Movie Night: What is the Scariest Movie You Ever Saw and Why?

[Vyacheslav Brolotov]

Please read the title of this thread and answer the question. I have to rent a movie tonight and I feel like watching some really good horror. Any suggestions? After tonight, this thread can just become a regular thread for the critique of horror films. Please answer fast. Thank you guys so much!

[Railyon]

If you're watching it alone, Paranormal Activity, first one preferably.

I'm a gorehound and watch loads of horror but that one in particular left me, well, unable to sleep for half a night.

[Ele'ill]

blair witch project

[Luc]

blair witch project

just saw that last weekend dunno why but it freaked me out

paranormal activity sucks :glare: it'll disappoint the only time I got scared was when my alarm clock went off (it's loud as fuck!) was fixing it while watching... well, maybe that's why I wasn't scared. :unsure:

I'd go with Blair Witch Project:thumbup1:

[Railyon]

paranormal activity sucks :glare: it'll disappoint the only time I got scared was when my alarm clock went off (it's loud as fuck!) was fixing it while watching maybe that's why I wasn't scared.

Pfff, everyone knows BWP. Well, goes for Paranormal Ac. too I guess...

I made it a habit of watching PA in the dark, alone, lights out and shit... could barely go down the stairs afterwards to fetch myself a drink without pissing myself at every sound.

If you like your horror trashy try Poultrygeist, fucking 10/10 horror trash gem

[Vyacheslav Brolotov]

I watched all of these :(

Is the original Friday the 13th any good? It is Friday the 13th today. :)

[Railyon]

The original, yeah. The remake, not so much.

[Ostrinski]

What about the Hannibal Lector or Saw films

[Luc]

You got a phobia?

You could watch a movie that is about it or contains alot of it.:)

That should freak you out, it did me :lol:

[seventeethdecember2016]

Reagan(2011). I just watched it and thought, "Wow... This guy has to be one of the most ignorant puppets I've ever seen. If this guy actually became President, his government would easily murder millions of people."

Luckily it was just a movie.

[Ele'ill]

event horizon

[Danielle Ni Dhighe]

The original Ju-on direct to video films, the original Thai version of Shutter, the original Japanese version of Dark Water, and the Japanese film Kairo. If you're renting from someplace with a good foreign film section, you should find at least one of those.

[Tenka]

John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness is pretty great. Don't know if it has enough jump-out-and-scare-you moments for some though.

[The Young Pioneer]

Any movies about exorcism are pretty good.

Just shut 'em off like 20 mins before the end.

The endings always make it lame.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Sometimes the most scared I've been watching a movie and the most scary movies in general are two different things. It's situational too - I've seen movies that didn't scare me at all when I saw them on TV in the theater by myself and it scared the shit out of me.

As far as some of the best I've seen go:

- Night of the Living Dead - this may not work for everyone because it's slow and low-budget. But I stayed up really late when I was 13 and watched this when my parents were out of town and it scared me so much that it jump-started my love of horror movies (at least my post-childhood love of horror movies - as a kid I always loved the old cheesy Hollywood and some of the Hammer movies and Corman Poe movies).

- Texas Chainsaw Massacre - the original one! I guess since my first horror-movie love was Night of the Living Dead, I've been drawn aesthetically to low-budget and raw-feeling horror movies.

- Psycho - this I saw when I was a kid and it didn't scare me at all. This movie is the one I later saw in the theaters by myself, and maybe because I was comfortable with thinking I knew the movie I let my guard down, and it scared me more than I thought. It's really well-crafted and earns it's rep IMO, unlike some other standards like Exorcist. That movie is just shocking because there's a vulgar little girl in it. I'm not shocked easily - especially not by sacrilege lol! I thought she was funny - she's be a great alternative comic if she were real and around today!

- Jaws/Alien - both solid well-crafted in suspense and horror - always watch them if I have the time and they come on tv.

- Ringu/The Ring - I saw this on a grainy bootleg someone gave me (the japan original) and I watched it on a TV that was on it's last legs and had a habbit of turning itself on in the middle of the night, waking me up to a blast of white noise and snow! I had no idea that the ghost in the movie had the same M.O. so needless to say it scared the shit out of me and continued to do so for weeks as my TV would wake me up at night. I also think that seeing the original Ringu and Ju-On were terrifying to me because they were not standard hollywood or anglo-phone ghosts. Their motivations were unexpected and "rule" unknown.

