The most frightened you've ever been by a film

[Jack Shaftoe]

The Blair Witch Project & Ghostwatch still gets the hairs on my arms up but the one I remember most (but can't remember what the film was called) was a Disney film shown after the Eastenders Omnibus one Sunday (when the Omnibus was only an hour long) & it involved the camera acting as whatever it was that was chasing some kids through some woods. Shit me up.

I got that from the start of Jabberwocky, which I saw on telly when I was about twelve-ish, I think. That opening bit with the camera going through the woods absolutely terrified me.

Actually, then beginning of otherwise rather poor Ben Affleck thing 'Phantoms' rather shat me up as well, just holding shots for rather too long, if I remember correctly, which can be incredibly unsettling.

[Wet Blanket]

I went to see Jaws at the cinema for its re-release a few months back. Even though I've seen it dozens of times the head scene still made me jump out of my seat. It was a real pleasure to do so at the same time as a packed cinema. A scare masterclass that puts to shame the 'screamers' that hack horror directors pack into a lot of modern movies.

Agreed on all the Lynch, he's the boss when it comes to primal terror. The sequence in Twin Peaks when we're first party to Laura Palmer's murder shat me up so bad I considered sleeping with the lights on.

It's on YouTube too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5aqLzl_VrA

[The Masked Unit]

I was a very timid child; terrified of the dark and slept with a light on until I was far too old etc, and I'm therefore predisposed to being scared of horror films I think, and don't have much of a tolerance to them at all due to that natural fright being exacerbated by a few things I saw as a teen. IT and The Entity spring to mind as films I was forced to watch, in the sense that a group of us were watching them together and it would have been unthinkable to say as a 13 years old "I'm too scared to watch this", and which scarred me pretty badly. Worst of all though was Ghostwatch, which kept me awake in a massive panic all that night and for some nights after, and I think I'd still be wary of watching it now. I 100% don't believe in ghosts but I'm still terrified by them!


The Shining is one of my favourite films despite being responsible for 90% of my nightmares. It's not the visuals as such, although the little girls are haunting. It's the atmosphere that gets me - that sense of what could be going on in any of those rooms at any given time. Just imagine being in their living quarters and hearing sounds faintly coming from other parts of the hotel. I think just being in a big empty hotel by myself, even if it were in the city centre, would give me the willies. It's that primordial fear of what's lurking just around the corner in the dark - I have a recurring dream where I'm looking out through an open door into a pitch black hallway, sensing but not seeing something malevolent there.

TL;DR? No horror films for me please. I'm a little pussy.

[checkoutgirl]

This scared the almighty fuck out of me as a 6 or 7 year old kid.

Superman III - Vera gets sucked into the machine and it changes her into a cyborg/robot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuSsSwg9MXs

To this day I still can't really face it.

Trauma...

[billtheburger]

Most recent film to creep me out was Los Ojos de Julia.
There is a scene

Spoiler alert

with naked blind women in the shower

[close]

that made me blurt out, "Fuck offffff" at the TV.

[BlodwynPig]

I was a very timid child; terrified of the dark and slept with a light on until I was far too old etc, and I'm therefore predisposed to being scared of horror films I think, and don't have much of a tolerance to them at all due to that natural fright being exacerbated by a few things I saw as a teen. IT and The Entity spring to mind as films I was forced to watch, in the sense that a group of us were watching them together and it would have been unthinkable to say as a 13 years old "I'm too scared to watch this", and which scarred me pretty badly. Worst of all though was Ghostwatch, which kept me awake in a massive panic all that night and for some nights after, and I think I'd still be wary of watching it now. I 100% don't believe in ghosts but I'm still terrified by them!


The Shining is one of my favourite films despite being responsible for 90% of my nightmares. It's not the visuals as such, although the little girls are haunting. It's the atmosphere that gets me - that sense of what could be going on in any of those rooms at any given time. Just imagine being in their living quarters and hearing sounds faintly coming from other parts of the hotel. I think just being in a big empty hotel by myself, even if it were in the city centre, would give me the willies. It's that primordial fear of what's lurking just around the corner in the dark - I have a recurring dream where I'm looking out through an open door into a pitch black hallway, sensing but not seeing something malevolent there.

