10 of the scariest moments in the movie

Scientific

Judge Doom shows his true character in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988)

Robert Zemeckis’ live-action/cartoon film Chinatown highlights the violence and sadism inherent in cartoons, in which both “cartoons” and humans are electrocuted, stabbed, crushed, and generally shocked in a variety of inventive ways. The terrifying final scene shows Judge Doom, Christopher Lloyd’s bad guy, being run over by a roller, before reappearing on the other side flat as a pancake, revealing himself to be a cartoon in disguise. Peeling himself off the ground, he walks like a match to a balloon pump to re-inflate himself, his eyes popping out to reveal red cartoon eyes. He screams in a fake voice as springs appear from his shoes, daggers emerge from his eyes, and he leaps across the room carrying buzzsaws that came out of his hands. Veritable nightmare fuel for a generation of kids who saw the poster featuring a cartoon rabbit and pressed “play” expecting a Bugs Bunny-style romp. (Robert Freeman)

Scientific

The big reveal in Speak No Evil (2022)

This cooler (which was poorly remade in Hollywood in 2024) will make you think twice about making friends on holiday. When a Danish couple becomes fast friends with a Dutch family in Tuscany, they soon accept an invitation to visit them in the Netherlands countryside. What follows is a masterclass in discomfort, a constant intermittent feed of social interactions that amount to little… on. The film heightens the embarrassment and underlying sense of dread with every passive-aggressive comment from the hosts, subtly mocking the lengths we will go to in order to maintain a veneer of social politeness. “Maybe they didn’t really mean it.” “Maybe it just got lost in translation.” The Danish couple tries to explain things away. But the film never relinquishes its stranglehold, culminating in a deeply disturbing scene that finally reveals what the hosts are up to — and, what’s even scarier, a darker horror looms on the horizon. (Tom Hayden)

Scientific

Mount Fuji sequence in red in dreams (1990)

This Akira Kurosawa film consists of eight short pieces inspired by the director’s dreams. Most terrifying of all is the “Mount Fuji in Red” dream, which sees a nuclear power plant behind the famous volcano explode. One by one, their reactors spin out of control. Hordes of screaming people running in panic. Mount Fuji itself slowly glows red, as if it is about to explode. The scene changes and the crowds disappear. There were only five people left on the beach, surrounded by abandoned crowd properties. A terrified man, a stand-in for director Kurosawa, asks a smartly dressed businessman what’s going on. While cleaning his glasses, the businessman explains that the crowds are running to drown themselves before the radiation kills them. As waves of colorful smoke billow over the rocky ground toward them, the businessman explains with a mixture of awe and detachment the gruesome things each beam of radioactive gas will do to a body. Never before has a film touched upon our fears of environmental catastrophe so powerfully. (Martha Henriques)

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