5. “Ringu” (1998)
The American remake, for once, is pretty good too, but there can only be one first time you see a black-haired demon ghost thingie crawl out of a television, and for those of us who saw Hideo Nakata‘s original “Ringu” first, that’s the one that will never be bettered. Especially since there’s something about the more lo-fi, un-glossy finish to this version that meshes well with the video/VHS aesthetic of that creepy tape, and makes the monster even scarier because she seems simultaneously kind of banal.
4. “Alien” (1979)
We all know now that the cast were not told in advance what was going to happen during the dinner scene on board the Nostromo in Ridley Scott‘s classic “Alien,” and that at least partially accounts for the scene’s immense impact: their reactions are nakedly human, and geniunely groosed-out and terrified. But then again, this scene has a vicious, screaming, eyeless, metal-toothed alien burst out of John Hurt‘s chest in a grotesque and violent parody of childbirth, so it’s kind of hard to imagine it was ever going to be ho-hum.
3. “The Blair Witch Project” (1999)
We always get a few derisive comments whenever we place Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez‘s found-footage horror on any list. It seems to have become terrible unfashionable to admit you were scared by it. But fashion schmasion, this film absolutely terrified me, perhaps more than any other I’ve seen in the theater, and this scene remains to this day one I only dare myself to think about when I want to test how brave I’m feeling. It’s the simplicity and rawness of the facing-the-wall conceit that is part of a mythology we hadn’t even noticed we were absorbing until that point, that makes this moment the one that defined for this cinemagoer, the actual feeling of “skin-crawling.”
2. “The Exorcist” (1973)
So many potential scenes to choose here, but only one can really get the ribbon. There’s the spider-walk (which did not actually appear in the original cut of the film) or the much-parodied head twist or the pea-soup vomit sequences, but all of those are such integral parts of the collective unconscious that there’s not really any point in calling them out again, and they have had a little of their shock value worn down through repetition. So we’ll go for the slightly less frequently referenced (probably because of, you know, the incest, sexual violence and blasphemy) scene below which still beggars belief that it actually ever made it in to any movie, ever.
1. “Don’t Look Now” (1973)
So many of the greatest horrors are a mixture of the uncanny, the horrible and the deeply sad, and Nicolas Roeg‘s peerless, heartbreaking and terrifying “Don’t Look Now” is surely one of the greatest horrors ever made. If perhaps over its whole length, it plays up aspects other than strictest horror, it still contains this one scene at its climax which in everything it is encapsulates everything this list is about: it’s first and foremost a shock, it’s grief made manifest, it’s inexplicable, yet it makes the weirdest sort of sense out of the foreboding and premonitions that have gone before. And it’s also, frankly, kind of gloriously, technicolor gory (the richest, reddest blood on record).
There are too many more to mention, so why don’t tell us which of your own favorite scary moments we missed out in the comments below, and a very creepy Halloween to you all.