Top Ten Movies That Scared the
Shit Out of Me
I’m a big fan of the
horror genre, but some people are surprised when I say very few movies truly
scare me. Since I’ve gotten into studying how movies are made, in particular
the secrets behind special effects, nothing has really scared me.
But, when I was
younger, it was a different story. Occasionally, I would see a movie that
terrified me so much, I did everything from bury my head in the couch cushions
until the scary part was over to run out of the room and wait until the whole
thing was over. I would wake up in the dead of night from horrific nightmares
about what I had seen, and sometimes I would even go as far as to avoid looking
at the covers when walking down the aisles of the video store.
These ten films (not
all necessarily horror films) scared the shit out of me more than any others at
some point in my life, and some of them still get under my skin.
10. The Fox and the Hound (1981)
Didn’t expect to see this on here, did you? At the end of the
movie a massive black bear shows up out of nowhere, and Copper (the hound)
tries to save Todd (the fox) from its wrath. When I was a little kid, the
second that bear appeared, I couldn’t look at the screen. I wish I could
remember the first time I saw it. I think I blocked it from my mind. Even today
the damn thing disturbs me, because it’s not just a bear. This monstrosity has red glowing eyes and is like
twenty feet tall and snarls like a Tyrannosaurus! And the fact that it arrives
without any warning or setup makes it feel like a scene out of a horror movie, in
what is otherwise a light-hearted kid’s movie. That bear never ceased to haunt
my childhood dreams.
9. King Kong (1933)
My first glimpse of this classic masterpiece was in the
documentary Dinosaur! hosted by
Christopher Reeve. I was a big fan of dinosaurs, and the scene used in that
program was the famous Kong vs. Rex fight, ending with Kong breaking the
predator’s jaw. It horrified me to see my (as of then) favourite dinosaur
brutally killed, and when I eventually saw the movie, I hid behind the couch
during that scene, stealing quick glimpses here and there because, as scary as I
found it, I also found it exhilarating. Other scenes that freaked me out were
the Stegosaurus charging the group of explorers, the Pterodactyl nearly flying
away with Fay Wray, and perhaps most-horrific of all, the airplanes shooting at
poor Kong until he fell to his death. King
Kong is one of only two movies on this list that ended up becoming one of
my all-time favourite movies, even after scaring me so much as a kid.
8. Pinocchio (1940)
Here’s another Disney classic that ended with a terrifying
sequence, but there’s even more to it than that. Yes, the massive Monstro the
Whale chasing down Pinocchio and Geppetto always triggered me to curl up into a
ball, but just as scary was Stromboli, the huge guy running the puppet show who
locks up Pinocchio in a bird cage, or the coachmen, a total creeper who brings
kids to Pleasure Island, where they violently transform into donkeys like some
kind of werewolf curse. When I watch it today, I wonder how they were able to
get away with such dark stuff in what’s supposed to be a movie for kids.
7. The Silence
of the Lambs (1991)
By the time I got around to seeing this Academy Award-winning
horror-crime-thriller, I had already seen every other movie included on this
list. I was in the final years of high school, convinced nothing could scare me
too badly anymore, but lo and behold, Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lector is
surely one of the most-unsettling performances I’ve ever seen, but he’s not
even the scariest character to me. Ted Levine as Buffalo Bill is the one who
really freaked me out. Everything from his weird little dance to his suit of
skin to the look of his house I found disturbing. Even little moments, like
when they pull the moth out of the dead girl’s mouth, or when one of the
occupants of another cell in Lector’s wing flicks semen at Clarice as she walks
by absolutely sickened me. It’s an incredibly well-made film that builds
tension right from the opening scene, bombards you with scares throughout, and
never lets up.
6. The Evil Dead (1981)
This is the classic cabin-in-the-woods story of college
students going for a weekend away and discovering the book of the dead, which
unleashes angry demons and turns them into deadites. I had heard lots about
this film before finally seeing it in high school. I put it on one fall evening
around Halloween, and at first wasn’t too impressed. It seemed quite cheap (little
did I know at the time it was made on a budget of merely 375,000 dollars), but
I continued watching. Once things started getting strange, I grew a little
unnerved. By the end, I was relieved it was over, and found myself checking
over my shoulder even as I took out the garbage later that evening. What
freaked me out the most were the Deadites’ unrelenting terror. They seemed to
always be laughing and enjoying torturing poor Ash, and no matter what he did,
they just wouldn’t stop. The idea of an unstoppable supernatural force like
that used to be one of my main fears.
