91 Comments

Truth be told, I still have nightmares about "Top Gun;" I was the right age and upbringing for this to qualify as a horror movie (complete with the "Bombing of Libya as I was entering Draft Age" marketing campaign), but I'm not sure that's what you were going for in this post.

Expand full comment

When I was 8 years old, I sneaked into the delicious and forbidden movie territory of Two on a Guillotine with Vincent Price and Connie Stevens. To this very 60 year old day, I cannot sleep with a closet door open. I suffered alone for years because, of course, one does not reveal the ways in which one has broken the rules. I love smart horror movies and really have never been as frightened since.

Expand full comment

I can think of three answers:

1.) Seeing "The Blair Witch Project" opening weekend. By that point, the hype from earlier in the year at Sundance and the online promotion was impossible to avoid. Going in, I can't say I quite bought the line that it was all real, but since it was a cast of unknowns and filmed like nothing I'd seen on a big screen before, it was easier to suspend disbelief. There was something about how real everything felt that unnerved me and I still maintain the film is brilliant because of how much it leaves to your imagination. I saw it twice that weekend and felt deeply chilled both times, to the point where driving home I made stuck to major roads and well-lit routes.

2.) I came to "Night of the Living Dead" late; I don't think I saw it until my early thirties. And I assumed that because it was a movie made in the 1960s and it was in black & white, it would be tame. I'd already seen other zombie movies, including Romero's other films. This was just eating my vegetables. But the gore and brutality took me by surprise, feeling transgressive because the starkness of it was simply not what I associated with the "safe" black and white, 1960s era. It bothered me in a way the bright red viscera of "Dawn of the Dead" didn't.

3.) "The Descent," opening night. There's a sequence in the film involving night vision on a camcorder that took me by surprise and made me scream in a way no film ever had or has. Once that happened, I was watching the rest of the film through my fingers because I was terrified of being jolted so suddenly again.

Expand full comment

Alien. The “chest burst” scene. The alien was gruesome and his appearance unexpected.

Expand full comment

"The Birds" was the scariest thing I saw as a kid, especially when Jessica Tandy pays a visit to a local farmer. I was very unsettled by "The Exorcist" and spent the night at a friend's house. When his dog started in with a low growl in the next room, I just about jumped out of my seat.

Expand full comment
Oct 26, 2021Liked by Ty Burr

Like you, I was terribly frightened of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," just because of its title and reputation. I didn't see it until years later when I decided to include it in a discussion of horror. I found it slightly less terrifying than I had feared, though still creepy as hell. Speaking of creepy, I had nightmares for years after seeing "The Hills Have Eyes" at a drive-in as a teen. The people in those hills were far more scary than anyone in a haunted house.

As for paralyzing fear, I could barely watch the scenes with Buffalo Bill in "Silence of the Lambs." I remember twisting in my seat at times, trying to get away from him and the pit. It still gives me the chills when I rewatch the film.

I should also mention that seeing "The Birds" when I was about 9 (I had an older sister) left an indelible impression: those pecked-out eyes!

Expand full comment

For me the gore-free 1963 The Haunting

Expand full comment

Many years of nightmares after watching King Kong as a young child. The scene of him looking in the window (a huge eye!) at Faye Wray featured prominently in those dreams! But the one that made me nearly jump out of my skin was "Wait Until Dark." When (spoiler alert!) the presumably dead thief jumps out and grabs Audrey! Yikes!

Expand full comment

I'll always remember as a child watching Vincent Price in The Fly. The last line was burned into my memory.... "Help me... PLEASE HELP ME!!"

I looked around my room at night looking for the clown from Poltergeist.

I shook in my seat at the ending of Blair Witch.

I shook, cried and worried for the world at the 2nd season finale of Chris Carter's Millennium.

Finally, as a child in the 80's I was deathly afraid of the thought of Nuclear war. Because of this watching Threads with my class on a VHS copy from the UK. ranks up there with the rest.

Expand full comment

Night of the Living Dead which I watched on Halloween in a drive-in theater in 1969. Had never heard anything about it beforehand.