- Blair Witch Project - I really enjoyed this movie-going experience and at the end my armrests were drenched in sweat. Unfortunately, I think the movie only works once and it's much better in the theater than on TV.

- Poltergeist - also a well done horror movie.

- Return of the Living Dead/Evil Dead 1&2/Drag Me To Hell - these are some of my favorite comedic-horror movies (as opposed to horror-comedies like Shaun of the Dead). When I was a young horror geek in the pre-28 days later "fast-zombie" days, the zombie debate was always do you like "Night" or "Return"? Beatles or Stones? I liked them both - mostly because they are just two different but equally iconic representations of Zombies, I mean as much as I am horrified by Romero's zombies as a force of nature or social disorder, Zombies wouldn't be the same in pop-culture if they didn't eat and say, "braaiiinns" - than you "Return"! As for the other movies - Sam's the man when it comes to cinematic pulpy horror fun that's absurd, genuinely scary, and funny. (the "Host" would also be on this list, but it's really a giant-monster movie and while very exhilarating and suspenseful in parts, it's not really a "scary" movie).

[Vyacheslav Brolotov]

I watched Friday the 13th (original) last night and Ju-on tonight. Ju-on was the best, hands down.

[Rocky Rococo]

When it first came out I saw The Exorcist at the theater. Oddly enough, the thing that made me shudder and kept me up late that night after seeing it was just a quick cut, a flash of a gargoyle in the desert. But a whole raft of the standard fright features in the genre of supernatural horror films got their first use in that movie.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Also I think after Hitchcock, Polanski is the best at constructing an amazingly cinematic psychological thriller. Some of my favorite "horror" movies by him are "Repulsion" "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Tenant". I like "Rosemary's Baby" a whole lot, but the other two movies made me feel that I was actually going insane along with the characters - just fantastic at using cinematic techniques to create a disorienting claustrophobic sort of insanity. I saw "the Tenant" for the first time in a theater after staying up more than 24 hours - I thought I was going to fall asleep but I was totally mesmerized.

Back to zombies: I think "28 Days Later" is a fantastic zombie movie and the best of the post-millennium zombie wave (though I also like "Land of the Dead"). It's not technically Zombies, but who the hell are we kidding, they are zombies for all intents and purposes.

John Carpenter's "The Thing" is also amazingly effective in mood and that claustrophobic feeling - the depiction of paranoia is the best since the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The most bizzare horror movie I ever watched was a Japaneese movie from the 1960s called "House" - I have no idea what it was about and the drugs I was on at the time are only part of the reason:lol:.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Does anyone know of any books about the horror genre in film (or more generally in lit) from a Marxist perspective? I have this book called "Let's Pretend We're Dead: Capitalism's Monsters" which has a sort of soft marxist-criticism perspective. It's more academic Marxism than revolutionary as far as I can tell - the author so far doesn't even say "marxist criticism" she says "economic-based critique of horror" and contrasts it to feminist-lit theory and Freudian criticism and then used Marxist concepts such as base and superstructure, LTV, etc to base her critiques on!

At any rate, I bought it because I just read a pretty interesting book called "Red Planets" (if overly academic sometimes too - but from a less passive Marxist perspective - in other words marxism is more than just a tool of academic criticism to them). It has essays by China Melville and Fredric Jameson and people like that discussing Sci-Fi and Utopian lit from a Marxist perspective. I didn't agree with all the essays or points raised but it was a really interesting book and I'd love to read something similar on horror-fiction. Sci-Fi has a much more over connection to Marxist thinking and social criticism and I think there's more of a tradition of Marxist thought on that genre (many SF writers were Marxists or influenced by Socialist ideas). Horror is a little more murky, tends to focus on internal and personal fears and had a pretty pronounced reactionary strands and traditions that seems less of an issue in SF lit (maybe movies are different).

Anyway any recommendations are appreciated.

[GiantMonkeyMan]

Fucking E.T. man. Still scares the shit out of me. D:

[bad ideas actualised by alcohol]

The Trotsky.

[marl]

The Trotsky.

Half of that movie was really lame, the other half was really good.

[Althusser]

The theatrical version of Stephen King's It was pretty scary. The Halloween from 1978 was also scary.

