Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING Contains Cinema’s Scariest Moment

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) was considered a critical disappointment when released in May 1980.  Apparently, time has healed all wounds.  According to reports in the New York Daily News and the Guardian, website Play.com surveyed 10,000 users to uncover what the ten most frightening films are in terms of physical response to fright.  They then hooked up the film viewers to heart monitors to gauge which film made their pulses spike the most.  The infamous “Here’s Johnny!!” scene is listed as number one.

While The Shining is my favorite horror film and still the scariest film that I have ever seen, Danny Torrance’s run-in with the Grady Twins on his big wheel is far more frightening to me.  Conspicuously absent from the list is the penultimate scene from Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) wherein Donald Sutherland has a run-in with a dwarf in a red rain slicker.  That is one of the scariest moments I have ever seen in any film…