For my annual horror movie list this year I wanted to highlight some of the movies I have been the most afraid to actually watch. Scary movies are often the scariest before you even see them, when you’re just dreading what imagery is about to be burned into your brain. Some on this list ended up not being nearly as bad as I imagined, and others definitely lived up to their reputation of depravity. I’ve put them in chronological order, since they often seem to be explicitly trying to be scarier than the movies that came before them. Watch these at your own risk, but I kinda think you should watch the movies that scare you the most!
Suspiria (1977)
This is one I found years ago on a list of scariest movie scenes. The poster proclaimed “the only thing more terrifying than the last 12 minutes of this film are the first 92.” Talk about good marketing…it is definitely stressful to watch a movie knowing that the ending is supposedly one of the scariest moments ever filmed. But it’s also the kind of hype that’s impossible to live up to (I imagine it felt similar to be among the second wave of people to see The Blair Witch Project. When you are warned to be scared by something, it is never as scary as being surprised by it). This movie is deeply unsettling and bizarre, and while I absolutely love the bonkers visuals and old-school gore, it often borders on incomprehensible. A review at the time put it nicely that it is “a movie that only makes sense to the eye.” Still, this is a must watch for any horror fan. It has an awesome score, with all sorts of bright colors, memorable visuals and beautifully framed shots (you can tell Kubrick took notes before making The Shining).
Alien (1979)
I was playing with Aliens toys when I was a kid, putting facehuggers on the characters and oozing ooze all over our carpet without really knowing the plot of the movie. I didn’t actually watch this until I was a freshman in college, because I had been told my whole life how scary it was. I had of course already heard about the chest bursting scene, and I knew Sigourney Weaver was the main character, but that was about it. Knowing these things makes the film less scary, but there was still so much dread when I actually watched it alone in the dark. If I could go back in time and see any movie opening night, this would be it. Watching Star Wars not knowing that Darth Vader is Luke’s father is up there, but this was one of the scariest movies ever to the generation that saw it in theaters. They didn’t know who was going to survive this thing…the most famous actor in this at the time was freaking Yaphet Kotto (not to speak ill of the dead, but Ripley doesn’t “save the cat” to make us like her more…she is separated for the brilliant misdirection of making us think she’s about to die). We were warned about this movie by our parents growing up, and I really think it always lived up to the hype.
Cannibal Holocaust (1980)
This was another one I came across in college after looking up scary movie lists. When this film was first released in Italy, the director was arrested for making a snuff film because the gory effects looked too real (he had to produce evidence that the actors were in fact still alive). Cannibalism is about as scary as it gets, so the idea of watching one of the first found footage movies with this kind of mystique around it was pretty intense. It’s definitely an upsetting watch, but really mostly just because of all the real animal violence onscreen (seven wild animals were killed by the actors for the movie, which is obviously pretty horrendous). This movie is an influential but very dated horror touchstone that I just can’t really recommend watching these days. I was terrified of Eli Roth’s “remake” of this, The Green Inferno, but that movie ended up being so bad I don’t think it deserves mentioning.
The Shining (1980)
I first became aware of this movie in 5th grade, when ten seconds of it played at a drive-in that gets destroyed by a tornado in the movie Twister. What the heck is that terrifying movie playing? “It’s The Shining, the scariest movie ever made, you need to be older to see that one.” Only a year later I’d find myself spending the night at a friend’s house, and he wanted to throw it on. I have never been so scared to watch a movie unfold…there was so much unexpected imagery I had never even imagined possible. Blood pouring out of elevators. the woman in room 237. This stuff was wild for a 12 year old, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how visceral it all felt. Watching a scary movie before you are “supposed” to is a right of passage, something that informs your love or fear of every other scary movie you watch the rest of your life.
Event Horizon (1997)
I distinctly remember one of my friend’s older brothers renting this movie for us to watch because one of his high school teachers told him it was the scariest thing she’d ever seen. I was in 7th grade at the time and made the mistake of agreeing to watch it with him. I hadn’t really dabbled with too many scary movies yet, and certainly nothing this gory. It was terrifying. I still think this holds up surprisingly well…the perfect combination of horror and adventure sci-fi, like A Nightmare on Elm Street if it was written by Michael Crichton. This movie doesn’t hold back, wiping out the crew one by one in increasingly terrible ways. I covered my eyes through the video they find of the previous crew when I was 13, and it’s hard not to still do it now.
Audition (1999)
I found out about this one in college when I saw an interview with Rob Zombie saying this was the scariest movie he’d ever seen. Eli Roth also credited it as a strong influence on Hostel. So even thought I had made it through Roth’s film and House of 1000 Corpses fairly unfazed, this one was still definitely intimidating. The first half plays out more or less like a romantic comedy, but that’s what makes what comes next so shocking. I don’t think this should be bundled into the torture-porn category. It saves all of its extreme violence for the final act, making it potent instead of exhausting. This was pretty unprecedented at the time, an unfortunate byproduct being the birth of the torture-porn genre with movies like Hostel. Both Eli Roth and Rob Zombie fail to realize, or choose to ignore, that shocking depravity only really works in small doses. Yet another movie I don’t feel the need to ever watch again.
