My Scariest Movies – Including Some Embarrassing Ones

When you really think about it, wanting to see a horror movie or psychological thriller hints at some sort of pathology of the viewer. Not only are you, the viewer, willingly and deliberately subjecting yourself to seeing a movie with the hopes that it will scare the living shit out of you, more often than not you’re paying for this pleasure whether it be at your local multiplex or renting a DVD from Netflix or your local Blockbuster.

Why?

I can only try to explain my own reasons, since I normally watch this stuff to relax. You read that correctly. I watch these movies and read these kinds of books right before I nod off. Why, I don’t know, and if that confession wasn’t weird enough, I’ve devoted the good majority of my life and waking hours sitting in front of my MacBook trying to figure out ways to scare myself. As a reader once said to me, “What’s wrong with you?”

Nothing, as far as I can tell. I grew up in a loving household. I didn’t suffer any physical abuse. I’m not some dark and brooding person. I’m kind and calm. I do want the best for the people I’ve met over the years, but I’d be less than honest if I didn’t admit that there have been a handful of people, namely inept and sometimes cruel bosses from former jobs, that I secretly hoped would get run over by a truck (and yes, sometimes I wished I was the one in the driver’s seat). But beyond that, I feel I’m a normal person with the exception of wanting to see a good, frightening movie.

Thing is, those movies are rare. I’m not a huge fan of the slice-and-dice antics of Jason and Freddy Kruegar (although Wes Craven’s first Nightmare on Elm Street was extremely good stuff). I saw Hostel and its squeal; saw the first Saw movie (a good story) but none of the dozen sequels that followed. For me, they were just gory outings. I needed something more psychologically disturbing.

So here’s my list of movies that have made a lasting impact – or scars, maybe – on my psyche. What follows isn’t a movie review, synopsis or thesis. It’s just a list of movies that scared the living shit out of me. I’ve tried to put them in the order I saw them and explain what it was about them that terrified me. If you’re looking for a good fright this Halloween, you couldn’t go wrong with any movie from this list.

The Exorcist

I forget how old I was when I saw this – maybe ten. And no, my parents didn’t let me see it. But we had cable, and one night I set my alarm for three a.m. so I could see this movie. The TV was downstairs, next to my bedroom (my parents slept on the top floor). I had the volume turned low and was doing fine until the scene where Ellen Burstyn throws open the door to her daughter’s bedroom and sees Linda Blair stabbing herself in the crotch with a crucifix. At that point, a voice inside my head told me to turn the TV off right now, but I ignored the warning and kept watching. When Linda Blair’s head turned backwards, my screaming woke up the entire house. To this day, I remember my mother yelling, “Oh my God, someone’s inside the house, ohmygod!” I was grounded for two weeks.

The Shining

Over the years, Stephen King has voiced his displeasure at the movie. In the book, King’s Jack Torrence slowly descends into madness. With Stanley Kubrick’s casting of Jack Nicholson, you just know this guy has a few screws loose. That being said, it’s still one hell of a frightening movie (the musical score alone gives me the willies, which is why I listen to it while writing). The dead twins standing the hotel hallway, the dead woman rising from the tub, the elevators parting to a sea of blood . . . truly haunting stuff.

Salem’s Lot (the 1979 TV movie)

I’ve never been scared by vampires, nor have I had any particular interest in reading about them – the exception being Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot and Charlaine Harris’s excellent Sookie Stackhouse series. I’ll always remember watching this TV movie and cringing when James Mason, playing Mr. Barlow’s evil henchman, Straker, impales a man on a chair made of antlers; the “dead” boy scratching his friend’s window in the middle of the night; and, of course, when I got the first glimpse of the truly frightening Mr. Barlow. What I loved and still love about this made-for-TV movie is just how frightening it is without using gore and blood. And all that wonderful seventies clothing . . . yikes.

Halloween (1978)

That famous mask and watching Michael Myers as a non-speaking killing machine scared me to death. What cemented the horror for me was the scene where Myers, after stabbing a man through the chest with a machete-type knife and pinning him to a wall, cocks his head and looks quizzically at the dead man as though the body is a piece of art. At that point, I just couldn’t take it and screamed. I woke my parents up and got grounded again. Yes, I was watching this movie on cable late at night.

Alien

Interesting story: in my eighth grade class at St. Pius V, one of my classmates, Robert McMannus, said he had seen the movie and was so scared he couldn’t talk about it. So what did I do? I begged my father to allow me to watch it. Needless to say, after what happened when I watched The Exorcist and Halloween, it took me a looong time to wear the man down.

Fast forward to Thanksgiving Day: my father allows me to watch the movie on cable. I’m doing fine, watching Tom Skerritt crawling through one of the ship’s claustrophobic tunnels, a small flame parting a few feet of darkness . . . he’s crawling and my heart’s pumping so fast and hard I feel lightheaded. Then the camera turns sharply and I see, for the first time, the face of the full-grown alien and scream – much to the delight of my father, who says, “I told you so.”

The Silence of the Lambs

My favorite book of all time was beautifully made into one of my favorite movies of all time. Hopkins pegged Lector, and I loved Foster as Starling. And the scenes of Buffalo Bill standing in front of a video-camera, dressed in a “skin suit” and doing the “gina dance”; Buffalo Bill holding his little poodle and looking down the pit and calmly saying, “It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.” – I was glued to the chair. Like the book, it’s a perfect thriller. Nothing has ever come close to it. Well, one movie has, which is my next pick:

Seven

Probably the coolest – and scariest – serial killer movie ever made. The fantastic cast – Kevin Spacey, Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman and Gwyneth Paltrow – and David Fincher’s genius direction of Andrew Kevin Walker’s brilliantly written script elevate this from the standard slice-and-dice affair. I’ve watched it dozens of times now, and the gruesome spectacles still make me cringe. It rains throughout the entire movie until the end – and I’ll never forget that ending. Not for the faint of heart.

