Horror is all about surprise. And these moments -- including an accidental electrocution,
a cannibal's connection to a bloodsucker, and a creepy inside joke -- surprised everyone.
At the conclusion of the classic 1996 slasher Scream, we finally learn who's behind the mask
of the ghost-faced killer that's been terrorizing the local teens of Woodsboro. It turns out there
wasn't just one knife-wielding maniac, but two: Billy, the bad boy boyfriend of heroine Sidney,
and agent of chaos Stu. Unlike Billy, Stu doesn't have a personal vendetta or a tragic dark past.
So when this deadly duo enact the final step of their plan by stabbing each other to make it
appear as though Sidney's dad attacked them, Stu doesn't exactly take it very well. He babbles and
hurls obscenities with the shock of a child who has just learned what consequences are.
Amidst the chaos, Sidney slips away, calls the cops, and proceeds to antagonize her assailants
over the phone. A frustrated Billy then throws the phone across the room and it hits Stu in the head.
"Ow. You f---ing hit me with the phone, d---!"
Scream writer Kevin Williamson revealed on the movie's Blu-ray commentary that Matthew Lillard
improvised a huge chunk of his lines, including the one in response to being hit with the phone.
In fact, this whole moment was unplanned, as Skeet Ulrich was supposed to throw the phone
at the kitchen counter, but it slipped out of his hands that were covered in fake blood.
So when he accidentally hit his co-star instead, Lillard promptly retorted in character.
When aspiring FBI agent Clarice Starling pays a visit to imprisoned
serial killer Hannibal Lecter, she learns the truth about him
via a vivid anecdote from the man himself about his encounter with a census taker.
"I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti."
Anthony Hopkins' delivery as Lecter is inhumane and terrifyingly visceral. It's a perfectly creepy
thing for a madman like Hannibal and a disturbing demonstration of vulgarity. The slurping noise
that he makes wasn't actually in The Silence of the Lambs' screenplay but was instead something
the actor added in at the last minute. In a 2016 interview with Radio Times, he revealed,
"I don't know why but I've always known what scares people. When I
was a kid I'd tell the girls around the street the story about Dracula."
He then reproduced Lecter's legendary hiss and added that "They'd run screaming away."
Jack Nicholson's performance as a writer losing his mind in 1980's The Shining is filled with
plenty of unforgettable moments. There are the quiet opening scenes when his strained smile
belies his simmering insanity. Then there are the sequences when the Overlook Hotel begins to seduce
an increasingly boozed-up Jack Torrance, thereby alienating him from reality itself. And then
there's of course the film's final act, when he tears through anyone foolish enough to wind up on
the pointy end of his ax. And the latter features one particularly memorable improvised moment.
While Jack's wife Wendy cowers in the bathroom, he hacks away at the feeble door with reckless
abandon. After creating a suitable crack, he peers through the porthole and maniacally proclaims:
"Here's Johnny!"
"Ahh!"
That line doesn't appear in either Stephen King's novel or the film's screenplay,
as it was instead ad-libbed by Nicholson. Maybe director Stanley Kubrick's infamously
exhaustive takes drove Nicholson over the deep end, or maybe he's just a really big
fan of late night host Johnny Carson. Either way, it's a terrifying moment.
"Herrrrrrre's Johnny!"
Just imagine you're out on a shark hunt, and when you least expect it,
your prey emerges from the ocean's depths, summoned by all that delicious chum you've been
dumping into the water. How would you respond? Before this moment happens in 1975's Jaws,
police chief Martin Brody has seen the shark before but only in mere glimpses. But now with
the beast just feet from his face, he has a real sense of what he and his men are up against.
"You're gonna need a bigger boat."
As Jaws screenwriter Carl Gottlieb recalled to The Hollywood Reporter in 2016, Brody's famous
utterance wasn't a scripted line so much as it was an in-joke among the filmmakers. The movie's
shoot suffered from numerous difficulties, like producers refusing to spend money on a
bigger support boat to steady the barge carrying all of the equipment. As Gottliebe explained,
"It became a catchphrase for any time anything went wrong — if lunch was late
or the swells were rocking the camera, someone would say, 'You're gonna need a bigger boat.'"
So Roy Scheider ad-libbed the line at various points throughout the shoot to
try to get this inside gag into the final cut. His persistence ultimately paid off in
the scene when Brody gets up close and personal with the great white. As Gottlieb remembered,
"It was so appropriate and so real and it came at the right moment."
The chestburster scene in the 1979 sci-fi horror classic Alien is an absolute nightmare.
While the crew of the Nostromo enjoys a pleasant crew breakfast, it's clear that something terrible
is about to happen. Sure, executive officer Kane says he feels great. But he recently had
an alien horseshoe crab glued to his face. So it's hardly surprising that the incubating baby alien
cracks its way through his fragile human ribs and rips its way through his guts. Then it flashes
its pearly whites before zipping off into the air ducts to fully mature into the monstrous
killer that will make the crew members' lives a living hell. But what really sells this scene are
the crew's reactions. They look genuinely horrified. And that's because they were.
John Hurt was the only actor who knew what was going to happen, mainly because he was outfitted
with a prosthetic chest full of real animal organs and a compressed blood machine. But the
rest of the cast was ushered off-set while Hurt was strapped in so that they could be kept totally
in the dark. When they leaned in close over Hurt's fake torso, they got an unexpected face full of
explosive viscera. Sometimes to make horror movie history, you have to break a few ribs.