Expand full comment
Oct 26, 2021Liked by Ty Burr

as a young child i was deeply frightened, and subsequently worried about.. The Blob! Although only accessible on saturday afternoon tv-the idea being enveloped by a slow-moving menace was the issue. I would imaging it lumbering oozily around the corner as i did my snow shovelling chores in upstate new york. Or coming out of a screen in the cinema. Today I am a fairly fearless openwater swimmer (@swimmersofanachy) in New York Harbor- but the late season spate of jelly fish (that grabbed and stung my mates) brought me right back to this fear. I donned my wetsuit early.

Expand full comment
Oct 26, 2021Liked by Ty Burr

The original “The Haunting” with Julie Harris and Clare Bloom—and you never really “saw” anything. The pounding at doors that starts upstairs, then moves downstairs, louder and louder, until it’s outside the room where the paranormal investigators are. Then the doorknob starts to slowly turn. My teenage self had never been more frightened watching a movie. Come to think of it, the only ones to approach it since then (many decades later) have been “The Blair Witch Project” and “The Witch.” (Perhaps a theme here?)

Expand full comment
Oct 26, 2021Liked by Ty Burr

The Toxic Avenger. I was about 12-13 years old. I can't even remember where I could have possibly seen it but two scenes scarred me for a long time: 1) the opening sequence where a group of people in a car have way too much running over and murdering a child riding a bike and 2) where a person is killed with a piece of gym equipment.

Recently, I was able to face my fears and caught a local screening at the Columbus Theatre in Providence. This time I was able to see the dark humor and cartoonish violence in a very different light. It was so over the top that I was laughing with it. No more nightmares.

Expand full comment

I have two. When it first came out, on a dreary night years ago, I went alone to a film that I knew absolutely nothing about. The ad in the paper made it seem sci-fi oriented and I was in that kind of mood, so I drove to downtown Boston and found myself in a huge and mostly empty theatre watching a movie called Alien. I'm a bit ashamed to admit that at certain points I was literally up in the Vom hiding from what was happening on the screen. It was terrifying. I've seen it many times since then and though the shock and horror of it has worn off, it still holds up as a film and I love it. My second one is a flat out ghost story called The Changeling with George C. Scott. Scared the hell out of me when I first saw it, and it still gives me the shivers when I rewatch it. I think the reason both of these films are so incredibly effective at being scary is that they establish a highly believable reality first, so the viewer is totally absorbed in the world of the story. Ridley Scott's early shots of a run-down, lived in spaceship, and a recognizably human, blue collar crew totally pulled me in. The Changeling has George C. Scott - Mr. tough guy - living in a haunted house. It's the only time I completely believe that a character would actually go up into the attic, or down into the basement when strange things are happening: George C. Scott isn't afraid of anything. But I am. The seance scene still makes my hair stand on end, and the ball bouncing down the stairs..... I want to hide just thinking about it.

Expand full comment
Oct 26, 2021Liked by Ty Burr

"The Hidden Hand," 1942, at a birthday party for 5-year-olds!! It's called a comedy horror film, but I didn't laugh, having my face planted in my lap most of the way through. Also, Vincent Price in The Fly, 1958. Some of the scenes stick with me today. He was just so/too good in this movie!

Expand full comment
Oct 26, 2021Liked by Ty Burr

The flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz did me in.

Expand full comment

Retired and avoiding Covid by hunkering down at home, I had the luxury of checking out “Eyes without a Face” as soon as I’d finished Ty’s Tuesday’s Thread. I’m glad I did.

Filmed in black and white and with brooding cinematography (if such “brooding” is possible), the film is unnerving because of its impact on the senses. It certainly isn’t the plot, which is straightforward (and I should have expected the ending).

The soundtrack is effective: strident and enervating at the beginning but always eerily gentle when the scene involves the masked girl. (And those dogs!) It is, in fact, the girl who makes the movie for me. Far from a Jason mask, hers is both lifelike and mannequin-ish and I found myself riveted to her unblinking, soulful eyes. I don’t know if the actress is a dancer but she used her body to great effect – from her poised neck to her gentle hand motions. She appears like a mannequin floating through water. I recommend this movie if only to watch her scenes.