Audition

My friend John Connolly, writer of the wonderfully riveting Charlie Parker series, gave me this DVD as a gift. I’d never heard of it, and when I asked him what the movie was about, John grinned from ear to ear and said in his gentle Irish brogue: “Just watch it.” This Japanese horror flick, about a lonely widower who holds an audition to meet the woman of his dreams, is unbelievably gruesome. How bad it is, you say? The widower’s date brings a rubber apron and a medical bag stuffed with pins. I should have expected this of Mr. Connolly, as he wrote The Killing Kind, the only book to date that scared me so much I had to put it down. I’ll repay him by sending him a copy of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (see “Embarrassing Confessions” below).

Jaws

You’ve seen the movie – the original, not the awful sequels that followed – and like me, every time you enter the ocean I’m sure you hear that famous music: “Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum.” When I was a kid, we used to vacation in Maine, and when I’d go into the ocean, my father would sing that music to me and laugh when I bolted for the shore. I never thought they could make a scarier shark movie than Jaws until I saw:

Open Water

Two things I hate: spiders and sharks. The idea of being stranded alone in the ocean gives me the heebie-jeebies. The scene I’ll never forget is the one that forced me to close my eyes for the first time in a movie: the bobbing camera dunks underneath the water and for a split second you see what seems like hundreds of sharks circling the dark waters around the stranded couple.

And the movie that scared me the most.

The Vanishing (1988)

Just so there’s no confusion, I’m referring to the Dutch version and not the 1993 American remake with Kiefer Sutherland and Jeff Bridges (which, ironically, was directed by the same man who helmed the original). Here’s the story in a nutshell: guy’s wife goes missing and he begins an obsessive three-year search. The abductor contacts him, and the cat-and-mouse game unravels into a study of psychological horror. The ending, one of the most terrifying I’ve seen or read, haunted me for days. I own the movie on DVD and can’t bear to watch it for a second time: that’s how truly horrifying this movie is.

Honorable Mentions:

The Whicker Man (1973)

A British police officer travels to a remote island to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. As he talks to the people living in the small town, he uncovers evidence of a much larger deception and in the end becomes the offered sacrifice for a bizarre druidic ceremony. This isn’t a fast-paced thriller by any standards, but the ending pays off for the slow but creepy pace. Dennis Lehane has said this movie was the inspiration for one of my favorite novels, Shutter Island. If you’ve read the book and seen this movie, you’ll know why.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

Families acting strange. Weird alien plants sprouting everywhere. People insisting that you go to sleep. Truly creepy. And the ending where Donald Sutherland points his finger and lets out that strange howl? If you know what that means, you, too, were as truly disturbed as I was.

The Mist

A mist covers a small town in Maine, and the people stranded in the small supermarket start getting attacked by various monsters both big and small. Think it’s just a monster movie? Guess again. I saw the movie before reading the book (one of the few Stephen King’s I’ve missed), and I’ll always remember the scene where a group of people decides to venture out into the midst to run to a drugstore. What they encounter is something that makes my stomach lurch in terror (hint: think aggressive spiders the size of phonebooks). But what truly disturbed me is how the movie ends. Not the feel-good movie of the year, which may explain why critics hated it, but the director, Frank Darabont, who helmed two other King adaptations, The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption, turned The Mist into both a horror movie and a psychological thriller.

Cloverfield

In a recent magazine interview about his remake of Star Trek, J.J. Abrams said the key to a successful movie was to take B material and do it in an A fashion. Case in point: Cloverfield, a Godzilla-type monster movie shot with that shaky handheld camera technique made famous in The Blair Witch Project. Abrams produced this creepy monster flick, and it had me glued to the screen. The secret to its success is the same reason many people didn’t care for it: you only get glimpses of the monster. I loved it from start to finish.

The Thing (1982)

John Carpenter’s second greatest horror flick, this one about a shape-shifting alien stalking an Antarctic base. Pure terror and pure gore, and I watched it at home – alone. The scene where insect legs sprouting out of a dead guy’s head made me turn of the TV and wonder, again, why I was drawn to these kinds of movies. I don’t scream or say anything to my parents, afraid that they might institutionalize me at this point.

And the ones I’m embarrassed to admit scared me as a kid:

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)

What can I say? Gene Wilder was weird and disturbing and the Oompa Loompas freaked me out, as did their singing. The kid who takes over the company in the end lives in this tiny, squalid home with a leaky roof and sleeps with relatives in the same bed, and it made me want to turn off the TV. Not a kid’s movie, in my opinion.

Batman – the 1966 TV series

No, Adam West’s potbelly bulging from his bad-looking costume didn’t frighten me (although I kept wondering why Batman was in such bad shape). The villains did me in: Burgess Meredith as The Penguin and Cesar Romero’s Joker and that cackling laugh prevented me from watching the campy TV show.

Kingdom of the Spiders (1977)

A bad movie with bad acting and a bad script but those spiders, all those HUGE spiders crawling over William Shatner’s body and toupee . . . I still can’t watch it. I hate spiders.

So that’s my list. If you have some of your own, post them. I’d love to hear from you.