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.
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.
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! And that was BEFORE Trump.
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?
118 comments :
Not scary as such but David Fincher's Zodiac creates such a palpable sense of dread, it makes for engrossing but also chilling viewing. Even though we know that the man believed to have been the Zodiac is long dead, the film is masterful in the way it recreates the atmosphere of fear from that era. So much so that the last time I watched it on TV, I had to double check the windows were locked.
P.S. Wes Craven passed away a few years ago.
Play Misty For Me / Fatal Attraction (basically a remake), at least until FA turned into a cartoon at the end.
Monsters didn't bother me, but PMFM and FA were things that can and do happen in real life. It's the reason I still won't watch In Cold Blood.
As a kid, of course, The Wizard of Oz (1939),
and The Boy and the Pirates (1960)
starring Joe Turkel (The Shining)
Don't know about the scariest movie, but the scariest hour of television was without question a 1962 episode of Thriller, "The Amazing Dr. Markesan" starring Boris Karloff and a pre-Darren Dick York.
Still terrifying today.
BTW- Boris Karloff - massively underrated. How many actors created three iconic screen characters?
Frankenstein
The Mummy (which is in the class photo for scariest movie ever)
The Grinch
Add to that minor greats like The Black Cat and The Body Snatcher.
Awfully good.Certainly the best in the genre by far.
A 1972 movie called Gargoyles. It had me skeeved out for months. I finally found it on Youtube and discovered it was a whole lot cheesier than I remembered, but it gave my 14 year old self plenty of nightmares back then.
Salem's Lot, the TV miniseries (1979). I was nine years old when I saw it. Scarred for life.
The vampire boy floating at the window, tapping on the glass, still freaks me out.
https://youtu.be/vV1V0U41HI4
Life lesson: If you're on the second floor and your dead friend is floating outside your window, do not open the window.
Lassie Come Home. I was seven, I thought the dog was going to die, okay. After seeing the movie, I had to watch the TV show from behind the couch, for like, years.
"Anthropoid." For one scene. When the son is reunited with his mother. If you've seen it, you know what I mean. If you haven't, I'll not spoil it for you. It's an otherwise OK movie, but I'll NEVER forget that scene. Wish I could ...
Don't look now.
Not going to comment on scary movies, but I will on your recall of the movie. As an older person, for whom movies were a rare treat in childhood, I remember both providing and receiving scene-by-scene synopses of any movie any of us saw to my friends. This was considered a requirement and woe be unto you if you couldn't deliver. Some of the breakdowns were so detailed that I sometimes thought I saw movies that I hadn't. I still remember seeing Gone with the Wind for the first time on a school field trip, and already being completely familiar with it because my friend Richard had seen it several years before and gave me a full rundown. That's a four-hour movie. Nowadays I couldn't tell you the plot of the sitcom I watched last night, much less summarize a four-hour movie.
By far the film that affected me (at 10 years old) the most was the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Before the film was over I had fallen in love with Dana Wynter. The scene in the tunnel when she turned into "One of them" and we saw Kevin McCarthy's face as he realizes she has turned, both scared the shit out of me and broke my 10 year old heart at the same time.
I saw the film again a week ago and it had the exact same effect. I am now 73 years old and reacted as I was 10.
Ken Sparks
Without any doubt it was Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). For years I wouldn’t swim in water where I couldn’t see the bottom.
"Darby O'Gill and the Little People". I saw the Banshee at the top of the stairs every night I was going up to bed, for years. Thanks, Walt.
The Birds. Hitchcock really knew his stuff.
Back in 1970 or so my aunt brough my little cousin (3 or 4 years old) to see “Willard.” My cousin was scarred for life- changed her name to something weird and became a Wiccan. That there is some bad parenting, even for the 70s.
Saw PSYCHO on the late show when I was about 10 years old. I begged my parents to let me watch it and they reluctantly agreed. The climactic scene in the basement, when Vera Miles finds Mrs. Bates sitting in the corner of the basement, terrified me in a way I'd never felt before. Then Norman appears dressed as Mother, and I was a goner. To this day whenever I go downstairs into a basement that image crosses my mind!
I love horror movies now and could easily rattle off a top 50 in terms of quality, but the one that scared me to death as a middle schooler was The Frozen Dead. It was made in 1966 but I didn't see it until the mid 70s at a Halloween party. A living head with an exposed brain, a wall of severed arms that move, and zombie Nazis standing around repeating whatever movement their reanimation surgery has activated. Creepy, creepy stuff. I didn't sleep right for weeks.
"Village of the Damned" is crazy good as far as chill factors go. I'm not generally interested in "scary" or "horror" movies at all, but that one has qualities. (The original 1960 British one, that is. Not the laughable 1995 US remake...) Also the original "Body Snatchers" with Sutherland, Goldblum and Nimoy.
