FROM THE BLOOD thing.
The blood scene still makes me jump after watching the film a dozen times.Best horror film ever. It’s no contest.
Show him “Alien,” that might do something
Ugh, seriously. My 11-year-old daughter wanted to “watch a scary movie” so I started light and ramped it up. Have yet to find one that she considers “scary.”
I shit you not, she openly giggled at the chestburster scene in Alien and declared it “cute.” Veronica Cartwright needed three hours to get herself together after *filming* that, and my kid was like “He he that’s cute!”
She’s probably a sociopath.
sit her down in front of EXORCIST III – that movie is full of creepy shit.i love it, since the first time i watched it was a halloween showing in my freshman dorm recroom. me and about half a dozen cute freshman girls crammed on a couch in the dark… good times.
She sounds adorable. I love it when I pick out a movie and it has an impact. I have a great pic of my oldest sitting on the couch, white-knuckling a couch cushion during the kitchen scene from the first Jurassic Park. Or my kids’ refusal to believe Darth Vader when he says he’s Luke’s father. Good stuff. My kids favorite gag of all time, well, at least back when they were little, was the “Hello my baby” scene from spaceballs. They thought that was the best joke ever written.
I’ll see your defibrillator scene and raise you one Frodo caught in Shelob’s web while she slowly creeps closer to him in the Return of the King.
ooo that reminds me of Pan’s Labyrinth where young Ophelia is running from the cannibal Pale Man. Del Toro said that Stephen King was sitting next to him during the premier and that King said it was the most terrified he’d ever been during a film. “Better than an Oscar,” Del Toro said.
My favorite jump scare of all time is when Kurt puts the hot needle in the petri dish of blood. All other jump scares are cheap POS compared to that scene. It is the piece de resistance of jump scares.
Yep, came here to say this. I didn’t see The Thing in theaters, but I damn near jumped out of my skin when watching this at home – which, given the subject matter, would have actually been a pretty appropriate thing to do.
Speaking of Carpenter, I don’t think anything fills me with as much terror as the “transmission” sequences from PRINCE OF DARKNESS. It’s SO simple but something about the whole idea rattles me all the way to my bones no matter how many times I watch that movie.
I like the idea of Prince of Darkness, but I couldn’t get over A.J. Simon’s 40-year-old grad student mustache
there was a lot wrong with that movie, and you just mentioned the top of the list.
second this – the transmissions where brilliant.Now, that’s a movie that needs a remake. Stop remaking good movies, Hollywood, remake the ones with tons of potential that didn’t quite work the first time ie casting a Simon brother.
I saw Ju-on (the original Japanese version of The Grudge) in the theater and during the pivotal crawling down the stairs scene, a girl in the row behind me put her bare foot on my arm rest and brushed up against me. I have never screamed so loudly in my life before laughing hysterically with a room full of strangers.
The Exorcist. When the telephone rang. People actually screamed.
Poltergeist.Which scene? Take your pick. The face maggots. The creepy clown. The creepy tree. The creepy medium. The creepy little girl. The creepy TV.I was 14 and I think I slept with the light on that night.
Good pick. I know the first sequel isn’t as good (or as scary), but the old cult leader Henry Kane singing “God is in his holy temple” as he casually strolls up to the family’s house—in broad daylight—was also creepy as hell when I was a kid. By the time he’s at the door asking about Carol Ann and demanding to be let in, I was genuinely terrified.
Kane was hands down the best thing about Poltergeist 2. Its a huge shame the actor passed away midway through production because the characters disappearance from the film is so noticeable.
The clown. The answer is always the clown.
It was the magotty chicken that I remember..( that was poultergeist right? or am I mixing it up with one of the other ‘80s haunted house’ movies like Amityville?’-edit-turns out it was Steak , not Chicken ..definitely a Mandala effect there as I ‘ remember ‘chicken!
You were thinking chicken because the guy had a chicken leg in his mouth when the steak started crawling on the counter.
the fake ending. People around me actually stood up and reached for their coats.
That movie always has more to offer than my memory can recall for me. Such a treat every single time.It’s all good, but without fail Diane’s primal scream in the pool unravels my nerves down to the nubs.
Huh? How does THE CLOSET SCENE not make your list?!
Didn’t sleep with my door open for the rest of my childhood!
Edit: Ohhhh, you must mean Poltergeist 2.
Paranormal Activity where Katie is standing next to her husband/boyfriend? in bed and you notice the clock in the screen is spinning showing that she had been standing there staring down at him and not moving a muscle for over 4 hours.
That first Paranormal nailed it. The tiniest things are utterly terrifying–the door opening, a sheet pulled off–because there is absolutely no explanation besides demons.
Yes, the very small but utterly inexplicable events that just got bigger and bigger. I mean, there’s nothing inherently scary about a door closing a few inches and then opening a few inches–it’s the implications behind that subtle motion. What’s doing it? It shouldn’t be happening.
Meus
When I saw Paranormal Activity during that scene the guy behind me, who had been quietly munching popcorn, said suddenly and very loudly, “OH HELL, NO!”
For me the little ghost (with the fan) was the jump-out-of-my-seat moment. (Was that 3?4?). It’s hard to explain to people how scary those movies were when seen in a theater, they lose a lot on a small screen in the living room and when I tell someone to watch them they just don’t get it.
Back in 1979 I walked in cold to a matinee of a movie I hadn’t heard anything about, but the movie poster looked intriguing. The film was named ‘Alien’.
I’ll 2nd that, although I even had warning. One day a co-worker came in to the office in the afternoon after coming from the theater, he had a look on his face I’ll never forget, and could only mumble, “You’ve got to see that movie.” I did, and he was right.
Me too. Saw it at Cinestudio on the Trinity College campus in Hartford, CT.
Saw it on opening night in 1979. (See my above post.)
I saw both it and “Aliens” on opening night. I saw “Aliens” 3 more times before it left the theater.
We saw it a second time, too. We must have seen “Raiders of the Lost Ark” fifteen times, though!
I saw Raiders once in a small place and then again at some huge theater in LA, and it was just better all around, the print, the sound, and especially the screen, which appeared new. In Vegas, where I lived, the lifespan of a new screen before it looked like someone peed on it or it had small patch on it was about 3 days.
That’s too bad. It’s just brilliant. Close Encounters was a memorable experience back in the day, too.
My girlfriend cried out loud at the end of Close Encounters. It was kind of embarrassing, and a preview of the insanity to come. She was great looking though, and has aged tremendously well. She ended up marrying some old guy who left her a rich widow. A lot of time alone and a lot of shrink sessions and she’s sane these days. She does a lot of animal charity work in SoCal.
I ran out of the theatre when the creature burst out of the pod and embedded itself in the face of the astronaut. My friends tried and failed to coax me back to my seat. I waited in the lobby for them to finish the film.
My sister and her husband walked out of “Alien” at the chestbuster scene, then went to try to make it through it when it was on a double feature with “Aliens”, but they walked out again. I don’t remember what scene it was anymore, but all I could think of when she told me was “What a couple of wusses!”. She tried to watch “Aliens” alone on HBO or something years later, and told me it was “too intense”. That’s the best thing about it!
Back in 1979 I walked in cold to a matinee of a movie I hadn’t heard anything about, but the movie poster looked intriguing. The film was named ‘Alien’. That film scared the crap out of me.Saw Phantasm (the original) at around that same time, it too did a number on me.And a few years before, there was Jaws and a few years before that that bastard Steven Spielberg did the same to me with Duel! ;-)Those four films, Duel, Jaws, Alien, and Phantasm are perhaps my favorite thriller/horror films of all time.
First R movie I ever saw. A reward for graduating 6th grade, I was so scared at some point (they were looking for the cat) that I told my parents I needed to go to the bathroom. I just needed a moment to recover; too tense!When we left, my dad just shrugged and said it was a haunted house movie in space (he’s not wrong).
“Aliens” when the team realizes they’re fucked in the first go-round is pretty great suspense/horror.
Also best trailer ever for a movie.
As a teen I went and saw Jurassic Park 3 with some friends one night. About halfway through, the cast come across a “spooky, misty” walkway inside a giant birdcage. Immediately, I saw it for cheap, obvious reveal of danger that it was. So I waited a bit, took a slow, calm sip of my drink, slowly put it back in its cup holder, waited a few more seconds, then suddenly grabbed onto my friend to my left. I scared the crap out of her, also my friend on my right, and also the people sitting behind us. Terrible movie, fantastic memory.
You should’ve timed that so they were jumpscared by “Alan!”.
‘Alan!!’
I’m a wimp, so, anyways:Conveniently enough, given the articles around here lately, The Blair Witch Project. No, I didn’t think it was real, though apparently a fair chunk of our sold-out audience did. There’s so many indelible scenes, but probably the tent attack got me the most. The kids laughing all around the tent, then suddenly something starts whapping on it, and on the big screen, I could swear you saw kid’s hand pressing against the tent from the outside. And then the very end, when they come upon the house. People were wailing and moaning in the audience by that point. Nothing good is going to happen now. I did not sleep a wink that night, or even a few nights after, for that matter. Runner up would be the T-Rex attack in Jurassic Park. I knew almost nothing about it going in, and during that steady build up of tension I thought my heart was going to explode out of my chest.
It’s Blair Witch for me, too. Like you, we knew it was fiction going in (they really didn’t try THAT hard to hide it at the time, no matter what people say these days,) but it was nevertheless a fascinating, intense, where-the-hell-is-this-going experience.The biggest scare for me was probably the first time the the camera was supposedly turned on in the middle of the night but with no lights, just hushed, terrified whispers and rustlings against a completely blank screen. It was at that moment that I realized exactly how dark a movie theater can get. Only the emergency exit sign and the dim little runner lights along the aisle kept us from being engulfed in absolute pitch blackness. That experience really captured the helplessness and isolation of the characters as they huddled together in the woods, and I always felt kinda bad for anyone who watched the movie for the first time from the comfort of their living room.
And then right after the tent attack when they take off running into the woods.“WHAT IS THAT?! WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!”True horror.
I remember that like it was yesterday. Torn between wanting to see what she was running from and desperately NOT wanting to see what she was running from
Yup. I love that they never really showed ‘the monster’. It lives totally in our imaginations. The best kind of horror does exactly that.
“WHAT IS THAT?! WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!”
Sir, a jelly donut, sir!
Remember the baby crying in the woods? I do, and it just gave me a chill, like 20 years later.
Runner up would be the T-Rex attack in Jurassic Park The moment where the T. Rex turns her head to look in the car window and her pupil dilates as she focuses. Some primitive part of my brain rolled over on its back, showed its belly and peed in submission at that point. I’ve seen the movie numerous times and the hairs on the back of my neck still stand up during that scene.
Yeah, wimp here who can second it. I’ve seen a lot of horror, but not a lot in the theater, because I get too involved. Which, incidentally, brings me to my mention:The car chase scene in Death Proof. To this day, the theatrical cut of Grindhouse remains the single best cinema-going experience I’ve ever had. That being said, during the car chase scene, I was so engrossed in the film, and gripping the seat so hard, that at one point I literally (and instinctively) tried to climb back over the top of my chair into the row behind me.
Fire in the Sky!
I was 11 years old, and the scene where Travis Walton is being experimented on by aliens was TERRIFYING. I was afraid of aliens for years after that.My father thought it was hilarious.
THIS! Seriously, that may have been one of the most terrifying movies I ever saw and I was a kid who LOVED horror movies/monster movies. I’m almost afraid to go back and watch it as an adult because my adult self will force me to re-evaluate the movie and I don’t think I want that.
Fire in the Sky is the gold standard for scary alien abduction movies. It wasn’t until years later I learned about the connections between sleep paralysis/night terrors and alien abduction which definitely helped explain why the movie felt so damn scary to me.
Somehow I came across Communion (thinking it was the book Fire in the Sky was based on) in like 7th grade and read about half of it and had to stop because I was so freaked out. I’ve never seen the movie and I LOVE horror movies.
The Silence of the Lambs, when after what seems like an eternity of suspense, Lecter snaps the handcuffs on the guard. The whole audience lost their minds.Most recently it was that particular part in the first half hour of Hereditary that I’m not going to spoil. If you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about.
“If you were freaked out by ‘that’ moment in ‘Hereditary,’ you’re gonna love ‘Midsommar’ because I pull that shit like five times in two minutes! That’s how suspense works, right? “- Ari Aster
That was quite the sound.
I read the summary on Wikipedia (I’m a sissy!) and that was enough to get me to avoid that movie.
