What's your scariest movie?

With Halloween fast approaching, what is the scariest movie you’ve ever seen? We all have one. An experience so frightening that it kept you up for weeks, resulted in therapy that is ongoing to this day, and accounts for your aversion to clowns. Could be Freddy or Jason or Chucky or Fran Dreschler – but surely there is one horror movie stalwart that still sends shivers up your spine. Maybe a Gothic classic where an old Hungarian actor skulks about in the night shrouded in a black cape. Or a maniac named Jigsaw terrorizes Shawnee Smith through six sequels. (By the way, when a parent names their son Jigsaw, what do they expect?) Perhaps you’re more of a science-fiction buff and Alien makes your skin crawl. Or the Creature From the Black Lagoon still comes to you in dreams and wants to borrow your girlfriend for the weekend. What movie frightens you the most?

For me, it’s one you probably have never heard of. It’s called THE 27th DAY, and it was a low-budget black-and-white film made in 1957. I saw it a few years later during a Saturday afternoon kiddie matinee at the Stadium Theater on Pico Blvd. near Robertson in Los Angeles. It was on a double-bill with a film about giant ants threatening civilization and picnics.

THE 27TH DAY had hardly any special effects and there were no hideous monsters. Gene Barry and no one else I recognized starred. The storyline was utterly confusing and the movie was very talky. I didn’t scream even once. And yet, it scared the shit out of me.

Here’s the plot. An alien from outer space beams up five people from around the world to his spaceship, which I just assume is hovering over New Mexico. They’re each given three capsules enclosed in a clear little case. Today they'd be mistaken for birth control pills.   Only these five can open their cases with telepathic brain waves. Once open, these people have the power to send the capsules anywhere they want and they will destroy everything and everyone within three thousand miles. So let’s say that Pez dispenser you bought from a guy in Florida was cracked and he wouldn’t take it back. Just vaporize the son of a bitch… and, y’know, 40,000,000 other people.

If these five people can go 27 days without blowing up the world then the Alien would either leave or the five people would get a space-age home tanning salon, or something – I forget.

For the next hour these five run around. They’re chased. One opens his case. One commits suicide. In the end, someone figures how to reprogram the capsules and it sets off this worldwide piercing sound that kills enemies.  Don't ask me why Eydie Gorme hitting a high note kills evildoers but in this case it does. 

You’re probably going, “Gee. People have capsules. That’s waaay more scary than a psychopath who cuts out your boyfriend’s entrails and then makes you eat them.”

But it was.

Remember, this was the ‘50s during the height of the Cold War. We lived in fear every day of worldwide nuclear obliteration. This little movie tapped right into our visceral panic and paranoia that we were all going to die. Eating your boyfriend’s entrails would be really gross but seriously, what are the chances that was going to happen to you? But this! The capsules were a metaphor for “the button” and at any moment some guy who looks like a Russian Howie Mandell could hit it and blow us all to kingdom come. Oh yeah, and then there was an Alien from outer space. Those don’t tend to sit well with little kids.

I was traumatized for about a month.

Did not see it again for a long time. It never showed up in old TV movie packages. And then about fifteen years ago TBS had a weekly sci-fi feature and I saw that it was going to be on. Excited, I stayed up to watch it.

Here’s the weird part: I’m sitting with my wife and saying, “Okay, now they’re going to go to the space ship” then “Now they’re going to Gene Barry at a race track”, etc. I hadn’t seen the movie in like a gazillion years and had previously only seen it once and yet I was able to call out scene-by-scene in order. That’s how much it made an impression on me.

Watching it again, I could see why it unnerved me so. The notion of paranoia and leaving the fate of the world to potential idiots is fucking SCARY! Real fucking SCARY!

So that's the movie I found the most frightening.  I doubt if Wes Craven will ever do a remake. I don’t think the original print will be re-mastered for 3D and IMAX. But these movies have a lasting effect on you. Some people are scared of birds, or showers, or chainsaws. I see Benadryl capsules encased in clear plastic and I have to leave the room.

So what’s your scariest movie?