‘Viscerally terrifying’: writers on their scariest movie moments ever
Lauren Mechling, Charles Bramesco, Radheyan Simonpillai, Jesse Hassenger, Andrew Pulver, Alaina Demopoulos, Veronica Esposito, Scott Tobias, Benjamin Lee, Francesca Carington and Jenna Amatulli
Dario Argento’s equally gorgeous and grotesque Suspiria is here to cure anybody of their scary-movie snobbery. In this masterpiece, Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) is a graceful and wide-eyed American who shows up at the Tanz Academy, an elite ballet school in the shadows of the Black Forest. Whoever dreamed up this august institution, with its sumptuous art nouveau decor and gaudily vivid hues, may as well have written the Wes Anderson playbook. Young women float by in gauzy get-ups and then, one by one, they disappear. The creepy-crawly atmosphere has Suzy on edge from the jump – and interludes with a Dr Feelgood and a case of maggots falling from the ceiling do little to calm her nerves. In the film’s thrilling climax, a terrified Suzy works her way down a secret corridor and finds the building’s inner sanctum, where she faces off with a coven of witches, floating furniture and bloodthirsty rotting bodies that make most Hollywood slasher villains look like slapped-together Halloween costumes.
Come for the vibes, stay for the violence. Lauren Mechling
The knives – Final Destination
From childhood, I’ve been pretty much impervious to most of the things cinema sends to frighten its spectators, secure in my confidence that vampires, ghosts, demons and the more colorful slashers are not sufficiently existent to actually getcha. (I was a strangely, morbidly reason-driven boy; I didn’t lose any sleep over monsters under the bed, but often fretted about homicidal kidnappers.) By this bulletproof logic, the banal becomes the most terrifying force of all, and nothing mines fear from the everyday like the found-object Rube Goldberg deathtraps of Final Destination. There’s a chilling plausibility to the set piece in which unlucky teacher Valerie Lewton (wink wink, give it a Google) unwittingly carries a cracked mug leaking vodka to her computer, drips a bit on to the central processing unit, and takes a shard of screen to the throat once it explodes. And as she writhes helplessly on the kitchen floor, of course she reaches for a dishrag draped just-so over her knives, the fatal weapon sitting in plain sight on every home’s counter. Ever since watching this through the wide eyes of a teen, I’ve angled every utensil with a point toward the wall and away from me while gingerly placing it on the drying rack.
The chestburster – Aliens
With all due respect to the OG chestburster scene from Ridley Scott’s superior creature feature Alien, the reup in James Cameron’s action-heavy sequel is more viscerally terrifying. Cameron’s sequence preys on our familiarity with baby aliens playing jackin-the-box in people’s chest cavity. He plays that dread like a fiddle during a mid-film search for survivors in a space colony turned xenomorph’s nest. The decor is contorted human bodies cocooned to the wall, amid alien eggs and carcasses. There’s a drenched-incold-sweat aesthetic all around, from the moisture dripping off the walls to Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, who watches the action through a monitor from a supposedly safe distance. We watch that safety crumble when Ripley and the marines spy a pale young woman whose head hangs out from the monstrous environment. She gives us the movie’s first jump scare when her eyes open, and then utters: “Please, kill me.” It doesn’t matter that we’ve seen what happens next before. The first time was shocking. This time, there’s a draggedout sense of inevitability and the retraumatization, as seen on Ripley’s face, that makes the body horror hit harder. Radheyan Simonpillai
The follower – It Follows
The tactic is familiar: a fake-out
followed by a sudden, jolting appearance of a menacing figure. But in David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, one of the century’s best horror movies so far, the jolt isn’t powered by a music sting or perspective cheats; it’s the product of a dread-inducing inevitability. The film’s premise, conveyed with the hurried whisper of an urban legend, is simple: a silent, shapeshifting figure slowly stalks its target until that person passes the curse along via sexual intercourse. Its newest target is teenager Jay (Maika Monroe), who early on winds up trapped in her bedroom, terrified by a rattling doorknob. The door opens to reveal, whew, just her friend Yara (Olivia Luccardi) – and then, out of the dark hallway behind Yara emerges a tall man we’ve never seen before. As our closest look so far at the entity, it’s viscerally frightening in the moment, but more impressive is the way the scare reverberates throughout the film: later, when a 360-degree pan around a high school hallway catches a figure, glimpsed through a window, walking toward the camera, there’s a shiver of panic over what the characters might be missing. It happens again when they gather in a car, and don’t notice another figure walking toward them from a distance. Background extras in their lives, or new incarnations of that mysterious force? The movie doesn’t always say. Like death itself, this is a specter that demands constant, impossible wariness. Jesse Hassenger
The nanny – The Omen
I can’t say that I am any kind of horror movie fan – I just don’t buy the idea that witnessing horrible or frightening events on-screen is some kind of necessary emotional catharsis. But there was a period, when I was a teenager in the early 1980s, that I thought I needed to grapple with these things, especially as they still showed them on late-night TV. So in quick succession, I got the other side of The Exorcist, The Amityville Horror, Halloween and
The Omen; all of which were variously entertaining and impressive, but confirmed my plans to avoid the genre if at all possible. The individual moment, for sheer creepiness, that has stayed with me since, is a bit near the start of The Omen, when the nanny jumps off the roof with a noose around her neck to make way for replacement Billie Whitelaw. I’m not sure why I found it so horrible – possibly the singsong calls of “Dam-ien” that precede it, and the sense she is compelled into it by a malignant force. But that was counterbalanced, of course, by the genuinely absurd death scene given to David Warner, decapitated by a pane of glass off the back of a truck. Many were the happy hours I spent slow-forwarding on a VCR to find the exact moment his head was switched for a dummy. Dummy is the word.
