Best and/or Scariest and/or Creepiest Scenes Ever (from horror films or TV shows or whatever, I don't care)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INjarC0gJo4

this isn't a bad movie, it's one of my favorite movies of all time, but the most recent, richest scare i can remember experiencing was during the theater scene in messiah of evil

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfLFCgBzmS4

and just to get it out of the way, the hospital scene from the exorcist iii

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBEfFgNld98

Yeah, there's a few hall-of-famers in that one, for sure.

I hate to derail this early, but imo "scary scenes not in horror movies" should also be a thing we discuss here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omNgeDME-cQ

oh yes i LOVE that

Yes, horrific scenes from non-horror entertainments should absolutely be a part of this thread.

I'd have to rewatch it (which I don't particularly relish the thought of) to see if it retained its impact but the suicide scene from Monster's Ball left its mark on me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtKOPF0NyHg

I watched WFRR over and over again as a kid but had to leave the room every time this scene came on

More 'best' than 'scariest' but the very last, completely WTF scene in the first Von Trier Kingdom miniseries (NSFW if you go looking for a clip).

More 'creepiest' than 'scariest' but Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill taking turns casually carving into their arms with an electric knife in Possession (plus roughly eight dozen other unsettling moments from that masterpiece of cinema).

The only time I’ve ever been seriously weirded out by a movie was the head-in-vice scene in Casino. But to be fair that movie was made almost 25 years ago so it’s probably pretty tame in these post-Saw days.

This is definitely not my thread, but Fringe has an episode set in a(n abandoned?) subway station where a head explodes that grossed/freaked me the hell out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkfnuUU_6J8

The death of Pesci and his brother(?) is the scene that fucks me up from Casino.

I wish I could find a clip, there's a scene in The Witch Who Came From the Sea where the main character is flashing back to a traumatic scene which ends with her as a panicked child shouting the same thing over and over as the audio track degrades her voice to some weird and barely-audible rasp, and the effect is so uncanny and creepy. I can't think of another scene like it.

Scenes that creep me:
Funny Games- when she is casually tossed off the boat
The Strangers- the stabbing and the one masked person standing quietly in the house
Twilight Zone (movie) - the monster on the airplane wing
Crash- the scar fucking

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ul-LwLX6Nk

I wish I could find a clip, there's a scene in The Witch Who Came From the Sea where the main character is flashing back to a traumatic scene which ends with her as a panicked child shouting the same thing over and over as the audio track degrades her voice to some weird and barely-audible rasp, and the effect is so uncanny and creepy. I can't think of another scene like it.

The ending of In the Company of Men creeps me out in a similar fashion

The dismemberment scene in Looper still freaks me out to this day

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxqe8Xq6LBQ

doesn't make a lot of sense (like most time travel shit) but I'll give 'em this, it's a really clever scene

Oh yeah, that Looper bit was rough. I had to turn away during the video in Annihilation.

The face slice in Pan's Labyrinth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5le9sYdYkM

Jesus christ, give a warning before you terrify me like that!

bean sí in darby o gill

tunnel in kill list

beach conversation in it follows

beach scene in Under the Skin. final scene with the coven in The Witch

There's a slew of Lynch scenes that I'm sure I don't even have to specify.

Green Room is filled to the brim with intense and terrifying scenes but the one that burned itself in my brain is the girl slowly unzipping the dude with a box cutter. Blasé, offhanded violence in a movie probably unnerves me more than anything.

Large Marge is all-time. Probably aided by lunch table mythologizing from the kids who'd seen it and built it up into the biggest scare imaginable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2Y5tgCBAvQ

for reference
The Haunt Of Fear: ILX Top 100 HORROR Movies Poll Results Thread

The blood testing scene in The Thing is up there with scariest of all time for me.

