To exorcise our demons, TheWrap staffers are confessing the movies that scared us the most… and why they still scare us. Happy Halloween.
“Darkness”
I still have nightmares about one scene. The one time I wanted to show my friend the trailer I hoped to God the scene wasn’t in it, and it was, and it was horrifying. “Darkness” stars Anna Paquin and was released in 2002. Directed by Jaume Balagueró, it follows an American family who moves in a house where six children previously disappeared during an occult ritual forty years ago. The thing that scares me involves… eyes.
-Beatrice Verhoeven
“127 Hours”
I can cope with ghosts, hauntings and flesh-eating zombies, but am claustrophobic and terrified of caves. The tight spaces and feeling of being trapped in “127 Hours,” makes me nauseous with fear, and that’s way before James Franco gets around to amputating his arm with a blunt pocket knife. I can’t even get through the trailer without cringing.
-Debbie Emery
“Pink Floyd -TheWall”
A family friend took me to an audition on the MGM lot in 1982, when I was 7, and sneaked us into a preview screening of this afterward, scarring me for life (sorry ’bout it, prospective girlfriends). What followed was a succession of marching hammers, ground-up children, exploding birds, sucked fingers, clawed walls, maggots, boning humans, boning flowers and prog rock to which no kid should be subjected. The animated sequences were the most terrifying because cartoons were supposed to be my friends.
-Jordan Burchette
“The Last House on the Left”
Wes Craven‘s 1972 film is terrifying because it has no supernatural elements — just things that could really happen. Released soon after the Manson murders, it shows what a psycho and his cultlike followers do to two helpless teenage girls. After they’re tortured and humiliated, one walks into the water, resolved to the fact that she is going to die. You feel like you’re watching a real murder. -Tim Molloy
“In The Heart of the Sea”
I didn’t actually see this movie because I’m no dummy. I’m not going to willingly sit through my worst nightmare. But I was at the movies see “Mockingjay Part 2,” a nice, family-friendly movie about children overthrowing the government, and was forced to sit through three horrifying minutes of proof that whales are evil and trying to kill me. They’re too big and they should be in jail. -Reid Nakamura
“House on Haunted Hill”
Back when I was a kid a long time ago, all my friends loved horror movies, and we all knew one thing for sure: William Castle’s 1959 “House on Haunted Hill” was the scariest movie ever made. Eccentric millionaire Vincent Price offers five people $10,000 if they can last the night in his haunted house, and things go very wrong. The film rarely played on the Saturday afternoon TV creature-features where we got our horror-movie fixes, and its scarcity made it even scarier. I saw it again years later and was surprised to find that it was kind of boring in between the cheesy shocks, but I don’t care: The 10-year-old me will never stop believing that this is the scariest movie ever.
-Steve Pond
“Texas Chainsaw Massacre”
This 2003 remake terrified me so much I can’t remember much of what happened… except that there was a psycho butcher killer who wore people’s skin for a mask and was on a murderous chainsaw rampage. I was thinking was “it’s okay, it’s only a movie, it’s all fake,” so the scariest part for me was the closing credits that showed video footage of Leatherface’s murder basement and said the movie was based on a true story. -Rasha Ali
“The Blair Witch Project”
At the end of the “Blair Witch Project,” after our heroes have discovered what might be their missing friend’s teeth and gone into a hideous abandoned house, Heather finds one of her friends in the basement, silently facing a corner. His posture still scares me. He looks ashamed. Has he been forced to hurt his missing friend? To lure Heather to her death? We don’t know, and that’s the scariest part. -Tim Molloy
“Lace Crater”
Harrison Atkins directed this 2015 mumblecore horror movie that still wakes me in the night. Lindsay Burdge (“The Invitation”) plays an awkward girl in a group of thirtysomething hipsters who escape to the Hamptons for a winter weekend. She draws the lucky (ha!) straw and gets to sleep in the estate’s guest house, but rumor has it there’s a supernatural presence living there. Turns out it’s a pretty hot male ghost and Burdge, on molly and PBR, winds up having a one-night stand with him. Truly, truly horrible things happen as a result — both physically and emotionally. But the most insidious scare of the film comes at the end, when she’s forced to reveal her tryst to her friends.
-Matt Donnelly
“Dead Silence”
I’d like to think that, after his “Saw” series, James Wan decided to show that he couldn’t just make torture porn. “Dead Silence” terrified me so much that I couldn’t sleep, even though I watched it in my own house with the lights on. The film is about a man who comes back to his hometown after his wife is killed in mysterious and gruesome fashion, with the only clue being an old ventriloquist dummy, which is the second-worst thing in the universe after clowns. – Matt Hejl
“The Conjuring”
James Wan is the master of creepy movies — his Twitter handle is @creepypuppet, after all. The movie is scary as hell and is one of the better demonic possession films out there. Other people seem to agree, too — the film has a score of 86 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
-Beatrice Verhoeven
“Johnny Got His Gun”
Metallica’s “One” is inspired by the Dalton Trumbo book and 1971 film “Johnny Got His Gun,” in which a naive young man goes off to war and loses his limbs, hearing, and sight. He spends the rest of his life in a hospital, covered in a mask, trapped in his imagination and pain. The video includes some of the creepiest scenes from the movie. I was a kid when the video came out, and one night when I could hear the song starting to play on some awards show my mom was watching, I had to cover my ears with my pillow to not hear it. I love the song “One” now, but I tried to watch “Johnny Got His Gun” a few weeks ago, for the first time, and didn’t make it through.
– Tim Molloy
“Urban Legend”
Make fun of Joshua Jackson‘s bleach blond hair all you want, but it’s been almost 20 years since this movie, and I still cautiously check every backseat for lurking ax murderers before getting into any car. – Linda Ge
