What makes a movie scary? One of the greatest of all theoreticians of human terror, Sigmund Freud, defined fright — as opposed to fear or anxiety — as “the condition to which one is reduced if one encounters a danger without being prepared for it; it lays stress on the element of surprise.”
The scariest movies are therefore the ones that surprise as the most.
Some of them do it cheaply and easily, using jump scares — a guy popping out of a door with a knife and a mask — that rely on enhanced sound design and music cues to make us leap from our seats. But the truly scary films, including all of those on this list, are the ones that surprise us with their originality and audacity, whether in taking us toward the unknown and the unsettling, toward something horribly new, or else by taking things so far that all we want to do is stop watching — although we can’t.
Freud’s definition comes from his seminal book Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which he described the death drive that is as much a part of human nature as the need for pleasure. Scary movies seem to inhabit both desires at the same time: We drive toward death while taking pleasure in the fact that it’s only happening on screen, which is why people both scream and laugh at a film’s most frightening moments.
And yet, the scariest of all movies go one step further, crossing the border between fiction and reality to make us believe that what we’re seeing is not only real, but that it could happen to any of us.
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Ringu (1998)
Image Credit: DreamWorks Home Entertainment/Courtesy Everett Collection Some people prefer the U.S. remake, but Hideo Nakata’s original version of The Ring is an eerie and terrifying exercise in J-horror filmmaking that would influence copycats for years to come. Reviving a genre that had been waning throughout the mid-’90s, Ringu drummed up fear in fresh ways, relying on haunting imagery rather than violence and gore. To quote Warner Wolf: “Let’s go to the videotape!”
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Deliverance (1972)
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection Few thrillers from the 1970s, or any other epoch, have left viewers as shocked as director John Boorman’s Southern canoeing trip into the depths of hell. The film’s budget was so low that Burt Reynolds and other cast members had to perform their own stunts, leaving them severely roughed up by the end of the shoot. Much more harrowing were the movie’s two key sequences: a long, graphic scene of male rape and a “Dueling Banjos” music scene whose haunting melody remains etched in one’s memory.
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Paranormal Activity (2007)
Image Credit: Paramount Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection Oren Peli’s micro-budgeted box office smash wasn’t the first-found footage film to try and scare the living daylights out of viewers, but it cleverly updated that conceit to the digital age. Relying on the simple use of a home video camera installed in a suburban bedroom, it managed to provoke primal fear out of the seemingly mundane, depicting a young couple’s gradual unraveling at the hands of hidden supernatural forces.
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The Vanishing (1988)
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection George Sluizer’s highly original kidnapping film is as disturbing for the questions it keeps asking and never answers as it is for a finale where the truth is shockingly told. The story begins charmingly enough, with a young Dutch couple on vacation in France. But then the girl disappears at a gas station, leaving her boyfriend as baffled as we are about what happened. He spends years looking for her as the film gets increasingly hopeless and unsettling. Note: See the original and not Sluizer’s lesser 1993 remake.
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Psycho (1960)
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection It may not seem so frightening today, but Alfred Hitchcock’s groundbreaking slasher flick absolutely terrified audiences upon its initial release in 1960, becoming the most profitable film in the Master of Suspense’s career. With at least three scream-inducing scenes – the infamous shower sequence, the murder on the stairway and the ending – Psycho is a primer in artful low-budget scares with maximum impact.
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Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection Roman Polanski took Hollywood by storm with this masterly psychological thriller starring Mia Farrow, who back then was known as the star of the pleasant primetime soap opera Peyton Place. Nothing pleasant happens to her titular character in this slow-burn descent into pregnancy madness, which is at once a frightening tale of Satanic conception and an unnerving look at the pressure both marriage and society place on a woman to become a mother.