"I doubt if Wes Craven will ever do a remake."
Considering that Wes Craven died over four years ago, I’d say that’s a pretty safe bet.
The Blair Witch Project is not a great movie, but the ending (with the kid standing in the corner as the girl hysterically screams) freaked me out for weeks.
The original Invaders from Mars. Saw it at the drive in. Had to hide behind the car seat as I watched it. Tapped into the same paranoia of world destruction. The ending totally freaked me.
TARGET EARTH was a 1954 cheap B&W science fiction film that was viewed by this then 7 year old at a Saturday Matinee in mid-1955. My mother would frequently drop me and my 4 year old brother at a theater (yes, it was a much different time) with 30 cents each (25 for admission and a nickel for a Sugar Daddy) and pick us up after several hours of cartoons, a serial chapter and the feature. This particular film was the star attraction and as soon as the invading robots with death rays beaming from their eyes/visor appeared my brother hit the floor and I covered my eyes only peaking out periodically to see if they were still there. After watching a sequence where one of them popped out from behind a door and beamed someone to death I made an executive decision that we'd seen enough. I decided we'd walk home. The only problem was that this geographically challenged seven year old was unaware that the distance from downtown Carmel to our home in Monterey was around 10 miles. But as my brother and I were trudging up the steep Carmel Hill toward Highway One our mother was driving down the hill to Carmel, saw us walking and, well, that was the last time we ever got to go to a matinee unattended. That movie was still the scariest film I've ever seen as it was for our mother though for a different reason.
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein
Wolf Man, Dracula, Frankenstein and Vincent Price as the Invisible Man.
Scary stuff.
I saw a movie that I've always remembered as "Piranha" but now think was called >"Killer Fish" when I was 12. I went with a friend and his older sister and it was the first time I'd gone to a movie with a rating that was higher than my parents approved of.
It gave me nightmares, and started my general avoidance of any movies classified as horror movies. Sort of funny seeing how tame this is by modern standards.
Real life is scary enough for me.
wg
All The President's Men. And I hate the current remake.
"With Halloween fast approaching, what is the scariest movie you’ve ever seen?"
Every movie directed by Nora Ephron.
John Frankenheimer's SECONDS starring Rock Hudson. It came after The Manchurian Candidate (1962), and Seven Days in May (1964). This was a super paranoid time when being atomized by The Bomb was a real possibility. Seconds was about a mysterious organization that would offer a second chance in life. The catch was if it didn't work out they used your body parts to give someone else a new life. Very creepy, dreamy movie.
Exorcist, hands down. Slept (or tried and failed) for the next 2 weeks with all lights on.
A distant second was one of the four sub-stories in 1965's Dr. Terror's House of Horrors. That sequence with the art critic's disembodied hand freaked me out but good.
Wait Until Dark. The sheer terror of the blind woman played by Audrey Hepburn was frightening. She even got an Oscar nom for it.
The movie that came first to mind is Don't Look Now(1973). I saw it with friends. When the big moment came a friend sitting next to me let out the first scream that I had ever heard in a movie theater. Almost simultaneously she apologized to everyone in the theater.Nothing that I have seen since has come close to that intensity.
I have two movies that scared me. One was a Wes Craven one..and the more I think about it, the dumber it seems. It was a remake of one called "Chiller about a cryogenic man come back to life and his heart/empathy is still frozen. All I remember is that some guy followed him up stairs and died of a heart attack...and as the man lay dying, the evil one placed two heart pills on his chest and calmly walked away.
The other one that scared me I cannot recall the title or very much else. All I remember is the guy had an artificial hand that was made from blue iron and the fingers were knives. I recall it aired on a Saturday morning in the '80s. My mom and I had taken to watching these kinds of movies before we would do our errands. Both of us were so freaked out, we didn't leave the house that day.
Jack Clayton's (with a screenplay by Truman Capote) take on The Turn of the Screw, the Innocents, based on Henry James's novella. Great and very scary ghost effects.
More show biz horrors- Boris Karloff- who hid his India ethnicity-
being perhaps denied admittance to this country today under
current immigration policies. No Grinch no Mummy no Frankenstein’s Monster
Or Steve Job’s birth dad certainly being denied admittance under the
current Supreme Court-approved Muslim Ban. No iPad no iPod no iPhone
no Pixar and Monsters, Inc.
Parable...1960s 22 min silent film screened in grade 6 religion class. Creepy as heck. Never watched it or sought it out again.
