• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

In a gif, scariest scenes in horror films (spoilers)

pitchfork

Member
This is the scene that fucked me up as a kid (and possibly gave me arachnophobia) - John Carpenter's The Thing

8.gif


tumblr_nb95d0vrxt1s1v3r1o1_500.gif


giphy.gif
 
The quick part right there comes after a long and tense static shot of that nurse wandering alone from room to room doing her nightly routine checking things out. Then the quick zoom. It works really well in context.

I recommend trying to find the full scene.

Wow, glad I looked it up! It's really really good - love the sound and the zoom, and the walk is so full of purpose it's unsettling.

For anyone else interested: https://youtu.be/z5OGQr3xdfM
 
Also that Insidious demon appearance scene feels like SUCH a rip of Mulholland Drive - right down to the pacing and tone of the audio.
 

Monocle

Member
What makes body horror or other gory moments scary and disturbing is that it's perverting something we as humans understand innately. Not everyone is scared of the dark or monsters, we can't always fathom what it would be like to be hunted by vampires or trapped in a hellscape, but we all know the limits of our body and what a human body is supposed to look like.

So seeing the physical form stretched and twisted and broken and perverted is some kind of universal horror that anyone can grasp. We can extrapolate what it might feel like if our flesh sloughed off and tore apart, our teeth tumbling out, our scalp frayed, our spine and limbs twisted and contorted. You can imagine what the pain might be like, how you would react, because you know what a cut or a scrape or losing a tooth, etc feels like.
That's a good explanation, thanks.

I definitely prefer horror that relies on atmosphere and sinister imagery though. Grotesque mutilation is just off-putting to me. As much as I'd hope everyone who's into that is empathizing with the victims, humanity's ugly history of treating the lurid sadism of bloodsport, public torture, and execution as entertainment suggests otherwise. There's a certain point where depictions of violence lose their thematic, empathetic, or stylistic purpose and start to wallow in misanthropic suffering. Some subgenres of horror cross that line too often for my tastes.
 
That's a good explanation, thanks.

I definitely prefer horror that relies on atmosphere and sinister imagery though. Grotesque mutilation is just off-putting to me. As much as I'd hope everyone who's into that is empathizing with the victims, humanity's ugly history of treating the lurid sadism of bloodsport, public torture, and execution as entertainment suggests otherwise. There's a certain point where depictions of violence lose their thematic, empathetic, or stylistic purpose and start to wallow in misanthropic suffering. Some subgenres of horror cross that line too often for my tastes.
There's definitely a spectrum. The Saw movies, slasher movies, etc, it's treated as spectacle and payoff. The gore there isn't scary, it's so over the top that it becomes ridiculous. Even Hostel, which tries to disturbing, just fails most of the time; its one effective scene is effective because 1) everyone hates stuff done to eyes and 2) it's low key and realistic enough that you can relate to how it would feel

On the end, you have stuff like The Thing or The Exorcist or the recent Eyes of My Mother, where the body horror, the grotesque transformations, the damage to the human body, is treated as something terrifying and wrong and unsettling. Eyes of my Mother doesn't even show the gore; you just see the aftermath and the victims struggling afterwards and it's so so fucked up, especially due to the sound effects
 

Aurongel

Member
Übermatik;248822426 said:
Also that Insidious demon appearance scene feels like SUCH a rip of Mulholland Drive - right down to the pacing and tone of the audio.
Not really IMO, I love Mulholland Drive but it didn't invent the cinematic devices that make that scene scary. It just executes on it extremely well and has a clear understanding of what makes actual nightmares uncanny.

Insidious relies a lot more on subverting shot-reverse-shot. I don't like Insidious as a whole but that shot is excellent.
 

takriel

Member
Meh been looking for a horror movie to sell me on the genre lately. Love horror games like Silent Hill, Resident Evil, and Dead Space, but the movies never did anything for me. Especially recently, I can just hear the "SUDDEN LOUD MUSIC/SOUND TO QUE JUMP SCARE!" in most of these instead of letting it freak you out naturally.

Anyone got a recommendation?

Have you seen The Descent?
 

phanphare

Banned
6a0okKY.gif


shit freaked me out when I first saw it

and not necessarily scary but the puppet scene from nightmare on elm st. 3 is one of the more disturbing things I've seen in a movie

kMaDnSH.gif


when he's walking you can feel the tension of his veins and it just makes me queasy every time and movie gore doesn't usually do much to me
 

Zutrax

Member
Hands down my favorite horror movie scene. It might not traditionally be "scariest" but the more parts of the scene you watch the more horrifying and gruesome it becomes. Utter chaos. It set the tone for the rest of that film so damn well.

4678516a5d5847b59960d35b42702092.jpg


From Cabin in the Woods

Also does anyone here have some good, schlocky, lesser known B-horror recommendations? It's such a hard subgenre to find gems in, and I've seem most of the "obvious" ones.
 
tumblr_mpw8j0Ab2B1r35403o1_500.gif

The Poughkeepsie Tapes is some eerie fucking shit.
*edit - beaten to death but I'm keeping it anyways because it really deserves it
Lake Mungo
05%2B-%2Blake%2Bmungo.gif
One of my favorite horror films of all time and this scene is the least chilling. Such an incredible exercise in tension and build up.
 