[Mass Grave Aesthetics]

The Trotsky.
One of the worst and most depressing films ever!

on topic: I´d reccomend these for a start:

The Stendhal Syndrome (1996)

The House with Laughing Windows (1976)

A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)

Grave Encounters (2011)

Trauma (1993)

Tesis (1996)

Art of The Devil (2004)

Reincarnation (2005)

Possession (1981)

The Gingerdead Man (2005) For comic relief!:D

These are some of my favourite horror films. Plenty of more stuff I can recommend. Use IMDB to look these up if interested.

[bad ideas actualised by alcohol]

Half of that movie was really lame, the other half was really good.

I think I missed the "really good" part, but maybe ,if the credits are half of the movie, you're right.

[Ose]

Ju-on: The Grudge scared the crap out of me in a way that no other fiilm has.

[Vyacheslav Brolotov]

Ju-on: The Grudge scared the crap out of me in a way that no other fiilm has.

The original Ju-on was even scarier.

[Zukunftsmusik]

The Blair Witch project is boring 90% of the time, then at the last few minutes it's like holyshitohmyfuckinggod

[Os Cangaceiros]

The only three films that had such an effect on me that I still thought about them days after viewing them were "Spoorloos" (1988), "In A Glass Cage" (1987) and "White Lightnin" (2009).

here's a list of ten horror films I like:

Day of the Beast (1995)
The Shining (1980)
Halloween (1978)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
Kill Baby Kill (1966)
Schramm: Into the Mind of a Serial Killer (1994)
Who Can Kill A Child? (1976)
Angst (1983)
Singapore Sling (1990)
In A Glass Cage (1987)

[Per Levy]

hard to say, when i was 13 i watched the first "nightmare on elmstreet" that was pretty creepy back then.

nowadays id go with "the mouth of madness", while hardly supra scary it builds a nice creepy atmosphere that a lot horrormovies dont even bother about, not to mention its a homage to h.p. lovecraft and its probally my favourite movie.

anyway, the creepiest expierince i had with any media so far is probally amnesia the dark descent, its game but creepy as hell, totally fucking creepy more so then any movie i ever watched.

[Os Cangaceiros]

I'd like to third the recommendation for "In The Mouth Of Madness", actually. That's a really good apocalyptic film, really surreal and dark.

Also, if anyone wants to see a good J-Horror film that doesn't have stringy haired pale ghost people in it, I highly recommend Sweet Home (1989). It's a haunted house movie that actually isn't lame! Better than the overrated Hausu, in my opinion.

[marl]

I think I missed the "really good" part, but maybe ,if the credits are half of the movie, you're right.

All the character relations were forced, the plot poorly represented, and yeah, upon thinking back, I guess it did suck.

I liked the idea, however.

On topic, 120 days of sodom.

[Ele'ill]

"The Thing"

Disgusting in a disturbing way, mysterious. I really liked it. Watch it especially if you have a huge problem with weird shit violently sprouting out of human and dog bodies. *cicada noises*



Also Quarantine. I highly recommend it.

[Manic Impressive]

A film hasn't scared me since I was a child, I'm slightly jealous of people who can still find films scary as an adult. That being said the only three films that I remember finding really scary are seven, It and Ghostbusters 2 that geezers head coming out of the painting gave me nightmares for weeks.

[Bostana]

This movie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._(film)) was horrific.

[Ostrinski]

Man, In a Glass Cage sounds fucked up as hell.

What's a good horror film without any/much gore?

[Rafiq]

Don't watch this movie called "Feed" on Netflix. It's ridiculously disgusting

Sent from my SPH-D710 using Tapatalk 2

[Os Cangaceiros]

Man, In a Glass Cage sounds fucked up as hell.

Yeah, it's the creepiest movie I've ever seen!

Not the bloodiest/goriest, or most extreme, or even the most disturbing...the creepiest.


What's a good horror film without any/much gore?

Two that I would definitely recommend are "Malefique" (2002) and "Sauna" (2008).

[Jimmie Higgins]

Ju-on: The Grudge scared the crap out of me in a way that no other fiilm has.For years after I saw that movie with my partner, if she was pissed at me she just wait until I was about to fall asleep and then make the ghost sound from that movie and I'd be awake and sweating pure fear for the rest of the night. Before that she'd envoke the twins from "the Shining" to scare the crap out of me.