Silence of the Lambs is one that scared me enough that I was still freaked out after walking to the car. Just driving around at night felt scary afterwards. It’s not gory, or even especially shocking, but it is very unsettling.
Went to see Silence of the Lambs, and was sitting pretty close to the screen. When they go to the full screen shot of Lecter in close-up, explaining his census taker meal to Clarice, you could feel the evil dripping off the screen.It was awesome.
An elderly man masturbating next to me when I was twelve and watching Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger. I’m not that susceptible to ‘jump scares’, can often see them coming, but seeing Carrie in a big West End cinema on the night it first opened in London obviously delivered, absolutely no one was expecting that. Or for sheer creeping horror, the final five minutes of Don’t Look Now, such inevitable, crushing desperation. And of course for sheer ‘What The Fuckery!’, large chunks of The Thing, which I can still watch and admire again and again. It appears to be on ITV3 over here ever four days, or so it seems, and if I come across it I usually leave it on. How could that film flop so badly? Bad moviegoers! *hits across nose with rolled-up newspaper*
In fairness to the old man, Jane Seymour is pretty stunning in that one.
Actually it wasn’t Eye Of The Tiger, it was The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad, and I suspect Caroline Munro may have set him off….
Good Lord, yes! It’s a wonder you had time to notice what he was doing.
Ha, I read Diabolik’s comment about Caroline Munro, and my exact words were “Good lord, yes!” Then I read your comment.
…unless it was those stop-motion skeletons that gave him a boner…
Snuck out of bed when I was 10 to watch that new sci-fi movie on HBO …
Se7en. Sloth.
Vid won’t embed.
Oh god. I watched that in college with a room full of girlfriends and my bestie jumped and kicked out in front of her…and hit the shoulder of a girl who had just broken her collarbone.
It’s not just the jump. The jump gets you, yes. But then the horror that this thing is alive hits.
I saw Se7en on a first date. The film we intended to see was sold out, and I didn’t want to come off as difficult or disagreeable so I cheerfully chirped “Sure!” when he suggested it as an alternative. Big mistake.I white-knuckled it as long as I could. But the “Sloth” scene catapulted me out of my seat. I fled the cinema in a rage. For years after that I refused to watch anything directed by David Fincher or featuring Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, Kevin Spacey or Gwyneth Paltrow. It was such an unrelentingly abject experience that I was angry at the filmmakers for years. Se7en invites the viewer to spend a few, very intimate hours with a serial killer– the most depraved killer imaginable. It’s a cinematic mind-rape.
I was angry about it, too. It seemed way too gleefully ugly to me. I actually felt bad for the people who wanted to make it.
You have to wonder exactly what excessively privileged, highly-rated artists like Fincher and Pitt think they are doing when they dump something like that into the cultural narrative…
ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS
I was, too. The thing that got me the most was the ending. It was like, “Oh, yeah, someone gets fucked to death with a knife strap-on, another has her nose cut off and kills herself, another has to cut off a pound of his own skin… but there’s one person who’s untouched by all of this depravity, Gwyneth Paltrow. And wait ’till you find out what happens to her!” I was like, you couldn’t offer one respite of hope or happiness here? It all has to be such ugliness? It really pissed me off.
Wwithout looking it up, how many people do you see murdered in Se7en?
Like the murders happen on screen, or just actual murder victims?
Because, by my count, on-screen would be one, but we actually see four. Gluttony, Greed, Lust, and Wrath. Sloth is painfully still alive, Pride is a suicide, and Envy is simply alluded to.
I saw the film in full years later; wanted to see if my initial reaction was… delusional?
I think there were 8 murders? Can’t remember exactly. Just an ugly, depraved, demoralizing story.
You only witness one murder. I believe that shows our ability as humans to be unreliable narrators. Our brains fill in the blanks to what we witnessed. It also shows how great Fincher is, in the constructing the film. Along w the writer and editor.Either way, I thinks its amazing that you only witness one actual murder but dont realize that’s the case. At least that’s what I gleam from people I ask that question.
There may be a clue in the name you are missing…
Okay, sorry, that’s a little unfair. 🙂 Especially considering that the number of people you actually see get murdered is one.
I don’t have to see people being murdered in order to feel like something is vile. I wouldn’t have the slightest clue how many people you see murdered in it. That’s not what I’m talking about.
Ookay. It was just trivia, for me.
Are you doing a trivia thing cause I know … Maybe I’m a little sick, but I thought the movie was brilliant.
I love that piece of trivia. On screen? One.
Correct. Only Jon Does murder is shown. But if feels like we saw more. That’s what I live about the film most.
Maybe the film just wasn’t for you and the people involved weren’t mind-rapists? Just a thought.
Considering the fact that Se7en is one of the most lauded horror films in recent memory, I’d say that the majority of viewers probably disagree with my assessment.
But I stand by it nonetheless.
I completely agree with you. P.S. But it did give us William Shatner’s head in a box, singing.P.S.S. I always pronounce the name of the movie as “Sezzen” because of that stupid fucking 7 which looks more like a z than a v.
“Sezzen”Thanks for the giggle.
Also, Morgan Freeman Unboxing
Prehistoric unboxing!
Everyone’s gonna experience something cerebral like this differently, and frankly I think that’s where it’s at its best. Your mind will define your reality, your values predicate your experience.The first time I saw it I was scared out of my mind. My buddy had the poster up in his room for months before I got to see it, and I was terrified of it. When it got to the end, and they pulled the most incredible shock twist I’ve ever seen before or since, I gained appreciation for it. Years later, when I learned that Pitt had fought for that ending, I gained respect for him.Sloth was the worst of them all, because the last thing you expect is him to start coughing. I jumped so high.I think I started to come off the scare aspect and having my attitude change after I watched it again. I started to be able to interpret the message, read the undercurrents better, and it became more enriching as a societal commentary. My wife, who I didn’t think would ever watch it, eventually did, and also found it a quite intriguing experience. She even suggested I buy it on Blu-ray, which I did.
I started to be able to interpret the message, read the undercurrents
better, and it became more enriching as a societal commentary. What was the message/societal commentary? I’m curious to hear your perceptions.
Its called a thriller for a reason. The pacing is so great. Kind of a slow burn without boring you. An unnamed city that you actual feel the grime and grit.
I agree with you, and I think it’s a brilliantly paced/shot movie. But I felt like the ending was so sadistic and unnecessary. Yes, it makes the film stand out; yes, it makes the film unforgettable; yes, society can be cruel… blah blah. It still struck me as pointlessly sadistic.
“what’s in the box?”. Kind of sad that that type of ending wouldn’t shock today. It’s what makes movies great, the time capsules they can be in our memories.
“What’s in the box” is almost a meme at this point. But I refuse to entertain making that reference without checking to make sure someone has seen the movie first. I won’t deprive someone of that moment if I can help it.
For sure only a dick would give away the details of Kaizer Soze. Hell, I hate it when someone compares films to others with similar endings… or shocking endings.They spoil the suspence.
I disagree that an ending in the vein of this wouldn’t be shocking
It’s not wrong to call it a horror, but it’s most likely listed under thriller.
Ypu say – mind rape – like it’s a bad thing.Ps. I find marriage more a mind rape. Slow and repetitive mind rape.
I wouldn’t know. After the trauma of seeing Se7en on that first date all those years ago, I never went on another date. I never married.
All because of… Se7en.
Well marriage is everything people say it is, inhumane torture.
I felt the exact same way. I hated that I’d let someone put those images in my head and got absolutely no enjoyment out of it.
Thank you. I just did not want to see the things I had been shown. Interestingly, I suspect that no actual serial killer has engaged that chilling level of depravity. The filmmakers took the basest human behavior (murder) and amped up the evil and insanity 1000%.
Just for… entertainment purposes?There is something about that equation that I will never understand.
You remind me of the aliens in Galaxy Quest who couldn’t understand the idea of fiction.
Maybe I’m just not as pious as you are. I prefer to bring a more critical perspective.
Well, I’m a priest.
Well, I’m a priest.
You’re kind of a baby
The only film that I ever saw that gave me no satisfaction, along with what felt like depressing thoughts and a lack of any redeeming quality, is Requim for a dream. An amazing film for sure. But the most horrifying experience I’ve ever had watching a film.I love sad movies, even depressing ones. But that is the only one I felt hopeless after viewing. And I’ve seen probably 20,000 films.
If you’ve not already been advised, I would strongly suggest that you avoid Mindhunter then. The entire premise of the series is the dive into what makes serial killers tick.
I find it difficult enough to deal with the twisted minds of garden-variety assholes in my life. I’m content to forego a nauseating reverie on the pathologically homicidal strain.
I didn’t take Se7en that personally, but I did have a similar reaction to The Cell, it was just murder porn.
You forgot to add that your seventh wedding anniversary is in October.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DFnB_v7vJfOg&ved=2ahUKEwjXxqrByrjjAhUEG80KHW6DB8AQwqsBMAN6BAgGEBU&usg=AOvVaw2I-_5XhUM7BoLPUUCbwXC_
This, yes. I didn’t see it in theaters and I still basically pissed myself.
Oh God. When I saw that (in the theater) I more or less literally lost my mind for about ten seconds. I actually tried to crawl under the seat in front of me and hide. I have no idea what goes on in the film for about 15 minutes following that scene.“He chewed out his own tongue years ago.”
Incredibly, I also had two of my hardest laughs in a theater during Se7en.“This isn’t even my desk!”and“If John Doe’s head splits open and a UFO flies out, I want you to have expected it”
Visually Sloth is the best but goddamn if Lust doesn’t just let you’re mind create the nightmare.
So much this. That fucking movie is so sadistic and rules so hard.
How many years later are we now? 24?… and I still wish I’d never seen that movie.
(awkward pause)Large Marge sent me.
“…….HER GHOST” in unison kills me every time
Not 100% on topic but for me it was when I was watching The Pang Brothers version of The Eye, which I was finding to be fairly fun stuff, when a rat ran across my foot. It was at the MGM Swiss Centre in London which has now been demolished because of it’s rodent problem, which I like to think was first learnt about when they heard my anguished screams.
Jeez, the Swiss Centre. I think my current TV is a bigger screen than they had in any of their auditoria. Actually in it’s last days it became useful because that was where a lot of Korean, Hong Kong and generally Eastern stuff would open for a brief run before going to VHS. The building was basically neglected, the landlords not wanting to spend money on it, so the offices, it being basically an office block, became badly dilapidated and it became hard to attract tenants, especially for the sky-high rents because of the location. That and the fact that the nightclub on the ground floor, which went through so many iterations, was one of the biggest drug hubs in London….I had something run over my foot in the Odeon, Wood Green, during a double-bill of Horror Express and Godfather Of Harlem / Black Caeser. Good times.
Yeah, it really was one of London’s shittier cinemas but I was quite fond of it just because as you mentioned it got films that weren’t shown anywhere else. I didn’t know that about the building as a whole though, it was interesting stuff, so thank you for that.
And I’ve never been to the Odeon Wood Green but I moved to Walthamstow last year so may well visit it soon, if only to see if something attacks me!
Nothing wrong with the Empire Walthamstow, only opened a couple of years ago. And if you fancy a pint afterwards, turn right out of the cinema and walk down to The Chequers.
I’ve been a few times recently as it’s only about a twenty minute walk from where I live, it’s a nice cinema but the problem I’ve had is extreme unluckiness with the audiences around me, who have heckled the films (including Toy Story 4) or loudly chatted throughout.
The Chequers is only a ten minute walk as it goes, but I’ve never been inside as it looks a bit rough, even by Walthamstow standards, I’m quite fond of The Bell, and Marvel, Mirth and Maud, though.
The Chequers used to be notorious, and run by some very dubious people in past years, with rumours that one iteration was running the rooms upstairs as a knocking shop at weekends (!), but it got entirely new management about five years ago, was refurbished and is now entirely different. Very welcoming and a fantastic range of beers.The Bell and MMM are both good, it’s The Goose you have to avoid, unless it’s late on a week nightand they’re the only one open.
Knocking shop?
A brothel.
It’s a slang term for brothel.
And before you go “Brothel”? – Somewhere men pay women to have sex.
I didn’t know any of that about The Chequers, but it made for great reading.
And I have made the mistake of going to The Goose once, but will never do so again.
