October 5, 2024
WRITTEN BY: QUENTIN
Although Halloween candy and pumpkin paraphernalia have been taking up shelf space in stores since August, October has only just begun — meaning the spooky season is ramping up in earnest. It’s the special time of year when people ponder their most clever costume ideas while catching up on their favorite scary movies. As I get older, I have taken a step back from such things, but it’s still wildly popular for most (younger) people. Incidentally, that general notion could describe my thoughts on horror as a genre.
Look, I love good horror, but the operative word is “good.” So many recent horror movies are cheap schlock churned out by studios like Blumhouse because they know horror-heads are perhaps the least discerning movie fans on the planet. I mean, how else can you explain Imaginary, which was roundly criticized, making a 283 percent return on its budget? On one hand, I get it. It’s just smart business. Grab a low-cost cast, throw some lazy jump scares at them, and maybe you can stumble into a franchise, à la M3GAN. Several relative hits like that can make up for one big flop. On the other hand…man, those lowest-common-denominator movies suck. Imaginary, The Strangers: Part One, and Night Swim were all box office hits in 2024 despite being widely panned.
Now, that’s not to say all recent horror is terrible. We’ve also seen Longlegs, Oddity, The Substance, and Strange Darling released this year, and they are *chef’s kiss*. Honestly, with just those four movies alone, 2024 has proven to be uncharacteristically strong on horror — for me, anyway. That’s how bad it’s gotten in my eyes. As such, since I’ve become less and less enamored with most horror movies, I started thinking about my best experiences with the genre, and the movies that gave me a true visceral reaction. Whether it was a tangible response to a jump scare or just a palpable feeling of uneasiness, the movies below are the ones that put the “scare” in “scary movie.” Again…for me. Or at least they did when I first watched them, which brings up another consideration.
Fear is so damn subjective. When it comes to horror movies, there are so many outside factors contributing to whether they work. Everything from age to the physical location in which you’re having the experience matter. Personal phobias, relatability, and one’s mental state also play a role. For example, a lot of people consider The Exorcist the scariest movie of all time, but I was 20 years old when I first saw it, and I watched it on a brightly lit Saturday afternoon in a communal dayroom, so very hard meh. That said, I readily admit that by my late teens, most of the internal fears that a movie might be able to tap into had long been burned out of me. That’s what happens when your parents let you watch whatever you want when you are eight years old, with the only guidance being, “if you have nightmares, that’s your problem to deal with. You chose this.”
So, with that in mind, you’ll notice this list comes almost exclusively from the 1980s. What can I say? Things were scarier when I was an impressionable kid. Also, just to clarify, this isn’t a list of “best” horror movies, so there is no It Follows, Get Out, or Psycho — horror movies that have almost no flaws other than not being scary in the traditional sense. There also aren’t any of the critical darling horror movies that people rave about while I defiantly tell anyone who will listen that they are wack (looking at you, Hereditary and The Witch). Truthfully, I’m not even sure “favorite” fully applies because I’m a huge fan of The Others, The Descent, and Frailty, but they didn’t elicit scares out of me in the ways the films below did. No, these are the movies and specific images that generally come to mind when people ask, “what is the scariest movie you’ve ever seen?”
JAWS (1975)
Fun fact about me: I can barely swim and I’m terrified of large bodies of water, and I’m sure that is in no small part due to watching Jaws when I was maybe six years old (there is also a story about me nearly drowning in a kiddie pool when I was a young toddler, but I digress…). This Steven Spielberg-classic is pure unadulterated terror, made all the more frightening by the reality that nature is often scarier than anything we can imagine. I mean, imagine seeing a movie nearly 40 years ago, and memories of it still feed a subconscious fear to not do something as innocuous as “go in the water.” It’s like Family Guy said, “Damn, Nature! You scary!!”
POLTERGEIST (1982) & POLTERGEIST III (1988)
This is a two-fer. Actual plot points aside, Poltergeist broadly revolves around a young girl trapped inside a television by evil spirits. Do you know how scary that was for me, a similarly aged child who spent all his time watching TV? My childhood brain conjured all the scenarios in which that could eventually happen to me. That doesn’t even get into the clown doll, skeleton-filled coffins popping out of the ground, or Zelda Rubinstein, who, for whatever reason, creeped me out as a child. Speaking of people creeping me out… Nathan Davis in Poltergeist III as the evil Rev. Henry Kane gave me nightmares for weeks. He was (is?) one of the most fright-inducing people I had ever seen in my life, and his unsettling singing of “God is in his holy temple” gave me the heebie-jeebies. For the record, Poltergeist II is no slouch, either.
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS (1987)
Of the famed ‘80s slasher franchises, Elm Street was the one I experienced last, and it was easily the scariest. Even as a kid, I was never really scared by Jason Voorhees because I knew, logically, I could just leave Crystal Lake and I’d be fine. With Freddy Krueger, however, I couldn’t not sleep. In fact, I’d get in trouble if I didn’t go to bed on time. That meant there was no escape. Dream Warriors was my entry into the Elm Street series, and between Freddy’s burnt visage, the razor glove, gruesome death sequences (one of which also involves a television set, incidentally), and the memorable “One, Two, Freddy’s coming for you,” it quite literally made me wet the bed at seven years old. Special shoutout to Dokken for the kickass title track.
PET SEMATARY (1989)
Maaaan…this movie messed me up when I was a kid, and it did so with a multi-pronged approach. Victor Pascow (Brad Greenquist), the ghost of a jogger who died after being hit by a truck, so his brain is just hanging out for all to see? Horrifying. The fog-filled atmosphere of the titular cemetery? Creepy. Angry zombie cat? I had a cat, so this wasn’t helpful. A young, reanimated Gage (Miko Hughes) taking people down with a scalpel, most notably by slicing through an Achilles tendon in one instance? Just no, hard nope all around on that one. I mean, even just the look of Fred Gwynne’s big head and his booming southern drawl…unsettling, to say the least. All that is to say, overall, given the context in which I saw this movie around 1990, it might be the scariest movie I’ve ever seen.
FINAL DESTINATION (2000) & FINAL DESTINATION 2 (2003)
Like Poltergeist, this is another two-fer. This thing is… this is more about the events that occurred after I saw Final Destination than the movie itself because, let’s face it, it’s not all that scary. However, after watching 98-minutes of various chain reactions kill a bunch of people in increasingly gnarly ways, it rightfully put me on edge. Every randomly loud noise was magnified, from a dog barking to a kid dropping his soda in the lobby, even more so because it was about 2:00am in the relatively quiet neighborhood of Pacific Grove, California. As I’m walking to my car, out of nowhere, there was a jarringly loud car accident about half a block away. No one was hurt, thankfully, but it nearly made me poop my pants as I stood in the street waiting for whatever knock-on effect was going to result in “death finding a way” on me. I drove home in silence, probably as the most attentive driver I had ever been in my entire life. Then, a few years later, Final Destination 2 comes out. While I don’t remember much about it, I remember the opening sequence. And more than 20 years later, I still refuse to drive behind logging trucks. Anything that has stuck with me for that long warrants a mention here.