The scene I'd pick from Under the Skin would be this one where the two guys meet while floating in the void. One of the few times while watching a movie where I really felt like I was seeing something otherworldly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UCPwlNd3Js

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdIlLn52Oak

Not really scary, but very, very creepy: Rosemary and Guy in bed when you hear the chanting next door for the first time. Can't find a clip, can't even find a still. The camera movement--a slow tilt up from Rosemary and Guy to the wall above--is beautiful.

a lot of the unremarkable domestic scenes in that movie are somehow terrifying

Furry fellatio

xxp yeah I just saw that, it was great

I hate to derail this early, but imo "scary scenes not in horror movies" should also be a thing we discuss here

Can't find a decent video of it, but one episode of Luther there's an extended opening of a woman coming home to her flat, brushing her teeth, taking off her shoes, getting into bed, drifting off to sleep. Then this man with a knife slides out from under her bed with this sort of stealthy wiggle. Absolutely horrible.

If you have a fear of mannequins/dummies/dolls suddenly springing to life, Tourist Trap is riddled with effective instances of just that. Movie makes zero goddamn sense but it does what it does well.

Plus these fuckers in old Doctor Who
https://cdn-static.denofgeek.com/sites/denofgeek/files/styles/article_width/public/autons_1.jpg
https://cdn-static.denofgeek.com/sites/denofgeek/files/styles/article_width/public/daffodils.jpg

Oh, the scene with the bag in Audition

Full body shivers the first time I saw that

Co-sign the subway sequence from The Wiz. Total nightmare fuel for my 7-year-old self.

yes to both under the skin scenes for sure

the b&w pictures of previous 'martyrs' in martyrs are haunting af, as is the entire last few minutes of body horror shading into cosmic nihilism and back again

Martyrs is all time and relies on its cumulative build to that pay off

That scene towards the end of Bone Tomahawk is the thing that's fucked me up the most recently. It's the audio track as much anything. Yeesh.

The ghost at the end of Personal Shopper is pretty extraordinary and had a huge effect on me - physically and emotionally.

The 'daylight stabbing' in Zodiac is horrible.

Yes, there's something about the overuse of darkness/nighttime as the setting for scary scenes that makes scary things happening in broad daylight even scarier.

when Matthau kneels on broken glass proposing to Elaine May in A New Leaf

(people do scream)

The 'daylight stabbing' in Zodiac is horrible.

― Good cop, Babcock (Chinaski), Friday, May 10, 2019 9:42 AM (twenty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh god zodiac is a very scary non-horror movie

just the sight of the killer stepping out from behind a tree in a long, kinda indistinct shot is terrifying even before the methodical stabbing happens

yeah cosign that scene, horrible

the end of this scene from the eye never fails to literally raise the hairs on the back of my neck for some reason

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIiVlAJ6Fqw

The elevator scene in this movie is awesome too

- Mulholland Drive - 'Man Behind The Dumpster'
- Kill List - 'Tunnels' / 'Hunchback'
- Eyes Wide Shut - 'Orgy' (the music + masks combo freaks me out)
- The Grudge - two scenes: one with the grandmother being tormented by an evil shadow spirit; another where someone is leaving work late and keeps getting phone calls on her mobile
- Midsommar - ritual suicide scenes

I thought there were some genuinely frightening scenes in M Night's 'The Invitation', especially the grandmother hobbling around the house at night screaming and puking, and the bit where she chases the kids around the crawlspace under the house

The "wall of death" execution scene in the mostly-execrable Caligula (1979) really got to me, I had to turn it off after that because I was getting freaked out. In fact I just looked it up on YT and it freaked me out all over again.

haha oh man yeah that is an image that really sticks

I wonder if I would've found Paranormal Activity scarier if I didn't regularly wake up to find my insomnia-prone gf basically doing some variation of the immobile late-night starefest that I assume is meant to make the viewer's skin crawl.

I don't know how I failed to mention it before itt but so many small, quiet moments in Testament are among the most dread-inducing things I've ever seen on film. Most especially the scene of a young Lucas Haas being bathed in the sink, which I saw when I wasn't much older and probably did permanent damage to my brain.

