Some of us love to be scared, if we are being honest, especially in a darkened movie theater.
This time of year — with Halloween approaching like a man with an axe — there is no better time to think about the films that provided us the biggest frights.
Zombies rising from the dead. Mindless, unstoppable killers. Terrors of the deep. Angry feathered friends turned into birds of prey. Unending darkness. Simple tools turned into weapons of mass destruction.
All accompanied by soundtracks that simply make our ears perk, our skin crawl and our hearts race.
God help me, I do love it so.
What do we love as much as scary movies?
Richland Source City Editor Carl Hunnell is admittedly the oldest member of our staff. His selections reflect his 61 years of age. We are hoping readers come up with something a little more recent. Please vote in this poll and help us show him there have been scary movies in the last two decades. We will publish some of the best thoughts near Halloween.
Easy …. we love a good list. A top five. A top 10.
This week, I decided to marry those two concepts and provide my top 10 favorite, scariest films.
Before we get started, there are a few ground rules to observe.
First, it’s my list. It’s not necessarily wrong or right. It’s just mine. Feel free to submit your own list and maybe we will publish it here. My list is largely older films. It takes a lot more to scare me after a 40-year journalism career.
Second, I am only including movies I have actually seen. So … if it’s not something that attracted me and my popcorn, it’s not on the list. There may be newer, scarier films. But I didn’t see them … or they didn’t scare me.
Third, these are not necessarily “Halloween” movies. In fact, most are not. But they all scared the crap out of me the first time I saw them.
Fourth, I am judging these films by the movie-making technology available at the time it was made. Don’t come at me now, maybe 50 years later, to tell me the special effects in a movie on my list are bad.
It was good enough at the time to frighten me during my six decades on this earth. And that’s good enough for me.
So, without further fanfare, here is my personal list of Top 10 scariest movies ever shown on the big screen:
No. 10 — The Blair Witch Project (1999) — The “documentary” feel to this movie, directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, made it seem shockingly real. It’s the tale of three college film students who went to a small town to get footage to go with a project on … The Blair Witch. Suffice to say, things were horribly wrong. I was 38 when this movie came out and it still greatly disturbed me.
No. 9 — The Exorcist (1973) — Linda Blair possessed by the devil, speaking in tongues, levitating in bed, f-bombing a priest, head spinning 360 degrees. I was 12 and didn’t sleep well for awhile after seeing this one. Directed by William Friedkin, this film is a classic.
No. 8 — Silence of The Lambs (1991) — “Hello, Clarice” are two of the scariest words ever spoken, delivered in this film by the great Antony Hopkins, who rightfully won an Oscar for his role as Dr. Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter. Directed by Jonathan Demme, the movie tells the story of a young FBI student/agent assigned to probe Lecter’s insights into a murder case. Jodie Foster gets more than she bargained for, including a nice chianti.
No. 7 — The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) — One word — Leatherface. OMG! Directed by Tobe Hooper, this movie follows a group of friends who fall victim to a family of cannibals while on their way to visit an old homestead. It was marketed as “based on true events,” (always a great marketing tool), but the plot is largely fictional.
No. 6 — A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) — This was the movie in which the great director Wes Craven introduced us to Freddy Krueger, a disfigured monster of a man who preys on teenagers in their dreams. I was 23 when the movie came out, but found it was OK to stay up later than normal and to sleep with the light on for awhile. Robert Englund scares me even out of makeup.
Which of these picks is your favorite? What scary movies did Hunnell miss? Let us know in this poll!
No. 5 — The Birds (1963) — No, I didn’t see it on its original big screen release. I was only 2 years old. But when I did watch it years later for the first time, director Alfred Hitchcock made me suspicious of winged creatures for a long, long time. An entire small town falls under attack from the sky, an assault that is never truly explained. I have never been to Bodega Bay and have no plans to ever visit.
No. 4 — Halloween (1978) — I took a date to see this movie when it came out during my senior year in high school. I nearly needed stitches from the claw marks the frightened young woman left on my arm. Director John Carpenter debuts the character of Michael Myers, a masked, silent creature of a man who wages a one-night war on his former hometown of Haddonfield, Ill. Carpenter also wrote the musical score, a piano-powered piece written in 5/4 time that remains burned into my auditory system to this day.
No. 3 — The Shining (1980) — Jack Nicholson disturbs me, in general. Paired with director Stanley Kubrick, Nicholson’s dark, increasingly disturbed and finally insane character of Jack Torrance made me never want to become a writer. Sadly, the movie came out while I was in journalism school. The line, “Here’s Johnny!” will forever belong to Nicholson, not Ed McMahon. And yes, Nicholson ad-libbed the line in the movie.
No. 2 — Jaws (1975) — Don’t even start with me about Bruce, the low-tech shark used in Steven Spielberg’s first classic. Based on the great novel by Peter Benchley, the film and its solid cast spawned multiple generations of sea-based horror films. None came close to this original, which gave us police chief Martin Brody (Roy Schneider), ichthyologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and grizzled boat captain/fisherman Quint (Robert Shaw) doing battle with a great white shark that scared us more even when it wasn’t on screen. Yes, you’re gonna need a bigger boat. But there is only one movie scarier.
No. 1 — Psycho (1960) — Alfred Hitchcock. Janet Leigh. Anthony Perkins. Bates Motel. A shower scene. A large knife. The movie came out a year before I was born, but this was Hitchcock at his film-making best. One of the greatest promotional taglines ever written for a film, “The picture you MUST see from the beginning … Or not at all! … For no one will be seated after the start of … Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest shocker Psycho.” Attention to detail was one of Hitchcock’s finest attributes. The shower scene alone had 78 shots edited into a 45-second segment that took seven days to complete. It’s one of the most hyped films ever made … and it deserves every round of applause … and screams.
Which of these picks is your favorite? What scary movies did Hunnell miss? Let us know in this poll!