5. Jaws (1975)
My dad told me the story of Jaws one night before bed when I was no more than five years old,
and the mere premise alone freaked me out so much I couldn’t go to sleep.
Because of that, it was a few more years before I was finally allowed to see
it, but when I initially saw it, I wasn’t all that scared. The parts that stuck with me were the music, the
floating barrels, Quint getting eaten and spouting blood from his mouth, and
when that guy falls out of the row boat and the shark swims up beneath him,
devours him, then there’s a shot of his severed leg sinking to the bottom of
the sea. It rattled me on a more subconscious level, as it turned out, because I
had nightmares for a week after seeing it (though not about sharks, strangely
enough) and when I re-watched it a few years later, I found even more parts to
be thrilled and terrified by. Like King
Kong, it scared me to begin with, but eventually became a personal
favourite.
4. An
American Werewolf in London (1981)
What’s funny is this movie is both a comedy and a horror
movie, but still one of the scariest I’ve ever seen. Two friends backpacking
through England are viciously attacked by a werewolf on the moors. One boy,
Jack, is killed, and the other, David, survives, only to be cursed to transform
into a hairy four-legged hound from hell on every full moon. American Werewolf has what I consider
the best werewolf transformation ever put to film, and it’s also the scariest
scene of the movie. One shot in particular has David—about 30 % werewolf at
this point—stare up at the camera as he groans and moans and stretches his arm
out at the camera. The pain actor David Naughton conveys here is so convincing
it hurts to watch, especially as you hear bones break and his face contorts
into that of a wolf’s. Even to this day, the transformation makes me tense.
3. The
Ring (2002)
This remake of the Japanese film Ringu came out in 2003, around the time VHS was starting to die off
and DVD was taking over. The premise is pretty well known: if you watch the evil
video tape, the phone rings, a little girl says you’re going to die in seven
days, and she kills you a week later. An effectively scary plot, but absurd, or
so I first thought. I watched this movie when I was sick—runny nose, fever, the
whole nine yards. You know how dreams can seem extra weird and vivid when you
have a fever? The Ring nightmares
that ensued sucked. I remember seeing a hallucination of ghost girl Samara literally
crawling out of my own television as I laid there in bed, helpless. I couldn’t
believe how much this movie initially scared me, which is why I became somewhat
obsessed with it in middle school. Nowadays, I find it less scary and more just
atmospheric, but still entertaining to watch.
2. The
Shining (1980)
Some consider this to be Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, a few
think it’s a poor adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, and some classify it as
the scariest movie ever. The Shining
is unsettling to say the least. Some people claim when they first saw it as a
kid, they were terrified, but now find it mostly laughable. There is nothing
laughable about it, and you can’t deny the sheer filmmaking brilliance at work
here. The one scene that still scares me today (for years I refused to even
watch it, I just skipped over it or left the room) is the scene where Jack
Nicholson finds the rotting old lady in the bath tub. Just thinking about it
makes my skin crawl. It shows her walking towards Nicholson, all wrinkled and
rotten and naked, and that shrieking music blaring the whole time, and her
melodramatic cackle. That scene alone prompted me to review The Shining: my first-ever movie review.
1. The Exorcist (1973)
People often see a movie and forget where they first saw it
or who with over time. This is one movie where you never forget where and when
you first saw it. I first watched The
Exorcist home alone one day after school when I was 16. I found it fairly
disturbing, but then quickly forgot about it that evening. Later that night, I
had unrelenting nightmares about possession and seeing the horrific face of
Linda Blair possessed by the devil. No sleep was had that night, and the next
day I was a mess. There’s a fine line between a scary movie and a downright
disturbing movie. The Exorcist didn’t
just scare me, it deeply affected me. I haven’t been able to watch it since.
The more I thought about it after that one-and-only viewing, the more it
freaked me out. It scared me, but not in an entertaining, disarming, fun way.
It was just awful, which I’m going to contradict by saying it’s also brilliant
and incredibly well-made. A brilliant and awful horror film so potent I can’t
recommend it if you haven’t already seen it. Watch The Exorcist at your own risk. 
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