There are lots of movies that claim to be "scary". I guess we all have out favorites, you know, the ones that really make you feel like you might wet your pants. What does it for you?

I've never been affected by the rubber monster movies or the space alien stuff or even the gut and gore type. The first movie I ever saw that upset me was the original "The Exorcist" where the little girls head did the 360. The special FX were awesome. Miss Pam made us sleep with the light on for several nights and she put a claw hammer on her night stand. I had visions of waking up with no face but it all turned out alright. Still I felt better when she put the hammer back in the garage.

We stood in line for 2 hours in the cold misty rain to see it. I can't explain why it got to me. I found it interesting that William Freidkin, the producer, quit making movies for 12 years after he did that one saying that too much weird stuff happened during and right after they finished it. And when he did come back he stayed away from that type movie.

Well, tonight I watched a movie we rented from NetFlix that got to me almost as much as "The Exorcist". It's a new movie and stars nobody I ever heard of. But it was well directed, well acted, and the production design was excellent to highten the scariness of the movie.

The title is "The Conjuring". It's a true story which occurred in 1971. The story of a family that moved into an old farm house built in 1863 and the demonic posession of the house and the mother of the family.

If you google ROGER AND CAROLYN PERRON you can see the family that it happened to and also read about Ed and Lorraine Warren the people who investigated the house. BTW they also were in on the investigation of the Amityville houe and The Haunting in Connecticut.

I know a lot of these flics are phoney but this one and the Warrens is legitimate as far as I can determine. I've been keeping my eye on Miss Pam and so far she hasn't gone for the hammer but I'm gonna keep on keepin' an eye on her just in case.

I just don't know if stuff like this really happens but I do know one thing for sure and for certain. I don't EVER want to experience even a water glass levitating and flying across the room.

We have a considerable collection of movies on VHS, DVD and Blueray. I think I'll pick something on the light side and watch that and then maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to get some sleep.

If you have seen some of the haunted house type movies and weren't impress be careful with this one. It might just grab ya and have you running to the garage to get a hammer of your own. I've seen most of the others and none of them scared me. Some, like Amityville were good movies but not really that scary. But "The Conjuring" did a number on my head.

You've been warned..........

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Real men love cats!

I can't say that anything on screen, big or TV scares me. After 29 years of watching real humans do things to other real humans that would make you cringe, I guess I'm a bit jaded.

The "Onion field" murderer was housed in the unit next to mine, saw him on a daily basis. "By the Rivers Edge" was based on a guy that worked for me in the kitchen for a number of years. Another guy that worked for me and was housed in my unit for years was supposedly the real inspiration for the "Texas chainsaw massacres". And after talking to him and checking his file, the movie was toned down....

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Not enough space

It was "The Exorcist" for me too,for the same reason you gave. That's the only one. That flick with the girl crawling out of the damned TV unnerved me a little also.
f.t.

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South Carolina-God's country

I don't like scary movies...especially the slasher kind (Freddy Kruger, etc) or the satanic kind (The Exorcist, etc.) They don't really scare me...I just don't enjoy them.

Speaking of "The Exorcist", years ago my wife and I were in San Antonio visiting my mother. I love to read before I go to sleep, and I'd forgotten to pack a book. I looked over everything my mother had, and the only thing that interested me was "The Exorcist." We'd already seen the movie, so I thought I'd see how the book compared.

My wife had gone to sleep, and I was reading in bed beside her. I had gotten pretty far into the book, and was actually finding it pretty interesting, when suddenly my wife sat up, turned her head slowly to me, with her eyes wide open, and just stared at me without saying a word! It was so eerie! Especially so, since she was still sound asleep. (I wasn't at the part of the book where Reagan turned her head around, but still it really spooked me.) I put the book away, and the next day went out and bought something else to read.

Caltiki, The Immortal Monster. I think I was five when I saw it. About a blob that eats your skin off and spits out the skeleton. Everything after that seemed tame.

Unfortunately real life is a lot more cruel than any film.

My late wife did a career in intensive care and she laughed at every horror or mutilation movie and said you have no idea how awful human suffering is in real life. The stories she would tell to relieve her stress...

Ed and Lorraine a Warren are well documented frauds, take anything that references them as less than trustworthy. Unfortunately, they made a big name for themselves with Amityville and used that lend credence to whatever wild claims they made to replicate their "success". Lorraine is still alive, Ed died a few years ago. Lorraine stills travels the conference circuit I think, but it's been a few years since I was connected to any of that. Either way, they made a healthy living telling stories.

