Top Ten List of the Most Terrifiying Scenes in movies

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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.