My Top Five Scariest Movies
Years ago, I remember watching the movie Aliens for the first time with my brother and some friends. During one particular scary moment, my brother jumped off the couch, flailing both his arms and legs as he vomited a stream of curses. His terror dance was so elaborate that it rained for weeks afterwords. I probably would have joined him but my nails were buried deep in the couch.
We get this reaction from our mother who gained some local fame after screaming herself into exhaustion during a screening of the movie Jaws. In short, horror movies can be a big deal in my family.
Below are my list of the top five horror movies that almost scared me back into oblivion. While these movies might be cheesy to some or downright funny when viewed during the day but at the time I watched them, I was reintroduced to the joys of diapers. One interesting thing to note … the scarier the movie, the younger I was at the time.
5. The Grudge
When I saw the trailer for this movie, my eyes rolled a complete circle in my head. I thought I was deep in cheese territory when Bill Pullman jumps to his death in the first five minutes. Then things got weird. My buddy and I watched a simple cheese movie grow into friggin’ terrifying experience whereupon I soon found myself hiding behind his futon. Yes. A thirty year old man hid behind a futon because a little boy in the movie meowed like a cat. We even muted the sound to catch a breath.
I will say that my favorite part of the Grudge was when the kill happy ghost decided to use the phone, proving that the passed on aren’t technophobes. The ghost did earn itself a red card for crawling under the covers. Hiding under the covers is a last ditch defense, and it broke my heart to see it so easily overcome.
4. Candyman
The name of the movie sounded like a joke but in the first five minute, the movie tells you that the movie is anything but funny. I saw Candyman in the theater which felt like a weekend at Dick Cheney’s house. The movie just didn’t let up. Coupled with a haunting score and a pissed off ghost who like to haunt during both the day and night, you have a mental clusterfuck that had me gibbering like an idiot by the end of the movie. To this day, I still cannot look into a mirror and say that one magic word five times in row. If you haven’t seen this movie, I’d tell you the magic word, but Candyman would have to kill you.
3. An American Werewolf in London
I was a tween when I heard about this movie. I saw one of the “making of…” documentaries of it and I was captivated with the idea of the hero being haunted by all the people he had killed. It looked to be pretty funny to see all the corpses just hanging out with him in a movie theater. So, when it came on television one Friday night, I thought I’d check it out. It scared me so much that I moved to the kitchen, and opted to listen to it instead. That didn’t really help matters much. One of these days, I’ll give it a proper viewing from the under couch.
2. Race with the Devil
It’s funny to look back, but at one time, people were afraid of Satan worshipers. While it seems kind of funny today, there was a bunch of movies made in the seventies about the unstoppable horde of devil worshipers. Race with the Devil is one of them and it scared the bejesus out of me. I must have been eight when I saw this movie. It was about two couples in an RV who accidentally witness a human sacrifice from the local Satanic cult. They try to flee, but these devil worshipers were all about being tenacious. The devil worshipers hunted the protagonists across the state, introducing the concept of paranoia to my young mind. At the end of the movie, the RV is surrounded whereby the screen fades to black. End of movie. End of tourists. Hello paranoia.
Sad but true, this movie is in the process of being remade.
1. Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark
Believe it or not, this was an ABC original movie made in the seventies and it is the scariest movie that I have ever seen. I must have been seven or eight at the time and the power of that fear still resonates with me today. The movie was about a family who moves into a haunted house and pretty much all hells breaks loose. I honestly don’t remember the plot just that everyone gets screwed.
This was the first movie I that remember where the good guys don’t win. Pretty much everyone goes to hell with the forces of evil laughing the entire way. I watched the movie with my sister, and I might have freaked out a little, requiring a lot of hugging. I was just too young to see this movie even though it was on the television and not bad by all accounts, but the movie rocked my young little core while also introducing me to the cold concept of nihilism.
And yes … this movie is also being remade (what movie isn’t these days?).
So what movies have scared you to pieces? Feel free to share.
I’m thinking that if The Ring didn’t make your list, you must have not seen it yet.
Believe it or not, I saw the Ring a few years ago. I thought it was a decent watch with more investigation than scares. Part of the problem was that I had heard a lot about the movie before I saw it, so a lot of tension was broken. Still I did enjoy it.
Three seminal horror moments in my youth — one, the night my cool older uncles took me to a late-night double feature of ‘Carrie’ and ‘The Exorcist’ at a packed old theater in downtown D.C. I have a real fondness for Carrie now but remained terrified TO MY CORE of The Exorcist. Two, ‘Jaws.’ Parents wouldn’t let me see it when it came out so I sat my mom down the day after she saw it and made her describe entire movie to me blow by terrifyng blow. Three, ‘The Sentinel.’ Caught this on late night cable when I was 13 or so, remember a scene where a creepy skinny old naked dude goes bolting across the dark attic apartment in front of the heroine and to this day — I am still afraid.
I actually saw the Exorcist the night that I saw Candyman, also making that day a double feature of doom. Thankfully, I saw the Exorcist on regular television, so the tension was periodically smashed by announcements of dish detergent and fabric softener. I can’t imagine seeing it in the theater. I don’t know how you slept that night. Do you still feel that fear when you think about it? It’s funny how those old feelings tend to linger.
Alien is the only movies that still gives me nightmares 15 years after first seeing it.
Cube 2 -Hypercube gave me NIGHTMARES. I can’t deal with hanging corpses, especially when they’re being looking at by…well, I don’t wanna give it away, but yeah, I actually had nightmares.