CARNIVAL OF SOULS lacks a star of even Gene Barry magnitude, but it scared the daylights out of me one Saturday night. Its major plot point was borrowed years later by THE SIXTH SENSE, but not improved on. Do not see it alone.
I always enjoy responding to this kind of question, because I had nightmares and lost sleep as a child due to something completely unexpected: A Bob Hope special. It would have been sometime around mid-70s and I would have been around 6 or 7. The special was a murder mystery parody with the usual large group of celebrity guest stars all attending a party at Bob's house, and getting picked off one by one by a masked killer that jumped out of the shadows and strangled them. I know it was intended to be silly and I recall that the big reveal at the end was that the killer was Johnny Carson.
At that young age it really hit the childhood paranoia about bad guys hiding in every corner. I didn't really get the joke, particularly since I didn't really know who Carson was at that time. We had all watched it as a family as I'm sure it never occurred to my parents that a Bob Hope special might be traumatic. It really stuck with me and gave me nightmares for quite a while, though.
I agree with MacGilroy (Don't Look Now with Donald Sutherland) and with Glenn (the final scene in The Blair Witch Project sent chills up and down my spine).
For me, it was, is, and always will be (drum roll, please)... The Wicked Witch of the West from THE WIZARD OF OZ, especially when she appears inside the crystal ball taunting Dorothy (Oo, you're not only going to kill her, first you're going to make fun of her for being scared? Now that's evil!) then cackles and turns to look directly into the camera!!! (Not cool, Wicked Witch. You're not supposed to be able to see me!) ;P
A digression but I thought you might like this review of Frasier, written by a millennial who has [re]-discovered the show.
https://www.thecut.com/2019/10/i-guess-my-parents-were-right-about-frasier.html
Michael Jackson's acting in Men in Black II. Terrifying.
As a teenager I could handle gory slashers like Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street but there was one movie I could never watch all the way through - Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds”. On two different occasions I tried watching it on TV. Both times I eventually had to turn it off or leave the room. I think it was the suspense and what Hitchcock left to the imagination that unsettled me. I recently bought it on DVD and am looking forward to watching it as an adult. Hopefully I can make it through this time and maybe even chuckle at how silly it was for me to be bothered by it.
FYI, my late husband, Dwayne McDuffie, once told me about his scariest movie memory, which was surprisingly similar to mine: no, there was no green-faced witch involved--but his was the moment in REAR WINDOW when [SPOILER ALERT] Raymond Burr looked directly into the camera.
The movie that scared the shit out of me was when I was just under 10...some 3D piece of crap called "The Bubble" from 1966. I don't remember what was so scary about it, just remember that it frightened me enough that I jumped over the seat and hid behind the chair for a long while. The second would have been "Alien" in 1979. Remember walking out of the theater and down a dark hallway [which soon became me running down the hallway] filled with overhead pipes and crap and expecting something to come leaping down on top of me. Think it scared me because #1, it wasn't human and #2, it was an ALIEN that didn't think like a human so who knew what it was going to do?
There is 'kid' scared and there is adult scared.
When I was a kid, my elder siblings watched "Creature Feature" which opened with a montage that ended up with a shot of "The Crawling Eye" that freaking terrified me silly. I had to cover my eyes every time.
As an adult, there is an English TV movie from the 1980's called "Threads" about a major nuclear event and its aftereffects that is less about the gross effects of the blast and more about how 'humanity' itself unravels in the face of deprivation. There is a very existential feeling of despair that was so profoundly depressing there should be a warning label on it.
THE PRESIDENT'S ANALYST
Here's how wimpy I am: I couldn't stay and watch the part in The Silence of the Lambs where Buffalo Bill is tracking Clarice and vice versa. I guess I'd better stay away from Freddy Krueger.
Only one movie ever gave me nightmares. "Picnic at Hanging Rock." I saw it in a cinema, which was way worse than having the film safely enclosed by a TV cabinet. I've only seen the movie that once, in the cinema. A couple of years ago, I bought myself a Criterion collection DVD. I still haven't taken the shrink-wrap off the DVD case.
If you watch it on TV and it doesn't frighten you, I won't be surprised.
Not a movie. An episode of "One Step Beyond" called "The Clown." A jealous boyfriend kills Yvette Mimieux and pins it on a silent clown (Mickey Shaughnessy.) Everywhere the boyfriend goes where he can see a reflection - the clown is behind him, fingers moving toward his throat. He turns around - no clown. Until the last time...
I saw this when I was home alone and around six years old. For *years* I was scared to look in a mirror. Some people have cited this as an unexpected benefit. But Jesus...
And of course there is the short "old time radio" cut from Arch Oboler's "Drop Dead" album - "The Dark," about the slithering black fog that turns people inside out. We used to hear that on WGN radio every Halloween as our mother was making breakfast before school. Stayed with us all day; nightmares at bedtime.