The overhead shot when Martin Balsam gets offed in Psycho freaks me out every single time

Yea that one was underrated

Shower scene overshadows some other mega legit scares

My dad, who saw it in the early sixties but wasn't what you'd called a cineaste, always said that the reveal mother scared him way more than the shower scene. That doesn't really do it for me but the framing of the stair murder and the way Perkins moves is just incredibly shocking still.

Tarman in Return of the Living Dead is half played for laughs but I dunno, that guy kinda freaks my shit out tbrr.

that's a good one. it's deffo the way it's framed, i was ready for the attack but not from that direction. the bare bulb swinging on the norman reveal is disturbing too mind you, that wig!! and the i wouldn't even harm a fly nonsense.

the only horror scene that had an effect on my actual behaviour was whichever hammer dracula film that had the count entering a bedroom as a bat via the window, i must have seen it on tv aged 8 or so and legit did not open any windows in my room for at least 3 years, even in the height of Summer. lol.

xp

After i saw Psycho i didn't shower for sixteen years

There's a Tintin comic (Cigars of the Pharoah maybe?) where someone blows a bold dart through a window into a sleeping person's neck and I slept with the covers right up past my jugular for years after reading that as a kid

In all seriousness tho my showers were very fast for the week after that. As fast as they could be for a nine year old at least

I was convinced that one of our friends mothers was standing in the bathroom one night with her back to me and i was afraid to come out and it turned out to be a misleading sihlouette of the mirror and sink through our frosted shower door

Watched Beware! The Blob recently (which is basically just a head film directed by Larry Hagman) and it had an amusing riff on the Psycho shower scene (wherein a husband keeps dramatically ripping back the shower curtain to ask his wife completely banal questions).

I wonder whether the bathing woman in the Shining might itself have been a play on a role-reversed version of the Psycho shower scene

there are probably loads of 'hiding behind the shower curtain' scenes through cinema though

Yeah, it immediately occurred to me after posting that riffing on the Psycho shower scene is probably among the most played-out tropes in cinema.

I've got mixed feelings about when people bring in types of disturbing that are too mundane for my tastes (as I'm always hoping for something on the eerie, awesome, pleasing terror side) but here I go...(I think I talked about a few of these recently, most are from childhood)…

Since when has doubleclicking the return button meant "post"?

Fantasy films like The Labyrinth, Willow and Dark Crystal depressed the hell out of me when I was a child. Legend has some awesomely creepy imagery but it also fell into depressing for me too.
I found these films deeply ugly in a way I just couldn't deal with and I just hated that it was so easy to slip into a hole or chasm and die. I was painfully aware how often characters survived by luck.
And the bog in Labyrinth with just too much. I could never find it funny, the idea of smelling like especially foul shit for the rest of your life was some of the rawest horror I'd seen from a film.
I remember vividly a sleepless night thinking about Dark Crystal and just feeling nauseated and hopeless about it.

More in a minute...

I had a similar sleepless night after watching the John Cleese comedy Clockwise. Maybe I thought it was an overpoweringly bleak vision of adult life.

The Mighty Max cartoon had a bit where the deformed clown Freako magically turned Max into a severely deformed person. Extremely disturbing.

3D cartoon Reboot when Dot is cornered in the streets and has her hair shaved off by the police robots of a new dystopia. Feels like a rape scene. Really troubled me.

Two things that seemed especially horrible because they were played for laughs:
In the sitcom Frasier, Roz getting full-on kissed by a creepy friend and she clearly wasn't okay with it.
The old ladies in Harry Enfield raping young men.

my favorite riff on the shower scene

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uPdZTiGoGc

(that's Barry Levinson as the bellhop)

There’s a harrowing scene in the (otherwise rather tame) Stephen King adaptation Doctor Sleep where a cadre of serial killers/psychic vampires ritually sacrifice a kidnapped young boy to harvest his suffering.

I’m not easily disturbed by horror movies, but the scene was surprisingly effective and harrowing.