A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)
Yeah I second this one - it's horrifying for the first half of the movie or so - I saw the end coming so it was a little bit of a letdown in the last act.


Day of the Beast (1995)Hmm, I don't know if this one is available in the States. I looked it up and it sounds promising tho.

[piet11111]

The thing 1982 as you never get to know who the thing is its the immense sense of paranoia that really gets you.
Great acting too its my all time favorite movie.

Texas chainsaw massacre
Great jump out of your seat movie.

Also the feast trilogy is a really good set of movies when you have a crate of beer along.
Quite sexist though with quite a lot of pointless nudity.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Also, if anyone wants to see a good J-Horror film that doesn't have stringy haired pale ghost people in it, I highly recommend Sweet Home (1989). It's a haunted house movie that actually isn't lame! Better than the overrated Hausu, in my opinion.

Also no stringy hair:

http://www.jeremyreviewsblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/gozu-yakuza-horror-theater-edition-cinema-epoch.jpg

[NorwegianCommunist]

The Blair Witch Project.
When I was 13 years old, my dad told me it was a real film, and that the tape was found two years later in the woods and then they published it as a documentary.

While I watched it, I almost died from fright xD

[Nox]

blair witch project

That is without a doubt one of the worst films I've ever watched. I didn't even find it scary. The ending is arguably the worst ending of any film, ever.

[Jimmie Higgins]

That is without a doubt one of the worst films I've ever watched. I didn't even find it scary. The ending is arguably the worst ending of any film, ever.Lol, I liked the ending. One thing about most horror movies - specifically supernatural horror movies (and lit) is the all-too frequent let-down due to the narrative explanation given for the supernatural event. My personal preference most of the time is for the explanation to be less explicit unless it's really central to the story - and most of the time it isn't and so you get explanations about 1/2 to 2/3rds of the way through that come about through crappy exposition in dialogue.

In Night of the Living Dead there is an explanation given through a newscast but even then it's speculative and in the context of the film, is sort of 3rd hand information to the protagonists. So it's treated as a minor thing and that works great IMO because the point is not why this happened, but how these characters (and society, the non-dead antagonist of the movie) deal with it and react to it.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre also has a fantastic, jarring, and chilling ending. The first time I saw the movie, it got to the end and I seriously thought the VHS tape had broken because it was so abrupt. There doesn't need to be a Norman Bates ending with a psychologist explaining why this happened, that's aside from the point - the result is a sense that there is no idealized "real America" but that there is something inherently brutal rotten, incestuous, and cannibalistic beneath the idea of small-town life and traditional family values. Other movies in this post-Manson Vietnam-era of indie horror cover this same terrain but I think this one holds up the best and is the most explicit. It takes the counter-cultural motif of traveling across the US to "find real America" and turns it on it's head (or amps up the themes of "Easy Rider" to a pulp level) by saying, "yeah but you won't like what you find". Not the most progressive views, but I think very representative of the social and class and modernization fears of the Vietnam era (Deliverance, Straw Dogs, the counter-culture vs. working class in "Joe" etc).

I think Blair Witch is sort of a po-mo take on these movies. To explain why what happens happens would be not only miss the point, it would be counter to the horror of the thing. The sin of the protagonists is in mocking rural people and folk lore and warnings. It's a very old motif of horror all the way back to "Dracula" but existing even before that. It's sort of central to horror in capitalism: a bourgoise fear of the limits of modern reason in dealing with some more fundamental problems - leading to a reversion to a pre-capitalist pre-enlightenment situation. "Dracula" is literally an anachronism - an aristocrat from the "backwards" feudal past who wants to use capitalism (literally land-speculation) to modernize and replenish his strange backwards power - a Tzar?

In Blair witch the characters, want to use modern devices (documentary) to expose a backwards tale to the light of day (and apparently mock it and the rural "rubes" who believe it). So to explain this supernatural thing would be to undercut the feeling the movie was trying to express imo.

But then again, if something that's intended to be horrifying doesn't work for someone on a gut level, then it sort of ends there :lol: so to each their own.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Personally, 6th Sense had the worst ending. It ended the movie with a twist answer to a question the audience didn't know it was supposed to be asking in the first place. I mean, Usual Suspects throughout asks, "Who is Kaiser Soze" and so when they tell you, if they fooled you then it's brilliant. In Jacob's Ladder, we aren't specifically asked the question that's answered with the ending, but there is clearly a question of "what is real?" for the protagonist and so the twist ending is totally organic to the story. But I digress.

