Top Ten List of the Most Terrifiying Scenes in movies

[AZLD4Candidate]

Last edited Thu Dec 12, 2024, 07:44 PM - Edit history (1)

This will be something I do or will try to do every week. A top ten list of things in pop culture. The list is subjective to my opinion, but feedback and entries you list could be used in future lists as long as the feedback is relatively polite. Now, on with the list.

When someone things a scary scene, they think horror. While that is normal, sometimes scenes in dramas can be just as scary on higher levels. With that, I would like to examine these scenes. Three rules apply:

A: The movie must be a mainstream movie, so things like The Beast of Yucca Flats and other Z list drek do not qualify.
B: The scene must make you have the ability to jump out of your seat.
C: TV movies do not qualify. The scenes of spousal abuse from The Burning Bed are absolutely horrifying, but being a TV movie, I will leave it off this list (however, that movie is amazing and the two leads nailed their roles perfectly).

Without further ado, here is my list of the Ten Scariest Scenes in movies along with an honorable mention.

HM: Fat Ass’ First Night - Shawshank Redemption. The fear that the New Fish feels is amazing, but the terror that goes through the cell block when Capt. Hadley confronts him, pulls him out of the cell, and then mercilessly beats him, interspliced with inmate reaction shots and the absolute silence in the block puts chills down your spine. All you hear is Hadley’s hatred, New Fish’s crying and begging, and the sound of the nightstick against skin. What drives it home is the fact the other officers didn’t care and never made a sound while it happened.

10. Drew Barrymore’s death - Scream. I don’t know what’s more terrifying in this scene: the lead up to it where Barrymore knows she’s about to die, the fact that she feels every knife stab, or the fact that her parents heard it on the phone but couldn’t find her to stop it, being only a few feet away. Listening to your daughter getting murdered on the phone sets the tone for Ghostface as a true menace.

09. Hello, Hello - 28 Days Later. Main character walks up from coma. Hospital is empty. Goes outside. Streets of London are empty. Confused. Terrified. And still has only been awake for just a few minutes, he gets chased by the rage-infected through the streets of London without so much as a second to gather his wits. Welcome to the streets of the world during COVID.

08. The Bad Execution - The Green Mile. This scene is torture. A electric chair execution where the sadistic trust fund baby with political connections purposely does not soak the sponge just to see what will happen. The next three minutes will make you wince as the condemned screams in pain and terror, literally starts to burn, his head gets engulfed in flames, and he feels all of it because, as Tom Hanks says in the scene, they can’t stop it because “he’s still alive.” This is one of the most horrifying scenes ever because of the callous psychopathy that made it happen as well as the torture Eduard goes through.

07. Quint’s Speech - Jaws. The dry, slow, and deliberate pace Robert Shaw uses giving his speech about the sharks that picked off survivors of a navy ship sinking in WW2 sends chills up your spine. The details are all there without flashback and you can see how it changed Quint’s personality completely.

06. Joker Loses It - Batman 1989. This scene is less than a minute long. After the Joker goes to a cheap plastic surgeon to fix his face after being dropped into acid by Batman, he orders the doctor to give him a mirror. When he looks, the laughter starts as giggle, then turns quickly to almost painful, which scares the doctor to beg for forgiveness, followed by psychotic cackling as the Joker accepts what he looks like now. Tim Burton nailed this and Jack Nicholson was amazing in this short scene.

05. Michael Myers vanishes - Halloween. Six bullets into Michael Myers and he falls out the second story window. Loomis turns to Laurie telling her it was the boogeyman. He walks to the window and. . .Myers is gone. After six shots, the evil escapes again and the movie ends with Myers breathing. Trend setting terror.

04. No Hope - The Mist. Spoiler alert. The ending five minutes of The Fog are just amazing. Thomas Jane was off the charts in the out of gas car with the survivors and a gun with five bullets. The horror isn’t what he does, but what he has to live with for the rest of his life when the fog clears. The screams are bloodcurdling and soul destroying, which adds to the terror.

03. Blood through the bed - A Nightmare on Elm Street. Johnny Depp’s death is iconic. Shook me for days when I first saw this movie when I was seven. The thought of a murderer killing you in your dreams then dying in life is terrifying as you are getting killed at your most vulnerable. But the terror of this scene is you don’t see what Freddy does to Depp do cause the torrents of blood after he pulls Depp into the bed. In horror, sometimes less is more and leaving things to the imagination is always best.

02. Hobbling the writer - Misery. This is the one scene that literally made me jump when I watched it on an America West flight from Newark to Phoenix when I was 11. The fear and terror James Caan feels when Kathy Bates sets him up and the knowledge that he is too weak to escape the inevitable. She did it on both ankles, then stared at him with a psychotic look on her face and whispers “I love you” while Caan screams in pain. What makes this worse is that we can see a stalker or some obsessed person do this.