Andrew Pulver The acupuncture – Final Destination 5
Whenever I bring up acupuncture, the traditional Chinese medicine practice that has significantly reduced the effects of my carpal tunnel, I usually get one of two responses: “Oh my God, acu has helped me so much,” or “I would never … I’ve seen that Final Destination scene.” In this fifth installment of the franchise, a group of people who avoid dying in a bridge collapse are later taken out in a series of gory and disgusting alternative ways. One member of the crew goes to a spa for a little me-time, lying on his back while the largest and thickest needles ever used by man protrude from his entire front half. Naturally, a calming fire providing warmth to the room gets out of hand, totally ruining the vibe. While the poor guy screams for help to a seemingly empty spa, he’s launched off of the bed and impaled by the needles. This being a Final Destination film, that alone does not kill him. Neither does a can of gas, which for some reason happens to be inside a spa room, when it spills near the fire. Or the fact that he begins picking out the bloody needles, one by one, undoubtedly poking and prodding multiple vital organs in the process. No, the kicker is an errant cellphone, which he left on during his appointment (this is why we have airplane mode!). When it suddenly rings, the vibrations move it in the direction of another candle, pushing it into the fire and causing an instant inferno.
Alaina Demopoulos The arrival – Blue Velvet
David Lynch doesn’t do typical horror movies, but he nonetheless is a master of making disturbing, impossible-to-forget cinematic experiences. His most disturbing creation is arguably Blue Velvet’s Frank Booth (although there is a lot of competition), and this character is possibly at his scariest when he enters the film. The set-up is immaculate: we have the oh-so-innocent college student Jeffrey Beaumont hiding in a closet after a bizarre sexual encounter with the considerably older and more powerful vamp Dorothy Vallens. This is already disturbing enough, but then in comes Frank, enacting a truly creepy, violent sexual fantasy with Vallens while inhaling narcotics via a gas mask – all the while Beaumont looking on in fascination from his hiding place. In the interplay of voyeurism, sex, terror, violence and transgression, the scene takes on a truly terrifying pitch – not necessarily in the sense of a jump scare but rather in the sense of something that will work deep down into the crevices of your brain and haunt your thoughts for a long time to come.
Veronica Esposito The ghost – Pulse
The brief boom of Japanese horror films (and their Americanized remakes) in the early 2000s hinged largely on the unsettling peculiarities of their ghosts – dark-haired, pallid-skinned wraiths that emerged from walls and wells with a twitchy, hitch-stepped gait. Yet there is no example as terrifying as the sequence in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse where a young man opts to peel away the tape around a cordoned-off space and discovers one such spirit approach him from the shadows. We can see this mostly featureless ghost is wearing a dress, but Kurosawa, amping the soundtrack to a choral wail, focuses on its mesmeric movements, which are unnaturally choreographed, like an avant-garde ballet. The man can only hide behind a couch, paralyzed in fear, as it crawls inexorably toward him. There are no shocks in the scene, just a mercilessly, sustained uncanniness.