From my youth: "The Bad Seed" (the original 1956) freaked me out enough that I had to sleep in my sister's room. And two movies I watched on TV that really scared the bejesus out of me, but I don't remember their titles: One was a film I think about aliens taking over and there's a scene where someone is swallowed up by quicksand and descends into the bowels of an alien ship. The other involve a little boy at a carnival who was watching an automated band playing on a stage when the conductor turns around, stares at the boy and then falls on top of him.

Expand full comment

I will never forget sitting in the theater seeing “The Gorgan” about a woman who turns you to stone if you look at her. I have not been as scared since. It was a double feature with “Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb.” I also remember the man next to me with a poker face the entire time.

Expand full comment

Another of the Greatest Hits, "The Sixth Sense". Yikes! And the original 1950's "Bodysnatchers", (he looks like Uncle Ira, but...) And "It", now streaming, with Tim Curry as the terrifying clown (he was also Dr. Frank-N-Furter in "Rocky Horror Picture Show").

Expand full comment

I don't know if it was the _scariest_ movie I ever saw, but it was the movie I was scared by the most—partly because it starred Perry King (who is a scary concept if you think about him too deeply. So, don't!) and partly because it's about demonic possession on LSD! And I was on acid when I saw it.

It's a D movie called "The Possession of Joel Delaney," and it's such a terrible, terrible movie that it never made the rounds on late night TV, and even Netflix and Amazon, despite their interminable search for content, have passed on it.

I remember the plot only dimly, except that at some point the spirit of a Puerto Rican serial killer decides to possess Perry King, and there's also a severed _head_ (though I can't remember whether it was a dog or a human), and there's this whole heavy-handed subtext of the oppressed classes rising up against the ruling classes, and Shirley MacLaine also gets involved there somehow. So, you know. It dings a lot of "scary!" bells.

I have searched for this movie throughout the intervening years, once even venturing into the Last Video Store in the United States (which is actually in Trumansburg, NY, not Oregon, whatever the documentary filmmaking world would like you to believe.)

But in vain.

Expand full comment

No one mentioned The Ring. Serious chills. Alien. Saw it as a teenager- nothing like that had ever been on the screen. As a kid, the flying monkeys in WoO. Someone mentioned The changeling- excellent. Loved it.

Expand full comment
Oct 26, 2021Liked by Ty Burr

1. Night of the Living Dead. Find myself at the end of a long isolated driveway and see lights appear at its end? Get me out now!

2. Rosemary's Baby. That call to Dr. Saperstein and our realization that we can't be sure about whether anyone can help because all might be in on the diabolical plot. The terror of realizing that we don't and can't understand what's happening, that things are not the way they seem.

3. Don't Look Now. Our deepest fears rendered uncanny, and dreamy, and not in a good way.

Expand full comment

I vividly remember watching Invaders from Mars more than once growing up. But the Bad Seed with Patty McCormack was my childhood favorite. I’m not as much a blood and guts fan as I am a fan of more psychological terror and suspense.

Expand full comment
Oct 26, 2021Liked by Ty Burr

A far from typical movie that really got to me was a 1972 movie by Robert Althman, Images. That one got to me: wasn't strictly a horror movie, but was scary....movies generally don't get to me like that, except maybe Bergman's Cries and Whispers. As to actual horror movies, cliche or not, The Excorcist really did creep me out the first time I saw out. It was a new movie, happening during the time of the Zodiac killer in San Francisco. Despite being 1500 miles from the west coast, when I got out of the car after the excercist I was sure the zodiac killer was going to shoot me. I've seen all of the Romero movies: they don't freak me out like that. I thought Portrait of a serial killer was just a plain bad movie

Expand full comment
Oct 26, 2021Liked by Ty Burr

Cat People (the original Jacques Tourneur version) and Diabolique (Clouzot version). I remember watching both of these with my mom when I was a teenager -- back when PBS used to show movies -- and nearly broke down from the unbearable tension and suspense during the classic swimming pool scene in the former and the buildup to the final bathtub scene in Diabolique. And I have to put Alien in here as well, because the first time I saw it was on cable TV in the early 1980s, late at night, and alone in our den. When it was over and I had to turn off all the lights downstairs, I was scared to death and ran as fast as I could to my bedroom upstairs to get the lights on as quickly as possible. Oh, and I also checked my closet even though I knew there couldn't possibly be an alien in there...but I had to make sure!

