YOUR scariest movie moments

I'm sure some people here remember Bravo's 100 scariest movie moments list, and yeah, some of those were really scary but to some people, not all of them are, and not every movie on that list has a particularly scary moment...so to everybody here, what in your opinion are THE scariest movie moments of your movie watching experience? Massive spoilers obviously.


One that had me pulling at my hair near the end of it was Scream of Fear (1961). A young woman confined to her wheelchair goes to visit her father whom she hasn't seen in 10 years. And when she gets there, he's not there, there's a big coverup about what's happened to him, and she keeps seeing his dead body all over the property, and hears him playing his piano, but nobody else does and when somebody else comes in, he's not there.

The scariest moment in that movie for me, was when, the chauffer finds the body in the pool, and he puts the woman in the back of the car and they go to tell the police. On the way there, they encounter the father's new wife, and the chauffer stops the car, and leaves the woman in it while he goes and talks to her. The car starts to move and it starts speeding down the road with her in the backseat, and she leans forward to take the wheel and sees her father's corpse lying on the floor of the front seat. It turns out that the chauffer and the second wife had planned to tell the police that the father and daughter died in the crash together, so they could collect the money and marry.

When a Stranger Calls (1978) Everybody knows the story about this movie, it's one of the classic urban legends. A young girl is babysitting and starts getting threatening calls telling her to 'go check the children'. So she calls the police and has them put a trace on the line, and the killer calls back, and the phones ringing again and she thinks it's him again and picks it up screaming 'leave me alone!' and it's the police, saying the calls are coming from inside the house.

This has gone down as THE scariest first 15 minutes in a movie. But the real scare comes in later, first you have Carol Kane trying to quietly sneak out of the house, at the stairs we see a light from the kids' bedroom, and as she heads for the door, the upstairs door opens and we see the light get bigger and the man's shadow is cast on the stairs. She sees this, and jerks on the door, forgetting to undo the chain and we see the shadow coming closer for her, she manages to get the door open and just as she's about to run for it, she sees a man standing right there in the doorway and screams.

This was very scary too, but THE ultimate scaredy cat moment in this movie, it's 7 years later and Carol Kane's character is married and has kids of her own. And they get a babysitter and go out for the night, but the killer, who has recently escaped, calls her in the restaraunt telling her 'check the children'. She, her husband and the police rush to the house, and find nothing, the kids are alright, the babysitter has no idea what's going on. It seems like a false alarm. But in the night, it's found out that the phone wires have been cut and no calls can come in or go out, and Carol Kane has just checked on her children and is in bed, and she hears the killer's voice coming from the closet. She turns over and tries to wake up her husband because she thinks Curt Duncan, who has haunted her for all these years, is in the closet, when in fact, Curt Duncan is the man lying in bed next to her, her husband is the one knocked out in the closet. When he pops up in bed next to her, and she screams, that is just...THAT is the moment when you really just lose it.

Psycho (1960) A classic. Everybody knows the shower scene and it in itself certainly scared plenty of people, but this is the scene that you anticipate today so it takes away some of the shock. But nothing prepares you for the murder of the detective, who slips into the Bates' home and is quietly making his way up the stairs. Mother's door opens and the music starts and 'Mother' takes two steps out into the upstairs hall, crosses over to the stairs and stabs Martin Balsam. And that scene gives you no time to really prepare for it, it's just that *week week* music and BOOM BOOM! He's stabbed and falling down the stairs with Mother at his heels.

Ernest Scared Stupid (1991) This one's going back to when I was a kid, about 9 I think. This movie scared me SO much the first time I saw it, about halfway into the movie, after Ernest lets the big, ugly, evil troll out who turns kids into wooden dolls. And the girl Elizabeth, who is the only one with any real belief in the troll, is in her room, and she's willing herself to look under the bed to get her teddy bear. So she pulls back the bedspread, and it's just the bear under there, and she picks him up and is relieved, and when she gets back up, she screams because Trantor the troll is on the OTHER side of the bed and right next to her. That scared me SO badly the first time I saw it, I had trouble going to sleep that night.

The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988)

This is one of the movies that, the things that should have bothered me didn't. The whole idea of people being poisoned so they're declared dead, and buried, and later dug up with their minds destroyed, did not freak me out. The part that freaked me out is, Bill Pulman's character has been having delusions from the start of the movie and you have trouble deciphering dream from reality, and near the end of the movie, he's running through like a Haiti prison, and you see these arms of the prisoners that are like 9 feet long, they stick clear through the bars and over to the other side of the room to grab at him. That freaked me out because dream or not, you do NOT want somebody to have arms long enough they can reach out and grab you from clear across the other side of the room.