I remember Horror Express as a terrifying movie. I saw it when I was 10. I won’t watch it again because it’ll ruin the memory
Oh, please do! Cushing and Lee at their very finest. Both their professional and personal relationships are very much clear on the screen. It’s a joy!And when the pair are being interogated by the slimy Inspector Mirov there is the deathless exchange- ‘But what if one of you is the monster?’ to which Cushing’s Dr. Wells replies ‘Monster? We’re British, you know’.Seriously, watch it again, an example of a film which will never be made again.
It was Telly Savalas and the zombified Cossacks that scared the shit outta 10yrold me.
I first saw that a couple years ago on You Tube. I found pretty entertaining in a ‘70s Hammer movie kind of way (it’s not technically a Hammer movie, but the Christopher Lee/Peter Cushing pairing tends to make one assume that).I also developed the strong suspicion that George Cosmatos ripped it off for the key plot points of his disaster movie The Cassandra Crossing that came out a couple years later.
Is that scene from The Ring the first time the stretchy-mouth effect was used? It’s so overused, yet it disturbs every time.
The alien autopsy scene from Independence Day. I still can’t watch it on Youtube without flinching and/or looking away a bit.
The last few minutes of Blair Witch undid me. I left the theatre so terrified, at 3 in the afternoon. Also, The Ring, when she climbs out of the tv. Ohboy.Also, Zodiac, not so much ‘scare moments’ but an unrelenting sense of dread. It was like a pressure on me. Still cant watch it and was unable to finish the book.
Hurdy-Gurdy Man freaks me out now, thanks Fincher!
Even creepier: Brian Cox in L.I.E. as an aging pederast cruising playgrounds looking for fresh meat while “Hurdy Gurdy Man” plays. And Brian Cox was also in Zodiac, I love coincidences!
OMG Blair Witch utterly destroyed me. Then we came home from the theater and our Norwegian Elkhound was – on my life, I am telling the truth – STANDING IN THE CORNER, staring at the wall, making these light chuffing barks … my husband thought it was hilarious. He’s now my ex.*
*No, not (entirely) for that.
I feel ya.I came back from a midnight screening of Paranormal Activity and somehow managed to fall asleep. At about 4am, my schnauzer (who was sleeping on the bed) stood bolt upright and started growling into the hallway. Not helpful, lil’ buddy.
Damn dogs. (j/k, they’re awesome, 14/10, would dog again)
I am going to dog again! A new puppy will be arriving at home in the next month or so. Because I can’t resist, here’s his lil’ 6-week old face:
OH MY DOG.
OK, you have to name him Blair.
The last scene in Blair Witch Project is the first thing I thought of. And I saw it at a midnight screening
The tiny handprints on the wall….
Such a simple, minimalist scene, but it still haunts me
I saw Blair Witch in the theaters, but well after it had been over-hyped as the scariest thing since sliced bread. Sat through the whole film with a comfortable sheet of film cynicism between me and the movie. I enjoyed it, I could see where it was being scary, but I wasn’t personally scared at all.That night, I had a dream that made me jolt upright, panting and sweaty with fear. All I could remember about the dream was a wall with dozens of tiny hand prints on it.
Man, our subconsciouses are just assholes.
Are we talking about the guy who disappeared, and suddenly we GET A GLIMPSE OF HIM STANDING IN THE CORNER as the surviving characters scream and scream and scream?Or are we talking the moment the camera’s dropped to the floor? And it just sits there … and sits there … and nothing else happens. Even the screaming has stopped. It stopped just as the camera was dropped, and then … nothing. Nothing …
I saw it with my folks. My mom sat between my dad and I and literally dug her nails into our legs during the last twenty minutes.
One thing I remember about Blair Witch was how completely obsessed I was with it in the weeks leading up to its release. I got completely caught up in the hype. I had a comic book that detailed the history of the Blair Witch legend, and I’m sure I watched the TV special. I was lucky enough to see it at a showing where one of the directors, Eduardo Sanchez, was there and introduced the movie. It didn’t disappoint. It scared the holy living fuck outta me, and I remember arriving home late at night after it was over and running in the house as quickly as I could because I had the overpowering feeling that something was going to get me.
Well, you should also be terrified because the Zodiac Killer is currently a Senator- AND HE WILL KILL AGAIN
The scariest part about all of that is still the moment when Cruz thought it would be a good PR move for him to try and own the gag and play into it.
As with so many things in his life, the end result was just incredibly sad in a cringe comedy sort of way.
I laughed at the last shot of Blair Witch because I thought it was a fakeout and the guy was just peeing on the wall. Then whoops, movie over!
Blair Witch was too nauseating for me to enjoy in the theater (and it was worse for my grandmother, who took me), but it was absolutely terrifying when I saw it years later at home by myself. The Ring was the opposite. I saw it once in the theater and everyone was scared shitless, but I watched it with someone else later and didn’t understand how I found it so terrifying or even a good movie.
I think Blair Witch works better on the small screen.
How about Se7en? As in everything in it?
Absolutely, but like Zodiac, not so much jump scares, other than the emaciated guy, just a dark terror.
The worst thing about the ending of Blair Witch is that it’s not a jump scare but an eyes-wide-open prolonged moment of pure terror.
BINGO. Exactly this.
Those final moments are great, truly like a bad dream.
The morning after I saw Blair Witch Project, I nearly attacked my landlord with a hammer because he was messing around with the garbage cans in the alley behind my apartment and I was in a state of such total unease that I was convinced something horrifying was going on back there before I realized what was actually going on.
The lake and basement scenes in Zodiac still give me chills to think about. The impression of seeing them for the first time almost 10 years ago is still seared in my memory. What a great movie.
Back when i used to live Downtown, I settled in to watch Zodiac… alone.At the crescendo of the basement scene someone randomly threw a rock through one of my windows.Movie Over.
So many people said the end of that movie was a let-down, but I guess they’re not insomniacs whose gaze went straight to the corner of their bedroom every time they woke up in the middle of the night for weeks after seeing it. I can still freak myself out if it crosses my mind at 2am.
That part of The Ring just made me angry. The whole movie they are letting your imagination give your horrific thoughts of how it happens, then they show it and ruin that dread you’ve built up. Either show from the get go (like Tooth Fairy) or don’t show it at all.
By the last scene in Blair Witch I had already been beaten nearly senseless by that movie. The moment that really got me was earlier, when Heather found that bag of… teeth??… outside her tent.
when he pulls the chain to turn the lights off in the basement Zodiac scene – thats A+ level horror movie stuff.
Same here. I’ve never been so terrified at a movie before. And then, as the credits roll and I’m trying not to visibly shudder, my date looked at me and asked, “when was it supposed to be scary?”
That moment in Zodiac when Gyllenhal is in the basement of the house and realizes that the killer could be in the house with him really shook me.
That scene of Samara climbing out of the tv had me shook! I was sitting in the theater and I could not move. I sat there frozen, watching this creepy girl climb out of a tv and do something nasty to that poor guy. That was the weirdest “scare” I ever had…just paralyzed by fear.
If we’re talking in the THEATRE specifically, the closet jump scare in The Ring is it for me.
I’m such a wimp it’d be quicker to list the films that haven’t made me jump.- Muppet Treasure IslandAnd we’re done here.
“Peter Pan” for me. I was so scared by the crocodile that I started crying uncontrollably and had to be escorted from the theater. I was three.(See also the spiders in the animated “Hobbit.”)
i played the croc in a stage version a few summers ago. i had a terrific large croc puppet that i named philbert – great fun!
Heh, I loved the crocodile so much I would giggle uncontrollably whenever it came on—embarrassing my dad somewhat.
John Travolta’s codpiece in Battlefield Earth. *shudder*
DEFINITELY “Paranormal Activity.” When that thing hits the accelerator toward the end, you’d better hang the f*ck on. Sheesh.
This. Just watch it.
Absolutely! This is the scene!
Exorcist III doesn’t get any credit because Exorcist II was so bad but it is a very good horror movie.
The Exorcist is a series where every other film is crap (for the most part)
-The Exorcist – Great Goddamn movie
-The Exorcist II: The Heretic – I’m still not entirely convinced this wasn’t a case of ‘we wrote an original movie and someone had the idea to retool it into a sequel’
-The Exorcist III: Legion – clumsy ending aside, genuinely solid, surprisingly human thriller and a great use of George C. Scott as a world-weary stand-in for the late Lee J. Cobb. (and yes, that hospital long take STILL gets me.)
-The Exorcist: The Beginning – You trade Paul Schrader for Renny Harlin, and you get…prettymuch what you’d expect.
-Dominion: The Prequel to The Exorcist – Okay, not quite up to the level of 1 or 3, but janky post-production aside, still a fairly capable sequel, and one where Schrader’s wheelhouse for exploring faith under siege pays off overall admirably. Also, a kind of underrated Skarsgard performance.
It’d say it’s an inverse of the Star Trek rule, but the weird production v. release date switch around between Beginning and Dominion makes it tricky to really match it up completely.
Dominion is very good and underappreciated
Star Trek III was not a bad movie.
Admittedly, the rule has also been kind of exaggerated and has several inaccuracies (TMP’s fine, if a bit dry, III’s only major problem is the fact it was bridging two fan favorites that it looks like it comes up short next to – and not for nothing, the self-destruct scene is up there on the generally great moments in the TOS movie run, and depending who you ask, Generations is okay.)
Also, that rule also suggests Nemesis is one of the good ones…which is a Goddamn lie if ever there was one.
It was a very good movie, right up until the end.
Absolutely. Wish we lived in an alternative universe where this was Exorcist II.
Your comments leave me curious to see the film!
Do you recommend The Exorcist III (1990), the theatrical release?
Or The Exorcist III: Legion (2016), the director’s cut?
Exorcist III doesn’t get any credit because Exorcist II was so bad but it is a very good horror movie.
Yeah, Exorcist II was just a cash grab; Exorcist III was based on Legion, William Peter Blatty’s sequel to his novel. I thought the movie was great, and actually find it more re-watchable than The Exorcist. Like the book, it’s a bit more contemplative about evil, and though it’s plenty scary it’s not as, well, pea soup drenched as The Exorcist.P.S. I highly recommend both books to any one who hasn’t read them.
P.S. I highly recommend both books to any one who hasn’t read them.William Peter Blatty was so, so good. And, despite having written a book as well-known as The Exorcist, is still fairly underrated, I feel. Legion and Dimiter are fantastic, and The Ninth Configuration — which he both wrote and then later adapted/directed himself, is just masterful.
yup.
Yeah, that was messed up.
Your comments leave me curious to see the film!
Do you recommend The Exorcist III (1990), the theatrical release?
Or The Exorcist III: Legion (2016), the director’s cut?
As far as I remember both are worth seeing. Studio exec silliness forced some reshoots for the theatrical release which added some very silly stuff, but it doesn’t ruin the movie for me or make it a less unique/enjoyable experience. The director’s cut is the more “pure” version, but they had to work with low-quality VHS workprint to restore some scenes that got cut, so visual quality is inconsistent across the film
Ive only seen the Legion one but I LOVED it
I remember being thirteen or so, when I started staying up alone and watching late night TNT movies etc (maybe courtesy of Joe Bob Briggs? dunno.), and this movie coming on, and this scene coming from seemingly nowhere just freaking me right the fuck out. Loved it.
This moment haunts me to this day.
And this clip cuts off the first half of the take, too. Master class filmmaking right here.
this movie is disgustingly underrated
Came here to post this very thing. AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Most effective “jump scare” in horror film history.
isnt there a nurse crawling on the ceiling scene in this film as well? thats what i thought you were linking to
Yes! There are not one, but two incredible jump scares in this one, which is crazy.
I put this in my own comment, but I said my brother has a better answer for this question than I do because he saw this movie in the theater, and he says that not only did everyone scream, they screamed twice. Like one scream wasn’t enough to release the tension.
Yes. Winner. I jumped five feet off my theater seat when this came out.
Yeah this scene made me jump out of clothes and out of my skin. I can only watch it without the sound. And it’s still almost as scary.
I remember watching this in a theater in New Orleans on its opening night and sitting near the back of the theater and being aware of almost the entire theater jumping and reacting at once at this scene. If you’re a director, THAT’s the money shot you make movies for.
I love this movie so goddamn much. I finally went hunting for it on DVD and bought it.
Yes! Great call!
My first, second and third thought. This scene was fantastic. My friend says that all the muscles in his body contracted at the same time.
That’s a great scene. I saw this in law school with a fellow student who went on to be an FBI agent. I thought we’d have to pry him off the ceiling.
One of the most hellacious jump scares in cinema history!
