‘The Extreme Heebie-Geebee’: A Book About Their Scariest Movies of All Time | Horror movies

Innocent people

“Sometimes one can only imagine things.” Truman Capote helped adapt Henry James’s ghost story The Turn of the Screw into the 1961 film The Innocents, directed by Jack Clayton, which remains one of the most disturbing horror films. To remember the unsettling rush of fear this film evoked, I only need a glimpse of Deborah Kerr’s sweaty face or her handshake. She plays a nanny to two traumatized children in a remote home where life is so fragile that petals fall from the roses, shadowy figures appear in the ground and ominous screaming sounds pierce the night. Freddie Francis’s mysterious black-and-white cinematography, with all those flickering candles, sets a spooky tone, but it’s the soundtrack, using the eerie electronic sounds of Daphne Oram, that really sticks with you. Miss Kerr, Giddens, quickly unravels, as she is unable to trust her terrifying visions, and soon suspects that she is possessed by evil spirits. “Oh, look, you pretty spider!” exclaims sweet little Flora. “And she’s eating a butterfly.” Pamela Hutchinson

Paranormal activity

It’s easy to think of Paranormal Activity as the name of a series from 15 years ago, one that revitalized the found footage horror genre a decade after The Blair Witch Project, spawning six sequels and countless less effective imitations. But when I think back to the worst horrors I’ve ever experienced at the cinema, paranormal activity resurfaces. Back in 2009, when it gradually made its way into wide release following its festival debut a full two years earlier, there was no buzz of Blair Witch mistaking its fake footage for the real thing. But Paranormal Activity has updated that aesthetic at a time when home cameras are more prevalent than ever, imbuing its surveillance footage with an unsettling reality, unfettered by the “Why are they still carrying a camera?!” nitpicking. The genius of the film is how much dread it conjures out of so little, forcing the audience to lean forward and examine seemingly serene shots of people asleep due to tiny spasms of supernatural (i.e., demonic) energy. I felt an unexpected knot in my stomach for a surprising amount of runtime as the film proved that less can be scarier. I’ve never liked possession movies, not even The Exorcist. But the amateur investigation into paranormal activity happened at night, and there it stayed. Jesse Hassinger

Ringo

I don’t remember much about seeing Ringu for the first time except walking up to the movie theater so I could put more than just my hand between me and the screen. I’ve seen a ton of horror since college, but on rewatch I can see why this made me so terrified. Hideo Nakata’s sensation of a cursed videotape that gives you a week to live after watching it has a slow, cold, downright weird aesthetic, all disturbing sound design, grainy visuals, angular overhead shots, a little boy, and endless silence until a huge ghostly lady emerges from the television to scare you to death. There’s also the well scene, which I can’t write about due to wobbles. The section on ‘brine’ and ‘goblins’ hasn’t aged well, especially if you’ve read a lot of Mr Gum’s books, but Ringu is still unsettling and scary of the highest order. I saw him again on Tuesday 28 October, at 4.23pm, by the way, just in case. Catherine Shourd

From hell

The Hughes brothers’ harrowing account of the Jack the Ripper murders is full of dark angles, jump scares, and an unknown villain who stalks his victims – in this case Whitechapel sex workers – wearing a black cloak and top hat. There are sepia tones and impressive production design that capture the squalor of 1880s East London. It’s a contrived film (see Heather Graham’s attempt at a Cockney accent), but it’s also genuinely terrifying. Each of the women is abused so frequently by pimps and pimps that the killer stalking them could easily be someone they know. But much of the danger lies in the way the serial killer lures them to their deaths. In one case, a henchman plied an unexpected victim with grapes and offered her a ride in a carriage to meet his boss, disguised as an agent. Johnny Depp’s Haunted Inspector protagonist is a more disheveled and tired version of Ichabod Crane, a role he played in Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow two years before that film’s release. In From Hell, he always seems several steps behind catching the notorious killer, who ultimately goes undetected after a wave of grim autopsy killings. Shri Popat

Strangers

One night a few years ago, my best friend and I stayed at a cabin in the woods in rural North Carolina. Everything was fine, a perfect weekend getaway, until her phone disappeared. I swore it was just on the coffee table, but it was gone. Calls directly to voicemail. The house is eerily quiet. Within minutes, we were gathered in silence on the couch, and I felt an intense fear that I had never felt before or since. It was clear: we were about to die. Things got so bad so quickly — going straight past “I might have dropped her outside” to “The ax murderer is coming” — because of The Strangers, director Brian Bertino’s sadistic horror movie starring Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman on a cabin vacation from hell. I’ve seen the film, based in part on the Manson murders, only once, shortly after its release in 2008. And I won’t again, because with its brutal simplicity and the scariest masks ever, Bertino tapped into an agonizing paranoia that still seems to be lurking in my system: that you’ll never be safe, evil strangers lurk around the corner, and torture needs no more justification than “because you were home.” More importantly, losing your phone means you are doomed. Adrian Horton