TL;DR? No horror films for me please. I'm a little pussy.

This was the one I stayed in in Croatia - ancient smelling room overlooking graveyard, wind howling down corridors, dead black cat outside, strange lone receptionist. Came down next day for breakfast, one solitary table in the centre of a huge ballroom.
http://www.facebalkan.com/hotel-jaska.html

[kngen]

The Shining immediately springs to mind because it's a masterfully scary film, but the version me and  a mate endlessly watched as a teenager was taped off the telly. Then a couple of years later I watched it at someone else's house, who had it on video, and witnessed the furry-blow-job scene for the first time, a sequence I had no idea existed. Fucking hell, I was beside myself. If I suffer long-term psychological damage because of that, the prudish cunts who programmed STV's Late Nite Movies can expect a writ in the post.

Also Ringu 2. The video editing sequence still freaks the fuck out of me, but the first time I watched it (alone, in  a little cottage in the country, in the middle of a thunderstorm - really!) the tape kept stopping and the static of the video channel would  blare out, which was a bit fucking unsettling. 'It's OK, be rational - it's just that the tape is too tight on the cogs, rewind and fast-forward it a bit, and it'll loosen up,' I told myself. I hit rewind and it started making this horrendous banging noise. I had to go and sit in the kitchen and have a wee whiskey to calm my nerves after that. If the phone had rang at any point I think I would have stuck my head in the oven. Had to sleep with the light on for a couple of days afterwards, nonetheless.

[Don_Preston]

A Spanish horror film, or short, on BBC4 that really put los willies up me. I forget its name, but involved a missing child, a doppelgänger and mirrors which accessed good and evil parallel worlds. The bit that scared me most was near the beginning, when the horror as most ripe, when the wife looks under her bed and sees her husband with glowing green eyes manically grinning at her.

[Jack Shaftoe]

Blimey, that sounds great.

[holyzombiejesus]

When I went to see [Rec], I screamed like a 9 year old girl when they put the camera in the loft space and saw the little zombie boy. I suppose that was a jump rather than fright though. Blair Witch shit me up and so did Paranormal Activity.

[Beep Cleep Chimney]

The Cube left me feeling unsettled and cold.

The TV spin-off was equally chilling.



EDIT: Oh bollocks, Asparagus Trevor's already done that one.  Sorry.  Move along.

[BlodwynPig]

The liquid appears sentient, producing increasingly complex data that is revealed by computer decoding to include differential equations

Woooooahhhh....light on tonight.

[Beep Cleep Chimney]

This scared the almighty fuck out of me as a 6 or 7 year old kid.

Superman III - Vera gets sucked into the machine and it changes her into a cyborg/robot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuSsSwg9MXs

To this day I still can't really face it.

Trauma...

This.  Definitely this.  That was probably my earliest experience of being scared by a film, but I still reckon the most scared I've been by a film was either the first time I saw John Carpenter's The Thing (the bit with the dog's face peeling back like a banana and the defibilation scene in particular messed me up when I first saw it when I was about 11) or Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (that was the first one I saw, for some reason).

There's one scene in particular I remember where Freddy cuts a bloke's arms and legs, pulls his veins out and walks him about like a marionette.  Brrrrrrrrrr.   I mean, for fuck's sake, I was about 12 when I saw that round a mate's house on Sky one night.  Fucked. Me. Up.

[Don_Preston]

Blimey, that sounds great.

I've found it after some painstaking research: The Baby's Room, from Six Films To Keep You Awake series.

Also includes a light-hearted Christmas film (A Christmas Tale) where a gang of children discover a dying woman in a Father Christmas costume.

[castro diaz]

Ringu, Gozu, Tale of Two Sisters, Honogurai Mizu no Soko kara (Dark Water) are also notable films from the Asian school of horror that have the supernatural firmly ingrained in the celluloid.