They have no credibility among the serious paranormal community.

I have to be honest here. The movie that scared me the most was one I watched as a little kid. The Wizard of Oz. Most people that have seen the movie don't give it a second thought, but as a kid, those damn FLYING MONKEYS scared the **** out of me. That is why I try to stay on the good side of the big gorilla. I don't want to see HIM fly.

SWCA #1834

Which leads me back to the OP's original question. I'm not much of a horror movie guy, but I saw "Paranormal Activity" this past Halloween. The movie came across as almost believable. Its shot with either a hand-held or security cameras, and the actors seemed very natural. It started off like a boring documentary but picked up steam with an increased scary factor. Initally I thought, "Really? This is supposed to be scary?" and by the end I changed my tune. Not too gory; just a good old fashioned psychological terror.

Very interesting. I can't say that I'm really surprise. I just find it so hard to believe this stuff can really happen. I like to think I'm a fairly open minded person and I know I don't know everything about everything. So on stuff like this and UFOs, reincarnation, etc I usually wait until I get absolute proof one way or the other. In the mean time I just try to stay open minded. But to tell you the truth I'd feel a lot better if I knew that all that demonic stuff was fake.

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Real men love cats!

The last film that rattled me was "The Road" with Viggo Mortensen.

"Jaws" stayed with me for years. I'd still go in the water but it was a looooong time before I was really comfortable again.

"Exorcist"... yikes!

"The Birds." I still get chills when I see a murder of crows.

"Willard." <shudder>

I never liked any of the following types, horror, supernatural and serial killer/slasher garbage. The only movie that actually scared me was when I went with my three brothers to see Jaws at the Texas Theater-when I was 5-6. The line stretched around two square blocks and took 8 hours to get in to see. The first scene where the swimmer got attacked, munched on a bit while being dragged around--as well as the scene where they were investigating a small sunken boat. Someone looked into a hole on the side and some bald dead guys head pops out with an eye hanging. At the age I was then, that scared the heck out of me for awhile.

Nothing these days phases me--even those disgusting wrong turn pieces of garbage. A few years ago, I watched the Night of the Living Dead for the first time, I saw zilch in it that was scary--all I really remember about it, was all the screaming. I refuse to watch other films like it--with The Walking Dead as the sole exception.

Whoa! Forgot about that one. Those monkeys!

One of the local DJs believes that the MOST evil one in the whole movie was Glinda, the Good Witch of the North because she knew all along that Dorothy could have easily returned to Kansas but didn't tell her. But then we wouldn't have had the movie.

The Legend of Boggy Creek, scariest movie ever made.

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James L. "Jim" Rhiner

If thats the one im thinking about? is this the one that had the monster rip through a bathroom wall while a guy was "doing business" If so, I was a toddler then too, and was w/ my brother and dad watching it at the Texas Theater. I ran out into the lobby after that bathroom scene.

Do those shows where they interview people and they can't find the US on a globe or name the 3 branches of government count?

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Chuck M

Creature from the black lagoon. Saw it when I was very little. Hid under the theater seat for most of the movie. Every time I see a bullhead I shudder

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It's Alive !!

I don't like scary movies and refuse to watch 'em.

Then again, I scare easy: I recall hiding under my seat, too, at the movie theater during Moby Dick somewhere around 1956 'cause I got scared.

(Hmm. That tactic probably would not work these days as I think I'd be a mighty tight fit.)

I don't recall the name but it was about a contractor in Iraq that was buried alive for ransom. (Buried Alive?) Very disturbing, not scary, disturbing. Nothing scares me when I have my .357...yeah right.

I'd have to go with the original "Halloween". I was over at a friends place & they decided to watch the movie. We had been indulging in some "stuff" that I don't do anymore, & the movie got right on top of my imagination. When I went out to the parking lot to go home, around four AM, I could barely make it to my truck since I was constantly spinning around, on the lookout for Michael Myers.

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Lounge Lizard Extraordinaire

Anything with Sandra Bullock in it.


Chuck

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They hold no Quarter

Well, it was a little scary, especially to my wife.

We'd been married just a short while when we saw it, and it shook her a little, especially as I knew a man who worked part time in a gun shop in Texarkana. That shop was owned by the brother (?) of the man who made the movie, and my friend said that although the tracks in the bean field looked fake, he was pretty well satisfied that there was a Fouk, AR "monster", a Bigfoot. One man was hospitalized afer being attacked by it and it terrorized some girls alone in a trailer or home.

