The 10 Scariest Moments in Movie History

It’s a shot that thoroughly establishes the tone of the film as something almost paranormal. This is a staged morality play, a classical tragedy about to unfold in a dark and dangerous world in which nothing good can last, and for this shot to happen so early in the film makes the moment all the more unsettling.

7. The Scare Built on the Sound

Let’s stick with craft for another couple picks and look at audio. These are the moments of terror that succeed in their scares chiefly through their use of sound. There are whole movies, of course, built on the idea of being quiet in order to survive, A Quiet Place being the most recent and fully committed of those examples.

Sometimes there’s a familiar clicking of an alien predator to build tension, or tripping over a pet’s water bowl after a long stretch of silence to break tension. This sequence from Invisible Man is incredibly shrewd, pinning our hero’s hopes for escape on her ability to stealthily get out of the house. Sometimes it’s just a loud noise that jump-starts our character back into reality, like the bus stopping suddenly in Cat People. This is the style of sound-based scares most often found in non-horror fare; think of the sequence from Ikiru that Darren Aronofsky later borrowed for The Fountain, with the sudden intrusion of sound from the world around the isolated characters waking ALL of us back up.

We Need to Talk About Kevin also deserves a non-horror mention for the truly awful sound of the titular Kevin biting his fingernails that adds a disturbing aura to that entire scene, and to invoke David Lynch again, the sound design attached to the old woman — a moment that rightfully belongs in the jump scare category, but is absolutely sold on the strength of that haunting sound.

But scary sounds are best in scary movies, when a single spike in the waveform can send shivers down your spine in a sea of other scary moments. For this, we look to The Conjuring’s game of hide and clap, with one last solitary clap coming at us from the dark. This moment is built on the sound design of the previous few minutes, with creaks and whispers originating from the dark corners of the house. While it is undoubtedly effective, for a moment based entirely on the sound, our number 7 pick goes to the clucking from Hereditary.

By the time we get to the clucking, we know exactly what the sound is, what it means, and where it comes from. It’s an involuntary tic, something Milly Shapiro’s Charlie does that’s quite literally out of her control. It’s something that on a narrative level implies the presence of a demon, but on an emotional level, it’s a reminder for Toni Collette’s Annie of the pain and grief that comes with loss. This tongue click in an empty car is the perfect deployment of a single sound scare.

What makes Hereditary great — what makes any movie truly great — is a connection to the characters. Things sneaking up on you, either visually or auditorily, will always give you a jolt, but things sneaking up on our emotions can do you one better. Here’s a moment where a mother is grieving, where disturbing mysteries about her family are coming to light, and she is at her breaking point; it’s something we can all empathize with. This sound, this piece of her daughter from the past, is a terrifying straw on a camel’s back that’s all but broken. It’s a trap that had been laid close to an hour earlier, creating a heartbreaking moment that’s also a terrifying jump scare.

6. The Edit

Combining picture and sound is sort of the literal definition of editing, so for our number 6 spot following our audio and visual cues, we may as well look at editing as well. Of course every scary moment on this list works based on the edit to some degree, but think about our last pick — that quick cut to the backseat certainly helps, but it’s not WHY it’s such an impactful moment. Editing does a lot of different things, however, and looks a little different for each moment.

It’s important to remember that there are entire documentaries about the editing in Psycho’s shower scene, so right off the bat, I can tell you that I’m not going to waste your time by talking about it more here. But for other scares that are truly pulled off via the edit, we can first look at a wild montage like the ending of Don’t Look Now that rapid-fires through a panicked set of images. This is also where my non-horror example would live, in the final moments of the still very horrific Come and See, flashing back in our protagonist’s imagination to find Hitler as a child.

Flashy quick cuts are not the only way to show off an edit, though. Sometimes the magic lives in not cutting. The Exorcist III’s famous hallway scene is as great a jump scare as has ever been seen in film, but it’s achieved through an incredibly long “what is it I’m supposed to be looking at” shot that builds the tension.

When we look at editing, we also have to think about juxtaposition. Where on-screen scares are concerned, I always think about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for this, with hard and fast cuts away from the gruesome to something peaceful. There’s also the narrative function of images on screen to consider, like Jordan Peele’s cutting back to the sitcom tragedy in Nope before we know its significance. But for pure editing, the brilliant combination of images and sound to tell a story, I’d really like to talk about Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s neo-giallo slasher, Amer.

