The top 10 scariest moments according to a TV programme....
10 A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984)
Wes Craven kicked off a long-running horror franchise with this imaginatively scary yarn about a dead killer who starts murdering teens in their dreams. The film introduces us to one of the 80s' most iconic movie bogeymen, Freddy Krueger. He vies for the title with Halloween's Michael Myers and Jason from the Friday The 13th films. What has always set Freddy apart, however, is the terrible humour in the character - all pitch black one-liners and sadistic glee.
9The Omen (1976)
Any Damiens out there born in the late 70s? If so, your parents must have had a sick sense of humour. The staggering success of The Omen put paid to the name for years. When his wife Kathy (Lee Remick) gives birth to a stillborn child, ambassador Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) adopts baby Damien. Little does he know that the boy is the Devil's own son. All is well for five years, but then the child turns nasty on nanny, and an ungodly maelstrom of decapitation, impalement and Satanic symbolism is unleashed as Damien starts bumping off anyone standing between him and world domination
8The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
We start in classic slasher territory. Five innocent kids go a wanderin' in the Texas badlands. In this case it’s to investigate reports of grave robbing. A sliding door opens …and soon little Pammy has fallen into the mechanical teeth of Leatherface’s chainsaw. Writer director Tobe Hooper used stories of real life psychopath Ed Gein as inspiration for his mask-wearing loon, but unlike many believe, Massacre is not based on a true story
7Halloween (1978)
John Carpenter's horror masterpiece kicked off the slasher genre and has been much copied - most recently to ironic effect in the Scream trilogy. A six-year-old Michael Myers murdered his older sister on Halloween night in 1963 and was locked away. Years later, Myers has escaped and returns to his old town on another Halloween night to murder his way through the local teenagers. Halloween made a star of horror queen Jamie Lee Curtis, who played an innocent babysitter who battles with Myers. Accompanied by Carpenter's own chilling score, Curtis visits the house of a friend only to discover a host of dead bodies and Michael Myers waiting in the shadows
66 - Ring (1998)
A recent Hollywood remake of Ring had audiences flocking to cinemas in the US, but no remake can match the unadulterated terror value of Hideo Nakata's original Japanese version. Depicting the horrors perpetrated by a mysterious videotape, which inflicts an agonising death on anyone who watches it within seven days, Ring is dark, suggestive and psychologically charged. In short, it's one of the 1990s' most gratifyingly unsettling movie experiences.
5The Blair Witch Project (1998)
Smash low budget horror hit of 1999. The highly effective plot involves the audience viewing 'found' footage shot by three films students who encounter something nasty in the woods, and are never seen again. Early screenings, and a canny internet campaign, left audiences convinced that what they were watching was true. So how did the directors manage to fool audiences into thinking they were watching documentary footage? They kept their cast completely in the dark about their plans for the film, only giving them their scripts for each scene a day before filming. Then there were the starvation diets and sleep deprivation techniques
4Alien (1979)
The film that gave us the action heroine, in the shape of Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley, and presented space travel as just another job. It's a tour-de-force of suspense, slasher antics and good old-fashioned sci-fi. Director Ridley Scott gave us one of the great moments in horror with great special FX and some good old-fashioned nastiness. Having answered a distress call from a long crashed spacecraft, the crew of the Nostromo discover a nest of eggs. When one member is attacked by a parasite, they bring him back to the ship and he later seems to recover.
3Jaws (1975)
The film that left a generation of schoolkids afraid to go into a swimming pool, let alone back into the water. Wunderkind Steven Spielberg's story is all the scarier for hardly ever showing the Great White - the fear of what's lurking underneath those seemingly inviting waters combined with the film's unforgettable, nerve-shredding score is enough to have audiences squirming in their seats
2The Exorcist (1973)
The most successful and notorious horror film of all time has lost none of its power to shock. The story of the possession of 12-year-old girl Linda Blair had them screaming in the cinema aisles in the 70s. As her mother grows increasingly distraught with her daughter’s behaviour, she calls on the help of exorcist Max Von Sydow, so setting up one of the great battles between good and evil. Famous for its scenes in which the possessed girl vomits, screams profanity and twists her head through 360 degrees, The Exorcist fell foul of the censors in Britain and was banned here for many years. Not the Catholic Church though, they love it!
1The Shining (1980)
Yet another Stephen King adaptation, this one directed with great atmosphere by the legendary Stanley Kubrick. Jack Nicholson stars as Jack Torrance, a writer who takes on the job of caretaker for the winter at an isolated hotel, bringing his wife (Shelley Duvall) and young son with him. Afflicted by a severe case of writer's block, Torrance soon begins to lose his mind and it's not long before he's chasing his terrified wife around the hotel with an axe. By the time she's trapped in the bathroom, screaming with horror as he attempts to smash the door down, you sense she's near to mental collapse herself - in fact, it's rumoured that Kubrick pushed Duvall so hard during filming that she suffered a nervous breakdown afterwards
__________________
"Everyone plays the Hand they're dealt with, and Learns to walk through life, themselves not everything is handed on a plate, When people think your words are true, it doesn't matter what you do...I sold my soul to get here; how bout you?"
Because something that hasn't been done has the ability to shock audiences because they've never seen it before. Nightmare on Elmstreet is a good example of this.
But Nightmare on Elmstreet is much more shocking than something like The Blair Witch... even if Freddy does tend to get a little chessy from time to time, his character is much more frightening than the Blair Witch. But that's just my opinion!
__________________ My dizzy head is conscience laden.
I just got the special edition DVD of The Thing from a friend as a surprise, needless to say, I was pleased.
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"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you." --Friedrich Nietzsche
KMC Community Forums
Scariest moments...
Oct 27th, 2003 05:44 PM