There was a real glut of fantastic east-Asian horror about a decade ago wasn't there.  I saw Tale of Two Sisters in the cinema at the time and have never been so scared (including real life situations, oddly).  There were a few walk outs, one girl was sobbing uncontrollably and I had to go out for a tactical toilet break to have a word with myself.  I remember just hanging around by the popcorn stand, reassuring myself that everything was fine and nobody could possibly be selling sugary treats if we were about to be attacked by demonic Korean schoolgirls.

I watched Ringu in my then girlfriend's flat, during a storm that made tree branches knock against the window.  She was terrified, so I thought it'd be a great jape to surreptitiously ring her landline (kids: like a mobile, but for your house) during a particularly tense bit.  In a deflating anti-climax she just picked it up and very casually said 'Hello?'.

Blair Witch is also unfairly maligned by idiots.
 

[billtheburger]

I've found it after some painstaking research: The Baby's Room, from Six Films To Keep You Awake series.

I wondered if it was this.
It's director, Alex De La Iglesia, is always entertaining. I've been fortunate to have see a few of his films now and I've always had good things to say.
One of his films, El dia de Bestia, is an excellent horror/comedy, and whilst not too scary during the film, gave me the worse nightmares I have ever suffered.

[Kane Jones]

There's one scene in particular I remember where Freddy cuts a bloke's arms and legs, pulls his veins out and walks him about like a marionette.  Brrrrrrrrrr.   I mean, for fuck's sake,

Messed me up too.  It just makes you think 'Why is Freddy such an unbelievable cunt?'

He walks him off a building so it looks like suicide too, if I remember rightly.  Nasty prick.

[Mark Steels Stockbroker]

Maya Deren's Meshes Of The Afternoon is the most unsettling piece of film I've ever seen all the way through. A clear influence on Lynch.

I also passed out whilst watching Un Chien Andalou at MOMI, but I'm not sure that wasn't due to being unwell/unfed at the time.

[Mark Steels Stockbroker]

Watching Inland Empire on DVD, my mind wandered and so I looked up the wikipedia article for a larf, and was thus pre-warned against the scary face bit. To be honest though I find it inferior to Mulholland Drive. Even though that had a convoluted production history, it somehow ended up being the best of what I think of as the "dream trilogy" (MD, Lost Highway, IE).

The straight-to-video Blair Witch 2 had an interesting "extra feature" conceit, which I learned of right away because the previous viewer hadn't bothered rewinding.

[Stone Cold Jane Austen]

This deserves to be laughed at but the one film that cacked me up more than any other was The Lost Boys. I was 8, and my older brother and my cousin were watching it so I asked if I could join them. That film properly damaged me. For months I was convinced that every little creak from outside my window was Kiefer Sutherland and his cronies were swarming outside.

As a result, I developed a massive aversion to horror films. I can remember at school all of my mates went through a phase of watching all the Friday the 13th's and Nightmare On Elm Street's, I had to pretend I'd seen them so I wouldn't look like some pathetic scaredy cat.

It wasn't until my late teens that I decided to brave the waters and watch Halloween, which scared me but had no lasting effects. It was just a really good film. I've watched all manner of horrors ever since and it's quite rare for me to be actually frightened by them. I watched the original Hellraiser for the first time the other day and it just seemed quite quaint.

The only film that, as an adult, I've had to switch off from being too scared by was a film called Mute Witness, which is about a deaf mute girl who gets trapped in some warehouse and witnesses a snuff film being made. There was something about the way she couldn't hear the baddies coming after her and couldn't scream for help that was just a bit too much for me.

[boy with no qualities]

Watching The Thriller on the making of VHS and An American Werewolf in London gave me recurring nightmares about werewolves at the end of my road for what felt like a long time as a young un. The Home Alone boiler/fire thing in the basement disturbed me as well.

[Noodle Lizard]

I must be one of the few who thought 'Inland Empire' was an absolute chore to get through (and not in the good way).  But 'Mulholland Dr.' and 'Lost Highway' both had bits which spooked me a little.

