Scariest scene in a movie? (Spoiler alert)

Tinman

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:) I was just watching a movie called The Possession (with Kyra Sedgewick). There's a scene where this teenage girl who is possessed is given an MRI. It shows a creepy, Exorcist-type face (think Linda Blair) inside her. It's far creepier watching it. But it got me to thinking, what are some of the creepiest scenes in movies?
 

Dennis E. Taylor

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The Excorcist is still the scariest movie I ever watched. Granted, these days it seems tame, but at the time...

Close follow-up would be Alien.
 

Tinman

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The Excorcist is still the scariest movie I ever watched. Granted, these days it seems tame, but at the time...

Close follow-up would be Alien.

Angry Guy, but what were the scariest scenes in those movies? I expected many would say the alien baby being birthed from the crew member's stomach would be one.
 

Pterofan

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An oldie but a goodie: Jaws. A lot of people will think of the head scene, but for me the scariest scene is still that one early on, with the two guys on the dock. It had me on the edge of my seat, and the shark doesn't even appear.

Also: Hannibal Lecter performs a facelift in Silence of the Lambs.
 

Curlz

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All scenes with long-haired Japanese ghosts creep me out and I always watch them with the lights on :snoopy: Especially when they go through the tv screen and into the room with the viewer...
 

Dennis E. Taylor

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Angry Guy, but what were the scariest scenes in those movies? I expected many would say the alien baby being birthed from the crew member's stomach would be one.

I can't remember the Exorcist well enough to give specifics. But for Alien, the bursting chest scene was gory, but those don't really scare the crap out of me. For that, the two scariest scenes would be when the female crew member is looking around the hold and the alien settles in behind her, and when Ripley is hiding in the closet and the alien is waking up. I think the promise of violence is more effective than the delivery. Hitchcock understood that.
 

Tinman

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I think the promise of violence is more effective than the delivery.

I agree to a degree. The payoff scene (the baby alien bursting through the crew member's chest) would be flat without the requisite buildup, but too much buildup (promise of violence) would fall flat without the payoff scene. It's like continual foreplay without actual sex,eventually it's no fun, lol.
 
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CrastersBabies

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As a kid, that scene in Poltergeist when the tree was eating the son. That scared the heck out of me!
 

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The scariest scene in Poltergeist for me is when she turns around to find all those chairs have been silently stacked on the table in the space of about a second. Jesus.
 

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*cracks knuckles*

Dead Birds: The scene where the gal is in the room alone and there's a kid running around. He hides under the bed and she brings her lantern and crouches down to try to see him but she can't. ...So she gets down lower, the lantern light flowing over him a bit more and he suddenly faces her and it's the hideous monster face that repeats a lot in that movie.

The Babadook: When the mother is lying in bed and the creature starts scuttling on the ceiling above her and climbs into her mouth.

Case 39: When Zellweger goes to pick the little girl up from group and already kind of suspects what she is and what she's done...she sees her through the classroom window, whispering to another little girl. Briefly, the evil child's face deforms in a very subtle way as she transfers this dark secret to the other child.

The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh: The entire thing is a buildup of tension and you gotta let it work on you. Because when you get to the part where he has the nightmare about the creature, this thing slowly, subtly emerging from the shadows of the hallway and suddenly its hand jerks out to point at the saying on the wall. I jumped! :D

Lovely Molly: The scene where she's got her video camera and she hears that someone calling her name and coming up the stairs. We see nothing but hear her voice and she's freaking terrified as she stumbles back into the bedroom and closes the door, the locks being manipulated and forcing her to run into the bathroom. She's breathing heavy as she sits on the floor or sets the camera down, I can't remember which, but there's a clicking sound...like hooves...and the sound of a horse breathing and still this purring voice calling her name. She's panicking out of sight of the camera as the locks on the bathroom door are manipulated, her voice begging this "thing" to stop and "not again" and the door swings open...and there's nothing there, nothing heard but the thing breathing like a horse, her voice suddenly cut off and completely silent.
 

Jess Haines

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I know it was pretty ham-handed, but the scene in Paranormal Activity where the lady gets dragged out of bed by some invisible something always creeps me the hell out.

Also the scene in Grave Encounters where they burst through the door that's supposed to take them outside, but--surprise!--they're still inside the asylum. Nightmare fuel.
 

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Katharine Ross' empty eyes in the grocery store at the end of The Stepford Wives... And her husband's delighted smile as he Drives her home.

I should explain why that scene trumps everything else for me, incliding Samarra crawling out of the TV, which was the first scene that made me jump in literally decades: Because Ross' character spent the entire movie using intelligence and sleuthing skills and desperate love for her kids trying to find and stop the evil genius... and it's all for nothing.

It's one of the most terrifying and bleakest scenes I've ever watched, including the end of Children of Men (which I contend is NOT a positive ending for the young mother or her baby).
 
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Alma Matters

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For me it has to be the climax of The Blair Witch Project when the account given by one of the talking heads at the beginning is finally realised in reality. No thank you. I'm out.

I personally think the entire film is pretty terrifying. I still wouldn't watch it at home, alone, at night.
 

R.Barrows

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In 'The Omen' there's a scene where a scientist discovers that Damien's DNA is part Jackal. As he's leaving for the night, the elevator malfunctions and he's thrown to the floor. You hear the counter-weights in the elevator break free and a cable cuts straight through the elevator cutting the guy in half. Ever since then, I've been a little nervous in elevators, although I talked with an engineer who ensured me that was impossible.