[NoOneIsIllegal]

I haven't watched it, but I read the plot to A Serbian Film. Honestly, I'm kind of scared to check it out...

You decide
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Serbian_Film

[Fawkes]

In terms of genres, horror is like the great bastion of independent filmmaking. With the possible exception of documentaries, there is no other genre containing as many low-budget movies that have gone on too critical and popular acclaim.

If one is asked to think of some examples of low-budget sleeper hits (movies that progressively grew in popularity upon release from word-of-mouth and inventive marketing), chances are the majority of films that come to mind will be horror. The main ones that I always hear referenced when this topic is discussed are The Blair Witch Project, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Paranormal Activity, and Saw. Not only did these movies generate huge profits in relation to their budgets (TCSM and Saw being the highest with budgets of about $1 mil. if you count for inflation with the former and BWP and PA both having budgets well under $100,000), they also garnered widespread critical acclaim and are considered hallmarks of American horror.

I think the reason why these movies were all so successful is a direct result of the fact that they were shot with very limited means. Shooting a movie on a low-budget necessitates high levels of experimentation and ingenuity. Horror movies are typically reliant upon the ability to confront, shock, and basically fuck with the audience. The audience recognizes this and is therefore more open to experimentation than they would be with other genres.

Paranormal Activity and Blair Witch: shot using consumer video cameras at one(PA)/a handful (BW) of inexpensive and easily accessible locations (PA was actually shot in the director's house). The manner in which they were both shot combined with the cheap yet ingenious marketing technique of "found footage" gave both movies a realness and intimacy that is highly unsettling, exactly what horror audiences want. Also, using a huge crew, elaborate set-up, and expensive equipment would've actually detracted from that feeling.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: Used only a handful of locations. More importantly though, because of the production team's lack of money, it was shot under incredibly stressful circumstances. Shooting took place during four weeks of humid 100+ degree weather seven days a week for 16 hours a day. The famous dinner scene was actually shot over a period of 36 straight hours due to the inability to reuse the grandpa's makeup. Also, the movie was shot chronologically, meaning the tension on the set increased with the tension on-screen. On top of that, real 'props' were used as opposed to their synthetic, yet more expensive, alternatives (e.g. a real human skeleton, dead animals found on the side of the road, chainsaw with an actual chain on it, and, in some cases, real blood), meaning the actors didn't need to feign disgust at the sight/smell of rotting carcasses. And if there's a guy with a real chainsaw chasing you, hell yeah you're going to run. All of these factors combined to give the movie its wonderful sense of dread and anxiety. When you actually feel like killing yourself, it's a lot easier to scream your fucking lungs out than to "meet your boyfriend's parents for the first time". ***

Saw: Again, shot almost entirely in one location. This is a tendency of low-budget movies because as the number of locations increases, so does the overall cost (greatly). Like PA, because it centers around one location, not only does the audience feel trapped and anxious along with the characters, more attention is paid to the development of those characters. You can't help but begin to question what you would do if you found yourself chained to the wall of some bathroom with the only escape being the murder of your fellow captive. That's a pretty scary thing to think about, and it's something that lingers with you in a way that someone popping out from the shadows doesn't.



tl;dr: low-budget movies foster experimentation + audiences are more accepting of experimental techniques in horror films than other genres = many of the most successful/acclaimed horror movies are independents




*** I don't mean to suggest that the final outcome of the movie in any way excuses the actions of Tobe Hooper (the director/producer). If you don't have the money to shoot on a reasonable schedule and with props that ensure the safety of the cast/crew, don't make the movie. Also, the whole movie is riddled with implicit sexism and did much to start the cliche of the final female victim found throughout slasher films.

[kitsune]

Quarantine is excellent, as is the original, REC. I love Carpenter's The Thing. I also liked In the Mouth of Madness. A great freaky, creepy, screw with your head movie.


The original Ju-on direct to video films, the original Thai version of Shutter, the original Japanese version of Dark Water, and the Japanese film Kairo. If you're renting from someplace with a good foreign film section, you should find at least one of those.

I agree. Ju-on and Shutter were the first films that came to mind.

[Igor]

Barney's Great Adventure