The scene: A tall man arrives Writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s debut feature, It Follows, was declared a modern horror masterpiece when it was first released back in 2014, and it’s the rare film that has only grown in stature in the years since that initial rapturous reception. The story is simple: a teenager (Maika Monroe) sleeps with her new boyfriend and finds herself cursed by Death, which takes the form of virtually anyone around her and simply moves – relentlessly – towards her, wherever she is. The only way to break the curse? To pass it on. The dread here is painted on as thickly as that metaphor is laid, and Mitchell’s movie is full of scenes you won’t soon forget (the sight of Monroe’s hair rising from her head on the beach still brings the shivers). But for sheer WTF terror we can’t go past the moment a tall man arrives from nowhere just when our hero’s closest friends are starting to doubt her story.
The scene: The opening scene Much has been made of Spielberg’s expert use of the unknown and unseen in Jaws, and nowhere is it more apparent than in the movie’s opening scene in which a woman is jerked to and fro by something moving beneath her in the black abyss. (Stuntwoman Susan Blacklinie had hooks attached to her Levi’s and was being pulled by divers.) The scene is also the first time the world got to hear that iconic John Williams score, its pulsing slow-build instantly becoming a mood-building classic. We eventually went back in the water after seeing Jaws, but never at night.
The scene: A transcendental experience Martyrs was part of the New French Extremity movement, where a wave of filmmakers put out horror films that hit harder than ever before. Part home invasion, part torture porn, all blood and gristle, Martyrs details a cult-like group who torture young, beautiful women to the brink of death to uncover insights into the afterlife. It all comes to a head with the final sequence, where one of the main characters is flayed alive. Worse: She survives. Even worser: The experiment actually works, as the character enters a transcendental state. The knowledge she gleans about the afterlife and passes on, however, proves too much for the living.
The scene: Annie breaks Paul’s legs When it comes to visceral gross-out scares, the Saw films may win for degree of difficulty and Hostel (remember that one?) may be the king of holy-f—k gore. But for impact, nothing beats Rob Reiner’s Misery, in which barely a drop of blood is spilled and not a single eyeball plucked. We’re cringing just remembering the moment Kathy Bates’ Annie Wilkes’ places a block of wood between a tied-down Paul Sheldon’s (James Caan) feet and breaks his ankles with the swoop of a giant sledgehammer. The crunch! The unnatural bend of the ankle! The slow and methodical description of “hobbling” that Wilkes gives before she takes her epic swing! Jigsaw ain’t got nothing.
The scene: A knock, knock game If you were watching director J.A. Bayona’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and wondering why, in the second half, this big-budget dinosaur adventure movie suddenly morphed into a haunted-mansion movie of sorts… well, Bayona’s debut feature, The Orphanage (La Orfanato), will explain a few things. Because, frankly, when you have a filmmaker who’s simply this good at making a scary-house movie, you just let him do his thing. Like The Haunting, The Others, and other classics of the genre, The Orphanage has so much more on its mind than sending tingles up your spine; it’s steeped in grief and history and – led by a terrific Belén Rueda as the mother who moves her family back to her childhood home, a former orphanage for children with disabilities – deeply moving. And, yes, it’s also scary as hell. Perhaps no more so than in the scene where Rueda’s Laura begins to commune with the child ghosts of former residents through the children’s game of “knock, knock”: knock twice, count to three, and turn around to see who’s behind you. With each turn, she sees the specters slowly advancing, until…
The scene: The 21st night Oren Peli’s game-changing found-footage film did for the bedroom what Blair Witch did for the woods. The fast-forwarded footage of Katie (Katie Featherstone) standing by her bed and watching Micah sleep was the reason some of us got separate bedrooms – with locks – from our loved ones for months after the hit film’s release. But the movie saved its best shock for last: On night 21, a now fully possessed Katie leaves the bedroom, lures Micah out with a torrent of screams, and then – after a seemingly endless silence – throws him at the screen and proceeds to eat him. Well, at least we think that’s what might happen. Like Blair Witch’s unexplained finale, this one leaves us with lots of theories to chew on.