On first blush, this is a largely visual movie you might think doesn’t belong in this category. Sure, its primary language is French, but you really don’t need the subtitles. It’s a luscious, erotic, and violent collection of close-ups coupled with the creaking of leather and the slice of a blade as gravel crunches beneath heavy boots. The film is a collection of images and sounds assembled in such a tight, breathless way that still manage to convey space and time and character in spite of being assembled almost entirely of insert shots.

But one moment in particular, at the end of a midnight cat-and-mouse chase through an italian villa, involves a sudden burst of violence erupting as a stylized attack. A long stretch of quietly breathless sneaking in blue-hued day-for-night is suddenly over with a series of swooshing stabs and gasps. This moment leads to an even more drawn out, methodically tortuous death filmed with quick inserts and a raw, animalistic sound design that makes you squirm.

Amer takes everything giallo was known for and squeezes it with a black leather glove, making it all sing through the edit. If the film weren’t cut so expertly, moments like this would be a nonsensical collection of inserts and sound effects; instead, it’s a sequence worth studying for its ability to convey so much fear and anxiety and discomfort with such minimal imagery.

5. The Scare Based on Real Phobias

For the second half of our list, let’s move away from strictly craft-based categories and get into some psychological stuff. To start with, I want to look at real fears — movies that very deliberately tap into well-known phobias. These can show up in the subject matter easily enough, with very little to do with the actual craft of filmmaking. Are you scared of big dogs? Maybe Cujo is going to give you nightmares. Scared of nightmares? Well, Freddy Krueger’s got a pun for that, I’m sure.

Some of our favorite scary stories to tell around the CineFix campfire though are moments of claustrophobia, like the tight underground tunnels of The Descent or the tight underwater tunnels of the perfectly titled Underwater. Both of those films feature killer monsters, but perhaps their most squirm-worthy moments trade on that all-too-common fear of enclosed spaces.

Then there’s the opposite fear, agoraphobia, that Hitchcock plays with famously in North by Northwest. There’s just straight up getting hopelessly lost in the woods, like in The Blair Witch Project, and then there’s the old reliable, ‘scared of the dark.’

Every movie I’ve mentioned here also features sequences in which the darkness holds a significant danger. There’s always something lurking in the shadows just beyond the light, but the cleverest twist on this timeless fear shows up in the basement of a serial killer with night vision goggles in The Silence of the Lambs.

By the end of The Silence of the Lambs, we know how much danger Jodie Foster’s Clarice is in. She’s been a step ahead of her boss for most of the film, and by the time she tracks down Jame Gumb, discovers he’s actually Buffalo Bill, and has to chase him into his basement / dungeon / fashion studio, we’ve already visited the space on a few occasions. For the audience, there’s no mystery as to what’s down there, so how does director Jonathan Demme escalate a terrifying Act Three set piece in a familiar location?

He turns out the lights.

But instead of letting us fester in our collective fear of moments like this, we get to see the scenario from the perspective of the thing we’re afraid of. We’re looking on as Clarice, eyes wide, pupils dilated and begging for light, stumbles through the basement groping at the walls; we’re seeing her through Buffalo Bill’s eyes. We see how easy it would be for him to reach out and kill our hero, and how he’s toying with the idea of doing just that.

The effect is not a jolt of adrenaline like something jumping out at you from the dark. Instead, the first-person perspective confirms what we’ve always been afraid of — that there’s something in the dark waiting to do us harm — and the scene is all the more terrifying for it.

4. Existential Dread / What Is This Terrifying Nonsense?

Ping-ponging away from the well-known phobias, we need to also look at the type of fear that’s not quite so easy to put your finger on. This is the realm of the existential, when a film presents you with an image that asks you to question your very nature. For me, I find myself simplifying that down to, “what is this terrifying nonsense?”

Jacob’s Ladder has a thousand great moments for this; Ken Russell’s work generally falls into this category for me as well, with Altered States and The Devils being a pair of fascinating films. Nicholas Winding Refn’s Valhalla Rising doesn’t quite qualify as a traditional horror film, but the simple-on-the-surface rock-stacking sequence is one of the more disturbing moments of that film, while I must, yet again, invoke David Lynch’s particularly unsettling tone in…oh, it’s everywhere in his work.