Jeffrey Graebner said...
"A Bob Hope special. It would have been sometime around mid-70s and I would have been around 6 or 7. The special was a murder mystery parody with the usual large group of celebrity guest stars all attending a party at Bob's house, and getting picked off one by one by a masked killer that jumped out of the shadows and strangled them. I know it was intended to be silly and I recall that the big reveal at the end was that the killer was Johnny Carson."
"Joys." ("Jaws," get it? Get it?) 1976. Mainly frightening as being the WORST comedian-studded special since "A Tribute to Stan Laurel," which at least had a scene with Buster Keaton and Lucille Ball.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90B3NB-aEXQ&t=304s
And the punchline of the whole shebang didn't work: Carson's motive? "Now at last I can host my own show!"
From a man known to have contractually fought for *more* time off. It doesn't work, mate.
The Beast With Five Fingers with Peter Lorre and a guy named Robert Alda. Not so much scared, just creeped me out but fascinated me, too. And a little funny.
'Evil Dead'. Scares me till date.
Later parts I didn't see completely. Just saw a few clips on YT, it was not scary. But the 1st part was something for a 8 year old me.
Scariest was the card reading scene.
Rewatching it I realised, how brilliant the scene was.
2 girls are playing guess the card.
The 3rd girl - who is about to be possessed- who is looking out of the window is able to read the cards.
First there is confusion / hesitation in her voice - like - How am I able to read? then quickly the voice changes from female to male - confidently and quickly reading the cards. And then she turns suddenly towards us, which scared me like anything.
Very well made movie with a very small budget.
Probably the original Halloween for me. First time I saw it, I was a teenager. My family had just come home from a haunted hayride thing (yeah), and there were these guys with chainsaws who jumped up onto our cart as part of the act. They'd startled me pretty good, so I was already on a bit of a freaked out buzz upon returning home.
Then I saw Halloween was going to be on, and I'd never seen it before (it came out before I was born), and I was like, "Well, hey, it is Halloween, perfect time to check out this scary movie."
Hand to God this is true, when I went to bed later that night, I checked behind every door and in every closet in my parents' and sister's rooms, as well as my own, just to make sure nobody was there. I very seriously considered sleeping with the light on, too. And the next day, as I was walking home from the bus stop, I was warily eyeing the row of trees in my backyard and thinking, "So help me, if Michael Myers pops out from behind there...".
What I love about that movie is that the concept is so simple. There's no excess gore or over the top craziness. Just a serial killer stalking young people at night. That sort of thing actually happens in the real world. And that's what makes it so terrifying to me.
Psycho is definitely up there, too, though, as is Scream (and that one I saw when I was, like, 12 or 13 years old, not long after it came out). And then there's the opening sequence in When a Stranger Calls...
Why do people hate Nora Ephron?
And also Michael Jackson? Because he is black?
The War Game. I watched it in my last year at school.
And a shout for The Dark Secret of Harvest Home with Bette Davis
King Kong, original B&W version. Remember seeing it on TV on a saturday afternoon. Freaked me out a little. When I went to bed, all I thought was King Kong was going to reach his hand inside our bedroom window, and pull me out. Couldn't sleep that night. Sat on the stairs looking out the window waiting for a monster.
Dirty Grandpa.
The movie was wacky as hell. But when Robert De Niro put his cock near Zack's mouth while Zack was asleep and woke him up asking him to blow it. I just freaked out. What the hell was that? I didn't expect that shit from a Robert De Niro movie, let alone from Robert De Niro.
Scared - Scarred - Traumatized me for life.
His sleazy scenes with Aubrey was just creepy.
How much did they pay him for that role? Why did he take it?
Never can understand these actors.
Good question. I saw a lot of horror movies as a kid and the later slasher movies never phased me. I think psychological horror is much scarier; but I remember sneaking in to see Invasion of the Body Snatchers when I was about 11 or 12, and still get flashes from it. I read The Exorcist before I saw the movie (I was a precocious reader) so I'd already had my nightmares before I saw it. Ditto for Salem's Lot.
As an adult, I don't find horror movies, or books, to be nearly so entertaining. Evil is too real to me now. And its still the will-sapping, identity swapping, don't know who to trust scenario that scares me most.
I remember that movie, and I think I also saw it at a Saturday matinee at The Stadium Theater. It didn’t really scare me much, but I recall thinking that the final twist was very cleaver (hey, I was young). I also spent a lot of Saturday mornings at the Lido (Pico & La Cienega) and Picfair (Pico & Fairfax). We’re you the kid who threw his popcorn at me?