Scott Tobias The flashback – Session 9
There’s a lot to be scared of in Brad Anderson’s unsettling and largely unseen 2001 horror Session 9, a grim little nightmare about an abandoned mental asylum, a building so horribly well-captured that I’d sooner spend a weekend in the Overlook Hotel than spend a single night there. Struggling new father Gordon, played by Peter Mullan, is in charge of the team tasked with removing its asbestos, a team that slowly starts to unravel as the week progresses, none more so than Gordon himself, our initial concern for his wellbeing slowly curdling into fear. In the frenzied climax, as it’s revealed that he’s been killing them all off himself, afflicted by some undefined malevolence, we go back to find out that in an earlier scene, Gordon had also killed his wife and newborn baby, something so mind-bogglingly horrifying, we only get to hear it rather than see it, a cacophony of terrified screams that has haunted me ever since. Resurfaced tapes found in the asylum have been played alongside the action from the start, cluing us in to where we’re headed, and the final scene plays us the most chilling soundbite as a doctor asks a woman’s murderous alternate personality where he lives: “I live in the weak and the wounded.” Sleep tonight? Me? Benjamin Lee
The scarabs – The Mummy
Of the several flesh-eating scarab beetle scenes in the 1999 Brendan Fraser classic The Mummy, one has always stood out to me. Primed by the earlier sequences – beetles pouring into the sarcophagus of someone being buried alive; a bug scuttling like a scarab-shaped tumour under John Hannah’s skin until Fraser flicks it out with a knife – the final scarab scene chills me all the more. It’s at the end of the film, after the vanquishing of the titular mummy, when his slimeball assistant Beni is trapped underground in a treasure chamber to receive his supposedly just deserts. A squeaking swarm of scarab beetles encircles him; they’re scared of fire so won’t come close while his torch is alight – it flickers, then goes out. Darkness falls, then the screaming starts. The scarab beetles terrified me as a child, when my siblings and I watched The Mummy on video almost every weekend. As an adult, they still make me squirm; that scene combines a number of elemental fears: being buried alive, eaten alive, bugs … the dark. Not to mention my more New York-specific ordeals with cockroaches. Which is why, even though that shimmering carpet of flesh-eating CGI-ed critters is unrealistic as hell, the very idea of it has a way of burrowing under my skin like … well, you know. Francesca Carington
The logs – Final Destination 2
I find the Final Destination franchise to be mostly ridiculous, but I was forever scarred by a scene in the 2003 sequel where a log truck causes a massively deadly highway crash. The logs break loose (despite being bound by metal chains that “Death” clearly snapped, as is his whim in the series) and proceed to kill dozens of people as they barrel through windshields and into cars. I saw the scene in my preteen years and it subsequently played an unexpected role when I was learning how to drive at 15, making me irrationally afraid of driving next to or near trucks carrying literally anything. To this day, I will get off the road if I’m too close to a log truck or something like it – no need to tempt fate!
in Iowa. “You hear that, Chris Christie? You bag those Pence voters, you could be polling as high as … 2%,” Colbert joked.
“Now that Pence is hanging it up, one candidate trying to get his endorsement is the guy who tried to get him hanged,” he continued before a clip of Trump openly seeking Pence’s endorsement for president at an Iowa campaign stop. “You’re asking for the endorsement of someone you almost got killed?” Colbert marveled. “That’s like if Jigsaw’s victims left a Yelp review – ‘very challenging escape room, two thumbs up if I still had thumbs.’”
And in other news, the new speaker of the House, the Louisiana representative, Mike Johnson, offered Americans a window into his mindset when he described the Bible as “that’s my worldview. That’s what I believe.”
“That’s great. If the Bible is his worldview on any issue, I don’t know why progressives are nervous. He’s clearly going to ask the rich to sell all their possessions and give their money to the poor!” Colbert deadpanned.
Seth Meyers
And on Late Night, Seth Meyers tore into more Trump gaffes from the campaign trail. “Trump’s brain has obviously been mush for quite some time, but still somehow it seems noticeably worse, and I didn’t think that was possible,” he said as, over the weekend, Trump appeared to not know what state he was in, mistaking Sioux Falls, South Dakota, with Sioux City, Iowa.
“It’s telling how different the reactions are when Biden screws up versus when Trump screws up,” Meyers added. “When Biden so much as stumbles, Democrats everywhere are like, ‘oh fuck, fuck, who else can we get?! There’s nobody!’ And when Trump screws up, Republicans are like ‘all right, we live in Sioux Falls now, who cares.’”
“I’m not going to sit here and deny that Biden also stumbles or gets lost sometimes,” he continued. “He’s 80, we get it. The point is, they’re both old, we all just age in different ways. When I get to that age, I’d definitely rather be Biden old than Trump old, just telling old stories and crushing people’s hands with my blue-collar handshake.
“I want to be walking around my kitchen muttering to my grandkids about how I used to know a guy named Corn Pop,” he concluded. “That seems much more pleasant than screaming non-stop about windmills killing whales and celebrities who were or weren’t nice to me back in the day.”