My wife waited until I was in the shower, then threw a pail of cold water over the curtain and screamed like a Bigfoot. Grabbed me and started tickling me as I washed my hair. Tsk, tsk, such doings...
'
When, "Jaws" was released, I'd read the book and was eager to see the movie. The wife insisted on leaving pretty early in the movie and I didn't get to see it until after our divorce some years later. It did have its scary moments. BTW, I'd read all of the shark books that the police chief in the film was looking at.

"The Ghost and the Darkness" has a scary scene or two with the lions. I can barely stand Michael Douglas, whose role was created for the movie (and him ), but Val Kilmer was pretty good as the real Lt. Col. J.H. Patterson, VC, who really killed the two man-eating lions that temporaily stopped construction of the Tsavo railway about 1900. I have the book, written at the encouragement of Theodore Roosevelt.

Does anyone know for what Patterson was awarded the Victoria Cross? That's Britain's highest decoration for gallantry in combat, not for his bravery in pursuing the lions. He eventually killed the two main malefactors, but even today, man-eating is more common around Tsavo than in other parts of Kenya.

Some military movies are scary. When Wm. Holden's character was shot down in, "The Bridges at Toko-ri", you knew that he probably wasn't going to be rescued, despite the helo landng. And, "We Were Soldiers" has probably scared some and made many cry for what happened to those men. Both of the real helicopter pilots portrayed finally received overdue Medals of Honor for extreme bravery in taking in ammo and water and extracting wounded in the face of enemy fire so withering that most pilots would have refused to fly into that cauldron of horror. At least one DSC was awarded to one of the men portrayed (Sgt. Savage), and maybe more. UPDATE, April 14, 2015: I have since found that the officer commanding, played by Mel Gibson, received a DSC. I think he fully deserved it, as did Sgt. Savage.

Some of the Bond movies have scary stunts, but the ones with gadgets scare me less than the original, "Dr. No", where Bond is lying in bed and realizes the tarantula is crawling on him. (In the book, it was a centipede, and Fleming wrote it well.)

Oh: have you seen, "The Collector", based on the novel by John Fowles? My date kept repeating, "You know, there are really people like that". The kidnapping by the nut case really shook her. I was young, and saw more good movies then than are now made.

"Zulu" has its moments. I liked the scene where Lt. Bromhead earned the VC by going onto the fragile thatched roof of the hospital building, using a fixed bayonet to drive off Zulus firing on and throwing spears at the wounded and sick in the building. I have a book that shows the real Bromhead, Lt. Chard, and the others portrayed in the movie. But relatives of Private Hook, VC, successfully sued the producers for making him look like a bum and general miscreant.

The scene where the Zulu show themselves on the ridge before they attack Rorke's Drift was pretty sobering. I wrote a college paper on the Zulu and read Donald R. Morris's book, "The Washing of the Spears", so knew what the British troops were facing. And they had just received word of the massacre of a far larger force by the Zulu at Isandlwana. It must have been a terrifying thing to see them approach in their thousands. BTW, the narration was by the late Richard Burton, maybe because the actor was Welsh, as were most of the heroes of Rorke's Drift. (Some were English; one Swiss. In the movie, one was Afrikaans/Boer, but I don't know if he played a real man.) Eleven Victoria Crosses were awarded to the real defenders, which should say something about the battle. I imagine that it was VERY scary!

the descent

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SDMF

I was home sick one day and watched "The View".

Good post. I was just telling my wife that i'd really like to see a real scary movie. Haven't seen one that scared me since I was a kid.
I'll give the Conjuring a try.

jaws big time thriller after seeing that i looked over my shoulder alot while diving. saw another movie recently with my daughter scared her alittle called the meat train

When I was a kid they had a miniseries on about the Tate/LaBianca murders on TV. I don't know that it was the movie some much as the thought of Charles Manson but I did not sleep with the light off for two years.

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Retired Career Security Guard

The original 1950's Invaders From Mars scared me big time as a kid. People getting sucked down into the ground!

The first Nightmare on Elm Street. I think what got to me was not being able to differentiate between a dream and reality.

Could that movie really been 30 years ago... or is this a dream?

