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

Ha, was literally just coming to post that it was effective seeing Ghostwatch for the first time as an American adult. I cannot even imagine what it would've been like to see it as a kid and in its proper context.

I watched it knowing everything about it and it was still some eye-boggling throat-cracking shit, can't even imagine what it was like to see it at the time

xp!! haha

The trailer for The Shining more than any moment in the film itself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANKdpe4J2h0

I feel duty-bound to point out this related A+ UK-centric thread for those unaware of its existence: is there a name or a phrase for or anything much written about that distinctly British CREEPY VIBE prevalent in TV shows and movies of the '60s/'70s? (e.g. The Prisoner, Sapphire and Steel, Baker-era

yeah I bumped it like yesterday :)

(with penda's fen. which isn't so much scary as lyrical, beautiful and inspiring. the edward elgar scene especially is one of the BEST if not scariest i've seen)

Ha, didn't even notice! I've had that thing bookmarked since its inception.

oh god i love ghostwatch. another scene of a door slamming that absolutely ruins my ability to sleep

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

spoiler for the end of prince of darkness but: this is the scariest scene john carpenter ever filmed

this is not a dream

one particularly sadistic sequence I think of from time to time: JJL's demise in The Hitcher

Ghostwatch is significantly enhanced once you know to keep an eye out for the many 'blink and you'll miss it' appearances of Pipes throughout (a trope I was glad to see Hell House adopt). The split-second glimpse in the room beneath the staircase is my favorite.

this shit may have damaged me for life
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z4rQfV3Lo8

also i may be hella corny but the end of paranormal activity fucked with my head a bit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCXmk4QAcUc

no that PA one got me too, and I usually am cool as a cucumber during horror flicks. something about watching it in my dark room with my face close to the laptop added to it

box cutter scene in breaking bad

christ that shining trailer is good. i wish i could have seen the shining for the first time without knowing every scare through decades of cultural osmosis.

- 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.