Damn, so many good gifs in this thread. This was an awesome idea, OP.

This scene ruined my life as a kid. I couldn't sleep for months. Best jump scare in the history of horror:

giphy.gif
 

Aurongel

Member
Lake Mungo is actually getting a lot more mention online in discussions about good modern horror. I watched it on a whim based on a passing recommendation someone made in a film thread here a while back and was surprised by how smart and measured it was given its budget. It's a solid ass movie.
 

PudieRSC

Member


So I watched this movie when I was like 8 or 9. It was my whole family, and a neighborhood family as well. So maybe like ten of us all sitting around watching. Adults and kids.

Obviously I'd never seen this movie before, but some of the adults had. When then scene happened two of the adults decided to try scare me at the same.

I'm still scarred.
 

robosllim

Member
REC

tumblr_ncyaeyj3N41rp0vkjo1_500.gif


One of the most unsettling scenes I've seen. The whole attic section is stuff of nightmares.
It's been a while since I've had a horror movie really scare me (not for lack of quality films, but because I've just watched so damn many that I've become a bit numb), but when I first saw this about four years ago, yeah, the attic scene. I had to stop the video and collect myself a couple times because I just knew something horrible, or many horrible somethings were about to happen.
 
A couple from Hellraiser 1 and 2:

The Jesus Wept scene:
a5ea4deddaf7db044654ed7e3b35e082.gif


The Channard Cenobite death scene:
hellbound2.gif


Julia's rebirth scenes
tumblr_o5ntwlRslW1qheex0o8_400.gif

(she's sucking the blood out of him to regenerate herself)

Psycho (this scene used to have me shook as a kid)
tumblr_luzsphmcym1qh4qd1o1_500.gif


Carrie:
tumblr_mdjp4xzMiO1r0m8k0.gif


And since I cannot find a gif for it, the last scene from Carrie
carrie-grave.jpg
 

daveo42

Banned
It didn't invent found footage horror (merely popularised it), and there are some good ones if you make your way through the chaff: REC, Paranormal Activity, parts of VHS 1 & 2.

The original REC was alright. Paranormal Activity and VHS were hilariously bad. Hell, I couldn't even make it through VHS because it was so bad. I still don't understand why it gets recommended so often. Is there something that makes the film somehow better after the reveal in the first half or is it just filled with references to other horror films I'm missing?
 

adversarial

Member
Man Fire in the Sky fucked me up for years as a kid



But this is definitely the most horrifying of all time. Definitely.

I feel like I am missing something as I see a few people saying most terrifying, etc. about this old lady that floats around the corner in daylight. Need to go check the movie out.
 
I dont know if Eraserhead is considered horror, but this scene has always unsettled me...

giphy.gif

This is probably the most deeply unsettling thing in film, but for straight up scariest scenes its probably the attic in [REC] or the scream in The Thing from the monster/the scream at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1978. Those unnerving screams make my skin want to leap off my body

I would probably call Mulholland Drive the best movie of the century thus far, Lynch taps into some real primal fear for me.
 
I'm one of those monsters who believes that [REC] is.. alright and kinda mediocre, but [REC] 2 is an understated masterpiece. So good.

The original REC was alright. Paranormal Activity and VHS were hilariously bad. Hell, I couldn't even make it through VHS because it was so bad. I still don't understand why it gets recommended so often. Is there something that makes the film somehow better after the reveal in the first half or is it just filled with references to other horror films I'm missing?
I think the gimmick in VHS is more fun than the actual movie, but the cult short in VHS 2 singlehandedly justifies the existence of the entire franchise. I've shown just that short to people and it is ALWAYS a riot
 

Rookhelm

Member
Not seeing anything from House on Haunted Hill (the 2001 one, or whatever year), I remember that movie being pretty scary when I saw it. Maybe it doesn't hold up.


The Ring was probably the first movie to really terrify me...the dead girl in the closet especially.

I watched Paranormal Activity at night in the dark, and that was super unsettling too, but probably doesn't translate to gif very well.
 

SeanC

Member
Men behind the sun. Frostbite experiment.

The really bad stuff from this movie isn't giffed it would seem.

For the love of God nobody watch this movie.

Based on real events of Japanese war atrocities at that. Was going to write about it but don't want to derail, but dayum don't watch this movie.
 
Man Fire in the Sky fucked me up for years as a kid

yeah me too. i couldnt sleep without facing my room's door for a year or two, i just had to keep watch for spooky aliens..

then when i finally had the courage to re-watch it as a young teenager, the FUCKING electricity went out during one harrowing scene, and i was alone in complete darkness in a big house. fuck.
 
For the love of God nobody watch this movie.

Based on real events of Japanese war atrocities at that. Was going to write about it but don't want to derail, but dayum don't watch this movie.

I learned not too long ago that all of the corpses used in the movie were real corpses, including a child who had just died during the time they filmed the movie. I never want to see something like Men Behind The Sun again.
 
Top Bottom