As a kid, a neighbor kid simply described Nightmare on Elm Street to me and it scared me to death.
When I saw it later as young teenager on VHS it was pretty good, but not nearly as terrifying as the way my neighbor described it.
In Lindsey Anderson's "O Lucky Man" (1973), the brief medical clinic scene where Malcolm McDowell's character ducks into a private hospital room and pulls back the covers of the terrified patient/subject whose head has been grafted onto the body of a hoofed animal.
Beginning of the End. 1957. Peter Graves and others. Saw it when I was nine years old. Somebody invents a radioactive plant food to grow tomatoes bigger than basketballs and save the world from famine. Unfortunately grasshoppers get into the food and grow larger than airplanes and attack Chicago. The world is saved when Graves leads a group to build a giant loudspeaker on a boat that makes a noise that sounds like "I love you" in grasshopper. Boat goes out in Lake Michigan. Stupid yet horny grasshoppers follow the sound and drown in the lake. The end. To this day over sixty years later I still have giant bug dreams, occasionally wake up screaming, pissing off my poor wife.
Martin Landis' The Fall of the House of Usher - I remember coming home from church one time, I reckon near Halloween, and my brother, father and I landed on some random made for tv version. I believe it was 1982, which would make ten years old.
I have never, ever been so scared in my life - while watching I literally BEGGED my dad and brother to turn the channel - even offering them money!! Gee, what good times...apparently I had disposable income to throw around. I mean, I was terrified. And I couldn't leave - no WAY I was gonna go be by myself. Way too terrified. And mind you, this was at about one o'clock in the afternoon. Broad daylight.
I remember going to bed later on and I was literally shaking so badly my brother yelled at me cause I was shaking the whole bunkbed. Wow. Unreal. Would love to track down a copy of this flick. I'm sure now it's prolly laughable now, but jesus I was terrified.
ALIEN.
Brad Anderson's Session 9 really got under my skin.
I don't see a lot of scary movies, but "Eraserhead", especially for the sound design, which freaks you out even aside from any imagery.
Dracula has Risen From the Grave. Saw it when I was 12 and couldn't sleep that night.
Also, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was scary for me when I was 10.
CoS is creepy.
Yes! Salem's Lot is a terrific and scary movie.
'Our Town (1940)', by Thornton Wilder, with William Holden and Martha Scott; which I saw on TV in something like 1963.
There's a scene where the heroine is dying of childbirth or TB or something, and she gazes at the wall of small framed family portraits opposite her bed. Then there's a 1940's style dissolve from the wall of pictures to the local graveyard, where the dead characters speak from over their headstones.
Traumatized? It wasn't until 1998 or something that I found from an IMDB forum where that scene was from. It had literally haunted me for 35 years. The film is so-so.
Leave Her to Heaven (1945) especially the scene in the lake. The opening of Bride of Frankenstein (1935) when the man falls under the burned mill at the start. And it makes no sense but The Cult of the Cobra (1955) with Marshall Thompson.
The movie Orphan (Because if you saw the news recently- It could really happen.)
Ken, Cheers Season 11 questions:
1- What was the impetus for the bar burning storyline? The background set changed (at least what was hung on the bar walls, everything seemed a lot brighter) post fire, just curious if this was purely storyline driven or was this some wacky situation where an NBC exec came in and said research groups showed the audience wanted a fresh coat of paint on the bar walls haha
2- "Little Match Girl", "The Guy Can't Help it" and "Teaching With The Enemy" are semi dark in tone for later seasons Cheers. (Frazier threatens suicide after Lilith leaves.) Was there any reservation on the tone of those episodes at all? They weren't the normal pattern of joke after joke etc....
3- What are some of your favorite season 11 episodes? I have to say- "The Beer is Always Greener" and "Last Picture Show" are near perfect episodes to me. Would put them in pantheon of best sitcom eps of all time!!
Thanks!
I was put off chicken for a year after watching Eraserhead. If you've seen it, you can guess why.
Well, Neil, a lot of people hate Michael Jackson because he's a self-absorbed child molester.
As for horror movies, they all scared me until I was about 12. After that none of them did. I find slasher movies boring. In fact, I can't abide listening to women screaming constantly, and that seems to be what happens in these things. Cujo was like nails on a blackboard to me.
Just wanted to say that I remember The 27th Day. It used to run overnight on WABC-TV in New York, back when local stations actually ran movies in the wee hours, instead of infomercials and news rebroadcasts. I can't say the film scared me, but the scene where they successfully test one of the capsules on the dying scientist was, to me, deeply moving. Good film.