YES.If no one else had posted Exorcist III in here already, I’d have done it. One of the most effective jump scares of all time.(Blatty is still so underrated…)
The croc jumping out and snatching Linda’s canteen in Crocodile Dundee. I was all of 9, just expecting a sexy funny Aussie comedy and that jump scare came out of nowhere. I screamed, one my friends was on her seat, the other actually started backing up the aisle and didn’t come back until Paul reassured us it really was dead. I have a healthy respect for gators and crocs.
Audition. ….The telephone ringing. The sack.
I love the two sharks fighting over his chomped body right after! “I get his head!”
Say what one will for Deep Blue Sea overall (personally, I think it’s enjoyably stupid, esp. with that ending theme) this is a legit good death scene.
Its the only thing people really remember from that movie and for good reason. Its a dumb and fun popcorn flick with one really memorable scene.
Agreed (that said, I’ve also kind of got a soft spot for using Stellan Skarsgard as a battering ram, but even I’ll openly admit it can’t top the SLJ surprise death.)
From what little I know about how Jackson selects some of his projects, I’m virtually certain he signed on to this movie just for that one scene.
Pretty much any scene from The Descent, but I’ll go with the night vision camera bit. Even though that scene was plastered over the promotions for it, it still was mortifying. Still the most terrifying theater-going experience I’ve had, and the theater was pretty full so it created a pulsating dread that I haven’t experienced since in a movie theater.Tip of the cap to Terry getting obliterated by the bus in the first Final Destination.
Beat me to it: when I saw The Descent at the cinema one of the guys that I was with literally fell out of his seat at the first night-vision image of the creatures. Terry’s death is also a classic, good shout.
Neither film is going to likely earn a critical reappraisal along the lines of Get Out or Hereditary or It Follows, but they sure as shit could do tension and jump scares properly – unlike the Paranormal Activity/Conjuring/Insidious-type shite that came in between.
The Descent got great critical response and has a pretty strong cult following now, but I still don’t think the first Final Destination got fully appreciated for how clever it was as a story. It’s more remembered as the film that launched all those other ones. But it’s very rare for the typical teenage slasher flick to root itself in God and fate as much as that one did. It operated at a smarter level than the horror flicks of the time period, which is ironic considering how incomprehensibly dumb all the sequels are. Aside from that, it’s really well-constructed, with overlying dread throughout and mixing in suspenseful set pieces with a few jump scares.
Absolutely. Tod’s death is also absolutely horrific, and for a long while the tension is produced by a guy pottering about in a bathroom around a small puddle of water. That mundane fragility of life is far more unsettling than, say, Freddy or Jason (or, god forbid, Freddy vs Jason).
Absolutely The Descent. I’m not a huge horror fan, so I don’t even recall the circumstances that got me into the theater in the first place. But from the moment that first character falls and breaks her leg I was done for.BTW just checked Wikipedia and it looks like they changed the US ending – anyone see both? Preference?
I prefer the UK ending to the US ending. Not only did it make more thematic sense to the feel of the movie, it actually tied together all the cut scenes of the daughter with the birthday cake.
I’ve seen both, and the UK ending is more disturbing. It’s just absolutely without hope. The US ending serves one purpose—it opens the door to the sequel.
The Descent is one of my favorites – I take it with me to re-watch whenever vacationing in a cabin or the woods. The U.S. version’s ending was a good jump scare but allowed for the terrible sequel. The director’s final cut is infinitely creepier and unsettling.
The Exorcist. Saw it for the first time with a buddy in an empty theater when it was rereleased in the late 90’s. And it wasn’t the loud, violent exorcism scenes that got me. It was one shot. The face on the vent hood of the stove when the mom walked through the kitchen. We both looked at each other like we were trying to make sure the other one actually saw it. Deeply, profoundly disturbed me. And I’ll add another Exorcist story while I’m at it: girl I worked with at the time grew up in a small town in North Dakota where the Catholic Church was the only building over one story tall. The girls church group had a lock-in one night where they all stayed in there from sundown to sunrise and had pizza, played games, etc. The nuns were in charge but pretty much left them alone. They rolled a TV into the main cathedral and watched The Exorcist at about 2 in the morning. Nothing freaky happened, but fuuuuuck that.
What got me about the Exorcist wasn’t the gruesome stuff, but the dreadful stuff. That face on the back of the door gave me the wiggins for the rest of the night. And since it was a midnight showing my friends and I had to walk home through the darkened abandoned streets at like 2 in the morning.
A friend of mine and I went to The Exorcist the day after it opened and we caused a lot of people in the audience to freak out due to our endless laughter at it. We thought it was just a silly movie and weren’t scared at all. Best time ever at the movies was Exorcist II:The Heretic. We (almost everyone there) heckled the movie from almost the opening scene and every time “Pazzuzu”, however it’s spelled, would be said, the entire audience would yell it back and laugh. When Richard Burton came on screen, people asked, “Is that guy dead?”, because he looked like he was made out of wax. The ushers came in a couple of times, wondering what the hell was happening. I was sore for a week from laughing so hard. I was severely disappointed in the “original version” released a couple of years ago that wasn’t original at all. It was the second version with parts of the first added in, but not all of it. Not nearly as funny, or bad, as the real original version was. The only movie that “scared” me, wasn’t scary at all, it was pretty disgusting. It was called “The Awful Dr. Orlof”, there’s a scene where a girl’s face is sucked off to be put onto his disfigured daughter. I don’t know why, but that really creeped me out. I didn’t see it in the theater, I saw it on Channel 2 in Detroit’s “Up all night” or whatever it was called about 1970. Maybe my being shot in the face with a BB gun and still bleeding from it just before it came on made it worse, but seeing it years later, that scene still make me squirm. The BB is still in my face, right below my right nostril, BTW.
The face on the back of the door for sure. I must have missed the one on the hood. It looks pretty silly when you are looking for it in the clip above.
I love that “Tubular Bells,” which is so closely identified with the movie, just plays when the mom is walking down the street. Scary as shit even though absolutely nothing scary happens.
I get creeped by the clock pendlum stopping and the Ouija board move.
I think we went to the same screening – I saw it at a midnight screening, and you’re right, the walk home alone after, reliving the whole movie was almost as terrifying.
According to my dad, due to some of the crappy projectors and screens you’d find in a lot of movie theaters in those days, it was common for people to not even see the face. One of my dad’s brothers had seen Exorcist a few times, but when he watched it on home video for the first time and saw the face it apparently fucked him up pretty bad.
When I was maybe 10, a friend’s teenage son babysat for me and my younger brother, and it was one of those things where everyone was like “well… I *guess* that’s OK” because the adults really wanted to go out and it was about 40 years ago and he wasn’t a criminal or a creeper, just a thoughtless asshole who didn’t give a shit about watching 2 little kids. The Exorcist was on TV and he insisted on watching it at top volume while we cowered in one of the bedrooms (all of which were off the living room). My brother ran out to beg him to turn it off or at least down, and reported back to me what he had seen, which turned out to be the moment of the hospital scene where “HELP ME” appears on her stomach. So that visual, as described tearfully by my poor brother, and the audio from at least the last 2/3 of the film, traumatized me for years.I eventually watched it in my late teens and developed a fondness for it and the fucked up lore around it. Having said that, I don’t recall what you’re talking about in the clip above, and I’m feeling too spooked right now to look!
I saw the rerelease in theaters too, and the scariest 3 seconds in the whole film for me was that backwards crab walk down the stairs that they added in. GAH!
Probably the face in Inland Empire.
The first glimpse of the creatures in The Descent. #foreverscarred
Worst scare? Hey, how ‘bout those concession prices, amirite?Actually — in The Shining, the part that scared me most was -Jack kills Halloran. Not so much a jump scare or anything like that but as a fan of the book, I was shocked into knowing that Kubrick was leading us to some other ending, no deus ex snow machine from the friendly grownup as in the book… [Also, Scatman Crothers was a charmer, and the only character in the whole film -including Danny- I rooted for, so that was a bummer.]
The Large Marge scene from Peewee’s Big Adventure didn’t bother me.The evils clowns in the hospital nightmare scene however…
Exact opposite for me. Large Marge is a favorite jump scare, but for some reason – probably the music – the hospital nightmare scene cracks me up. It helps that I don’t feel any way about clowns.
GOOD HEAVENS YES…..I had to watch the climax through my fingers. Every time I thought it was safe to look up again, there were the EYES again…
REMEMBER MEEEE, EDDIE?
The creepiest thing about that scene is the weird pseudo-deja vu effect it pulls off. It might just be overflow from all the other toons dimly remembered from childhood, but I’ve met quite a few people who agree that the “unmasked” Judge Doom seems familiar somehow, but can’t quite place it.
Kaa from Jungle Book, maybe?
Just possibly. But I think the voice was part of it too.
If I remember right, I read somewhere that earlier in the movie we see a poster for some fake old animal cartoon in the background of one of the sets, and Doom is supposed to be the former star of that cartoon series. I wanna say a ferret or something.
I came here to say this, damn, you didn’t have to include a gif of him! Now I’ll never fall asleep.
Oh yeah, that, Ghostbusters 2, and much later Inland Empire
This. This scared me all through middle school and highschool.
For a new classic scary scene I humbly submit the bear scene from “Annihilation”. My teenage daughter noped the fuck out during that scene and that’s not like her.
That movie is on the bubble for me…but that scene was legitimately scary
Just watched it on Hulu last night and that was the scene where I realized “welp, I guess I’ll be watching 2 hours of parks and rec after this so I can sleep.”
It didn’t make my top spot, but yeah, the bear is on my list in general.
Also, when they find the video of the previous team. Oscar Isaac’s grin during …THAT…was genuinely unsettling to me.
My biggest public scare as a kid was Jurassic Park when the raptor jumps out after Laura Dern gets the power running again, but there’s some backstory involved.See, I was about 8 or 9 when Jurassic Park came out, and my parents weren’t sure that I was ready for a PG-13 movie yet. So the weekend the movie comes out my dad goes to see it first to see if it was too intense, and he assures my mom and I that it wouldn’t give me nightmares. The next weekend we all go out to see it. We load up on popcorn (this being the 90s, back before you needed to take out a mortgage to pay for movie theater popcorn). Everything is going great and I’m handling the scares fine right up until that scene.One thing you have to understand about my dad is that he was a trolldad before trolldads were a thing. Having already seen the movie, he knew that jumpscare was coming. So when the raptor busts through the pipes he grabs my mom and I by the arm (he was sitting in between us) and yells “AAAARGH!” Needless to say, that startled the shit out of us, and we sent a good portion of our popcorn flying. This in turn startled the shit out of people in front and behind us, causing about three rows of people on either side of us to also freak out.My dad thought it was hilarious. I refused to watch anything remotely scary with him for about ten years.
I very rarely see horror films in the theater or anywhere else, but I’ll list a few that come to mind.- The werewolf creature in one of the glass boxes jumping out of the darkness in Cabin In The Woods.- The above-listed moment in Jaws. My dad didn’t do kids’ movies when my sister and I were growing up, so we saw what he wanted to see. I must’ve seen Jaws at around 4 or 5 years old, and it scared the living shit out of me. I give the old man credit now, though, as he unwittingly turned me on to some of my current favorite movies, Jaws included.- The end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I was about 8, and I was both terrified and captivated by all the melting faces and exploding heads and whatnot. Same thing goes for Temple of Doom, really. My dad would take me out of school for the big releases, and when we walked into the theater for the 10 AM showing or whatever, we were the only ones there. I was both awestruck and terrified. I didn’t even realize you could be in a movie theater by yourself.- The Ring. My ex-wife somehow conned me into seeing it, and while I won’t mention the exact moment that did it (I’ll start thinking about it again, and fuck that shit), there came a time that I realized I’d seen enough. So I got up and left. She had a friend there with her, so I left them to watch the rest of the movie while I walked around the mall. I don’t need that shit in my head. Never will.- The Blair Witch Project. I had the last shot in my head for pretty much the whole night after I saw it, and I doubt I slept very much at all. I’ve mentioned it a few times here this week, but we were living up in the mountains/forest at the time, and it certainly did not help things. I had fingerprints on my glasses from hiding my eyes so much. I love it now, but holy fuck, that movie got me good. The hands pressing in on the sides of the tent? FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU
Blair Witch didn’t scare me when I saw it, but that night I couldn’t sleep because I kept reliving that last shot of the kid standing in the corner. It really got to me. This is the first and last time such a thing happened to me.
