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50 terrifying movie moments

Time Out's film team's run-down of the scariest scenes in cinema

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  • 50

    Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

    Dir David Hand (Animated feature)

    If you can’t get even – get old

    The Evil Queen in this Disney animation is none too pleased when the mirror on the wall breaks the bad news: Snow White is alive and still the fairest of them all. That does it: the Queen sets to work on a magic spell – ‘The Peddler’s Disguise’ – that will allow her to get into Snow White’s home and give her a deadly apple that will get rid of her for good. The Queen knocks back a horrific potion and the room starts to spin round and round. Is she dying? Is the spell going wrong? But then her hands shrivel up and become boney. There’s lightning! There’s music! There’s a shadow of a hooded old shrew on the wall! Slowly, she reveals her face from beneath her cloak and it’s all so frightening that even a poor  old crow leaps into an empty skull to hide from this terrible vision. DC

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  • 49

    Fight Club (1999)

    Dir David Fincher (Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, Helena Bonham Carter)

    The unkindest cut of all

    *SPOILER ALERT*
    He’s already lost his job, apartment, moral compass and most of his marbles. His larky little ‘Project Mayhem’ has mushroomed into a full-blown terrorist cell, his hipster doofus alter-ego has revolted and gone rogue and his girlfriend has just walked out on him. But now Edward Norton is about to lose the one thing that a man can never, ever hope to replace. Held down by three burly policemen who have been instructed – by none other than his own other-self – to cut off his crown jewels as a symbol of martyrdom to the gods of fight club, he is locked into a Kafkaesque nightmare of his own making. Like 007 and the laser in ‘Goldfinger’, it seems there’s no way out, and Fincher strings the scene out until every male viewer has tied themselves into knots of alarm, passed out or left the room. ALD

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  • 48

    Labyrinth (1986)

    Dir Jim Henson (David Bowie, Jennifer Connelly, Danny John-Jules)

    Cool as a cucumber

    ‘The Excitement of David Bowie!’ ran the trailer to Jim Henson’s genial puppet fantasy-musical. Given the eye-wateringly snug collection of jodhpurs, leggings and codpieces he’d shoehorned himself into, there must have been plenty of ’80s parents hoping the Thin White Duke didn’t get too excited whilst cavorting through Muppetland. But even though he kept his genie fully jeaned, many were nevertheless scarred for life by the ‘Dance Magic Dance’ sequence in which Ziggy – sporting kinky boots, leather waistcoat, jodhpurs and a riding crop – gets hideously jiggy with a gaggle of belching Viking sock-puppets and a clearly terrified toddler. All this and Tin Machine round the corner! ALD

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  • 47

    God Told Me to (1976)

    Dir Larry Cohen (Tony Lo Bianco, Deborah Raffin, Sandy Dennis)

    The way of the gun

    ‘Loopy’ Larry Cohen remains one of America’s sultans of schlock, but – like John Carpenter – his grungy genre work-outs carry incisive political barbs. ‘God Told Me to’ is a mad, hardboiled satire about extra-terrestrial religious cults in which a strange lizard-like creature takes hold of people’s minds and orders them to kill in the name of the Lord. The film opens on a young sniper taking potshots at a busy street, but it’s a later scene where the startling reality of this act becomes clear. And it centres on an out-of-control policeman. Played by, um, Andy Kaufman. There’s a police parade, and he just whacks out his pistol and opens fire. The scene is heady and amazingly choreographed. It encapsulates the gritty, street-level, in-the-moment style that characterised such ’70s American classics as ‘The French Connection’ and ‘Mean Streets’. It forces you to look twice to make sure it’s not really happening. DJ

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  • 46

    Halloween: H2O (1998)

    Dir Steve Miner (Jamie Lee Curtis, Josh Hartnett, Michelle Williams)