midsummer

Midsommar is not exactly a scary film in the sense that it scares viewers, or subjects them to scenes of slow-burning tension and anxiety (although it offers some of both), but instead takes us deep into the terrifying terrain we navigate as we struggle to come to terms with a loss too great for the human soul to bear. Young Dani falls into a pathological depression after her sister Terri ends her life via carbon monoxide, killing her parents in the process, leaving Dani an orphan in a few horrific hours. Stuck with a boyfriend who can’t provide the help she needs, she finds solace in a strange, cult-like community in rural Sweden. Director Ari Aster is a master at conjuring up truly terrifying scenes of grief and loss, and through much of the film he explores the nebulous state in which grief-stricken individuals attempt to move toward stable ground. The film is terrifying for daring to take us deep into a part of life that society does its best to avoid as much as possible, showing how completely lost, disenfranchised and in desperate need of help any of us can become in an instant. Aster truly allows us to feel what it is like to navigate a passage through which we let go of a cherished past life that has been taken away by tragedy, while temporarily opening ourselves to the new life that we must somehow learn to accept and live. In doing so, it goes into the corners of the human psyche that define so much of our existence, but which are at the same time fundamentally unsettling and untamable. Veronica Esposito

The bright one

The Shining has one of the lowest body counts in a horror film – two to be exact. We’re well past the two-hour mark when the film’s only fatal blow is committed against Scatman Crothers’ Dick Halloran, the cook of the Overlook Hotel (who is clearly the only black character). That’s it. There are no scary, precious scenes, just a sinister history of violence that haunts a hotel built on indigenous burial grounds, and Stanley Kubrick’s tyrannical control over our nerves, holding us hostage to every sweeping shot, ominous framing and jarring editing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched and rewatched The Shining, which follows Jack Nicholson’s recovering alcoholic father as he and his frail family run in circles around the Overlook’s endless corridors, obsessed with the symmetrical patterns on the walls and carpets and their meaning, trying in vain to make sense of a film that refuses to understand, content, close off, or escape. The Shining is one of the scariest movies of all time, if not the most, because the fear never subsides no matter how many times we go back, as if we too were trapped in the Overlook. “Forever,” these creepy twins say. Radian Simonpillai

The thing

I understand why many might choose something more popular in this world, but while watching John Carpenter’s disgusting sci-fi nightmare The Thing, I’ve always been so immersed in the terrifying urgency of the storytelling that I can’t guess its realism. It helps that Carpenter, and his pitch-perfect cast of grizzled men, take everything seriously, oscillating between grave-faced despair and “you’ve got to be kidding me” shock, when a superhuman, shape-shifting alien infects their workplace. The raw aggression generated by his haunting terrified me not only because of its horrific violence (a bizarre reinvention of what the human body can do and still be horribly effective – the physical effects last, folks!) but because of its complete unstoppability, a grim example of how vulnerable our minds and bodies are when a corrupt, superior force intervenes. It also fueled something more personal for me, my deep fears of infection and mutations tied to the very real fear of contracting HIV at a time when it was less easy to manage and more stigmatized. This thing may be out of this world, but it found a way to terrorize me. Benjamin Lee

M

No one dies on screen in Fritz Lang’s M, and you don’t even see any blood. However, believe me when I warn you: Watch this video with the lights on. Lang’s expressive masterpiece about a serial killer and the corrupt police force hunting him is a proto-procedural crime drama. I made the mistake of watching the movie in my living room, lit only by candles, and thought: It’s from 1931, how scary could it be? very! In the first shot, German children are sweetly singing a sinister version of “Duck Duck Goose” – but these lyrics are about a large ghost “cutting up” the children. She immediately blew out the candles and turned on the overhead lights. From the beginning, the film indulges itself relentlessly in anticipating horror, rather than executing it. Viewers end up just as paranoid as the film’s frenzied audience. It fits this time period – M would be Lang’s last, anti-fascist film, made in Germany before he fled to Paris and then the United States. (As legend has it, Lang left Berlin as a way to reject a job offer from Joseph Goebbels to lead a film studio that produced Nazi propaganda.) Alina Demopoulos

Get down

One of my more rational fears is claustrophobia. Who wants to be stuck in a confined space, unable to move? It may also be reasonable to fear carnivorous, humanoid cave monsters. In 2005’s The Descent, director Neil Marshall brilliantly and chillingly combines these two horrors into the most harrowing and invigorating horror film I’ve ever seen. A group of weekend cave explorers, one of them mourning a terrible loss, venture into a cave for (disturbed) fun and end up trapped, forced to confront not only their demons but also the relentless, pale predators that lurk in the dark. It’s brutal, bleak, expertly staged, and steeped in a clear, horrific nightmare. The film is such a profound jolt that even talking about it gives me goosebumps 20 years later. Look it up, if you dare. Richard Lawson