The scariest thing I ever saw on Halloween wasn't a monster movie. It was a short documentary about a crew going up into the broadcast tower of the Empire State Building to do maintenance and some mapping. Surprisingly, there were few handholds up there. There was one point at which safety harnesses became unusable because there was nothing to latch onto, so thse guys had to clamber freestyle around a large, flat ring surrounding the outside of the tower in order to continue their way up. A couple of them were wearing cameras, and there were also two helicopters hovering a few hundred feet away. The heights and the risk really got to me. I watched most of the show through my fingers.
I still wonder if they ran this show on Halloween on purpose, or if it was just a happy accident.
Neil
Really? You have to ask why people have a problem with Michael Jackson? And then make the absolutely ridiculous suggestion it's because of his race? Yeah, it can't possibly have anything to do with him being a foul child molester.
"A Christmas Carol". 1969. Animated. Originally broadcast - and rerun through the 1970s - as part of the CBS "Famous Classic Tales" series.
The usual limited animation of the era. The storytelling somewhat perfunctory. Ten minutes into the story, however, the VERY unique interpretation of Jacob Marley's ghost (voiced by one Bruce Montague) brings everything to a stop. Saw this at five years of age, and never forgot it. Watch this at ANY age, and you will never forget it.
Oh, the Bob Hope special. It was "Murder at N.B.C.," and the periods were necessary because it wasn't NBC. Yeah, a laff riot. It was the Oct 19 1966 installment of Bob Hope's anthology series for Chrysler. There was a large cast of then-current comedians ranging from Milton Berle to Rowan & Martin. Pic from Mark Evanier's blog:
https://www.newsfromme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/comedians04a.jpg
IDs here:
https://www.newsfromme.com/2015/07/02/funnymen-foto/
They're not all in there, either. The missing cast members: Bill Cosby, Shecky Greene, Don Rickles, Don Adams, Red Buttons, Johnny Carson and Jonathan Winters. Of them all, only Cosby and Greene are still alive.
The early-1980s TV movie Special Bulletin, from the Herskovitz/Zwick team, who knew exactly what they were trying for and succeeded. Boy, did they succeed.
Exorcist. I can still feel the goosebumps on my spine when I first saw Linda Blair's head do a 360.
Another is Something Wicked This Way Comes, based on a Ray Bradbury story, starring Jason Robards and Jonathan Pryce, who gives a terrifically menacing performance. Unfortunately, it never pops up in October when all the slasher movies are repeatedly played.
I also doubt that Wes Craven will do a remake since he died four years ago.
First scariest was the original Psycho seen on TV when I was a child. Later it was The Exorcist and recently it was The Ring. The scene at the end when she comes out of the TV....
Janice B.
Target Earth (1954) scared me as a kid. I think it must be the slow ponderous way the robots walk. All the best scary things walk like Karloff as Frankenstein's monster.
Be warned. These may be too scary for you.
Scariest film: The Woman in Black (1989 TV film), adapted by Nigel Kneale of Quatermass fame.
Scary film: Dead of Night (1945), Ealing Studios.
Creepy film: Ringu (1998), the Japanese original.
Horrific when viewed as a child: The Naked Prey (1965).
Hey Ken-- I seem to remember that you shared time in the Mariner's booth with Ron Fairly. In light of his passing today, do you have any good stories about your time with "Red?"
There is an especially big, for its time, scare scene in the aforementioned "Wait Until Dark."
I was staring at the "wrong" part of the theatre screen when the scene unspooled,
and so the audience howls were more shocking to me than horrifying.
This, of course, would never have happened if my first viewing had been on an iPhone.
Here is that scene- S P O I L E R S
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0s_qq2clHA
As it has been noted elsewhere, it is odd how many blacklisted/left wing women wound up as leads in the biggest 1930s horror films- Fay Wray, Gloria Stuart, Rose Hobart, Gale Sondergaard, Elsa Lanchester....
and how many Oscar-winning/nominated women starred in horror and fright shows when the studio system died-
Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Olivia de Havilland, Mary Astor, Barbara Stanwyck, Audrey Hepburn
Can people identify this film? Not scary. Seen as a child and unable to place.
A man stands viewing a painting in an art gallery. A painting of an isolated house. He's joined by a stranger and they discuss the painting. Somehow they step into the painting and enter the house. The stranger is the painting's artist. He feels that the house needs a figure in the window and the man is left trapped in the painting.
Back in the gallery, the artist views the painting. It needs another feature to offset the new figure. He's joined by a woman...
Hello again Ken. I've been trying to think of some anagrams of your name, given the topic a few days back. KEEN N EVIL? ;-)
But regarding the topic at hand, I'm a huge Kubrick fan and after reading extensively about how Stanley and Shelley Duvall clashed on the set, I'm wondering if a horror movie could be made just about the making of THE SHINING in 1979-80.