    The knife man cometh

    Is twentieth- anniversary cash-in ‘Halloween: H20’ a patch on John Carpenter’s original? Hell, no. In comparison to that groundbreaking, genre-defining classic, ‘H20’ is a dithering minnow next to a ravenous pike. And yet… smack in the middle of the movie, after a fairly dull set-up establishing the new, witness-protected life of erstwhile Haddonfield resident Laurie Strode (Curtis) and before the film descends into screeching histrionics, there’s a five- or six-minute chase sequence through the halls and grounds of an abandoned school which is close to perfect in construction. It helps that Miner’s cast includes superior teen stars like Williams and Adam Hann-Byrd, not to mention that he has Carpenter’s original score to riff on. The result is a textbook nail-gnawer, all the more so for arriving in the midst of such an average stalk ’n’ slasher. TH

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  • 45
    Robert Downey Jr. and Jake Gyllenhaal in Zodiac Robert Downey Jr. and Jake Gyllenhaal in Zodiac

    Zodiac (2007)

    Dir David Fincher (Jake Gyllenhall, Robert Downey Jr, Mark Ruffalo)

    Down the wooden hill he goes…

    Come on, Jake! A freaky old projectionist invites you down into the fusty basement of a house so big and creepy and oppressively old-timey that even Norman Bates would find it a bit dank and unnerving, and down you go!?! The fear, malevolence and inky-eyed madness that course through Fincher’s dissection of a city under siege comes to a head in a scene that has its roots in the haunted-house horror tradition but ultimately has more in common with the fevered detective fiction of James Ellroy, wherein the fear in the dark is not of being hacked to pieces but of finding out something so terrible that you can never hope to un-know it. ALD

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  • 44

    Trouble Every Day (2001)

    Dir Claire Denis (Vincent Gallo, Tricia Vessey, Béatrice Dalle)

    Fangs for the memories

    *SPOILER ALERT*
    Years before ‘Let the Right One in’ had critics slathering about the fact a vampire movie had been set in the Real World, France’s Claire Denis had already scoped out that territory with this underrated, globe-trotting follow-up to her masterful ‘Beau Travail’. Gallo plays a scientist on his honeymoon in Paris, but he’s suffering from a strange condition which paralyses him with sexual desire. He happens across a women (Dalle) with an advance form of the ‘disease’, only she’s at a level where she can only be satisfied by gnawing her sexual partners to death. The climax of the film yields numerous look-away-from-the-screen incidences of flesh chomping, but the one in which Dalle turns the inexperienced Nicolas Duvauchelle into a bloody mash – photographed in Denis’s customary super-fine and sensual detail – is certainly not one for the kiddies. DJ

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  • 43

    Jurassic Park (1993)

    Dir Steven Spielberg (Sam Neil, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum)

    If you can’t stand the teeth, get out of the kitchen

    Putting aside the unrealistic anthropomorphism of a prehistoric reptile with a tiny brain intelligently tapping its claw on a hard kitchen floor in an I-know-you’re in-here manner, Spielberg’s raptors-in-the-kitchen scene is terrifically tense. Part of the success of this sequence is down to the size of the dinosaurs, which are small enough to pursue little Lex (Ariana Richards) and Tim (Joseph Mazzello) between the stoves and shelves, yet strong and toothy enough to rip them both to shreds. The long shots also work well, giving us a wider perspective on the peril the youngsters are facing. DA

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  • 42

    The Hitcher (1986)

    Dir Robert Hanson (Rutger Hauer, C Thomas Howell, Jennifer Jason Leigh)

    Chop-chop in the cop shop

    *SPOILER ALERT*
    We’ve all been there. A night out, a few misunderstandings and next thing you know you’re waking up in a jail cell. After being forced into a series of cat-and-mouse road-games with deranged Dutch hitchhiker Hauer, it comes as a blessed relief to little C Thomas Howell to find himself safely behind bars. But this race isn’t run just yet. A few hours’ kip and he wakes to find the cell door ajar. The film, once again, has turned on a sixpence. Heart in his mouth, he slowly creeps out of the cell and through the police station in a scene of building suspense that recalls the heart-wracking tension of John Carpenter’s finest hours. And what’s that police dog licking up from that sticky red pool? Looks like Uncle Rutger wasn’t too happy when he was told visiting hours were over… ALD