This is more the first thing I remember scaring me and it wasn’t in the theater so maybe this is cheating.
The Pinocchio cartoon when they start turning into donkeys. Freaked me out and left an impression on me.
Brought back some unpleasant memories when I watched “Sorry to Bother You” last year.
Pink elephants.
Even after all these years of advancements in CGI, the strong scenes in Pinocchio are still as strong as ever. Those guys working at the early Disney studio were true masters.
My better half has always quoted that same scene as the most disturbing to him ever since he saw it as a child—and I can tell just by his body language when he talks about it that he’s not faking—but I guess I don’t share whatever dark connection it holds for him and you.
That was an existential freak out too, you knew there was no coming back for poor Lampwig.
No kidding–those first five pre-war Disney films are all masterpieces, with Pinocchio maybe the best (certainly the most gorgeous–or tied with Bambi). I don’t think they get proper credit–as they really can stand up against the very best Hollywood live action from those same years.
This is dating me hard, but Disney used to have slide shows of their films that they would show in schools. Just that version of the donkey scene in Pinocchio scarred me for years. The only reason I’ve seen the whole film is that it’s my mother’s favorite and I made a great concession to see it with her the last time they showed it in theaters. I still say that it’s proof Disney hated children, that and Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.
I think you are thinking of film strips rather than actual slides. They were relatively common in schools (along with actual movies on film reels) until the mid 1980s when VCRs replaced them. When I was in grade school in the 1970s we used to see a lot of film strips in school.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filmstrip
Oh god. In elementary school, they showed us a film strip of the original 1953 War of the Worlds; I think it was supposed to be a special treat. It scared the absolute living shit out of me. Still pictures of the alien ships and people getting irradiated or blasted to smithereens or whatever, with the accompanying audio on a cassette tape: “Look out, the aliens are attacking!”…and then the little musical “bong!” chime to alert the AV kid to turn the knob to advance the frame. I didn’t sleep well for MONTHS. I’d lie in bed with my back to the window, because what if one of those telescoping murder-ray thingamabobs was PEERING IN AT MEEEE
Hell, Disney’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow. THAT was freaky. The burning jack-o’-lantern throw followed by the cut to black … and then the narrator going “and he was never heard from again.”
I had the exact same experience when I saw Pinnochio in the theater. I was very young and started screaming loudly. That was back before VHS when Disney would re-release the films occasionally.
You are not alone.
That’s a good one. “Don’t have any fun, kids!”
I had nightmares for years.No one can scar a child like Disney.
I’m thinking of the movie where James Franco and Seth Rogen were mauled by rabid, wild dogs. There was no such movie. But I can dream.
You reminded me of this old Glenn Ford movie:https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060882
Mine was the unborn which if you don’t remember was the nazi twin horror movie from 2009. For those of you who remember it you might be thinking it isn’t that scary and yes I agree with you. I went to see it after being awake for 36 hours (chemistry degrees are fun…) and I fell asleep. My friend noticed this and decided to wake me up by choking me (quite lightly but still). I woke up with some weird thing on screen and let out a strangled (literally) scream.
He decided to what?
The Brazilian birthday party in Signs. Whole theater knew it was coming but everyone jumped anyway.
Same here. Don’t know what it is about that scene, but it gives me the shivers every time.
and you know it’s coming. They tell you! And yet…
Growing up, the scene in Jawbreaker (1999) when they open the trunk to the car to find the girl with a lump in her throat stayed with me for a long time.The first real horror movie I remember that unsettled me was Pin (1988).
I took my daughters and s friend each—so four girls between age 5 – 9 and me—to see Frozen. I barely survived.
Tina’s death scene in the original A Nightmare On Elm Street.It probably doesn’t hold up today but sneaking in to see this as a kid, really freaked me out.
The arm effect did not age well, but everything about this first movie is really a classic. It was scary versus snide Freddy. And they got their money’s worth with that rotating bedroom. (Plus, young, not off the deep end Johnny Depp ….)
I think I need to change my answer. The worst scare I ever experienced in the theater was the time the snack counter thought they were out of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. But then they found a box so catastrophe averted!
Much of Raiders of the Lost Ark was terrifying to a 9 year old me. Along with the open grave scene in Salem’s Lot (but that was on TV…not in the theatre).
Jurassic Park. My grandmother was killed in a car accident a week prior to the opening of the film, and I was the only family member living in town when the accident occurred. When the time came post-accident to go to the junkyard and try to salvage personal effects, retrieval of the license plate, etc., it fell to me. So on the way to the way movie, my roommate and I stopped by the yard and I did my business. An hour or two later, settled in for the film, the scene in the rain where the kids are screaming in the overturned wreck of the tour car while menaced by the T-Rex just made me lose it. I fled from the theater, ran to the restroom, and just had to compose myself for fifteen minutes or so. The sight of those kids in distress, coupled with the raw memory of having just seen the aftermath of my grandmother’s untimely passing was too much. I eventually went back into the theater and finished that movie – my roommate was also my ride – but 25 years and four sequels later, I still haven’t watched any part of the Jurassic series.
“the poseidon adventure.” all of it. my mom took me to see it & for some reason, it really upset me, it was almost as if i thought it was a found-footage documentary. at some point, my mom had to take me out to the lobby to calm me down. i kept asking, “why did the captain have to turn the ship (which causes the wave to hit it just right to upend it)?!” my mom’s brilliant answer – “because if he hadn’t, there wouldn’t have been a movie.” that restored my sanity. phew.
Every horror movie needs to be remastered with the soundtrack from The Beyond.
The shark popping up from nowhere in Jaws STILL gets me. It’s how everything transforms from “hunting in the middle of nowhere” to “I’M RIGHT HERE GET IN MY MOUTH” in an eyeblink, with absolutely no warning. No music sting, no setup, Scheider isn’t even looking at the water, which is what makes it so horrifying. It was always right there.
I absolutely adore that moment. It comes right on top of a joke and is just a more effective jump scare because of it. And the payoff right after is just perfect.
“We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
Yeah! “Why don’t you come down here and chum some of this shit?” He’s laughing, they’ve been out a while, things are starting to get a little…boring? The waiting’s gone on long enough that that first edge of adrenaline and danger is blunted, you’re actually thinking about lunch, then BOOM.
I thought Blair Witch was really scary (yeah, I know, whatever) because I just suspended my disbelief and walked in ready to enjoy it for what it was. But The Ring was the worst. When they shock you with the dead girl in the closet–no fucking lead-up!–my girlfriend turned to me and said, “I don’t think I can sit through this.” I agreed, but we stuck around anyway. That was a bad idea. Fuck that scary-ass movie.
For me, though there is plenty of effectively scary, upsetting shit in The Ring, the one little thing that has always gotten to me — and particularly did the first time I saw it (home alone as a teen, watching a rented VHS copy) — is that little repeating sound effect that you hear any time someone watches the damn tape. It’s like… a faint, faraway squeaking sound, like something small and rusty rotating off-kilter. I don’t associate it with any particular object, and it doesn’t sound like anything I’ve ever heard, but it slowly, eerily repeats in the background of the tape, and it fucks. me. up. I have never been able to explain this, but it’s a perfectly engineered sound to just set my nerves completely on edge.
The sound design in The Ring was phenomenal. That movie just sets you with a sense of dread throughout the entire thing.
Black Phillip’s various antics in ‘The Witch’ kinda spooked me out, especially near the end of the movie.
The time i was most scared for an extended period of time in a theater: Watching the Minority Report, a few months after 9/11, in NYC, crowded theater. Guy a couple seats down by himself gets up in the middle of the movie, leaves his bag. I’m not sure if he was gone for three minutes or 2 hours, but it felt like FOREVER
Look, I like a finely crafted film pf any genre, but I’m not clicking any of the goddamn links on the article or the comments.
Part of me wants to say the accident scene in Hereditary, but that feels less ‘scare’ and more ‘all-encompassing dread’
Weirdly enough, my back-up choice:
A few years back went to a midnight showing of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.
Not a first time seeing the film, overall knew what to expect.
…even with that in mind, BOB’s first scene fucking rattled me. One of those moments that, on a small screen is one thing, seeing that in a theater, with the full nerve-rattling burst of sound as that creepy bastard first rushes out…
That jolt stuck. Like, I was still feeling a bit unsettled by it after the movie was over.
Runner-up: The Conjuring – clap. fucking. clap.
The clap… I forgot about it, rewatched it this Halloween, and it got me again!
When I saw Hereditary. Not the film itself ,which did indeed affect me for weeks, but rather the big eyed old person who had been in the front with me the whole film. He/they seemed to be already staring at me as I got up from my seat.
The part in Red Dragon where they reveal that it wasn’t Dollarhyde’s body in the burned out nursing home made me literally hide behind my popcorn. Not sure whether I did it out of genuine terror or for comic effect, but it made my friends chuckle.
Titanic, in its entirety. The fact that it was the most successful film ever when I saw it in the cinema was terrifying.
A friend’s girlfriend trying to sneak her way into giving me a 100% unwanted handy… I guess that would be a humble-brag if you had never met the woman, but… trust me…
I’m surprised nobody mentioned the twins in The Shining. Not so much when they first appear, but the quick flashes where you see them lying dead in a puddle of blood.
That’s what makes JAWS so great – no matter how much someone thinks they’ve “absorbed” from the movie’s having become part of the popular culture, or they’re like “No, but I’ve seen the sequels” (as if that had anything to do with JAWS!) they (in my experience) LOVE it the first time they see it, especially if it’s in a theatre. It’s full of memorable parts, and images, and quotes, but as a MOVIE it’s not those things at all. I saw it for the first time around 2000, on letterboxed vido, with a friend who’d also never seen it, and we actually and without irony moved our seats closer together at one point because it was so effective. Now I see it in the theatre whenever I get a chance, and I’ve seen it more than once with other adults who are old enough but have never seen it, and it is a TREAT. BTW, PSYCHO is the same experience. It’s transcendent in the theatre – sensual in a way that it just can’t be on a tv screen, and if there’s someone there who’s never seen it, their reactions are gold. A girl of about 17 or so was with a group of adults once, and her genuine, terrified scream when someone is unexpectedly killed was worth the price of admission alone. Also at the “explanation” at the end, she shrieked “Www-HAT???”, at which everyone in the theatre chuckled knowingly – cuz we all knew, the idiocy of the explanation is well-known, and intentional.
Some movies just really need the theater experience. Years ago they did the original Jurassic Park in IMAX and since I’d never seen it in the theater I got a group of people together and went. It was an incredible experience, especially the sound. The t-rex’s first big roar rattled my bones and basically had me shaking with excitement, despite having seen the movie at home dozens of times over my life.
I also know why my parents said they couldn’t take me to see that movie in the theater when it was originally out. I was like 6 and I would not have been able to handle that shit.
When I saw PSYCHO in the theatre for the first time, I really debated – I mean, I’d seen it countless times on video, and loved it, but did I really need to see it again?It was, no kidding, like watching it for the first time. Of course not plot-wise, but in every single aspect otherwise: performances, photography, music, everything had a new impact. I remember being able to see the grooves in the staircase panelling just inside the Bates house door, and thnking “That looks kind of rough, oh yeah this was made by the television unit” (a weird little detail I know). And when we join John Gavin and Janet Leigh in the hotel room…holy shit, they were JUST fucking. You can see the sweat on both of their skin – their movie-star sensuality JUMPS off of the screen.
I saw Black Christmas at a rep theatre for the first time. When the woman opens the bedroom door to see Margot Kidder and Andrea Martin all hacked up and then THAT moment happened. Still careful to look behind doors when I enter a room.On another note; I think there is a substantive difference between a ‘jump scare’, which I think is more getting startled and a real scare. That moment where the lawyer is about to get eaten by T Rex while on an exposed toilet is scary. That guy is out of options… But not a jump scare. When father and son blunder into a hidden cannibal farm in The Road is terrifying…but it’s not a jump scare like a cat leaping across the screen. ( Seriously, fuck those things)
Agnes it’s me Billy
I misread the title as “What was your first scare?” and my mind went to Creepshow. The first jump scare when the Father’s Day corpse’s hand juts out of the grave. I ruined it for my little sister on second viewing because just before the old lady sits down by the graveside to drink whiskey straight from the bottle, I turned to her and said, “You better let me hold the popcorn for a while.”Just thinking of it now, I think Creepshow holds up well because it spreads out different flavors of horror through its 5 segments: Jump Scares in Father’s Day … Existential horror in The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill … Suspense in The Tide … Blood & Revenge in The Crate … & Creepy Gross-out with They’re Creeping up on You. Just a full meal of horror.