Harrowing enough to use the word “harrowing” twice, even

THE HARROWING

Prepare...to be harrowed.

if we're talking about creepy stuff in generally non-creepy media: there is a lot of low-key terrifying stuff in both avatar and legend of korra, cf. bloodbending

It's not generally thought of as a scary film, but the first abduction scene in Communion used to freak the hell out out of me, and still kinda does. I dreaded the alien on the book cover as a child, so maybe watching it was never the best idea.

But I do like the somewhat surreal, dream-like approach is takes in regard to the experience, which is a nice contrast to the literal-mindedness of most UFO/abduction depictions on film and TV. There's the sense of intrusion from some "other", akin to the Diner monster in Mulholland Drive and the subway/passing car people in Jacob's Ladder.

The scene in Paul Schrader's "Blue Collar" where Yaphet Kotto is slowly asphyxiated by spray paint

The scene where Peter Weller gets shot at the beginning of Robocop made me queasy at age 14 in the theater, especially when his hand gets blown apart by the shotgun. Ugh!

Yeah, that scene has stayed with me too. The 'knife across the chest' in First Blood had a similar, visceral impact.

Midsommar - ritual suicide scenes

This piqued my interest, as I somehow hadn't heard of Midsommar. I took myself over to YouTube, where someone has helpfully uploaded an edit titled "All the deaths in Midsommar".

I really wish I hadn't watched it.

child-catcher scene in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

There's a scene in The Exorcist that terrified me, no pea soup vomit, no head spinning, just the expression on Regan's face watching the priest walk across the room. Still haunts me, and I haven't seen the movie since 1974.

Hardly original but the Wheelers and the creepy statue setting is just perfectly terrifying (Return to Oz)

I mean hardly original in that it's probably been suggested already

isn't Midsommer the movie with the cliff diving scene

remember being like..."uh you're supposed to cut away from that"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Catcher

the character does not appear in Fleming's book itself. In fact, Roald Dahl, co-author of the film version's screenplay, originated the Child Catcher (as well as almost all of the Vulgarian scenes).

The Child Catcher is very very Roald Dahl.

uh i am apparently only now learning that chitty chitty bang bang is roald dahl's second film adaptation of an ian fleming novel, the first being you only live twice? which is very off-topic but blowing my mind regardless

A tiny moment that gave me a chill--Richard Gere's face hitting the water in Days of Heaven.

Re The Exorcist, the scene where they're doing tests on Regan & put something into her neck and blood spurts out always makes me shudder. Realism/physicality I guess. The sound in that scene also plays a role.

thread just reminded be about ghostwatch

i think it did genuine fuckin damage to me for a while, that did. i was put to bed screaming, and woke up the same way, for about a week.

It's not generally thought of as a scary film, but the first abduction scene in Communion used to freak the hell out out of me, and still kinda does. I dreaded the alien on the book cover as a child, so maybe watching it was never the best idea.

But I do like the somewhat surreal, dream-like approach is takes in regard to the experience, which is a nice contrast to the literal-mindedness of most UFO/abduction depictions on film and TV. There's the sense of intrusion from some "other", akin to the Diner monster in Mulholland Drive and the subway/passing car people in Jacob's Ladder.

― Duane Barry, Thursday, 21 November 2019 12:53 (three days ago) link

Totally. “IS THAT SOMEONE THERE?”

Underrated movie.

Christopher Walken giving the most Christopher Walken performance ever only compounds the strangeness further.

Perhaps not as surreal but certainly justc as scary is the alien abduction flashback from Fire in the Sky. The movie itself is mediocre but that sequence could stand on its own as one of the greatest sci-fi horror shorts ever made. It masterfully captures the pure animal terror of being treated like a lab rat by beings with unfathomable motives.

Forgotten to mention the scary bits in Beyond The Black Rainbow

As this thread seemed to expand to include 'disturbing or upsetting' I'm going to nominate the beating dished out to Ray Liotta in Killing Them Softly. Brilliantly acted and really quite horrible.