The scene: The shower kill Hitchcock didn’t invent the slasher, but we’ll be damned if he didn’t perfect it with Psycho and its seminal scene: Marion Crane’s iconic shower death. Even after you analyze the hell out of it – the Hershey’s chocolate syrup in place of blood; the edits that never once show knife penetrating skin – the moment loses none of its ability to shock. The key is the build-up, that wonderful shadow of Norman behind the curtain, and then the brutality: those quick-cut thrusts matched by that iconic burst of Bernard Herrmann’s score.
The scene: Dragged into darkness This is a found footage nightmare set in a quarantined building in Barcelona where a zombie virus infection is breaking out. Our protagonist Angela is a newscaster who at first merely wants to report on the mysterious closure of the building, and then becomes the news herself when she ges swept into the quarantine. [REC] is a roller coaster of a film, culminating in its final scene, presented in eerie quiet and night vision, as Angela, seeming like she just might make it out, is dragged into the darkness while the dropped camera rolls on. It’s such an effective moment, it was of course spoiled on the theatrical for the American remake Quarantine.
The scene: The cursed video It took us far longer than seven days to wipe the images from this bizarro piece of video art from our minds. Gore Verbinski’s U.S. remake of The Ring is full of excellent creepouts – Samara emerging from the TV; the distorted victims’ faces – but the ace up its sleeve is the video at its center. This unnerving mishmash of static, random ominous imagery (a tree aflame, a woman brushing her hair), and insistent screeching is truly dread-inducing. Even after it’s been aped by the opening sequence of nearly every season of American Horror Story, the Ring video still makes an impact.
The scene: Mother and child The tension rises and falls throughout Rosemary’s Baby, never allowing the viewer to settle in and fully process what’s happening. A demonic rape here, some weird juice there, just to keep the viewer discombobulated. It all reaches a boiling point in the dream-like coda, when Rosemary wakes up after giving birth, in her empty apartment. She finds a hidden room where her husband and neighbors have gathered, all in on the conspiracy for her to deliver Satan’s child, and welcome her in. You never see the baby, but Rosemary’s line says it all: “What have you done to him? What have you done to his eyes?!”
The scene: ‘Do you like scary movies?’ Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson’s genre-reinvigorating classic kicks off with what many consider the greatest opening scene in horror history. Plot-wise, it’s basically When A Stranger Calls, ’90s-style – girl is alone in the house, receives stalk-y phone call, happens to have encyclopedic knowledge of the film genre in which she suddenly finds herself – but Craven brings so much smarts and bravura skill to the direction of it that it kicks complete ass even decades later, after we’ve seen the countless imitators that followed and the shock of having a big-star snuffed out in the first 10 minutes has worn off. Credit too to Ghostface voice Roger L. Jackson, that perfectly placed pan of Jiffy Pop, and to Williamson’s script, a step-by-step screenwriting masterclass in how to ratchet up tension. “The question who am I, the question is where am I?”: Chills to this day.
The scene: Jack on the attack Kubrick stuffed his adaptation of Stephen King’s novel with so many scary moments and images, trying to pick just one could drive you to Jack Torrance levels of craziness. But we’re doing it anyway. While the Grady twins in the hallway are spooky as hell, and we still can’t erase the image of the bathtub woman from our minds, we had to go with the movie’s most iconic moment: Wendy trapped in a bathroom as Jack hammers at the door. Kubrick’s swinging camera, Jack Nicholson’s mania, and Shelley Duvall’s totally convincing fear combine to make this the most terrifying scene in one of cinema’s most terrifying movies.
The scene: Night vision Jonathan Demme’s Oscar-winning thriller makes good on all its pent-up tension with a finale that takes the “killer cam” idea to terrifying new levels. Having just clocked that Jame Gumb (Ted Levine) is ‘Buffalo Bill,’ the killer she’s been tracking – with the help of imprisoned cannibal Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) – Jodie Foster’s Agent Clarice Starling suddenly finds herself plunged into complete darkness in the murderer’s home and desperately trying to orient herself. Demme shoots the scene from Gumb’s point-of-view, through the killer’s night vision goggles, forcing us to watch a seemingly helpless Clarice as she is silently stalked and even taunted, Gumb reaching out a hand to just inches from her face. The sequence was reportedly shot over a 22-hour period and its influence lives in on the found-footage/screen life genre.