And does Mandy count as a horror movie? I think it does, but it also certainly counts as three or four other kinds of movies at minimum, including a drug-fueled cult trip into the heart of madness and revenge that peeks past the curtain of humanity and into the dark places beyond. But it’s hard not to pick an oldie but a goodie, a moment from a movie that likely could have or should have been used in all these categories: The bear suit guy from The Shining.

Two hours and change into the runtime of this much-dissected horror classic, Stanley Kubrick has us sprinting to the finish. Jack is axe-wielding his way toward Danny while Wendy is frantically trying to secure her son’s safety. It’s chaos, utter insanity-inducing chaos, particularly when compared to the rest of the movie’s relatively measured pace. And then Wendy tops another set of stairs to find a man in an assless bear suit performing a sex act on a man in a tux, who pops up to make eye contact with an inscrutable look on his face.

This moment, especially the first time you see it, fits so perfectly into my “what is this terrifying nonsense” definition that it’s almost like I reverse engineered this entire category. Ink has been spilled for literally decades about the scene’s meaning and metaphorical significance, and every theory out there has merit, which is what makes this moment so great.

On the surface, it’s a truly bizarre image couched in a sequence of increasing terror. Wendy’s husband is trying to kill her and her son, she can’t find him anywhere, the hotel is understood to be haunted as shit at this point in the film, and then she stumbles on this remarkably upsetting scene. While that’s a specific set of circumstances not many of us have found ourselves in, the Rorschach-ness of it — the ability to read your own flavor of horror into it — speaks to how existentially terrifying this scene can be.

3. SHOCK!!!

Getting into the final third of our list, we have to pay a visit to the specific subgenre responsible for as many scary movie moments as anything else: Body horror. The shock and grotesquerie of seeing the human body pushed past its limits creates images that can, in a snap, terrify our most inner caveman brains.

There is a Mount Rushmore of body horror that is easy to rattle off, from the chest-chomper in John Carpenter’s The Thing, to the spider-head from the Thing, to the…my God, most of The Thing could be our pick here! Ditto for Jeff Goldblum’s gradual evolution into BrundleFly, or the tapedeck tummy of Videodrome, which puts David Cronenberg in the all-timers club. An American Werewolf in London’s transformation scene is carved into the side of a mountain as well, so I’m not going to speak more about any of those here.

There are great, shocking, violent moments of disfigurement in films like Green Room, when an arm gets stuck on the wrong side of a door, or in Midsommar during the suicide jump, or the hooks dance sequence in Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake. All of them are incredibly disturbing and sudden.

But there’s a quieter side of body horror. Think about Black Swan, which perfectly toes the line between “scary movie that’s not a horror film” and “just straight up a horror film” while following the slow descent of a ballerina into something else entirely. This, I would argue, is also Nightcrawler, digging at the depths to which ambitions will drive and warp somebody mentally. For our Number 3 spot though, there are two movies I love for the body horror’s subtler side: The Skin I Live In and Eyes Without A Face.

These films about renowned surgeons performing experimental surgeries at home, about an urge to right a wrong with yet more wrong, aren’t related. To clarify, The Skin I Live In is not technically a remake of Eyes Without A Face, but I’ve always found the films to be fascinating companions. One features a man seeking a new face for his daughter who’d been disfigured in a car accident, while the other focuses on a man seeking revenge on the young man who raped his daughter. Both Pedro Almodóvar’s 2011 film and Georges Franju’s 1960 film feature a clinical approach to body modification.

The doctors have so fully committed to the reason they’re doing these things — the why of it all — that there’s no questioning their actions. It’s most evident in the quieter moments, like the simple and straightforward way the doctor and his wife drug their victim. It’s the casual normalcy with which Dr. Ledgard examines the progress of his work. Above all, it’s the comfort with which they go about it, with no regard to being caught or exposed. These films don’t shock with gore or sudden snapping of bones; they look at incredibly intelligent and skilled people with real and relatable motivations doing horrible things to their victims without thinking twice.