01. Slamming the door closed - Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The scene is rather simple. A man goes into a home looking for help. He walks into the home looking around. Within 15 seconds, a door slides open, someone hit him in the head with a mallet and he falls. Then he hits the guest twice more causing the body to shake involuntarily. The mallet wielding man then grabs him, pulls into into the room and slides the door shut violently. We don’t know what horrors are in store for the man and that’s what makes this scene the more terrifiying scene on the list.

[Ocelot II]

1. How about the classic jump-scare scene in Wait Until Dark?

I saw that movie in a theatre and literally everybody screamed. And there's the scene in Don't Look Now when the little girl in the red coat turns around...

[AZLD4Candidate]

3. Wait until Dark was an awesome movie. . .an even better stage production though.

I thought about the horse blinding scene from Equus too. Again, I will revisit topics I post later so I take all suggestions into account as long as they are polite and respectful.

[sorcrow]

10. Exactly the first movie I thought of

[leftieNanner]

5. I was going to mention this

The ads for the film said - no one admitted during the last fifteen minutes, or something.

[BOSSHOG]

2. The last five minutes of Friday the 13th?

[AZLD4Candidate]

4. I tend to agree due to the lasting power of the franchise, but I found F13 to be too cardboard and wooden for me

I never got scared once in the movie because everything was so telegraphed.

Kevin Bacon's death was awesome though! That got a little jump out of me, but nothing like the ones I mentioned. John Carpenter did it better than Sean S. Cunningham could ever do.

[happybird]

6. Dick Halloran getting an axe to the chest in The Shining

Last edited Thu Dec 12, 2024, 08:34 PM - Edit history (1)

The suspense, the jump scare, the sound effect/music, Danny’s screaming, and Jack’s crazy, twisted face after the deed.

(the soft serve ice cream machine at my old job had a belt that would sometimes make almost that exact same sound effect, lol. I kept thinking, “Where have I heard that sound before?” until one day the “where” just hit me out of the blue.)

[wnylib]

40. A couple more scenes from The Shining.

When Danny sees the twin girls in alternate flashes, first alive and well, then chopped up and bloody. The background music, Danny's facial expressions, and his innocence and vulnerability alone in that corridor create a dreadful foreboding. Maybe it doesn't qualify as a shocker that knocks you out of your seat, but feeling the fear from Danny's perspective is frightening on a deeper level.

?si=q9bcLloLMteZObV2


The other scene is Jack Torrance in Room 237 where the beautiful woman in the bathtub turns into a decrepit corpse in his arms. No video available. Searches turn up only discussions of the scene. Maybe because of the nudity?

[TexasBushwhacker]

7. #4 Correction - you are describing "The Mist"

and yes, the ending was a gut punch.

[AZLD4Candidate]

8. Oops. . .you're right. Changed.

[KitFox]

9. First thought was

“Wait Until Dark” and second was “Rear Window” when the suspected murderer is coming up the stairs after Jimmy Stewart who is laid up in a cast for a broken leg. When I was a kid I saw a movie “The Tingler” and had nightmares for months.

[ailsagirl]

16. I thought that "Wait Until Dark" was more suspenseful than terrifying

Audrey Hepburn did a great job, as did Alan Arkin.

[yellowdogintexas]

43. "The Tingler" was creepy as hell and scary! My sister and I would watch it together and

still get scared at the end.

[some_of_us_are_sane]

11. Psycho. Two Scenes

The shower scene, when we first meet Mrs, Bates, and then when Detective Arbogast also meets her at the top of the stairs, where she springs out and stabs him in the head. BOTH are "jump scenes" for sure.

[happybird]

12. For some reason, The Birds scared me more than Psycho

I blame it for my lifelong fear of birds. Not songbirds, and I ended up loving chickens once I got to know some personally, but parrots, macaws, emus, ostriches, and gawd help us, cassowaries scare the hell out of me. It’s the big, peck-y beaks and weird scaly feet.

[Ocelot II]

17. That's because birds are dinosaurs.

[electric_blue68]

19. Ah, our tiny mamalian ancestral memories of living back during the Age of Dinosaurs!

And one of funniest memes related to this is a slimmed down maybe a near to tween age blue heron w the text saying something like; if you don't believe birds are dinosaurs.

[Floyd R. Turbo]

13. 😰

[PlanetBev]

45. Oh, yeah....

The Ring. That scene where the girl crawls out of the TV screen. I screamed in the theatre. Scared the hell out of me.

