For me, oddly, it’s The Ring. The shitty american Ring that everyone agrees is really not very good and the ridiculous color filter slapped over the whole thing just makes it dreary and washed out and bad.
I know why this is, too. It’s because I watched it in middle school before I had any experience with horror movies. The Ring was the first actual horror movie I ever watched and I didn’t watch another until after college. As a result, I can’t watch The Ring without being transported back to being a scared middle schooler. If I’d first watched it later, after I had a handle on the kinds of scares to expect from a horror movie, it wouldn’t have affected me the same. Objectively, it’s not that scary and is mostly just kind of bad, but fuck me if Samara climbing out of a TV isn’t an image that scares me to this day, every time I think about it!
I hated the American remake of The Ring so goddamn much it made me learn how to pirate movies so I could get a subbed copy of Ringu, idk how you sat through that horsefucking nightmare of a remake lmfao
Well, I was in middle school and it was the first horror movie I ever watched.
Ringu is significantly better, I don’t disagree
Honestly, I think The Ring (yes, the American remake) actually stands up pretty well and is a genuinely scary movie. It has plenty of cringe parts, the relationship drama was stupid and out of place, the whole overdone “spooky child” thing (with Aiden, not Samara, who really was terrifying) etc. It wasn’t perfect. But the horror part really was good. It’s one of those things that has been both copied and satirized so much that it seems like just a massive cliche. But it wasn’t cliche at the time, at least not in American horror. The slow, determined and supernaturally inescapable girl in the TV emerging up out of the well and coming for you right through the medium that you thought would keep her separate, and the imagery and sound design they chose to frame it really was very good horror. I know people make fun of the video content of the deadly tape, but to me, it really is deeply unsettling imagery that gives me a certain feeling of the kind of tortured existence of Samara. It was decent story telling, and like I said, touched on some truly unsettling nerves.
Damn, Euclid couldn’t handle this one!
/lh
Hereditary
mainly since after i biked home baked at 3am thinking about it
Hereditary scared me most too
It’s old hat now but the movie that scared me the most is Ring - the Japanese one. The atmosphere is constantly threatening, the visuals are scary but not in an easily comprehensible way, like something primal but unknowably wrong. I feel like very few movies can do what it did.
Oh actually, I watched Hereditary recently and I think maybe it’s scarier, but it’s hard to judge because I’m like 15 years older than when I saw Ring.
I think if I’d first seen it at the same time as Ring, I would have been more scared by Hereditary.
Probably Color Out of Space, based on the work by H.P. Lovecraft.
Really shook me by the end.
(The recent one, I mean.)
Ooh, I’m going to have to watch that! Color out of Space is probably my favorite Lovecraft story of all time, so a well-done movie adaptation could be extremely good!
Yeah, it was a great movie… but damn, I’m not used to horror movies, and that movie is “up there” in terms of horror.
I really did like that movie. But I didnt find it scary , just weird…in a good way.
I found it weirdly scary.
Scary in a weird way.
I don’t really watch horror so I’ve got a low tolerance, but It Follows scared me and left me spooked. Like being constantly stalked by that snail but it’s a sex snail that could be anyone freeeky deeky stuff.
Apart from that lol it’s The Grudge, USA remake. But I didn’t actually watch all of it cos I had to leave the cinema (uhh it was too scary for my younger bro) so after one my friends told me that apparently there’s a scene where there’s croaking ghost in a swivel chair and they turn it around and there’s a jump scare, and my house had a swivel chair, and it would often be facing back towards me when I entered the back room and for a month I couldn’t look into that room if the lights were off, I’d just avoid it so indirectly it’s The Grudge.
