Top 10 Scariest Movie Moments

Interested in comparing your favorite scary movie moments?

Horror is an intensely subjective genre and one difficult to define; it isn’t easy to pinpoint what constitutes something being scary. Does fear come from a sense of brooding dread and atmosphere? Is it the unknown, the barely seen on screen, or the graphic and unpleasant, body-focused horror of physical repulsion? Is it a sense of the uncanny and the mundane slightly askew or all out screaming, fleeing terror? A recent conversation with a friend got me thinking about horror and the scariest scenes in cinema – hence this top ten, in which I’ll look at what personally, I deem to be the scariest cinematic moments with a brief discussion about what makes them work, coupled with videos if Youtube favours me with clips. Looking at similar lists online, I was struck by how non-frightening they were – the problem with most horror movies, as much as I love them, is that they’re not scary.

They may be very well made films, with great pacing, creative ideas and unpleasant imagery, but there’s nothing in them to keep you up at night. Case in point, the shower scene in Psycho tends to top these lists, and whilst I agree its a remarkable feat of imagination and editing, brilliantly directed and utterly iconic, it’s really not scary. It’s an amazing scene and probably upsetting at the time, but nowadays it wouldn’t really shake audiences on a deeper, more unsettling level, the way true horror should. The Exorcist shares this kind of fault – it’s a great movie and fun to watch, but far too over-the-top to be scary, and somewhat a victim of its own success – the possession genre completely saturated to modern audiences.

Read entire article at Some Films and Stuff.