There's nothing that makes you wanna sleep with the lights on more than a good old
fashion scary movie.
But how does that work?
To figure it out, we've took a look at some of these scenes that did it best.
These are our picks.
For the seven scariest moments of all time.
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Kicking us off at number 7, let's get it out of the way, the jump scare.
People complain a lot about jump scares in horror films.
And if these people are to be believed, jump scares are played out.
But we don't think that's true, we think that bad jump scares are played out,
mostly because the audience is way, way ahead of the filmmakers.
We see those hiding spots a mile away.
But filmmakers who can keep ahead of expectations,
who can put jump scares where we least expect them, that's what we love.
It says to us, on some deep subconscious level,
that place you thought you were safe, yeah, there's danger there too.
Think Insidious's from behind a head, Friday the 13th's from in the water,
The Ring's from beyond a cut,
The Descent's In the dark, Scaries Below ground.
The Fellowship of the Ring's right in front of us.
And even The Cabin in the Woods title.
However, for our number seven we've got to give it to Jaws.
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Aah!
Even when you know it's coming, you almost don't know it's coming.
And sure, the sound helps it along.
But the real genius here is that Jaws sneaks around our expectations by not even
letting us think it's a horror movie.
It's a horror in disguise.
A low-key horror that doesn't have any of the surface signifiers to warn us to keep
our guards up.
So we sit back, relax and spend our time watching it like an action film or
a disaster film or maybe even a thriller.
But we're not sniffing out jump scares, so
when one does emerge, it's all the better for it.
Next up at number six, we're moving from surprise to suspense.
And where the jump scare hits us where we don't see it coming,
the suspense scare hits us where we do.
Well, almost do.
Suspense is really just fear of the unknown, anxiety about the future.
You take your protagonist, you confront them with the terrifyingly deadly outcome
and then inject a little ambiguity into the mix.
It's the closet in Halloween.
It's the bathtub in Les Diabolique.
The hallway in Nosferatu.
The basement in Silence of the Lambs and the ending of Wreck.
And while those all wet our collective drawers,
we think that zodiac takes the wet drawer cake.
>> This tip is how you go it in your head that Rick is the zodiac?
>> That and the poster.
>> The poster?
>> Doug.
The poster that Rick drew.
The handwriting is the closest that we have ever come to a match.
>> Rick didn't draw any posters.
>> No, he drew this one.
Mr. Graysmith, I do the posters myself.
It's my handwriting.
>> I won't take any more of your time.
>> Why don't I just go and find out when we played that film?
>> That's all right.
>> It's not a problem. They're just down in the basement.
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>> Not many people have basements in California.
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>> I do.
>> Zodiac devotes its entire plot up to this point building up a terrifying
impression of the killer and teaching us subtle clues that might identify him.
And then when all the sudden Bob Vaughn starts ticking all the clue boxes,
we can't help but recall that terrifying reputation he now might posses.
Well Fincher is as always pitch perfect in his execution of the scene.
Building the suspense into a fever pitch of terror through camera and
editing and audio.
We think the reason it's so effective is that, while we might be yelling,
don't go down there you idiot, at the screen, he's not an idiot.
He's not walking down there without any sense, but in spite of his sense.
His character is just as afraid as us but his decision to press onward is
completely in keeping with who he is, curious and obsessive to a fault.
And the best part, despite the distinct probability of getting super murdered,
we're so curious that we want to go down there with him too.
At number five, we got a twist on suspense that takes it one step further.
It's not the suspense that comes from knowing something bad might happen, but
the dread that comes from just kind of suspecting that it might.
It's a feeling not a thought,
it's a visceral uneasiness, a nameless anxiety not a conscious objection.
Our emotions are telling us to feel suspense but
our intellects got no reason to confirm it.
In stark contrast to the surprise of the jump scare,
this succeeds on being familiar.
It's usually hidden away in the way the story is told.
Not the story itself.
It's the imperceptible and inexplicable shift in the music.
It's the shot that's holding way, way too long.
It's the metanarrative understanding that the filmmakers have
got to do something bad sometime soon.
It's right before we meet leatherface in Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
It's the first kill in Jaws.
It's most of the entirety of The Blair Witch Project.
It's the hospital scene in Exorcist III.
It's every part in a movie where the horror strings swell for
no God damn reason other than that's what they do.
However, our favorite version of this might just be the diner scene from
Mulholland Drive.
>> So, you came to see if he's out there.
To get rid of this God awful feeling.
>> Right then.
>> This scene is such a perfect example because while we're feeling it,
watching it, Patrick Fischler's character is feeling, living it and
there's perhaps no one better at executing it than David Lynch.
He sets us up with a brilliantly detailed story of a dream.
The illogical, emotional terror of it and then prods us through it.
Giving us no reason to fear anything except that we do.
With the river be sound, creeping drone, and lingering POV camera,
he gives us subtle emotional cues to feel uneasy.
Exactly like the memory of a dream might.
So when the jump scare at the end confirms our non sense for
fears it turns our whole world upside down.
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Moving forward to number four,
we're turning away from those fears that play with our expectations and
anxieties and instead looking at the ones that frighten us on a primal level.
And first step, we wanna talk about the grotesque,
the shocking perversion of the human body.
There's something intrinsic to human nature that makes looking at the distorted
human form horrifying.
It's the reason for the uncanny valley.
It's a fate worse than death, a waking death.
It plays on our basic fear of mutilation,
reveals our repressed denial of the fallibility of our body.
It's the distorted figure like in Jacob's Ladder, The Other, Safe and
the Dark Crystal.