Also, because of its ending, it's to this day one of the most controversial horror movies ever made, but a scary flick I love to recommend to people is PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK. Warning: you may be angry after it ends (and you'll understand why if you watch it). I will share about it, it's an Australian flick, was made in 1975, takes place in the year 1900, and is rated PG. Forget blood and gore; there's barely even a cuss word in it.
House of Wax with Vincent Price. Saw it as a youngster on TV & his deformed visage gave me a nightmare that night in bed.
Psycho, specifically the ending
The Incredible Shrinking Man. I was young and didn’t really understand. I was afraid of fog for a long time.
@anonymous
Boris Karloff was English, born in Great Britain.
There was some Indian ancestry in his parents' families.
I'd been working in the tiny lab on a research vessel with 10 or so other scientists for a couple of months. We described it as being in prison with the added possibility of drowning. When we came into port for a few days, we went to see Alien together. The Nostromo reminded us a lot of the ship we were working on - tight quarters, dirty, nothing worked quite right. We were primed to be scared to death. When John Hurt's chest exploded we all screamed and grabbed each other. But I did fall in love with Sigourney Weaver that night.
By the way, speaking of “giant ants” it might interest you to know this:
“On December 15, 1954, during its first season, the Disneyland TV show aired an episode called "Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter." It was the first of three episodes about the legendary frontiersman. Fess Parker, who was then 30 years old, had been chosen by Walt Disney himself to play Crockett. Disney had spotted Parker in a 2 1/2-minute bit part in a science-fiction thriller called Them!, about huge mutated ants that were threatening the American Southwest.”
http://www.michaelbarrier.com/Interviews/Parker/interview_fess_parker.htm
The movie with the giant ants must have been "Them!", the first and best of the "giant insects run amok" genre. And yeah, even now it has a couple of scary moments, since they went to the trouble to build the giant ant props, instead of splicing in nature stock footage, like all the flick's imitators did.
The Tingler (1959) was especially terrifying because the schlimy beast thingie that was loose in the movie in a movie theatre could have been loose in YOUR movie theatre as you were watching the film....crawling around the floor....seeking its next victim....what's that on my neck?....AAAAYYYYEEEEE!!!
And props to the original Night Of The Living Dead. Caught that on a Friday night at the drive-in. When a zombie's arm comes streaking out of the wall unexpectedly, I jumped in my seat so hard I banged my head on the ceiling....eliciting PEALS of laughter from all my so-called buds in the car. Good times!
It's not a movie, it's a tv show - or, rather, one episode of a tv show, "Rod Serling's Night Gallery." It was called "The Caterpillar" and starred Laurence Harvey, Joanna Pettet, and Torin Thatcher. Harvey's character is sent to a depressing colonial outpost with way too much rain, rendering this already bitter, depressed man even more so. He falls in love with his boss's wife (Pettet) and can't believe that a lovely young woman like her could be happy with her much older husband (she is). He arranges with a local to have an earwig planted in the ear of his 'rival'. Things go horribly wrong. The very last line actually made me gasp with horror.
Turns out the entire basis of the episode - earwigs will eat their way in a straight line through your brain - is utter nonsense. But it seemed all too true to me at the time. I spent days scratching at my ear.
I saw a double bill (remember those?) of Carrie and The Exorcist. I was awake half the night.
Silence of the Lambs. It's the only movie to give me nightmares in adulthood.
The scariest movie I ever saw was a short called "Duck and Cover" which came out when I was eight years old. It taught me to always be aware of where I could quickly throw myself to gain maximum protection in case of a flash from an atomic detonation which "could come at any time".
These three films scared me a lot on original viewing. I saw Psycho in 1960 when it first came out (I was in 12th grade), George A. Romero's Night Of The living Dead (in 1968 my wife refused to go with me and I saw it at the drive-In theater and I locked the car doors!) and of course Jaws
I read The 27th Day when I was in high school. I do not think it was a movie tie in or not.
The Leech Woman. (1960), which I saw when I was 9 or 10. My friend Steve Bissette helped me figure it out. My neck hurt for weeks!
Scariest movie I saw, at 9 years old in 1953, was at Picwood theater Pico & Westwood a 3-D horror movie "House of Wax". Nightmares ensued.
But neatest horror movie is Roman Polanski's "Fearless Vampire Killers" a horror comedy starring Polanski and Sharon Tate involving gay ghouls.
And don't forget Mickey Spillane's Cold War "Kiss Me Deadly" of 1955 with great locations on soon to be demolished Bunker Hill,Angels Flight as well as West L A and Malibu. Starring Ralph Meeker and Albert Dekker with Cloris Leachman running for her life.