The scene: Leatherface appears The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is considered one of the most punishing, sickly transformative experiences in horror. And it’s not even 90 minutes long – and nothing really happens for the first 30 minutes. But once Leatherface appears, the movie never lets up. His grand debut happens inside his house, when a stupidly intrepid young adult enters looking for fuel for his car. Leatherface pops out from a hallway and hits the dude in the hammer, the body crumpling and then twitching on the ground. Leatherface drags the body into the butcher room, and slams the door. There’s plenty of more scares to come, but this opening salvo is as disturbing as they come.
The scene: Getting something off your chest John Carpenter was well into his groove by the time he made The Thing, and he put all of his talents on display to contribute one of the most influential entries in the “body horror” genre not directed by David Cronenberg. We get our first glimpse of the “thing” fairly early in the movie when it absorbs a pack of huskies, and we see it again when it attempts to assimilate Peter Maloney’s Bennings. But the big scare comes when Charles Hallahan’s Norris appears to have a heart attack, and Dr. Copper (Richard Dysart) attempts to revive him with a defibrillator. Norris’ chest opens up like a giant mouth, complete with teeth, and rips Copper’s arms off before Kurt Russell’s MacReady blasts it with a flamethrower. Thanks to some top-notch practical effects and the judicious use of a jump-scare, the scene remains the most memorable and viscerally disturbing in the movie.
The scene: “There’s a Family In Our Driveway” Horror fans are split on whether Jordan Peele’s Us is a match for his debut feature, the Oscar-nominated and ground-breaking Get Out, or whether the film itself manages to sustain the tension of its first act as its story expands. But few would argue that the initial visit of the Wilson family’s mysterious, red-jumpsuit-clad doppelgängers (their Tethereds) to their vacation home is not among the most well-orchestrated and suspenseful home-invasion scenes the genre has ever given us. It’s not just the expert build-up of tension, as Winston Duke’s Gabe suddenly realizes he may need to get a little “crazy” with the strange quartet who’ve come a-knocking, but Peele’s ability to sear instantly iconic images onto our brain, from the shadowy figures holding hands in the driveway to Lupita Nyongo’s Adelaide clutching tightly to her children and, as the sequence settles, the first appearance of those golden scissors.
The scene: The truth Forget everything you know about The Vanishing. Oh, that was fast — as if you’ve never seen the Jeff Bridges/Sandra Bullock kidnap thriller before. It was a lousy movie with the distinction of being a remake…with the same director. George Sluzier was brought to Hollywood to direct the remake, and it’s easy to see why: the 1988 Dutch original is a chilling, methodical examination about the mundane face of pure evil. Naturally, the American version has none of that. It also doesn’t have the original’s ending: When the hero finally confronts his girlfriend’s kidnapper, who offers him the opportunity to find out what happened to her. The answer is one of the most terrifying scenes in movie history.
The scene: A climax in the dark Sensory deprivation has long been a part of some of the most terrifying sequences in horror film history; see, for example, the climax from Silence of the Lambs, highlighted in this list, or the two Don’t Breathe movies, or, in a kind of inverse of the idea, A Quiet Place and its sequel. All likely owe some debt to Wait Until Dark, the 1967 thriller about a recently blinded woman (Audrey Hepburn) who finds herself under siege in her New York apartment when a group of criminals begin casing the place to find a heroin-stuffed doll they believe is inside. (And yes, you read that right: Audrey Freaking Hepburn is an OG Scream Queen.) The movie’s finale, in which Hepburn’s Susy Hendrix is trapped inside her apartment with the criminals (and which features a jump scare for the ages), is a nerve-shattering crescendo for a movie Stephen King has described as among the scariest of all time.
The scene: The phone calls Pop in When a Stranger Calls and for the first 20 minutes, you’ll think you’re watching the scariest movie ever made. Carol Kane plays the babysitter, and she keeps on getting increasingly menacing calls to check on the kids upstairs. When she gets the call traced, naturally it’s coming from inside the house! Think this scene won’t work anymore because it’s been parodied and referenced to death since? Think again. It remains a masterclass in editing and suspense. The rest of the movie is pretty lousy, but that opening act can still dial up the tension decades later.
The scene: The burning Not quite a masterpiece these days but definitely a classic, The Wicker Man follows a prudish police officer as he investigates the disappearance of a young girl on a remote English island populated by pagans. As he follows the clues and contradicting statements of the village people, he edges ever closer to the titular wicker man, a sacrificial vessel to be burned at dusk. Even if you can get who gets put inside it, the sheer intensity and terror of the scene is still something to be witnessed.