Martyrs (2008)
When you search for ‘scariest movies ever’ lists, certain titles keep popping up. Martyrs was one that was continuously mentioned as being on the outer reaches of what’s even watchable for a person. For years, I stayed away. Without spoiling anything, what I ended up loving about this movie is how it is constantly changing what type of horror film it is. Just when you think you know what you’ve signed up for, it lowers itself down to the next ring of Hell. For all of the hype about the images of torture (and it is certainly next level), I was actually surprised at the restraint shown in the final act. By the end of it you realize this isn’t just trying to shock you with gore for the sake of gore…any critic who lumps this in with Hostel is missing the point. The dark message behind the film, and your interpretations of its ending will leave you much more shook than any of the blood that is spilled.
Antichrist (2009)
I had been warned about this movie by a few of my more daring film-going friends when it came out, but I never got the guts to see it in theaters before it came and went. Once it popped up on Netflix a year later, I decided that I finally had to see it for myself. I would say this is probably the hardest one to watch on this list (really a toss up between this and Martyrs). The perverse combination of grief and sadomasochism leads to some of the most shocking imagery I’ve ever seen (not many horror movies feature several minutes of full-on genital mutilation). This is definitely a movie you only watch once, but you leave with a bizarre appreciation for having seen something so uniquely upsetting. It’s hard for me to recommend because it is such an intense viewing experience, and sections of it are literally unwatchable. But there are many other parts that are beautiful (Lars von Trier in a nutshell, really). You’ve been warned.
The Skin I Live In (2011)
The hype around this movie is that the perverse twist will shock you. So you just keep waiting…guessing what it could possibly be. And you have no idea how bad it really is. This one isn’t exactly a horror movie in the classic sense…but it is extremely horrifying as it unfolds. The initial premise is creepy enough, that a doctor is conducting indestructible skin-grafting experiments on a woman he is holding captive at his private estate. But then the flashbacks start kicking in, and the floor drops out when you realize what the hell is actually happening here. This one wasn’t nearly as gory as I thought it would be, but the twist messed me up big time.
Goodnight Mommy (2014)
The trailer for this Austrian movie was widely being considered as maybe the scariest trailer ever, so I was definitely nervous to watch this one. What ended up being frustrating for me, though, was how the trailer ended up completely misrepresenting the plot. I was assuming we were getting a movie about children thinking that the person who came home after plastic surgery isn’t actually their mother (which is such a freaky idea). What ends up really happening was kind of a let down for me, but there’s still some great visuals and scares.
Hereditary (2018)
The initial hype around this movie was enough to make anyone dread seeing it in theaters. Both this and The Haunting of Hill House intertwine horror with grief, but this takes everything in a much, much darker direction. Twenty minutes in, you quickly realize this isn’t going to end well for anyone. American audiences have a tough time with the nihilistic implications of a bleak ending in a horror movie…if nobody makes it out of this nightmare, if evil wins, what’s the point? That’s why Hill House has us wiping our eyes as much as covering them in its final episode, and why Danny and Wendy make it out of the Overlook Hotel alive instead of freezing to death in the maze. But I think for a movie to truly be terrifying…for it to truly shake you, there can be no happy ending. There can be no survivors. the survivor is you, the viewer. The point was to freak you the hell out, to keep you up at night when you remember what that clucking noise sounds like. This is one of the best horror films ever made, and the final twenty minutes make you want to never see it again.
The Bent-Neck Lady (2018)
This is a movie list, but I wanted to include episode 5 of The Haunting of Hill House because of how much I was dreading it based on the title alone. After having to pack a ton of information in the pilot, episodes 2-5 are brilliantly constructed to focus on only one of the Crain siblings at a time. They aren’t quite bottle episodes, but they are showing us exactly how the house has haunted each of their lives. The basement scene in episode 3 got me pretty bad, the tall man in episode 4 was extremely unsettling, but by far the scariest thing this show had given us in the first four episodes was a few glimpses of the Bent-Neck Lady. So having an entire 70 minute episode constructed around Nell’s relationship with this horrible recurring nightmare was obviously going to be jump scare city. And I can’t overstate how important it is to just watch this show with complete focus…it’s second nature to retreat to your phone when things get spooky but the jump scares and shocking, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it imagery is all too good to only half-watch. This episode was going to be a favorite of mine regardless, but the mind-blowing ending elevated this to something truly special. Also Victoria Pedretti is extremely good in this.
Suspiria (2018)
Got a chance to see this before it was released, and I was very excited/nervous about how messed up this movie would get. It is such a bummer to admit how disappointing this movie is. I really wanted to love it, but came away thinking it had a ton of problems. This might be an unpopular opinion, but I have yet to understand the Dakota Johnson appeal…the audience was laughing at several of her serious line readings. Tilda Swinton plays three different characters in this, and that’s not a spoiler because it never ends up mattering plot-wise. I kept waiting for her main character Madame Blanc to have a breathtaking scene, and it just never comes. There are also several bizarre stylistic choices like whip pans and slow-mo and flashes of nightmare imagery that just all feel a little try-hard. This is all such a shame because the ending ceremony is certainly as bonkers as advertised, and probably still worth sitting through the two plus hours to get to it. Still, even some of the editing choices during that scene keep pulling us out to safety, instead of just making us feel terrified to be stuck in this chamber of depraved horror. This was a big swing, and unfortunately I think save for a few haunting sequences it was mostly a miss.
And that’s it! Thanks for reading, and hopefully you don’t get too scared finally watching one of these tonight. Happy Halloween!
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