[Floyd R. Turbo]

46. 😬

[JMCKUSICK]

14. The shower scene in The Shining

where the woman turns into a dead old woman

[ailsagirl]

15. The Last House on the Left (1972) was sickening and terrifying

But it may not be classified as a scary movie-- it was downright repulsive-- we had thought it was one of those hokey horror flicks that we could laugh at. It wasn't funny.

We left after about 15 minutes.

I think that was one of Wes Craven's works

[AZLD4Candidate]

18. first move he ever did.

[no_hypocrisy]

26. Rated "V" for "violence.

Didn't the theaters provide free barf bags for this movie?

[ailsagirl]

27. We were at a drive-in, so I don't know if they did or didn't

It was the sickest thing I ever saw

[electric_blue68]

20. I rarely ever watch horror movies, and usually avoid horror-laced Sci Fi movies, too! But I did go to the....

movie theater to see "I Am Legend".
[whatever possessed me to do that!? Maybe bc it takes place in NYC my city]
🚨 Spoiler
.
.
.
Little hazy but it's the sunset scene Will is out in a open Plaza area w his dog. Sun is getting near sunset so there's a line of shadow coming from a big, bulky building s-lo-w-l-y creeping across the flat part of the area.

I don't remember if his dog would turn zombie once it's engulfed in shadow. I don't remember why he doesn't run, and get him, and his dog inside. BUT...
the anticipation was agonizing for me! Whimper....

Now there the scenes where the zombies crash in etc. Yeah, I jumped outta my seat a few times.

If you love horror, and at least like Sci Fi you gonna love this movie!

[C0RI0LANUS]

21. Card reading scene from the "Evil Dead."

[10 Turtle Day]

22. I'm not a big horror flick fan so I haven't seen many of the ones listed here

… and can’t comment on them. One that has stuck with over the years is Pan’s Labyrinth, that guy (Pan?) with eyeballs in the palms of his hands instead of in his face creeped me out and scared the heck out of me. When he chasing them I was scared out of my mind. I only saw it once and my memory isn’t great, but like I said, that fear/creepy feeling stuck with me.

[Intractable]

23. Chest-bursting scene in first Alien movie.

In space, no one can hear you scream. - Alien

But this scene was on a spaceship, and everyone was heard screaming.

[Woodwizard]

32. The first time I saw it I jumped.

My wife hated that movie. Well pretty much any like that.

[VGNonly]

24. This one

[nuxvomica]

35. For me it was this scene

[oasis]

38. +1

[ProfessorGAC]

25. I'll Add One

You mentioned the movie, but there's another scene.
In Jaws, when Hooper is diving looking at the boat damage, and finds the tooth.
Then, a disembodied head falls to the hole.
I saw that in the theater, and there's popcorn flying! People came a foot out of their seats.

[AZSkiffyGeek]

28. The Serpent and the Rainbow

“I want to hear you scream”

Along the same lines, “Is it safe?” From Marathon Man.

[Shermann]

29. The Blair Witch Project - Tent attack

This movie didn't work for everybody, but I recall being in the moment for this.

[ultralite001]

30. Almost passed out holding my breath during the ending of Dead Calm...

Sam Neill + Nicole Kidman + Billy Zane... 1989... I'm creeped out all over again...

[Luciferous]

31. Great list!

[ailsagirl]

33. "The Haunting" (1966) is a superb movie

Spooky as hell but without a drop of blood.
Highly recommended!!

[nuxvomica]

34. The Exorcist: Regan starts levitating

Even more than the head-spin, this is the point the audience realizes something otherworldly is happening.

[oasis]

39. I got chills when I saw that, even 20+ years later

after seeing it again.

[VGNonly]

36. Ear problem

[happybird]

37. Exorcist 3

The elderly lady surreptitiously crawling on the ceiling.
Only saw that movie once, long ago, and it freaked me out even more than the original. The big head-lopping scissors were unforgettable, too. The Exorcist 2 was so bad, I think many didn’t bother watching third movie. Might be time for a rewatch to see if it’s as scary as I remember.

[AZLD4Candidate]

41. The hospital scene, where you get the jump scare followed by the creepy guy chasing the nurse with hedge clippers

only to cut to a statue with blood on the neck and its head cut off.

That scene also made me jump as it was so unexpected.

[bedazzled]

42. The scene near the end of the original "Carrie"

No spoiler. Gotta see it

[PlanetBev]

44. Trilogy of Terror

That Zuni Fetish Doll that chases Karen Black around her apartment with a knife. The scene where Karen shuts him into a suitcase and he cuts himself out of it with his knife. That scene is non-stop heart failure.