Most of the entries on this list feature human ingenuity,
but this one is more about human error. As revealed in the making-of documentary Never
Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy, the scene in 1984's A Nightmare on Elm Street in which
a snoozing Glen Lantz is sucked through his bed didn't exactly go as planned.
If you've seen it, you surely remember the geyser of blood that emerges from the bed after Glen
gets sucked in. And then gravity basically stops working as the blood begins to slosh from wall
to wall like a crimson tide, perfectly capturing the nightmare logic at play with Freddy Krueger.
But filming the scene was a nightmare unto itself. It was shot in a rotating room that was flipped
upside down. The mission was simple: pour fake blood into a hole and film it. The first problem
was that the red liquid was poured onto a lamp, which electrocuted a crew member. On top of that,
the now-electrified blood caused the room to roll all the way over. Fortunately, though, nobody was
seriously injured, and the filmmakers were left with a trippier sequence than they'd expected.
"No one was hurt. We got the shot."
Possessed preteen Regan MacNeil goes through hell over the course of the 1973 classic The Exorcist.
And the most hellish moment is probably when she projectile-vomits split pea soup onto Father
Karras. Naturally enough, he reacts by gasping for breath and looking appropriately disgusted.
But if you look really closely, you can also detect a hint of uncharacteristic
anger on the usually even-tempered priest. This is because Jason Miller,
the actor who played him, wasn't clued in to what exactly was going to happen.
In the BBC documentary The Fear of God: 25 Years of 'The Exorcist', the movie's head of
special effects revealed that he was all set up to have the vomit hit Miller in the chest
as scripted and rehearsed. But delays in setting up the scene led to the vomit getting cold,
so the trajectory of the rig was changed and tilted it up towards Miller's face,
and his unscripted reaction made it into the final cut.
1996's From Dusk Till Dawn is what you get when you throw vampires,
Westerns, and siege thrillers all together in a blender. One scene finds two bad brothers,
played by George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino, in a lavish watering hole called the Titty Twister,
awaiting the arrival of a partner in crime.
Soon after the duo arrive, a stripper by the name of Santanico Pandemonium
performs a snake dance striptease routine. This is before the brothers discover that this bar
in the middle of nowhere is also an ancient Aztec haunt for a coven of blood suckers.
So at least the dance is an enjoyable perk to their supposedly calm rendezvous.
Santanico was an early role for Salma Hayek. In a 2017 interview with Yahoo, she admitted
that she has very few memories of filming the striptease scene because, as she put it,
"I had to go on trance to do the dance."
This was all a matter of the actress overcoming her fear of snakes. As she further explained,
"There was no choreography. It was improvised.
Because you can’t choreograph a snake, we don’t know what she’s going to do!"
"Kneel and worship at the feet of Santanico Pandemonium!"
The Blair Witch Project wasn't the first found footage horror film, but it's almost surely the
most influential. Filmed on commercially available camera equipment, a big part of what makes Blair
Witch so scary is its commitment to realism. It really feels like we've stumbled across tapes
recording an ill-fated documentary crew. And a big part of how directors Eduardo Sanchez and
Daniel Myrick captured that realistic vibe was by having almost the entire film be improvised.
As relayed in an oral history for Vice celebrating Blair Witch's 20th anniversary,
the film's cast of three inexperienced, nonunion actors were set loose in the Maryland wilderness
to basically fend for themselves. They only had one hazy sense of anything resembling a plan:
every night at the campsites, each actor would be given a film canister in a milk crate
with top secret instructions that they weren't allowed to share with each other.
For instance, when Joshua Leonard mysteriously vanished in the middle of the night,
his castmates had no idea that was going to happen. As the actors tell it,
they would've been genuinely terrified if they weren't so damp, cold,
and exhausted from actually camping while making a film.
A 1978 remake of a 50s B-movie, the Philip Kaufman-directed Invasion of the Body Snatchers
spins a terrifying yarn about spores from outer space that quietly spread
carbon copies of human beings to take over the world. In the film's final moments, it appears
that Donald Sutherland's Matthew has somehow managed to evade the swarm of alien clones,
which is weird, because it seemed like he'd been cornered.
But now here he is, going peacefully about his day. Maybe he's found a way to fly under the
radar and trick the aliens. That's what Veronica Cartwright's Nancy hopes anyway when she sees
her old friend. But then Matthew's jaw spills open, with his eyes peeled wide, as he screams
with the signature accusatory shriek of an alien clone. Nancy is aghast, as are the rest of us.
[screaming]
And so was Cartwright, as it turns out. As Kaufman explained to The Hollywood Reporter in 2018,
while Sutherland was clued into this dire vision for the film's ending,
Cartwright was left in the dark. As the director explained,
"I don't remember that we even told Veronica until Donald turned and did that shriek."
Kaufman's desire was to make an ending that would be truly horrific, which is why he didn't share it
with anyone, not even the studio executives. The result was ultimately quite uncanny, as Cartwright
looks genuinely shocked and terrified. That's perfectly understandable, though, because if
you were suddenly faced with a shrieking Donald Sutherland, you might be pretty terrified too.