It's torture porn like Eyes Without a Face, Martyred, Misery and
Human Centipede.
It's body horror like American Werewolf in London, the Things, Potrero,
Eraser Head, Video Drone and Pinocchio.
That's right, Pinocchio.
For our number four pick, we think it's gotta be the demonic
perversion of a little girl from The Exorcist.
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>> She earn.
My God!
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[NOISE] My God.
>> [NOISE] [SOUND] That!
The Exorcist is brilliant with it's body horror because it's not as much the form
of the human body that's distorted but it's movement.
And it doesn't just pick any old victim.
A devil with red skin and horns, that we can deal with.
But a little girl in pajamas, feels so evil.
The distance between a fantasy of the story and
the reality of our lives is collapsed.
It's playing on the border of the familiar,
all the while making it terrifyingly strange.
There's something wrong, something deeply inhumanly wrong and
it's hard to watch which is exactly why we want you to watch it.
The human form isn't the only thing movies can pervert.
It's often just as effective to pervert the the human psyche.
This time your character is even more familiar but
something about the way they act is just off.
It's creepiness, eeriness, it's the chilling sensation of stranger danger.
Think the beach from Under the Skin, the end End of Psycho,
the [SOUND] from audition.
It's Frank from Blue Velvet, the pedophile from Gone Baby Gone and that God damned
air conditioner that ruined my childhood from the Brave Little Toaster.
They're all terrifying, twisted psyches in innocent looking packages.
Things we deeply repress as part of our everyday socialization.
And the scariest of them all, the death drive.
If Freud is to be believed that death drive is a compulsion towards self
destruction.
It's repressed, subverted, converted, defeated.
So when we see someone enact this self-destructing upon themselves,
it's the absolute worst.
Now we too might be the monster by whom we are victimized.
We can't be trusted because somewhere deep inside our subconscious is a death drive
waiting to escape, like Hell Raiser or Anti Christ or Mirrors or The Omen or
again, with the Exorcist.
They shock us in a way little else can.
But if there's an award for most scarring of the bunch, it has to go to Cache.
But before it does, this is a serious spoiler for an incredible film and
an immensely disturbing sight.
So, proceed with caution.
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>> What's going on?
>> Thanks for coming.
Come in.
>> What's this all about?
>> Sit down.
>> I truly had no idea about the tapes.
>> Is that all?
>> I called you because I wanted you to be present...
>> [NOISE] Death just comes so suddenly.
This is a spine chilling expression of immense pain.
A disturbing reminder of the fragility of life, a psychological jump scare.
It is grotesque of the body, it is grotesque of the mind,
it is danger from where we least expected it.
And it's absolutely horrifying.
There's no fancy camera work, no unknown outcome, no shrieking score,
just a man in his terrible pain.
Way too close for comfort.
[SOUND] Closing in at number two there's a certain kind of scare that besets upon
us from all sides.
And not just the protagonist as a proxy, but seemingly us, the viewers themselves.
In contrast to the jump scare where it's over in an instant, where the various
forms of suspense that toy with the idea that something bad might happen.
This kind of scare puts us right in the middle of that bad thing happening right
now and leaves us there.
The shower sequence from psycho is the perfect prototype.
We are being stabbed, over and over.
Annihilation is approaching from all sides.
Wherever the camera turns there's a knife.
And it's not just the characters in the stories that are assaulting us.
The editing and the music are almost literally cutting into our experience.
It's horrifying.
However, for our number two pick,
we're even more impressed by the ending of Nicolas Roeg's, Don't Look Now.
[SOUND] >> It's okay, it's okay.
I'm a friend.
[SOUND]
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>> It's simultaneously a physical annihilation and a psychological one.
There's a realization embedded in his dying thoughts.
A realization that destroys his former world view.
But even as the montage gives us logic and story.
It's more about the effect of it, the cutting is assaulting us with
all kinds of frightening imagery, evocative imagery.
It's a violent rush of imagery.
It attacks us as we watch it.
The church bells assault us as we listen.
There's little time dedicated here to the surprise and the suspense of it and
more to the abject horror of death.
And that's what this sequence is,
a cinematic interpretation of the experience of death.
The final dissent of the symbolic into bloody madness.
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At the core of all this fear, of all this suspense and surprise and terror and
horror and piercing violence and flashing frames is one thing, death.
Literally or
symbolically, each of these scares confronts us with the threat of death.
The experience of death, the fallibility of our defenses in the face of death.
Where our number two assaulted us with the cataclysmic violence of death.
Our number one tried to overwhelm us with something even worse, the nothingness.
The utter hopelessness, emptiness and bleakness and
suffocation and meaningless of the void and we won't beat around the bush here.
Although there are moments in Johnny Darko where we sneak a feel of this and
we think Kubrick also manages it pretty dreadful since of doom at the end of 2001.
Our number one pick has to be from The Shining.
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[SOUND] It is rolling death.
It is overwhelming our senses.
It is inescapable.
We are immobiling the face, it is intercut with flashes of danger,
flashes of terror in its face, but with no sound.
We are powerless to even scream in the face of the hypnotizing drone.
It is slow and simple and quiet and completely abstract.
We are not really afraid of drowning in a molasses speed tsunami of blood.
But something about it just contains the feeling of existential dread in the best
possible way, so that we can't help but
experience our entire self being swallowed up by the inevitability of death.
Which is why we think it's one of the scariest moments of all time.
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So what do you think?
Do you disagree with any of our picks?
Did we forget the moment that's most often fueling your nightmares?
Let us know in the comments below and be sure to subscribe for
more CineFix Movie Lists.
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