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The Strangers (2008)
Image Credit: Universal Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection The home invasion genre was explored early on in films like Shadow of a Doubt and the original Cape Fear, taking a turn into horror territory with the Audrey Hepburn starrer Wait Until Dark and Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left. One of the most accomplished examples to date remains Bryan Bertino’s debut feature, about a young couple that retreats to an isolated country house in order to work out their issues, only to get terrorized over and over by a trio of mysterious strangers.
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Don’t Look Now (1973)
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection A deeply troubling study of parental grief, Nicholas Roeg’s 1973 occult thriller follows a husband and wife haunted by their dead daughter as they wander through gothic Venice. Perhaps more famous for its explicit sex scene than for its frights, the film nonetheless employs jump-cuts, flashbacks and other stylistic devices in disturbing ways, returning time and again to the unforgettable image of a little girl in a red coat.
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Halloween (1978)
Image Credit: Compass International Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection The ominous piano music — composed by the director himself — is one of several ingredients that render this John Carpenter slasher a bona fide classic nearly four decades since its release, where it grossed a whopping $70 million. Turning every kid’s favorite holiday into a gory nightmare, the original Halloween has been imitated, remade and rebooted, but rarely surpassed. While there are plenty of jarring moments throughout, its most harrowing aspect is the repeated image of a sadistic killer roaming the streets of picture-perfect suburbia.
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Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection The last film of the great Italian poet and director Pier Paolo Pasolini, completed just before he was killed at the age of 53, is neither for the squeamish nor the intellectually uncurious. Adapting the Marquis de Sade’s 18th century novel of torture and sexual violence to WWII-era Italy, Salo is elegant, thought-provoking and incredibly brutal, pushing viewers to the limit of what seems acceptable. The horrors depicted on screen are all the more troubling because they feel so real under Italy’s ruthless Fascist regime.
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The Shining (1980)
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s 1977 novel is less about shock scares – although it has a few – than about creating a sustained atmosphere of psychological dread. Conjuring up some of the most memorable images in horror history (the twins in the hallway, the blood in the elevator, “Here’s Johnny!”), it remains one of the genre’s aesthetic highpoints – a masterpiece of brooding visual terror.
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The Exorcist (1973)
Image Credit: Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett Collection There are definitely some scary moments in this 1973 sensation, but what’s most frightening about The Exorcist is its brutal portrayal of a 12-year-girl’s complete mental and physical breakdown at the hands of Satan, while her mother stands helplessly watching by her side. Alongside William Friedkin’s unnerving direction, the fog-filled imagery of Owen Roizman and electro theme by Mike Oldfield would go a long way into making this an unforgettable viewing experience.
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The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Image Credit: Artisan Entertainment/Courtesy Everett Collection Few viewers were left unscathed by this massive indie horror hit, which ingeniously utilized faux-found footage – shot on video and 16mm – to follow a group of film students trying to document an alleged witch phenomenon in backwoods Maryland. Employing one of the genre’s cardinal rules that the less you show, the scarier you make it, directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez would inspire hundreds of imitators, but none of them would whip together a movie so straightforwardly fearful.
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The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
Image Credit: Everett The goriest tangent of the horror genre was spawned by Tobe Hooper’s vicious foray into deep Texas, where a group of college friends find themselves prey to a clan of psychotic cannibals. Relying less on classic jump scares or sound effects than on the shocking sight of a flesh-eating family and their collection of power tools, Massacre is a movie that leaves you battered, bruised and slightly nauseous after each viewing.
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Funny Games (1997)
Image Credit: Attitude Films/ Courtesy Everett Collection It’s rarely classified as a horror movie, but this Austrian home invasion flick remains one of the most terrifying, if not traumatizing, films ever made. Ostensibly the story of two young psychopaths who terrorize a family on vacation, Funny Games is really about how bringing fear to the viewer is a question of pure cinematic manipulation, with director Michael Haneke thwarting expectations at each turn and forcing us to suffer the consequences. Next time a neighbor asks to borrow an egg, lock your door.
This list was first published on October 16, 2016.