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  • 41

    Manhunter (1986)

    Dir Michael Mann (William Petersen, Brian Cox, Tom Noonan)

    Feel the wrath of the Red Dragon

    *SPOILER ALERT*
    Michael Mann was the first to commit Thomas Harris’s crime thrillers to celluloid. His intelligent adaptation of ‘Red Dragon’ still stands as the best Hannibal Lecter film to date, not least for Noonan’s cleft-lipped serial killer, Francis Dollarhyde, who is still among the most terrifying of all screen butchers. The most memorable segment illustrating Dollarhyde’s calm, calculated methods is when he rips the blindfold off a smart-ass tabloid reporter he has tied to a wheelchair and lets him see his shocking, half stocking-covered visage. Then he calmly sets him alight. Do you see? DA

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Comments

By Zack - Apr 20 2012

Not even a single mention of Suspiria anywhere on this list? Downright criminal.

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By Balham76 - Apr 7 2012

i guess this list is not confined to horror movies. some odd choices that 127 hours shouldnt be in there. but otherwise a good list. ringu would have been my number 1, followed by chest busting scene from Alien and final scene in Se7en.

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By Andrew - Jan 19 2012

In terms of creepiness, surely Salo or the 120 last days of Sodom should be here. The first time I watched, I had to walk away after 20 minutes. And then it only gets worse...
And in terms of serious jolts, the moment the camera goes indoors in Lost Highway definitely did it for me...

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By andrew - Jan 19 2012

Of course there's a difference between gross (Saw 1 to 23, Wolf Creek and countless films I'll never watch, except for the funny ones) and scary.
And then there's the difference between "jump out of your seat scared" (the last scene of Carrie anyone?) and a growing, objectless unease (Innocence).

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By MikeK - Nov 24 2011

I grumble at the absence of The Descent.

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By list - Nov 3 2011

Scariest bit in this whole list is Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, that whole film is twisted! - but as an adult I suppose it would be Fire Walk With Me. David Lynch is brilliant at scaring the wits out of me... I thought I was going to have a heart attack during Inland Empire. Bloody Hell.

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By Movie is Me - Oct 29 2011

@ AUDITION - I fell asleep before I could be scared! Such a boring film....

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By firma - Oct 29 2011

ha ha ha

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By heyhey199 - Oct 28 2011

oh cmon..it's disturbing rather than scary..it's just a very graphic torture scene.

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By Malcolm - Oct 28 2011

The opening sequence in 28 Weeks Later when the cottage is besieged by rage victims and Robert Carlyle loses his nerve and escapes through the window abandoning his wife and the child to save himself, with the audience thinking to itself, 'yes, I would have done the same!'

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By Simon - Oct 27 2011

Greg - 100% agree mate. Those were some truly terrifying minutes of my life.

Also - Bowie in Labyrinth is all well and good - but if you want a really disturbing Henson movie, it;s The Dark Crystal every time. I was eight the first time I saw that, and the skeksis are still the most unsettling, grotesque creatures I have ever seen on film.

Finally - for sheer nerve-tearing intensity - The Descent is hard to beat.

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By Kevin - Oct 27 2011

Interesting list with some surprises, however it just proves that what is regarded as terrifying is relative. Some classics included, however thousands omitted...
The Shining, Them, Tale of Two Sisters to name just 3 quality skin-crawlers.

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By tom - Oct 27 2011

Audition is gross and disturbing, but not so scary. It sags under a pretentious, heavy handed dime store psychology revenge explanation. If one wants to be disturbed, why not just open a history book?

Ringu... much more clever and original, dare I suggest bettered by the remake, even if it clearly owes something to Cronenberg's Videodrome. And where is Dead Ringers on your list?

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By Greg - Oct 26 2011

Did NONE of you see [REC]?? A "Scariest Moments" list without the last minutes of [REC] is not a proper list, indeed...

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