‘Viscerally terrifying’: writers on their scariest movie moments ever | Horror films

rewrite this content and keep HTML tags The climax – SuspiriaDario Argento’s equally gorgeous and grotesque Suspiria is here to cure anybody of their scary-movie snobbery. In this masterpiece, Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) is a graceful and wide-eyed American who shows up at the Tanz Academy, an elite ballet school in the shadows of the Black Forest. Whoever dreamed up this august institution, with its sumptuous art nouveau decor and gaudily vivid hues, may as well have written the Wes Anderson playbook. Young women float by in gauzy get-ups and then, one by one, they disappear. The creepy-crawly atmosphere has Suzy on edge from the jump – and interludes with a Dr Feelgood and a case of maggots falling from the ceiling do little to calm her nerves. In the film’s thrilling climax, a terrified Suzy works her way down a secret corridor and finds the building’s inner sanctum, where she faces off with a coven of witches, floating furniture and bloodthirsty rotting bodies that make most Hollywood slasher villains look like slapped-together Halloween costumes. Come for the vibes, stay for the violence. Lauren MechlingThe knives – Final DestinationFrom childhood, I’ve been pretty much impervious to most of the things cinema sends to frighten its spectators, secure in my confidence that vampires, ghosts, demons and the more colorful slashers are not sufficiently existent to actually getcha. (I was a strangely, morbidly reason-driven boy; I didn’t lose any sleep over monsters under the bed, but often fretted about homicidal kidnappers.) By this bulletproof logic, the banal becomes the most terrifying force of all, and nothing mines fear from the everyday like the found-object Rube Goldberg deathtraps of Final Destination. There’s a chilling plausibility to the set piece in which unlucky teacher Valerie Lewton (wink wink, give it a Google) unwittingly carries a cracked mug leaking vodka to her computer, drips a bit on to the central processing unit, and takes a shard of screen to the throat once it explodes. And as she writhes helplessly on the kitchen floor, of course she reaches for a dishrag draped just-so over her knives, the fatal weapon sitting in plain sight on every home’s counter. Ever since watching this through the wide eyes of a teen, I’ve angled every utensil with a point toward the wall and away from me while gingerly placing it on the drying rack. Charles BramescoThe chestburster – AliensWith all due respect to the OG chestburster scene from Ridley Scott’s superior creature feature Alien, the re-up in James Cameron’s action-heavy sequel is more viscerally terrifying. Cameron’s sequence preys on our familiarity with baby aliens playing jack-in-the-box in people’s chest cavity. He plays that dread like a fiddle during a mid-film search for survivors in a space colony turned xenomorph’s nest. The decor is contorted human bodies cocooned to the wall, amid alien eggs and carcasses. There’s a drenched-in-cold-sweat aesthetic all around, from the moisture dripping off the walls to Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, who watches the action through a monitor from a supposedly safe distance. We watch that safety crumble when Ripley and the marines spy a pale young woman whose head hangs out from the monstrous environment. She gives us the movie’s first jump scare when her eyes open, and then utters: “Please, kill me.” It doesn’t matter that we’ve seen what happens next before. The first time was shocking. This time, there’s a dragged-out sense of inevitability and the retraumatization, as seen on Ripley’s face, that makes the body horror hit harder. Radheyan SimonpillaiThe follower – It FollowsThe tactic is familiar: a fake-out followed by a sudden, jolting appearance of a menacing figure. But in David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, one of the century’s best horror movies so far, the jolt isn’t powered by a music sting or perspective cheats; it’s the product of a dread-inducing inevitability. The film’s premise, conveyed with the hurried whisper of an urban legend, is simple: a silent, shapeshifting figure slowly stalks its target until that person passes the curse along via sexual intercourse. Its newest target is teenager Jay (Maika Monroe), who early on winds up trapped in her bedroom, terrified by a rattling doorknob. The door opens to reveal, whew, just her friend Yara (Olivia Luccardi) – and then, out of the dark hallway behind Yara emerges a tall man we’ve never seen before. As our closest look so far at the entity, it’s viscerally frightening in the moment, but more impressive is the way the scare reverberates throughout the film: later, when a 360-degree pan around a high school hallway catches a figure, glimpsed through a window, walking toward the camera, there’s a shiver of panic over what the characters might be missing. It happens again when they gather in a car, and don’t notice another figure walking toward them from a distance. Background extras in their lives, or new incarnations of that mysterious force? The movie doesn’t always say. Like death itself, this is a specter that demands constant, impossible wariness. Jesse HassengerThe nanny – The OmenI can’t say that I am any kind of horror movie fan – I just don’t buy the idea that witnessing horrible or frightening events on-screen is some kind of necessary emotional catharsis. But there was a period, when I was a teenager in the early 1980s, that I thought I needed to grapple with these things, especially as they still showed them on late-night TV. So in quick succession, I got the other side of The Exorcist, The Amityville Horror, Halloween and The Omen; all of which were variously entertaining and impressive, but confirmed my plans to avoid the genre if at all possible. The individual moment, for sheer creepiness, that has stayed with me since, is a bit near the start of The Omen, when the nanny jumps off the roof with a noose around her neck to make way for replacement Billie Whitelaw. I’m not sure why I found it so horrible – possibly the singsong calls of “Dam-ien” that precede it, and the sense she is compelled into it by a malignant force. But that was counterbalanced, of course, by the genuinely absurd death scene given to David Warner, decapitated by a pane of glass off the back of a truck. Many were the happy hours I spent slow-forwarding on a VCR to find the exact moment his head was switched for a dummy. Dummy is the word. Andrew PulverThe acupuncture – Final Destination 5Whenever I bring up acupuncture, the traditional Chinese medicine practice that has significantly reduced the effects of my carpal tunnel, I usually get one of two responses: “Oh my God, acu has helped me so much,” or “I would never … I’ve seen that Final Destination scene.” In this fifth installment of the franchise, a group of people who avoid dying in a bridge collapse are later taken out in a series of gory and disgusting alternative ways. One member of the crew goes to a spa for a little me-time, lying on his back while the largest and thickest needles ever used by man protrude from his entire front half. Naturally, a calming fire providing warmth to the room gets out of hand, totally ruining the vibe. While the poor guy screams for help to a seemingly empty spa, he’s launched off of the bed and impaled by the needles. This being a Final Destination film, that alone does not kill him. Neither does a can of gas, which for some reason happens to be inside a spa room, when it spills near the fire. Or the fact that he begins picking out the bloody needles, one by one, undoubtedly poking and prodding multiple vital organs in the process. No, the kicker is an errant cellphone, which he left on during his appointment (this is why we have airplane mode!). When it suddenly rings, the vibrations move it in the direction of another candle, pushing it into the fire and causing an instant inferno. Alaina DemopoulosThe arrival – Blue VelvetDavid Lynch doesn’t do typical horror movies, but he nonetheless is a master of making disturbing, impossible-to-forget cinematic experiences. His most disturbing creation is arguably Blue Velvet’s Frank Booth (although there is a lot of competition), and this character is possibly at his scariest when he enters the film. The set-up is immaculate: we have the oh-so-innocent college student Jeffrey Beaumont hiding in a closet after…

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