It wasn’t exactly a “scare” – but the autopsy scene in Silence of the Lambs. I was 16 when I saw it. And I was raised on Friday The 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, and a lot of generic ‘80s slasher films. The killings in these movies were cartoonish. So, seeing what looked like an all-too-relateable “normal” body get discovered – everything from Clarice Starling putting the numbing agent under her nose, to the disgusting, sticky sound when they opened the victim’s mouth. It was very much like “this is real world.” I couldn’t eat red meat for a week after that film. A close second is the phone ringing in Fatal Attraction. Again, “real-world” stuff scared me more than anything Jason or Freddy did. And when I was in 7th grade, the phone ringing was more unnerving than the notorious “bunny boiler” scene. I think primarily because it was a scene where the main character could not get any rest – that the moment he fell asleep, at 2:14 in the morning (or whatever the time was) – the phone would ring, and his entire world could collapse if he let his guard down for even a second (e.g. his wife would pick up the phone before him).
I was about 11 when I saw Silence of the Lambs, and I explicitly was not allowed to watch slasher movies. My mom’s main issue with them was not that I’d be scared but that they were cheap and stupid, and Silence of the Lambs was not.I was right under the TV because I was both very myopic and very unhappy to have to wear glasses, and everyone else was on the couch behind me. During Clarisse’s last consultation with Lecter, he’s backlit and filling the whole screen while giving a creepy speech. I look behind me, and my cousins had gone to bed. Still the most genuinely terrified I’ve been over a movie. Jerks.
Agreed on the unrealistic violence of Freddy/Jason making 80’s slasher more funny than scary, but my favorite jump scare story is recent and due to Friday the 13th.
Growing up, my dad and I would rent terrible slasher/horror/B movies on weekends when I would visit (basically, we’d MST3K before it was a thing). So it would be like 2 terrible movies (there is one called Humongous that is particularly dire) and one real movie with production values (eg Nightmare, Halloween, etc). For some reason, Nightmare on Elm Street was my go to, so we’d seen that more than Friday the 13th, but in my dad’s head, they were kind of the same. Fast forward 3 decades – my dad lives in one of the towns that Friday the 13th was filmed in (walking through town, diner, crossroads with cemetary). On actual Friday-the-13ths they play the movie at the local town hall (which is in those town shots). A couple of years ago I went out and we decided to see the movie in the town hall, because I actually never saw any of those movies in a theater. Nothing surprising, all the regular beats. My dad is having a great time with popcorn, laughing at the 80s-ness of it all ….
And then, it is the last scene, when all is well … and Jason jumps back out of the water. My dad is packing up to go, but forgot there was a final jump scare and literally got startled from it beingunexpected – actual popcorn goes up in the air, everything. Also, my dad is like 6’5″ …. so his jump scare reaction is not tiny. It was awesome because it was so classic – completely made the night for me and several people around us.
The phone ringing in Scorsese’s Cape Fear undid me in a similar way.
Going to add another one – Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. If only for the way the movie subverted expectations. I was six – and Yoda seemed to be everywhere. This cute little muppet on your juice glass. This cute, green new toy. Then, when Luke tells him “I’m not afraid” – This so-called cute muppet looks at the screen and through his gnarled, yellow teeth, he said “you will be, you will be” – I think I gripped my sister’s arm like a tourniquet during that scene.
Screw that tree scene. Not terrifying, but a helluva good jump scare.
I was also terrified at The Empire Strikes Back, but not by anything in that movie. I was 9, and my older sister and her friend took me. The movie hadn’t started yet, I guess they went to get popcorn it something and left me by myself in the theater. Back in those days they didn’t run a million previews and commercials, just Muzak and a blank screen. So the lights went down and the screen lit up, and there’s a shot of a hallway with an elevator, and the elevator doors open, and a river of blood gushes out, filling the hallway. It was terrifying. It was, of course, a preview for The Shining, but I didn’t realize that, thinking I was in the wrong movie. I shot up out of my seat and was going to run out of the theater, and I probably actually said out loud, “I’m in the wrong movie!” because a man sitting near me recognized my confusion and said, “No, you’re in The Empire Strikes Back, this is just a preview.” I’m glad that man was there.
Wampa. Attack. When you’re eight and excited to see Luke Skywalker again, that freaking beast jumping out of nowhere is the scariest thing ever.
That scene scared me to death, and this was the first Star Wars movie I ever saw.
Oh my god. I was so fucking traumatized by robots after watching Star Wars. Something about all that exposed wiring in C-3PO’s abdomen filled little 4 year old me with existential horror.
I think the first time I felt an adrenaline rush was when the Emperor was blasting Luke in RotJ. I remember this intense, buzzing kind of feeling, not quite fear, just really alert and alarmed.
Large Marge.No competition.
This was a massive game changer and it would be yeeeeears before I could/would watch another scary flick.
My biggest freakout ever didn’t happen in the theater. It happened at home when I was about six or seven, watching 5 Million Years to Earth/Quatermass and the Pit. I remember vividly completely freaking out and having a crowd of older siblings and my mom gathered around my bed trying to calm me down so I would sleep. I think it was at least four people. To this day that film freaks me out. Heck, for years I couldn’t even look at the Chessie logo for too long because it looked like the giant martian in the sky to me.If I have to limit it to theater, I’m going to go with 1984. Now, to be honest, I don’t remember freaking out during the film. I just developed a rat phobia around the age I was when I saw it. It wasn’t until many years later that I learned how. I happened upon the scene with the rat cage strapped to
John Hurt’s face and realized that I had completely suppressed the memory of it. I knew it had to be the culprit.
Sitting in a seat, slouching a bit and having my not-well-secured phone fall onto the floor. Reaching down, not thinking, hitting a layer of sticky, crunchy, sharp AND MOVING.Presuming I hit a couple of bugs, but there are some things I just don’t want to know.
Gremlins, when Stripe comes back. 8 year old me though I was gonna die from fear. I couldn’t watch that scene for years, even though I knew it was coming.
The judge answering her phone in Law Abiding Citizen.It is a rare thing to make me scream out ‘Holy fuck!’ in a crowded theater, but that scene did it.
The little boy killing Jud in Pet Sematary freaked me the hell out as a kid. And, it’s been mentioned, but the donkey boys in Pinocchio.
Thanks, Randall, for picking something older than the rest. Really enjoyed what you wrote, nice job.As for me, you know the cliché of jumping in your seat and your popcorn flying? There’s a moment in The Descent featuring a videocamera and… something… appearing suddenly that literally sent my popcorn in the air.
My mom took me to see Outbreak in like 1995 when I was in 5th grade.
I think there was a scene showing how the virus spread through the US, and i think they showed it spreading airborne and infecting people at a movie theatre.
I started panicking and crying and we had to leave! I never, to this day, have rewatched it to see what happens. And it made me kind of a germaphobe
Phantasm, with all those scenes involving The Tall Man and the flying silver sphere…https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079714Those little aliens on the alien planet were also super creepy. To this day, I won’t get very close to a mirror, either.
The ticket prices. I wait for the DVD now.
The car crash scene in Enter The Void. Still haunts me. Anyone who’s ever been in a serious crash understands that surreal quiet in the moments before help comes. But thank God I never experienced anything like this.
I used go to school with a dude named Chris Scudiero who was a magician. I was also working at a movie theatre at the time. One day my buddy and I were cleaning on of the theatres and we noticed a white thing just barely sticking out of the edge of the screen between the frame and screen. And when we got closer we discovered it was a playing card that said “The Magic of Chris Scudiero,” on the back. It felt like the longest magic trick set up ever. To this day, that’s the freakiest shit I’ve seen in a theatre. Or… I dunno, Midsommar was freaky too.
I second The Ring. The closet scare in the beginning haunted my dreams for weeks. I would also add this freaking scene from Black Christmas:And Buffalo Bill mock-screaming in The Silence of The Lambs:
Black Christmas truly IS terrifying. I like it cuz the Villain is a gibbering cypher. You learn nothing about himherorit, the whole film……( I mean, the movie is from 1974. So no spoiler warning needed.)
I can’t think of anything for me, but my brother (16ish) squealed like a little girl when Shelob stabbed Frodo in Retuen of the King. He had read the books multiple times.
As an adult , ok this is going to sound weird , but horror films dont scare me , they just make me angry…but as a kid , I was traumatised by the robot bit in Superman III for YEARS..its laughable now, ( and was this what was left of a brainiac character in the script?), but Jesus , that gave me nightmares!
I had forgotten being traumatised by that in exactly the same way. …thanks, I guess?
No, that’s not laughable at all. I haven’t seen that scene in decades but I still remember it was seriously messed up. Real Cronenbergian body horror type stuff where you’d least expect it. Well, before Zack Snydner anyway.
You are not alone. I remember that shit getting under my skin too as a little kid.
YES. I came in here specifically to see if anyone mentioned this! The. Most. Traumatizing. Movie ever for little five year old me. (wow my parents really didn’t censor what I watched, in hindsight). Scarred me for years. I still can’t watch that scene in its entirety.
This was a very traumatic moment.
In 1995 I went to my local theater to see a movie with Christopher Walken and Eric Stoltz called The Prophecy. I didn’t pay for my ticket; I used a movie pass awarded by my work. And yet I was horrified to find I had lost something. If not my soul, then time and valuable grey cells. Seeing Stoltz in demonically colored contact lenses while he narrated the film’s opening still haunts me.
You remind me that I saw that in the theater too. The only thing I remember is that there was some visual that inspired the guy I was with to sing a line from a King Crimson song that went “impaled on naaaaaails of ice,” out loud at normal volume, to the probably empty theater.
That is worth the full price of your ticket. Thanks for sharing that moment.
The movie’s not all that great, but Silent Hill when she first enters the Dark World and encounters the grey, ash children genuinely shook me. I love horror movies, and as a result, I just do not get frightened by them. But that scene still sends a shiver down my spine.
I actually think Silent Hill is pretty under rated
As a horror movie, it’s a B-/C+.
As a video game movie, for all its faults as an adaptation, it’s still one of the better contenders out there.
That says a lot right there.
Say what you will about the movie but they absolutely nailed the look and feel of the games which counts for a lot I think.
The scene in The Innocents when Debrah Kerr looks out into the garden: it’s a wide landscape shot so it takes a few seconds to see the ghostly woman standing in the reeds staring back at her. If I didn’t literally jump when I saw it the first time, my psyche did.
Classy.
Father Karras seeing the face of his mother in The Exorcist.
“Dimi, why you do this to me Dimi?”
Goddamn terrifying.
Great picks! This is one of mine:
Just seemingly came out of nowhere, in a pretty calm scene. Although it is in the book, with the sudden transformation and Bilbo being ashamed and all.
Ernest Scared Stupid.That would have scarred me for life just from the first scene with the troll sucking out the first kid’s soul, but then they just HAD to do the “monster under my bed” scene.
The power station scene in Jurassic Park. I was 7.
The price of a ticket. BA DUM TIIISSHHH!
July 2oth, 2012, was the shooting in Colorado at the Dark knight rises. On July 22nd, I went to see it opening night in Oklahoma City. My wife refused to go, she wasnt ready to be in public.I got there and found a good seat in the middle, in the front row of the balcony. Before the movie started, the fire alarm went off. Everyone was looking around. I didnt move but was planning an escape from a side door. It went on and on. Finally, I got up and went to the lobby of the Quail Springs mall theater. For the 1st time in life, I was relieved to see a group of police standing in a circle.It turned out an 8 year little shit had pulled an alarm. I ain’t gonna lie, it was creepy and I was glad my 1 year old was too young to join me.Fyuck that future delinquent.
When I saw the article I couldn’t remember any but reading through now everyone has jolted my repressed childhood memories. For me it was the library ghost in Ghostbusters, Large Marge in Pee Wee, The face in The Ring, and Blair Witch.
My friends had a projector in their basement apartment that took up the whole wall. We tried watching Mulholland Dr but had to quit 10 minutes after the Winkie’s scene, because the scene where Naomi Watts’s character is slowly peeking around her new apartment seemed like it was teasing another jump scare and we decided we could not handle another one after the man behind the dumpster.