Expand full comment

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is probably my pick for the scariest horror film I've ever seen, and also my favorite. The atmosphere is just so repellent and oppressive. It sounds cliche, but every time I watch that film, I feel like I'm there.

A more recent film that really frightened me was probably a more divisive pick: Gaspar Noe's Climax. I actively seek out extreme films and tend to really enjoy being totally overwhelmed by a film on a sensory level. Noe, for the most part, is someone whose style works for me. The way the joyful, dance-heavy first half melts into outright depravity and cruelty in the second half really viscerally upset me. I felt truly shaken leaving the theater. I'm really curious to see Vortex, which by all accounts is a much more subdued and tender film, but is nonetheless still very devastating.

Expand full comment
Oct 26, 2021Liked by Ty Burr

Village of the Damned, a British film 1960. I was 7 or 8, watching it with my 4-years-older-brother. I stayed and watched it, but wow i was thinking of those creepy kids. I'd love to see it again. Kinda, "Faces Without Eyes" (real ones, at least). :)

Expand full comment

The scene in The Haunting (1963) with Eleanor (Julie Harris) is lying asleep in the darkened bedroom! She is awakened by the sound of a child weeping and reaches out to Theo (Clair Bloom), sleeping next to her. She tells Theo that she's holding her hand too tight - it hurts. Then Theo turns on the light across the room, where she was sleeping on the couch. Harris' line "Whose hand was I holding?" was absolutely terrifying.

Expand full comment

In 1953 I was a naive boy. I had just turned 11 years old. I went with a friend to the Apollo Theater in Nantasket Beach. (The space is now a Mexican restaurant and townhouses.) I saw... It Came From Outer Space. I was terrified by the music - a Theremin? Someone playing a saw with a bow? The one-eyed gelatinous monster was really scary. Richard Carlson was very convincing. Walking home with a friend on the beach I was so scared that I vomited on the sand. Now that is a really frightened child! As an adult I learned that the story was written by Ray Bradbury!

Expand full comment
Oct 27, 2021Liked by Ty Burr

I’m one of those folks who is scared easily so I know to avoid these, but still will watch if it is supposed to be very good (Hereditary, Midsommar, Get Out, for recent examples). Here are mine though chronologically of when I was traumatized:

1. Trilogy of Terror - the little doll with the pointy spear. I saw this alone on TV after school one day in my elementary years. “Stuck” with me for a LONG time. (And no way I’d have anything similar in my home as an adult.)

2. Friday the 13th, Part II (I think?) - Junior high school sleepover rented on video. I made it about 5 minutes in. Jump scare fakeouts one after another until there’s a severed head revealed in a refrigerator. I called the ‘rents and went home. By this point I already knew my limitations.

3. The Exorcist Part III - when someone walks across a hospital hallway with giant scissors. I jumped out of my seat and into the ceiling seeing this in a movie theater. Had nightmares for days. (Felt quite validated when this made a Buzzfeed number one jump scare in a movie list.)

4. The Shining - now we enter the “it’s so good though” phase. I’ve watched this movie multiple times because I love it so much. However, I will not nor will I appreciate any impression of Redrum being voiced. Any horror where it’s a kid as the “monster” freaks me out (probably to do with motherhood). And don’t get me started on their being a “Redrum Drive” near my house…

Expand full comment
Oct 27, 2021Liked by Ty Burr

1958 The Fly, still terrified by the cry “Help Me, Help Me”…I was very young….same terror that you spoke about when seeing the 1932 Mummy

Expand full comment
Oct 27, 2021Liked by Ty Burr

Diabolique - You sensed something was off throughout the film. Yet, there was utter acceleration of anxiety leading up to the "surprise".

Expand full comment

Tales of Terror (1962, Vincent Price, Peter Lorre) did it for me. I was about 9 when I saw it at the neighborhood theater in my hometown San Francisco, and had nightmares for years - the worst about being entombed behind a brick wall (The Black Cat), and visions of that putrid man's face in the last 'tale'. After that introduction, I further then became obsessed with reading all the Edgar Allan Poe stories repeatedly.