Honestly, for me, it’s probably Poltergeist. I watched that movie waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too fuckin young, like, still in grade school, and television static STILL bugs tf out of me as a result
I watched that movie waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too fuckin young, like, still in grade school,
1st grade might be pretty early for that. But if by the time anyone in my school got to the 5th grade and hadn’t seen every non-R-rated horror movie (and many R-rated ones too) the ridicule they’d get would be more traumatizing than any scary movie. I’m not saying that’s good, quite the opposite. Just that it’s crazy to me to think of grade school as being too young for something as tame as Poltergeist. I watched it repeatedly around 2nd and 3rd grade. It did scare the piss out of me at first, but I really liked it.
(On a side note, there is some very strange and tragic events that happened regarding that movie in real life, not the least of which being what happened to the actress who played Carol-Anne. CW if anyone looks further into it, child neglect, death, etc.)
I think I was like 7, so that tracks. Like, TV static imprinted on my mind in a way that the likes of Jason, Freddy, or Pinhead couldn’t come close to. (I do still adore the first four Hellraiser movies, though.) The happenstances around the real-world production are fuckin nutty though.
Probably that move Mirrors. I just saw it at the exact right age for that jaw ripping scene to scare the fuck out of me
I couldn’t help myself but reply with a really long list. It has been a long time since I saw a scary movie, or one that scared me anyway, so the award is gonna have to go to Rec (2007), and prior to that The Descent (2005). Room 1408 (2007) also really scared me at the time, and I discovered when rewatching it last year that there are multiple different endings depending on the version you get.
Other honrouable mentions:
- The Blair Witch Project
- Event Horizon
- Alien
- Aliens
- The Ring
- The Grudge
- Eraserhead while high as a teenager was genuinely traumatising
- Arachnophobia if you are at all scared of spiders
- Jaws when the head pops out
- It (1990)
- 28 Days Later
- 28 Weeks Later when he pops his wife’s eyes out
- The Dead Outside is another one that I was too high when watching to remember the plot of, but it was also very traumatising
- Deathwatch is set in the trenches of WW1, and the scariest thing is other people
’
Special shout out to American Horror Story opening credits, which never fail to make me feel deeply unsettled
If I am really honest though the things that scare me the most are movies like Hostel where people are getting tortured ;_; the guy getting his achiles tendon sliced through stuck with me for a very long time
The Last Airbender
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the grudge has haunted me from a very young age, I just don’t like that noise holy fuck what a nightmare
If you’re claustrophobic: the descent might land you in the hospital. It’s also really funny
When I was young it was the grudge, i had to sleep on top of the bed covers for ages. But recently rewatched it and its deffo more of an unintentional comedy.
Possum terrified me because its so very well made but its not the traditional kind of horror.
UK version of the office because my dad showed it to me and said “this is what life is like after school” yeah not a movie but yeah.
My mom used me for translating horrors from a very young age. It didn’t desentisize me at all. It gave me fear induced insomnia.
The Ring / Onryo cursed me for years until I had a dream that I killed the girl with a sofa by shoving her with it against a wall really hard, but it was very late into my teenage years and prior to that it kept me unable to sleep very frequently.
I also agree on the Mirror movie. It’s very fucking scary.
I think the scariest movies take an element of an everyday life and then twist it. I watched the Descent and liked it. What keeps me scared is having my view of everyday things poisoned, so I start being apprehensive of them.
I dont know the horror name but I saw a meme of a horror where I assume a parental figure is replaced in bed with a monster and a child is reaching out to wakeup said parental figure without knowing. This is terrifying to me.
Another one which fucked with me was the one which is named like Ikea furniture. I couldn’t even finish on my own and watched analysis after analysis.
Midsommar?
No.
Yeah I would’ve been surprised, but it’s the only IKEA name movie I could think of
Skinamarink
You mean that horror movie, named after a pre-school song?
Yes, I think.
Ima go out on a limb and say the only movie I can’t watch, to this day.
The Barney Movie in the 90s where they have the egg and go to egg land. Something about that movie freaks me out. The scene where they’re looking for Barney and call his name, then the shower turns on and the kids are looking around and Barney appears in the tub. Hate it.