Whenever these kinds of threads come up, it's always a reminder that I don't remember being genuinely scared by a film since I was a kid.  Though I fell asleep the other night with 'Mean Girls' on the TV and got scared momentarily when I woke up to piss.  Things get menacing when you've just woken up.

[graffic]

The Blair Witch Project

Blair witch didn't scare me at all. The only film that genuinely disturbs and unsettles me now is the exorcist. Borderline unwatchable at times. Also the film fragiles is genuinely scary. The build up to to revealing of who the ghost is and you when you eventually see the face of the ghost is terrifying.

[Don_Preston]

I must be one of the few who thought 'Inland Empire' was an absolute chore to get through (and not in the good way).

Me too. Admittedly I've only sat through all of it once, but it was bloody difficult at that. I'm planning on giving it another try thanks to this thread.

But as I said in the Cult movie/Room thread, After Last Season seems to capture the Head in hands, "What the fuck is this?" that I'd like, without being 3 hours long.

[Johnny Textface]

I once did a lung and went to see 'Star Trek - First Contact'. I was very young, utterly stoned and the borg blew my tiny mind.

[Phil_A]

This deserves to be laughed at but the one film that cacked me up more than any other was The Lost Boys. I was 8, and my older brother and my cousin were watching it so I asked if I could join them. That film properly damaged me. For months I was convinced that every little creak from outside my window was Kiefer Sutherland and his cronies were swarming outside.

As a result, I developed a massive aversion to horror films. I can remember at school all of my mates went through a phase of watching all the Friday the 13th's and Nightmare On Elm Street's, I had to pretend I'd seen them so I wouldn't look like some pathetic scaredy cat.

It wasn't until my late teens that I decided to brave the waters and watch Halloween, which scared me but had no lasting effects. It was just a really good film. I've watched all manner of horrors ever since and it's quite rare for me to be actually frightened by them. I watched the original Hellraiser for the first time the other day and it just seemed quite quaint.

The only film that, as an adult, I've had to switch off from being too scared by was a film called Mute Witness, which is about a deaf mute girl who gets trapped in some warehouse and witnesses a snuff film being made. There was something about the way she couldn't hear the baddies coming after her and couldn't scream for help that was just a bit too much for me.

The first half of Mute Witness is just like you said, brilliantly tense and unnerving. Then in the second half it turns into a sort-of really peculiar slapstick comedy thriller, and even a surprise

Spoiler alert

Alec Guinness

[close]

cameo can't save it. The shift in tone is abrupt and jarring that it really lessens the impact of what came before. If it wasn't for that disappointing second act it might be considered a minor classic now instead of a forgotten obscurity.

[Hangthebuggers]

Me too. Admittedly I've only sat through all of it once, but it was bloody difficult at that. I'm planning on giving it another try thanks to this thread.

I've managed Inland Empire twice and again didn't fully grasp it. It's hard going, more so than his other films (even eraserhead, which at least seems to have a shade of slight comedy about it at times - or at least scenes were you giggle from nerves) - IE just felt like everything was decaying into some feverish dream.

Also - club silencio in Mullholland always makes my hairs stand on end, with the silent musician. Fucking brilliant.

[Hangthebuggers]

I also passed out whilst watching Un Chien Andalou at MOMI, but I'm not sure that wasn't due to being unwell/unfed at the time.

I had to design a soundtrack to that film when I was in college. I didn't find it scary at all, and besides the unpleasant eye scene, I rather enjoyed it.

[Small Man Big Horse]

I remember being a little disturbed by Mute Witness as well, though my memory of it is fairly poor (I'd forgotten about the Alec Guiness cameo, for one thing). Another vague memory is of Paperhouse, which freaked me out a bit when I was young, but I've no idea how it stands up today.

[Cohaagen]

When I was about 10 I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey and it remains the most terrifying film experience I've ever had. I was a very spooky child, fascinated by aliens and the supernatural, and the scope and scale of it disturbed me immensely. That scene where they inspect the monolith that's been dug up on the moon, with the handheld camera work and creepy opera singing, nearly brought on a bona fide neurotic episode.