Expand full comment

Our local movie theater had a Saturday afternoon “kiddie matinee” double feature of Hammer Films “The Evil of Frankenstein” and “Horror of Dracula.” The former left me nonplussed but the latter gave me nightmares for several weeks afterwards. These days, would this kind of fare be sold as a “kiddie matinee” ?

Expand full comment

Growing up in the sixties in Buffalo, NY, I planned my Fridays around "Fright Night" at 11:30pm which featured horror classics and cult movies alike. I remember the first time I watched the 1931 classic "Frankenstein." To this day, that movie rivets me. When The Monster is in Elizabeth's bedroom as she is getting ready for her wedding, arms outstretched and walking behind her, and she escapes him through the door. Is his intent to harm her or, as the lost soul that he is, does he only wish to have physical contact? To me, that was scary. In fact, when you watch some of the serial killers interviewed on "Scary People" (i.e., Aileen Wuornos), they talk about needing intimacy and love, and express anger - and kill - for never having gotten it.

Expand full comment

I deliberately watched "The Fly" with Jeff Goldblum on commercial TV so I would get the edited version and still had to stop watching midway through. Maybe with 1950's level special effects I could sit through it, but by the late 80's, the effects were real enough that even now, I cringe to bring "The Fly" to mind.

Expand full comment

A 1960's comment: in the Pittsburgh area Bill Cardille/Chilly Billy's Chiller Theater reigned supreme. And TV Guide used to have a "melodrama" designation attached to a certain kind of horror movie, especially the vampire genre. I guess they were cheesey and soap operatic, but they REALLY creeped me out. Can't remember a single title though. In the 70's we loved in the drive ins the Count Yorgas, but not because of their campiness but because they were really scary!

Expand full comment
Oct 27, 2021Liked by Ty Burr

… OK, you’ll have to understand this through the prism of my ( then ) 8-year old eyes.

While I’ve seen countless well made, superbly directed and capably acted scary or horror films over the years

… in order to answer THIS particular question, I have to reference a terribly bad and cheesy, grade B schlock monster movie from 1959, “Attack of the Giant Leeches”.

Little 8-year-old me was watching this black and white, rubber suit monster flick on Pittsburgh’s “Chiller Theater”, a show that directly influenced SCTV’s Pittsburgh native, Joe Flaherty’s schlock horror TV host, Count Floyd.

No, it wasn’t the cheesy rubber giant “leeches” that creeped me out as a kid.

But rather, it was the image of the several dead victims of the monsters, slowly floating to the surface near the end of the movie - after the heroes set off underwater explosives that dislodged the decomposing corpses from the leeches’ underwater cave.

The camera focused fairly tight on these corpses’ faces, with their vacant dead eyes and mouths gaping open as they slowly floated to the surface.

To an eight-year old, the memory of that slow sequence of fairly realistic dead bodies creeped me out for years.

Only a couple months ago did I see the film again. It wasn’t that bad this time around, but the childhood memory lingers.

Expand full comment

The Omen with Gregory Peck and Lee Remick from 1976 was a truly creepy movie. Lots of psychological horror and scary music/chanting to heighten the tension.

Expand full comment
Oct 27, 2021Liked by Ty Burr

The Ring scared the shit out of me, I remember. And not even the original, the Naomi Watts remake. I actually don’t remember anything about it other than being terrified.

One non-horror movie that terrified me: Blue Velvet. the first time I watched it, I must’ve been 16-ish, home alone, watching on VHS. I think it was one of the Dennis Hopper – Rossellini scenes where I just had to turn it off and finish it the next day.

Expand full comment
Oct 27, 2021Liked by Ty Burr

My Dad would take me to wildly inappropriate movies when I was very young. Planet of the Apes freaked me out. And for The Light At the Edge of the World I had to leave the cinema, the old Palace in Montreal, midway through and wait for my Dad in the lobby until the movie has over. I can't remember why it scared me but it did. And Alien and Aliens of course always get to me.

Expand full comment
Oct 28, 2021Liked by Ty Burr

1978's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" - still scared thinking about Donald Sutherland's gaping mouth and squealing noise when he sees Veronica Cartwright.

More recently, 2014's The Babadook. A demon-monster summoned from a picture book that terrorizes grieving widow Essie Davis and her oddball son. The sound design of the croaking Babadook skittering all around the house is so dark and scary. A movie I recommend yet never ever want to see it again...