I didn’t see The Shining in the theater, but I found it to be very unsettling. The most uncomfortable I’ve been was watch Se7en, which I maintain to this day is an absolutely shitty movie and I don’t care who directed it or starred in it, it’s a bad premise and hinges on one, very specific event that one of the actors does in order to make sense of the whole thing.The worst scare? The interrogator droid in Star Wars. I was 4 or 5 at the time (I saw it on a re-release, not the original release, before Empire) and it scared the shit out of me.
I’m dating myself here badly, but the worst jump-scare I ever had was when I was a kid, and I was watching The Greatest American Hero – the episode titled “Operation Spoilsport.”Now, this series did a lot of work with the concept that aliens used dead guys to transmit messages to Ralph and Bill. But in every other episode, the dead people just acted normally – covered in what was clearly ketchup and bad makeup – so it was hard to be skeeved out by it.But this… the first scene involves an Air Force airman being electrocuted. His dead body falls out of shot. Then the other characters head for the door – I don’t remember what they said – and the camera angle remains at about calf level. Suddenly… the corpse sits up. Its eyes are wide open. The face fills the screen.If that weren’t bad enough, the next scene shows Ralph and Bill driving at night. They see a hitchhiker on the side of the road. They pass him. Then, just a minute later, they see the same hitchhiker – and the camera switches from the in-car perspective to an exterior pan, following the car down the road and then suddenly focusing on the pale, dead, eyes-wide-open ambulatory corpse.Those were two of the worst jump scares I ever had – but it gets better, because at the end of the show, as I was going upstairs to get ready for bed, I turned the light on, and my brother was standing at the top of the stairs in the same pose as the dead hitchhiking airman.I pissed myself. Completely, utterly, bladder-emptyingly pissed myself.I’m almost 50 years old now and I still haven’t seen that episode a second time. But I can remember that sequence of scenes as clearly as if I were watching them in UHD.
I still remember talking about in lectures at university the next day about how unnerving that scene was in Star Trek: The Next Generation of all things was when the corpses went from lying down to sitting up in the morgue in the episode “Night Terrors”.
The diner scene in Mulholland Drive because I was absolutely not expecting that.
Mulholland Drive. Behind the diner.
One of mine is Fire Walk With Me when Bob appears behind Laura’s dresser
This one kills me because he actually explains almost exactly what will happen, before it happens, and it’s still scary. The couple of times I’ve seen it in a theater, people just freak out.
I realize this isn’t exactly what you’re asking, but the day after the theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, my wife and I went to see The Dark Knight Rises at the IMAX theater near us in Michigan. We had purchased our tickets in advance, and decided to use them. We’re seated in the middle of a packed theater, when 30 seconds into the movie, the screen suddenly went dark, and the dim lighting clicked off to full darkness.There was no sound for a few seconds, and then a scream.I pushed my wife to the floor, and stood, turning to attack what I assumed was a copycat.It was pitch black, and I knew I was probably going to die.When the lights clicked on five seconds later, and the theater apologized for the error, I almost threw up.
My friends and I saw “Alien” at the theater on opening night when I was 16 years old. We didn’t know from a “chest burster!” It wasn’t a part of our popular culture for the very good reason that it hadn’t sickened millions of people yet! It freaked us out, and the rest of the movie turned my entire body into a clenched fist.
When I was a child I watched a black and white British film (perhaps over Canadian TV) that genuinely terrified me. It Was Deborah Kerr in ‘The Innocents’ (1961). The first and best adaptation of the Henry James novel ‘The Turn of the Screw’ (the film adaptation was cowritten by Truman Capote). The horror comes from not knowing if the children are being haunted or is the governess is merely psychotic.
Over the course of my education, I had two teachers show us this in relation to The Turn of the Screw at two different points.
In high school, it didn’t really click with me. I didn’t dislike it. It was just…in one ear, out the other.
Seeing it again in college for a Film & Literature course, I got sucked in (and subsequently jumped on the release when Criterion got it.)
That class, and the subsequent film courses it led me down are up there on my good memories of those years.
The scene in The Dark Knight when a dead wannabe-batman’s body swings into the window of Harvey Dent’s office. I was at a midnight premiere screening, and we all jumped so hard that the person sitting in front of me threw their entire bucket of popcorn in the air.
The Eclipse (2009) starring Ciaran Hinds. There are two scenes that immediately come to mind. I can only find the one on youtube. The other is later in the film and involves a closet. I watched it in a film studies course and the entire class screamed or jumped right out of their seats. It’s such a quiet film you’re just not expecting it
What’s the worst scare you’ve experienced in the theater?
Realizing that I left my wallet in the movie theater. The happy ending (no, not that kind!): workers found it and returned it to me, everything intact and unmolested.
left my laptop under my seat once. Was halfway home before I realised. Turned around, made it just before they closed the place up, found it just where I left it.Now, that was scary…
It’s beautiful!
Mulholland Drive. You know the scene.
The “No, no no no no” bit in Get Out fucking terrified me
What’s the worst scare you’ve experienced in the theater?When they told me the price of the soda and popcorn.
Mine is super simple: it was during the original “Exorcist” film. The camera slowly zooms in on Father Kara’s face as he contemplates Reagan…the recent death of his mother…the fact demons really exist…his wavering own faith…slowly zooming in…RING!!!
It’s just a phone call for him, but holy shit that scared me more than anything before or since.
I had the EXACT SAME REACTION! I had skipped uni to go see the re-release. That scared the bejebus out of me.
Not theatre, but one that stands out to me was watching the following scene from 1988 oddity Paperhouse as a child and jumping so much I fell off the sofa. I was inconsolable for ages after.
The opening scene of “Twilight Zone: The Movie” with Albert Brooks and Dan Aykroyd
I don’t remember this, but the first movie I saw in theaters was Star Wars (Episode IV, a New Hope, yada yada – at the time, it was just Star Wars), at the age of 2, and I’m told I actually hid under my seat during Darth Vader’s first appearance.
The elevator headshot scene from The Departed. What was scarier was that I saw it coming as soon as the doors closed, and I’ve never been sure why.
I was… 9(?) I think and me and a friend snuck into a theater to see the original dawn of the dead. Gave me nightmares for days.
The scene with the video from the children’s birthday party in Signs. Up to that point the movie had only shown tiny glimpses of the aliens (which was for the better considering the ending) so I remember my friends and I leaning forward, straining to see an arm, a leg, anything. And then it was just, there. Our theater went berserk.
I saw Wild Wild West in theaters!! That shit was the scariest thing I ever saw!
oh so we’re just gonna sit here and NOT talk about the ending of Sleepaway Camp huh
When I was 9 I dragged my father out of Critters because I could not handle it.
In retrospect, I was a total wuss, because that movie isn’t even scary.
it wasn’t really the movie itself but the first time the ex-wife and i watched THE RING, our telephone rang just as the credits were rolling. which, if you remember the film, is not a welcome coincidence. we both shrieked and refused to pick up, letting the answering machine handle it.we also had just moved into a new bedroom the night after we watched THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and, until the middle of that night, were unaware there was a tree branch outside the window that would brush against the screen when the wind was right – that, and the neighbor’s crying baby (which we hadn’t really noticed before then) was enough to make for a pretty spooky night. i went out and bought a pair of loppers the next day, rather than wait for the landlord to do something about the tree branch… not much we could do about the baby, tho.
LOLOL when we were in college, we watched the ring, and right as the movie ended, one of my roommates surreptitiously called my other roommate’s cell phone, and he went from being across the room to sitting on my lap about as fast as a human can blink.
?? But… a baby’d be no match for a good pair of loppers!
Nothing made my late uncle laugh harder than the Large Marge scene. We saw it in the theater opening weekend, and after that happened, my uncle laughed for *at least* 10 minutes. People were staring, and he couldn’t stop, to the point that other people started laughing at his laughter. RIP John!
The night nurse scene from “Exorcist III” got me like no other jump scare ever did. The rest of the movie was pretty mediocre stuff (well, a few fun off-the-wall bits were interesting, but most of the flick was boring.) But even now sometimes, when I’m walking through a hallway alone somewhere, I get a little paranoid about who might be just behind me.
Large Marge always got me when I was a kid.
Blair witch for me as well, always found the fate of josh most disturbing, especially hearing his screams in the night then finding abag of his teeth the next morning but its also the 20th anniversary of sixth sense which I actually found scarier especially the scene after the kid reveals his secret and then aftere encountersthat lady in the kitchen after getting up to pee ‘I told you DINNER WASNT READY”. That’s the stuff of nightmares for me, having had similar dreams quite frequently.
Large Marge messed up my brother something bad. For me it was the abduction flashback scene in Fire in the Sky. I did not sleep well for an entire year after seeing that.
Large Marge messed up my brother something bad. For me it was the abduction flashback scene in Fire in the Sky. I did not sleep well for an entire year after seeing that.
When I realized the climax of a certain character’s arc in The Last Jedi was going to involve that ugly brown sunset…
Event Horizon, for all it’s overreach and schlockiness, still gets me, mostly due to Sam Neill’s Dr. Weir.
Yep, I scrolled down to find this. I still have never made it through a rewatch of that film.
Hellraiser in space! Man I had a blast watching that movie in the theater.
There’s an excellent gore free scare early on in Event Horizon when a glove had floated up behind Laurence Fishburne’s character.
Mulholland Dr. That creepy, tar-drenched hobo behind the restaurant that the Patrick Fischler says he saw in a dream. Then they go back behind the restaurant and BAM! – There he is! Crazy scary the first time seeing it in the theater.
worst scare for me was i did the popcorn trick on a girl and she couldn’t find “it”.
Any scene where Cher sings.
Alien. Everything about that movie scared the ever-lovin shit outta me but at the end when you think Ripley and Jonesy are safe and find out very quickly they are not, I distinctly remember throwing my popcorn everywhere and screaming. Seeing Jody the pig in the window of The Amityville Horror was pretty brutal, too. Something about that just got me.
Hereditary spoiler!!!When the camera zoomed out from the son while he was about to wake up, slowly revealing his possessed mom up on the ceiling, staring down at him with this deranged look on her face. I didn’t see it at first, but once I did I about shat my pants. Toni Collette did an amazing job in that movie.
It was during a Star Wars movie, but that doesn’t matter. The fire alarm went off and we all had to leave the theater.
Since you did specify “in the theatres”, it would have to be the scene in Aliens when the creatures burst into the elevator.Outside of a theatre, it would have to be the bone sucking creatures dropping out of trees in Terror Island.
The Banshee in Darby O’Gill and the Little People scared the shit out of me when I was seven:
The Grudge was not amazing overall but that entire sequence of that woman being haunted in the office building leading up to the bed scare was a fucking masterpiece.For me: the giant dong at the end of The Crying Game. I know that’s a puerile answer but I was a teenager on a first date and sweet jesus.
Honestly, dude in the corner in Blair Witch Project. Still to this day, the scariest moment in film for me personally.
Do coming attractions count?I was a kid when The Omen came out. Creepy. The little kid riding in circles on his tricycle and knocking his nanny off the landing. She’s hanging from the rail and he begins picking her fingers from the railing one by one. So much was left to my imagination. Then there were brief clips that made no sense—screaming monkeys? A giant metal rod that falls from a church seemingly into someone. It haunted me. I actually saw the movie as an adult and it was just as creepy (when his next nanny hangs herself at Damian’s birthday party! Jeeze!)There were others, often slashing films that let my imagination fly.But when I was six, a movie came out called Arnold. There were images that fucked with my little brain, but it seemed Arnold was a painting that had a moving eye (?). At least that’s what I thought. Years later, I was flipping channels and there it was. It was a comedy! A really bad British thing that I couldn’t watch because it was so bad/boring. Still, when I was a kid, I slept with the light on for two years because of the images.
Glenn Close in the mirror. Followed by Glenn Close coming out of the tub. My friends and I had skipped school to go see “Fatal Attraction” at the mall. Couldn’t tell anyone at home why I insisted on having the bathroom door open so as to cut down mirror steam after the shower.Of course now Glenn Close is a fucking legend so I watch this with nothing but admiration and I doff my cap.
I was 8. I wanted to see Lady and the Tramp. But no no, my dad knew better. He knew The Last Starfighter would be a much cooler movie. And he was right… almost.From the safety of the other side of my 40th birthday, I now give this animatronic monstrosity 3.61. Not great, but not terrible.
Car Scene in Heredity.Literally had to get out of my seat, walk out the theater, and pace around a few times before heading back in.
The hole in the popcorn bucket trick.
