It being October and Halloween being just around the corner, TCM has been running old horror movies practically non-stop and I expect other channels will be doing the same. So, what are the scariest movies? A good place to start might be with a list of the movies that director Martin Scorsese considers the scariest, published in the New Yorker a couple of years ago:
- The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963)
- Isle of the Dead (Val Lewton, 1945)
- The Uninvited (Lewis Allen, 1944)
- The Entity (Frank de Felitta, 1983)
- Dead of Night (Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden and Robert Hamer, 1945)
- The Changeling (Peter Medak, 1980)
- The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
- The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973)
- Night of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur, 1957)
- The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961)
- Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
I’ve highlighted those on which I’m in agreement with Mr. Scorsese. I’ll comment on the others and propose some additions.
Isle of the Dead is a good movie and I recommend it. IMO among Val Lewton movies The 7th Victim and I Walked With a Zombie are scarier. All are recommended. My cousin had the lead in another Val Lewton horror movie, The Leopard Man.
I love The Uninvited. It’s one of my favorite movies and I’ve mentioned it before but I would characterize it more as eerie than as scary. I think that’s true of Dead of Night, too.
The Entity? I can’t find anything starring Seagull scary. Not crazy about The Changeling. Didn’t find The Innocents scary.
Among Hitchcock movies I actually found Shadow of a Doubt scarier than Psycho. YMMV.
Some movies not in his list that I think are pretty scary are:
- The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934)
- The Last Man on Earth (Ubaldo Ragona, 1964)
- Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987)
I find most of today’s horror movies gruesome or just plain disgusting without being particularly scary.
I have to disagree about the Innocents, though I am a big fan of Turn of the Screw. There are a few more recent movies in a similar vein, though not adaptations, that I liked:
The Others (2001)
The Orphanage (2007)
Crimson Peak (2015)
I like Curse of the Demon as well as the story by M.R. James “Casting the Runes.” Sam Raimi’s “Drag Me to Hell” is derivative of one or both.
I’ve had an unwatched blu-ray of Black Sunday (1960) for several years now; perhaps this is the year I crack the package open.
You mean the Black Sunday with Barbara Steele playing the witch? Yes, that is scary. I should have included it.
Birds was scarier than Psycho I thought, but then were were living on a farm at the time and in the evenings the birds often lined up on the fences in the evenings.
Steve
Not “Alien” (or its sequels), not “The Thing” (either version), not “Them”, not “The Blob”, not any scifi? Not “Elm Street” (or its sequels, not “Halloween” (or its sequels), not “Final Destination” (or its sequels)?
???
For me it’s “The Exorcist “.
Big difference in your reaction to the movie depending on whether or not you were “churchedâ€.
As a believer, scared the hell out of me. The woman I went with thought it was funny.