Campfire Tales...a movie about teenagers telling ghost stories that are urban legends, and it comes to the Humans Can Lick segment, in which an 11 year old is left home alone and chatting online with who she thinks is another kid but in reality is a child murderer who knows where she lives. And they go through this long drawn out thing of he comes to the house, will he kill her? Will she see him? And then her big sister comes home and tells her to go to bed, and she gets in bed and puts her hand out for the dog to lick, but she sees in the mirror that it is an old dirty looking man licking her hand and she runs out screaming for her sister. The older sister comes in, pulls the bedspread up and finds the dog murdered under the bed, and the man is gone. I was 16 when I saw that and it completely FREAKED me out. You know, 16 is well past the point of being able to know 'this is just a movie, it's not real', but I STILL found myself, taking a Ginzu knife up to my room and search behind the door, in the closet, under the bed, and in the trunk to make sure nobody was there.

Anybody else got some to add?

Exorcist as a kid freaked me right out. The first time I experienced surround sound in my friend's home theater, The Ring made me have to have her walk me home!

Forgot a few:

Poltergeist...okay, not exactly a SCARY moment, but the whole thing of the steak breaking up into little pieces that push themselves up and then it explodes into bugs basically, and the guy's face falling apart...some people seeing this for the first time HAD to be puking their guts up at seeing that crap. Exactly WHAT drugs were the people making that movie on at the time they did it?


The Last House on the Left (1972) It has gone down in history as being one of THE bloodiest, most violent movies, people say it's like watching a snuff film, and STILL the British Censors will not allow it to be shown in its full form, because it's so violent and horrifying. I saw this movie and I loved it, but it IS a creepy film...part of it seems very corny, very campy, the music doesn't help that any...but you have these two young girls, who are raped, and murdered and one of them is disembowled and dismembered, and this is all very disturbing. Then, the killers wind up staying the night in the home of one of the girls they murdered...and from that, I personally get a feel of Hitchcock's Rope, that the parents are unknowingly sharing a meal and making light discussion with the people who have murdered their kid, have no idea WHO or just what they are talking to, what they are dealing with.

The Nanny (1966) Bette Davis scared the hell out of me in this movie...she does a psychotic very well, because she doesn't think she's psychotic, she thinks she's just doing her job as the nanny. You have a 10 year old boy who was blamed for killing his little sister in the bathtub, he says the nanny did it, but of course nobody believes him. So he comes back from the reformatory and the nanny is still there, and the mother comes up poisoned and little Joey is STILL blamed for what happened. His Aunt Penelope, who everybody knows has a bad heart, comes to stay with him, and during the night, she finds out that Joey was telling the truth, and it was Nanny who tried to kill the mother, and in this discovery, she drives the aunt into a heart attack and just stands around smiling and calmly talking about the events leading up to the little girl's death as the aunt is reaching out for her medicine in vain, and ultimately dies as Nanny is completely oblivious and still talking about her responsibilities as a nanny, to take care of everybody. I'd think anybody who ever saw that movie would say 'to hell with that, I'll just keep an eye on the kids myself'.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1973)

This movie FREAKED the hell out of me. And it has nothing to do with the gruesome murders, those don't really bother me...in the beginning, those flashes and the pictures, and the weird noises you hear in the beginning, that alone was about enough to drive me out of my skin. And then you have the whole crazy Leatherface family getting together for dinner, bringing down Grandpa, who until he starts sucking on the girl's fingers, looks like a corpse, and you don't really expect him to move at all, he looks like he's already dead, and then all of a sudden he's sucking her blood, and that's just about enough to put you over the edge.

Homicidal, can't believe I forgot Homicidal!


Of all the William Castle movies I have seen, this is the one with the real jump moment, the one where you're cringing and pulling your hair and ready to crawl out of your skin.

This movie actually had a gimmick when it was in theaters, known as the Coward's Corner. Before the film's climax, you had a certain amount of time to leave the theater and go to the corner and get your money back if you were too much of a coward to make it through the end of the film.

And in the climax, the woman who has been in dispute between her brother and his wife during the whole movie, goes into the brother's house where his disabled nanny who is in a wheelchair all the time, is, to find her brother who's gone to confront his murderous wife. And she's in the dark, and she sees the nanny in her wheelchair at the top of the stairs, and the electronic ramp starts up and her wheelchair comes down, but after the first step or two, her head falls off of her body and falls down the stairs!

William Castle's movies have never really scared me, but that was THE moment that I felt like I could lose it, that just freaked the HELL out of me.

About the last 10 min. of The Fly (1958) and just about all of The House on Haunted Hill (1959). LOL, there was also this really cheesy Sci-Fi flick, It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958). This monster stowes away on board a rocket returning to Earth. At one point it attacks one of the crew as he's trying to escape up a stairway or ladder...grabs his foot. For a long time after that, I would run up our basement stairs before something down there could grab me