Expand full comment

Could not agree more with your singling out HENRY and EYES WITHOUT A FACE. The former is flat-out terrifying and the latter creepy and perversely beautiful.

Story I heard about HENRY: when the film played at a horror film festival, many in the audience walked out. The director, John McNaughton, collared a veteran horror director (Tobe Hooper, if memory serves) and asked what was going on. Hooper explained that horror fans are used to a ritualized presentation of dread and gore; they couldn't handle HENRY's unvarnished realism.

Finally, a personal story to underscore how important context and timing are to our perceptions. The most scared I have ever been in a movie was watching Clint Eastwood's directorial debut, PLAY MISTY FOR ME. I was thirteen, and the randomness of the film's violence completely freaked me out. In later years, I have wondered if some of MISTY's impact could be attributed to a choppiness that was less a product of skill than of sketchy writing and uneven pacing. My adolescent self wouldn't have been able to tell mise-en-scene from mise-en-place. The movie just washed over me like a wave and swept me away.

Expand full comment

For those of us "of a certain age" Vincent Price is the master! "Buried Alive" gave me a lifelong case of claustrophobia and I still have to force the images out of my mind. (Go on! Scram!) The only movie scarier: "Eraserhead," but at least I was an adult by then.

Expand full comment

I have to immediately say "The Haunting" (from the 1959 novel "The Haunting of Hill House") scared me to death in 1963 at age 8. Although I saw a few others—"Night of the Living Dead" being another one 5 years later—it still sticks with me!

Expand full comment

I’m 75 and was introduced to horror movies by my mother(!) when we went weekly to the Egyptian theater in Brighton and was happily terrified by The Thing and House of Way when they first came out. Some weeks we also saw so-called adult dramas that I also loved.

So categories:

Most shocked: The Thing when the amputated hand moved and nobody noticed it but me (I thought)

Most Surprised: seeing Psycho on opening day. (Also Crying Game much later - I was so naive)

Most creepy: several - Them, Rosemary’s Baby, Henry, the Michael Shannon tornado movie (I forget title).

And the beginning of the invasion Mars movie.

Expand full comment

As a kid, "Invaders From Mars." A few years ago I was on a panel discussion on 50's sci-fi films at the local Boskone convention, along with former local writer Nat Segaloff and others. To our mutual surprise, this was the film me talked most about!

The highligths of my senior year in college were the Blizzard of '78 and a first-date viewing of "Night of the Living Dead," I believe at the Orson Welles. It proved not to be a great date movie. As an adult, I sort of don't do fear, but this left my shaky, largely because it had refused to play by the storytelling rules re heroes and their proper fate.

A side question: what's your favorite moment in a horror movie? Norway's Joachim Trier made his reputation with the terrific drama "Oslo, August 31st," so a horror movie from him was unexpected. "Thelma" came out the same year as "Raw" and I liked it even better, in part because it had a moment that didn't so much floor me as drop the planet from underneath me.

Expand full comment

When my daughter was about 10-12 years old. Her best friend was sleeping over. They wanted to watch a scary movie. I put 'Rear Window' on. For the first 1.5 hours, they complained it wasn't scary. No heads being chopped off. No pools of blood. Then...when Raymond Burr is going up the back stairs, the SCREAMED and jumped out of their chairs.

Expand full comment
Oct 31, 2021Liked by Ty Burr

Rosemary's Baby, I happen to be pregnant myself at the time and was terrorized for months. It didn't help that our little apartment had a long hallway similar to the one in the movie. When I was younger my older sister and I went to see "The Thing" (pretty sure of the title) and it had something to do with walking up the basement stairs and the THING would grab your ankles and drag you down. At least that's what my 12-year-old brain remembers and I am STILL not comfortable walking up open staircases! ahaha

Expand full comment

Apollo 18. Someone told me it was a documentary. I thought it was never-before-seen footage of the discovery of evil life on the moon. I was sure I had been infected because I once touched a moon rock at the Air and Space Museum. Bolted. Couldn’t go back in. When my son came to the lobby and told me it was fiction, I felt like such an idiot.

Expand full comment