If body horror is about blowing past the limits of what the human body should be able to do, making you squirm while watching it, The Skin I Live In and Eyes Without A Face ask you to consider what you would do given the tools at these doctors’ disposal, making you squirm just the same.

2. The All-Consuming Terror

There are only two spots left, and so many scary moments still to consider…which is in itself another scary moment for anybody that’s ever written a movie list! But one more stop that we need to make is in the realm of the all-consuming scare; these are the moments that create terror or even just unease, and then make you stew in it.

This is different from the slow burn or the existential scares in that these moments are still more self-contained — moments that confront the viewer with a very specific feeling and force you to keep watching. Most of Nosferatu lives in this world, especially when the vampyre kills the two children. This is Get Out’s Sunken Place sequence, and the girls walking away in slow motion from Picnic at Hanging Rock while their friend still watches at sound speed.

This is another category that non-horror movies see a lot of success in, because I find Barry Keoghan eating spaghetti in The Killing of a Sacred Deer to be terrifying, not to mention the later sequences of Mother! But the all-consuming scene I think of most often is the beach sequence in Under the Skin.

Jonathan Glazer’s version of E.T., Under the Skin finds an alien abducting men throughout Scotland for some type of study. She finds herself on a beach luring her next subject, a surfer, back to a van when a tragedy begins to unfold in the water further down the beach. A dog has ventured too far out into the waves; a woman tries to save it, then a man tries to save her, followed by the surfer trying to save them both, only for all of them to fail, leaving a baby alone on the beach.

It’s an upsetting scene just to describe, but the true brilliance is in how it’s shot. We can hear nothing over the powerful sounds of the waves. Glazer uses long lenses, leaving us detached from the proceedings, unable to connect or participate in the same way that Scarlett Johansson’s alien female is incapable of empathy.

The scene also sets up her journey for the rest of the film. It’s an Act One break at which she begins to want something, to know what being human feels like. But to watch a family drown, to leave their infant stranded and alone, and to pull it off from such a detached perspective, is the whole reason this movie is incredible, featuring a truly terrifying movie moment.

1. Fear of the Nothingness / Void / Oh God Whatever’s Next

As we arrive at our number one category, we’re fully on the other side of the spectrum from the jump scare with which we started. For our last spot, I want to talk about something everybody has in common. Regardless of who you are, where you come from, or what you find scary, we’re all going to die some day; it’s the one universal fear there is — knowing that one day, for some reason, you’ll just stop. Movies that can pull off a scary moment built around the unknowable void that comes after death are fewer and farther between than those in our other categories.

There are of course some great rug pull-style twists that point in this direction, famously featured in movies like The Others and The Sixth Sense. But Lars von Trier’s super slo-mo overture at the beginning of Melancholia is more what we’re looking for; it’s a moment that stares the end of existence in the face. 2001: A Space Odyssey cosmically does the same thing with Dave Bowman’s life cycle, presenting an uncomfortable and, dare I say, scary thread to pull on at the end of a mind-blowing bit of science fiction.

But the moment and movie I want to talk about is more recent, with a title that hints at the oldest scary moments in our storytelling history. It’s the montage of time passing in 2017’s A Ghost Story.

What begins as a contained story about grief and a ghost watching his partner move on with her life shifts gears to the entire world moving on. About two thirds of the way through the movie, writer/director David Lowery presents us with a montage of time passing from the perspective of this ghost. It is eerie, unsettling, and magnificently edited to feel as though it’s happening in real time. In the spot on which his house used to stand, a skyscraper is constructed in two straight minutes, and it all ends with a ghost deciding to jump off a building.

Time itself is presented as incalculably huge in the montage, with a sense of loneliness, of desperation, damnation even, accompanying this long-waiting ghost; it’s a terrifying thought.

The technique Lowery (who edited the film as well) uses to jump us through time the same way in which the ghost perceives it is used throughout the film, but it never feels like much more than cleverly assembling the story…until this montage. As his spirit lingers, we see that this moment makes the story about more than one dead man’s experience. This is a movie about memory and legacy and their microscopic significance set against eternity itself. Nowhere is that driven home more than the montage of a fraction of that eternity passing, which — for my money — makes it one of the scariest movie moments of all time.