When I was around six, I snuck behind the couch and watched the movie my parents were watching. It was the Poseidon Adventure - not the remake but the old one. When the survivors had to crawl through water flooded passageways over dead bodies, it freaked me out pretty good. Gave me nightmares for weeks.

And then there was Cloverfield. The glimpses of the giant monster were pretty freaky, and the scene in the collapsed skyscraper was also tense, but the one that got me the most was the person who'd been attacked by the little monsters suddenly exploding.
 

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There hasn't been a movie that's scared me since I was a little kid back in the late fifties. Back then, most of them scared me! It got so bad my grandpa finally took my by a movie lot in Ellay and showed me how fake it was. Not only that, my dad was infamous for pointing out flaws in movies, especially the b-movie monster icky bug movies we used to watch on KTTV Channel 11 in Ellay (that's Los Angeles for those of you out of the loop).

The one scene that really stands out that I vividly remember was when Les Tremayne got swallowed by this amoeba-like monster on Mars in the Angry Red Planet. They made it even worse when he's floating around it it's "stomach" and I could hear this crunching sound. I had nightmares about that for weeks! There were others but none of them ever had the impact that one scene did on me. When I saw it as an adult fifty years later, it was pretty silly and didn't look or sound anything like I remembered. Go figure...jaded eyes!
 

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The first time Peter Lorre kills a child in M. You see him lure the child away and they go around a corner...

...and you know he's killed the child and you're left to fill in the blanks on what he actually did.
 

ElaineA

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This is going to date me. The phone booth scene in The Birds flat terrified me. I had to be under 8 when I saw that on TV. I was also terrified by the scene in the Wizard of Oz when the Wicked Witch tells the monkeys "FLY! Fly!" I don't know if The Birds made me scared of the monkeys or the monkeys made me scared of The Birds.

The scene where the woman's partial body is washed up on shore in Jaws freaked. me. out. But I think the scene where they're singing in the cabin actually made me far more tense.
 

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When I was a young girl (8) seeing Freddy Kruger scared me, wherever he popped up, his burned/scared face just marked me for life lol Same with Friday the 13th when they were in the water or on the jetty (Dock) what ever it was and Jason jumps out the water and pulls her or him in - bloody hell I can't even remember what character it was - way too long ago - I just know that both Freddy and Jason spooked me, and now a days I have yet to find anything to scare me at all. I've become desensitised against all horror's.
 

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The first time Peter Lorre kills a child in M. You see him lure the child away and they go around a corner...

...and you know he's killed the child and you're left to fill in the blanks on what he actually did.

I remember that scene. It scared the crap out of me too!
 

Vegetarian Cannibal

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I don't know about "scariest" but most visceral for me is that scene in Misery when Kathy Bates sledgehammers the dude's legs. I still can't look at the screen. Ugh. Shudders. Also doesn't help Kathy Bates role reminds me too much of my mother... 0.0;
 

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This reminds of the scariest in the Horror movie that I would like to make: the phone scene in "Conjure Wife" by Fritz Leiber. Probably the best horror novel ever written, but it has never been converted directly into a movie; there have been three attempts in which the story was completely rewritten.
 

Tinman

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, especially the b-movie monster icky bug movies we used to watch on KTTV Channel 11 in Ellay (that's Los Angeles for those of you out of the loop).

In the St Louis area we had those movies on KTVI Channel 11. I had two scenes in two different movies that affected me:

Attack of the Giant Leeches. The leeches capture people swimming in a lake and drag them to an underground cave to suck on at their leisure. The people in the cave have these horrible, overly-large, open-wound hickies. In one scene a leech is approaching someone and the victim is screaming "No. Not me. Take someone else." Creeped me out big time, lol.

I don't know the name of the second movie, which I've never seen again, but it was some kind of werewolf/western. I was about 8 years old (give or take 2 years). It was night and my parents were sleeping. I was watching the movie alone in our livingroom -- which adjoined my parents' bedroom. A scene came on where this guy was bedded down near a campfire in the wilderness and this other man appears. They're friendly at first, but then they get into a fist fight and fall behind a large log. You can hear the grunts as they fight and see the occasional fist reach above the log as it prepares to land a blow. Suddenly the grunts turn into growling and you see a hand reach above the log . . . only now the hand is covered in hair and has claws. Not scary at all at this point, not even to an 8-year old. But then I hear the identical noise coming from somewhere behind me. It's coming from my parents' bedroom and I'm for god sure someone in there is turning into a werewolf. I flew up the stairs to my second-floor bedroom and covered my head.

Of course, I realize now it was my dad's snores. But they had never sounded so strange before -- so much like a werewolf undergoing the change.
 
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It isn't a horror movie per se, and a lot of it had to do with the fact that I was alone in the theater except for one old lady a few rows behind me, but the entire first 10 or 20 minutes of Irreversible had me reeling for days. It is literally a descent into hell with a vomit-inducing soundtrack, and ends with one of the most violent scenes in movie history. I was thoroughly disturbed for weeks, and felt violated in some way. Like my brain would never be the same. Now I think the movie is a masterpiece, although I can't remember the last time I felt like watching it.
 

R.Barrows

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I don't know about "scariest" but most visceral for me is that scene in Misery when Kathy Bates sledgehammers the dude's legs. I still can't look at the screen. Ugh. Shudders. Also doesn't help Kathy Bates role reminds me too much of my mother... 0.0;

Gotta say, that WAS a really freaky scene. Still hurts my legs to think about it.