May I be so bold as to suggest a TV episode as scariest "movie"? The Zanti Misfits episode of The Outer Limits. Originally broadcast in 1963. You can watch it on You Tube now, of course. 50+ years later and I still have a hard time watching the ending.
I was three or four when I saw Gargoyles and it gave me nightmares for years.
This was when I was a kid - probably 10-12 years old. One of the local stations (there were only three) had a late-night feature call "Project Terror". The scariest movies I remember were The Blob and the Frankenstein moves (original, bride of, etc.)
Just saw Doctor Sleep this evening, the sequel to The Shining. Excellent film. Not scary and obviously not as great as Kubrick's film, but very well made and very entertaining.
The 27th Day on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/57JkQASO_SE
It's funny what scares you in different eras of your life. As a very young child, I saw Birds. It was the most scared I have ever been by an entire movie. The next one was Drew Barrymore's tv scene in Poltergeist. I still freak out when I see a snowy tv screen (tonight even - the cable went out at 9, and I shut off the tv and all the lights to go hide in my bedroom). I saw Blair Witch Project as soon as it came out and we still didn't know if it was real or fictional (obviously an ere before social media). That made for a harrowing movie theater experience. But the most terrifying film I ever saw was a documentary about Jonestown that showed one evening on PBS. At the end they played actual audio footage of Jim Jones telling all the mothers to bring their babies forward to drink the kool-aid. I did not sleep at all for the next 2 weeks.
@Tudor Queen: I'm glad someone else is mentioning "Night Gallery", because it's the first thing I can remember scaring the crap outta me as a little kid. But my episode was "Green Fingers", with Elsa Lanchester, rocking in her chair, covered in dirt and roots sticking out all over. "I told you, I have GREEN FINGERS. EVERYTHING I plant, grows... even... ME!" Oh dude, I think I was like 4 years old and I lost it completely. My parents come in, comfort and chastise me, put me to bed, and said no more of THAT.
And yet, I came back for more later, and the next one I sneakily saw was the episode called "Lindeman's Catch", and hey, there's a mermaid in it, I'm a 4 year old girl, I LOVE mermaids! And then the fisherman that catches her tries to do some kinda funky hoodoo juju to make her "all woman", but only succeeds in flipping her around somehow so she was a woman from the waist down... (camera slowly pans up from her feet)...and a FISH FROM THE WAIST UP. WHY, ROD, WHY?!? My parents tried a little harder to keep me away from that show after that. Even the theme song still gives me the wiggins.
And yeah "...it laid EGGS!" is a damn close third place!
@Guffman: My husband is just the same, he can't stand that episode or the one with the evil tumbleweeds. Grown ass man, damn Eagle Scout, screams if a tumbleweed blows across the road in front of him. It's a hoot.
Happy Halloween, and a blessed Samhain and DÃa de los Muertos, too!
Storm
An earlier attempt apparently didn't go through, so Take Two:
Torin Thatcher wasn't in "The Grasshopper" on Night Gallery.
It was either Tom Helmore (the older husband) or John Williams (the doctor).
But it definitely wasn't Don Knight (the waterfront skeev/earwig salesman).
By The Bye:
Did you know that when he wasn't playing scruffy spivs on TV, Don Knight had another job?
He was an ordained Methodist minister.
Honest to God …
DIABOLIQUE. Case closed.
Disney's Pinocchio scared me for life. Saw it when I was 4 or 5 years old. 60 years later I still feel anxious if I even think about it.
The movie that scared me the most as a child was DR PHIBES RISES AGAIN (which as an adult I now recognize as an inferior sequel to the camp classic ABOMINABLE DR PHIBES, my favorite Vincent Price film).
The movie that scared me most as an adult was Roman Polanski's THE TENANT, which is a freakier mind game than anything David Lynch has done.
My stepdad hates "horror movies"... but he likes old-skool sci-fi monster movies. So I showed him John Carpenter's version of THE THING (1982) last night. It sucked him in good... and then it GOT him.
I concur with everyone who mentioned "Don't Look Now". The final twist at the end is one the greatest WTF moments in the history of film.
Also, they're not horror movies, but every one of the original Indiana Jones movies had a scene that scared the living crap out of me when I was a kid. In "Raiders", it was when that guy's face melted after the Nazis opened the Ark of the Covenant, in "Temple of Doom", it was when the cult leader ripped the still-beating heart of out of another member's chest and in "Last Crusade", it was when the main villain drank from the wrong grail and began rapidly decomposing. In contrast, the only scary thing about "Kingdom of the Cyrstal Skull" is that I paid $8 to see it.
I'm sorry, but no-one has pulled you up on " 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." Did she ever say "Oh shut up!"?
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