The Shining in the theater… i was 12 … my friends older sister took us… was scared out of my gourd almost from moment 1 til the end
I like horror movies, but to me they don’t work to their best effect in a theater so I don’t generally watch horror in theaters. So my biggest scare from a theater viewing is from Jurassic Park, when Samuel L. Jackson’s arm falls out of the breaker box onto Laura Dern’s shoulder and just as you’re processing OH GOD THEY GOT SAM L. it’s all SURPRISE RAPTOR and you’ve already been through the usual thriller pacing of TENSETENSETENSEFAKERELIEFDEADGUYREVEAL and I was not ready for the follow-up punch of the raptor.
I never saw the Exorcist in a theater which is the movie that scared me the most. Then there’s the final shot of Trilogy of Terror where Karen Black smiles at the end, that scared the shit out of me. But in a theater it was the chest burster scene in Alien. Veronica Cartwright’s “Oh God!” pretty much summed it all.
Right when the implied teen rape scene in Sleepers cut to a cross, a strobe briefly went off in the theater. I was no kind of religious, but my Jewish heart jumped out of my chest at the surreality of it all.
Large Marge damaged me as a child. If coming home at night I would run past the staircase to our 2-story building’s upper apartment without looking, for fear of seeing her. Also, more recently, the person behind the dumpster in Mulholland Drive. Fuuuuck that. I saw Blair Witch at the drive-ins and had a couple jump scares because of random people wandering too close to our car in their quest for the concessions stand.
I’m not a big horror movie guy, and what horror I do watch, I mostly watch at home. So for me the biggest scare I ever got at a theatre was probably the librarian in Ghostbusters. I was six when that movie came out and my dad took me to see it and that bit scared me so much that it wasn’t until I was into my teens that I was able to not look away when the moment came.
When my friend and I were like 13 we snuck in to see Red Dragon. The usher spotted us and came to ask who we were with. Thought we were done for. The lady next to us straight faced looked at the usher and said that we were her son and a friend.
It was the premiere of Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado…
After the time I thought my Uncle Ed was going to get into a fight with some guy, probably that huge dresser sliding by itself to block the door and Ellyn Burstyn looking over to see her demon possessed daughter starting at her giggling with her head turned 180 degrees.
I feel this was a very scary moment for me in the theaters. I love the way the camera just stayed there and never cut and how long the masked man just stands there and looks at Liv Tyler not moving and not having any clue what’s behind her. The theater went nuts during this part.
As …not great… as Zack Snyder turned out to be, the opening scene in Dawn of the Dead is still arguably my favorite single moment in a horror movie I saw in the theater.Also because it gave us this:
A lot of mine have been posted already (Blair Witch is the scariest movie I’ve ever seen), but here’s one that really freaked me out when I was a kid that I haven’t seen posted yet.
I remember being genuinely creeped the hell out during Bram Stokers Dracula the first time I saw it in the theater at 15. When the recently deceased Lucy is slowly walking down the stairs to her crypt to eat the screaming child in her arms with that awesome soundtrack playing I kinda peed a little.
I fell asleep during Seabiscuit and had a nightmare horses were chasing me down. So that, I guess.
Ben’s boat, yes, but for sheer, sustained terror, it has to be wandering in to the original Evil Dead during a deserted matinee. I think when the bench suddenly stopped swinging was when I knew I was in trouble.
All mine are from when I was VERY young. My first one is actually not a movie, but a high school musical rendition of the movie version of Little Shop of Horrors. I was like 5 or 6 years old and they did a lot with fog machines and lights and music, and the only reason I was there was because my 18 year old cousin was in the show, except he was the evil dentist who got dismembered and fed to the plant, and the whole experience was fucking traumatizing. I had to be taken outside and my older cousin had to console me the whole night after the show and try to convince me he wasn’t an evil dentist and was not murdered and fed to a plant. I remember earlier that day being so excited to get to see him on stage. It was just so fucked up.Another was a few years later when I saw Independence Day. The area 51 lab scene. I was such a huge fan of Data from Star Trek TNG that even as like an 8 year old I knew who Brent Spiner was and immediately recognized him. Then that scene happened and I kept having real ass nightmares afterward. But eventually I got the action figures and for some reason having the action figures of Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum on my shelf near my bed stopped my nightmares about ID4 aliens.And my all time most frightened moment in a theater came at the hands of Fire in the Sky. A little context; in 1993 a lot of movies didn’t have any TV commercials, and most people didn’t have internet, so if you wanted to go to the movies you read two-sentence descriptions of movies in the newspaper where the show times were listed and picked one that sounded good. My dad adored ET, and he felt like Close Encounters of the Third Kind was a great genre movie. So when he read a pretty vague description of Fire in the Sky, he thought it’d be a good movie to take me and my sister to see. I lost a year of sleep to that trauma.
I would say Zodiac is the all time scariest movie to me. The lake scene is horrifying, and the overwhelming sense of dread physically affects me. My runner up would be The Exorcist, for the overall demonic shit popping up in the background, not the main performance. The scariest movie I’ve seen recently would be The Autopsy of Jane Doe with Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch.
Anyone here old enough to see American Werewolf in London in the theatre? There’s a dream/fake out jump scare that I won’t spoil… but the entire cinema jumped. The change of tone, with Jenny Agutter’s slight flirtation, really sells it. Wow, Landis really knew what he was doing, once upon a time.
Alos: Jenny Agutter…
I pissed myself when the lizard spit acid in Nedry’s eyes.I was 3, but the point still stands.
Hands down, the scariest scene for me was when I saw Halloween for the first time sometime in 1978 or 79. It was when Dr Loomis scared away the kids that were outside the Myers house. Right afterward, Loomis turns to walk away and bumps into the police chief, who had quietly walked up on him. It was so unexpected practically the entire theatre jumped at the same time.
not so much scared as agonized. My then GF broke one of my fingers when this happened:
aurora, colorado.
Probably the Nazi face-melting in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Which isn’t scary at all and is kind of funny now as a 21st century adult, but I was 7 when it was in theaters; my parents did not censor when it came to any kind of media (that was around the same age that I loved reading the V.C. Andrews books that my mother left lying around the house). I knew it was going to be bad when they took the lid off, but I think I thought it would be something that was over fast so I didn’t look away. In my memory, those Nazis’ faces seemed to go on melting off for like half the movie.My brother has a better story about this, because he saw Exorcist III in the theater and says during that scene, you know the one, the entire theater was so scared that not only did they scream but they screamed twice. One scream wasn’t enough to release the tension.
I still remember my first viewing of ALIEN and that slooooooow wait for Brett to die.
Best jump scare in any movie:
It may not count as full horror, but this terrified me when I seen Signs in the theatre as a kid.
The Mulholland Drive jump scare. Game. Set. Match.
I remember walking home from the theater after It Follows and literally having some asshole (actually just a stranger, I’m sure a very nice person) walking slowly behind me to the subway, wearing all white.But for reals? The muppets who fucking pull their heads off and juggle them in Labyrinth. And the mouse bone-crunching Owl in Secret of NIMH. Kind of ironic, given that I work for NIMH now, and wish we had some owls.
NIMH fucked up 5-year-old me pretty significantly. But in a way that I loved, since I kept coming back to it. It’s still my favorite Bluth film, I think.
I didn’t experience it in the theater but the Exorcist is the one horror movie that deeply affected me from childhood. I first watched an edited (!!) version on TV when I was a tween (while my dad was out of town for work) and ended up sleeping with my mom for protection, which she found super ironic because she saw it with my dad when it first came out and she still remembers how jealous her girlfriends at work were that she had someone to be with at night after seeing it! Some movies like The Conjuring and Paranormal Activity have stuck with me at night but nothing got into my brain as much as the Exorcist.
Nearly every single minute of 2013’s Gravity is a heart-pounding, terror-inducing thrill ride for me. It wastes next to no time establishing the extreme danger and threat to mortality that simply existing in outer space poses, and it rarely lets up with this crushing tension, until right before the credits roll. From the great camerawork, the outstanding sound design, excellent special and practical effects, and wonderful acting, in my mind it’s one of those nearly perfect movies that delivers, every single time.
The Entity, all of it.
The original Alien, which I saw in the theater one lazy summer afternoon of its opening week (so no spoilers). Never in my life have I been so frightened, in a theater or under any other circumstances.I don’t know how it plays for younger people who already know the plot; but seeing it fresh—the mystery of the aliens, the escalating events and the ratcheting tension—my God. I’ve learned to love the way this film is constructed, and after multiple viewings I’m convinced it’s a just about perfect film of its kind.
If I’m to believe my parents, the greatest cinematic scare of my life was over Cruella DeVille in the original animated version of 101 Dalmatians. She was hurting dogs! I was making a scene in the theater, and to calm me down my mom spoiled the goddamn movie and told me the villain dies. As I was too young to be upset that I could no longer be surprised by the movie’s resolution, I cooed happily on her lap for the rest of the film.(I was not alive in 1961, so there must’ve been some kind of one-off Disney movie night at a local theater or something.)If we’re going off of incidents I still remember, we’re probably looking at the original Paranormal Activity, and it probably had more to do with being in a crowded room filled with jumpy people than whatever was happening in the scene. I don’t even remember the scene. I just remember the movie’s nervous tension being amplified because of all the nervous breathing and quivering comments during “safe” scenes, and then this one lady’s scream, probably over some goddamn ouija board scene or something equally hokey, scared the crap out of me.
Probably trying to watch “The Dark Knight Rises” in Denver a couple weeks after it came out.
The Grudge still has me to this day. The girl at the bottom of the stairs of the school. they turn to see her… without a GD jaw… I was beside myself.
guess ill post again. Dark Knight rises. Aurora, Colorado.
Movie related, but not actually ‘in the theater’ –
When I was a kid in Louisiana, we didn’t have air conditioning, so in the summer we all slept on the living room floor with the door open and the fan blowing. My mom slept with the TV on, so imagine my 8-year-old self waking up and watching ‘Three Faces of Eve’.
Scared the HELL out of me, and still does just thinking about it.
As a kid who never learned to swim and had really bad sleep paralysis, the bathtub scene in What Lies Beneath was hard to get through.
i’m almost embarrassed by this now, but the birthday party news footage in Signs felt like it stopped my heart when I saw it for the first time in theaters in 2002
Nothing’s more terrifying than seeing these words come across the screen:
Fuck this forever, The Descent:
JAWS doesn’t get me but I just watched it big at the Castro Theatre and damn if that audience wasn’t FULL of people who had never seen it before: jumping, screaming, flailing during the boat discovery, and much clawing of dates during the final tipping of the boat and sliding of the crew.The movie is in my top five but that movie experience made it so much better, a true event.
Bambi. I saw it in the theater when I was a kid & it wrecked me. Probably why I became vegan
Didn’t experience in theaters, but this one haunted me through my childhood…
This was many years ago, in a little theater in Hoboken. The walls were decorated with sort of squiggly plaster noodles. I assume it was a kind of soundproofing. Halfway through the movie I realized that the walls were infested with cockroaches scrambling in and through the plaster tendrils. There must have been hundreds.You asked.
The Excorcist III is the only movie that ever scared me in a theatre. My blood ran cold and I thought my heart stopped when this happened after they had already relieved the tension with a false alarm jump scare:
I was 8 years old when the original Jurassic Park released and my dad took my brother and I to see it.This scene will forever be etched in my memory:
The librarian ghost reveal in ‘Ghostbusters’ jumped the hell out of me as a kid.
Requiem for a Dream. It’s hard to pick just one scene as this movie overall was the scariest and most unsettling cinematic experience I have endured to date.Perhaps the scariest moment was the “feed me Sarah” scene when Ellen Burstyn is attacked by her refrigerator. The intensity of the scene just keeps building and building and building…
Not the most scared I’ve ever been in a movie, but this scene, which I saw when I was much younger, literally jump scared a box of reece’s pieces out of the box making it rain yellow, orange, and brown candies on myself and fellow movie goers.
Not in the theater, but The Day After.Realistic scenarios of doom that could happen in real life, with no heroes and nothing that can be done about it, tend to be the only thing that gets to me.The attack scene is mortifying, but when they start losing their hair and teeth and dying of radiation poisoning, it’s just ugghhhhh let me out of this world.
The scene in Inland Empire where Laura Dern’s crazy face is suddenly all up in the camera genuinely made me scream out loud because it freaked me out so much. It still freaks me out
Jump scare: Audition, the bag scene.Hardest to watch: Funny Games, the original version. Although I think it’s a great film, I have no desire to watch it or the American remake again.