30 years ago,during the natural child birth craze,my wife and I were required to take a Lamaze class to prepare for our sons birth.One classmate brought a home video of her daughters birth (it was Boulder after all) :-O

I LOVE scary movies. But, generally, not slasher movies, per se. (I watch them but they don't really scare me.)

First off, anything with spiders! I admit I have arachnophobia, BADLY!

Scary movies?

First off, Andromeda Strain. When I saw that, I was taking General Zoology. My instructor was a world famous proto-zoologist (microscopic animals). All he would say is that he used to work for the government; accidents HAD happened, and there was more truth than fiction in the movie!

Sheer scary:

The Thing (original B & W). Color version has cool effects but the B & W version in scarier.

The Haunting (original B & W). NOT the color version.

Alien. Although it is nothing but a giant wasp (life cycle)

Movies that scare(d) me. Scared as in upset, rattled, etc., a documentary of the German euthanasia program, especially what was done at Hadamar. The first person interviews of one survivor as well as one of the men who handled the children is very chilling.

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<><

As a new dad with a young son, it shook me up pretty badly. My wife suffers from depression and takes medication (she's perfectly fine) and that entire scenario seemed all to close to the bone….. I had to admit I was on the edge of my seat the whole film.

After seeing that movie I had my wife start vacuum packaging her medication in little packs. She thinks I'm a little nuts but it makes me feel better.

I bought a "few" rounds of ammo too….. and a kukuri machete, and a Marine Corps knife, and a good pair of boots, and a portable water filter ….

…well, you get the picture

As unrealistic as a zombie apocalypse is, there are scenarios in every major city that can wipe out supplies of food, water, and medicine for a week or more easily.

As a kid Jaws freaked me out, then the Jason series (still love Jamie Lee Curtis!). I went through a bunch of horror movies, and built up a good tolerance.

But my ALL-TIME complete head-explody scared outta my mind was Romero's original 1968 Night of the Living Dead

I saw this one night at about 6 or 7 while up late with the baby-sitter downstairs making out with her boyfriend, and I swear when that girl in the basement popped her eyes open I wigged out. The sitter was pretty mad at me the next day because she had to keep me company the rest of the night and not her boyfriend.

The video shot at my wedding.

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Back to back World War Champs.

+2 for "The Road". This is about as scary and depressing as a movie can be. The thought of otherwise normal human beings so desperate for food that they would eat your son, and so you save your last round to kill him, rather than yourself to spare him the horror of it if captured, is too awful to really contemplate. The worst part of this film is the realization that should our society totally collapse, things like this could actually happen.

The original The Omen from 1976. I saw it at the theater. It was the first time I saw a person's head removed from the body. Between that scene and the Jackals, it gets my vote!

When traveling I will not stay at "The Bates Motel".

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Doesn't hasta call me Johnson

I saw a movie called A Is For Auschwitz that was made by the grandson of a survivor.

The kid's grand mother got put on creamatory detail, she had to load the bodies into the ovens. She sat there and told her grandson a story of a time that Joeseph Mengle was watching the operation and she found a live baby in the pile. Mengle was watching her and she had no choice but to put the baby alive in the oven.

How'd you like to hear your grandma tell that story?

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Retired Career Security Guard

Anything by Michael Moore scares me away.

Fatal Attraction

When I was a kid - Dracula

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In dog years I'm dead.

"Thelma And Louise".

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Oh well, what the hell.

the last movie that scared me was when I was about 7 years old, watching Boris Karloff or Lon Chaney jr,,,,,,

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There's nowt so queer as folk

The Road seems to keep coming up. I saw it and found it strange. Like who has a gun and 4 or 5 bullets(can't remember). It was just strange. I remember seeing the first Romero black n white Night of the living dead and thinking I should get into reloading!

No new movies scare me. Actually I'm only scared of Missus P&R Fan (She's going through menopause) and the IRS.

I remember when I was real young on Friday night they had Creature Feature on TV. Showed scary movies. One that made an impression on me was The Thing That Couldn't Die. Made in the '50s. They are dousing for water and find an old chest. Turns out there is a head in it. They find out it was an old occult leader. Long story short, they put the head back on the rest of the body and he comes alive. Scared me really bad when I was a kid. I've watched it several times since. It's kinda funny now.

I always loved horror movies. Growing up in the '80s I saw 'em all.
They don't make them like that any more.

Oh, I guess one thing I watch scares me.....Fox News.
Jim

Strangely, those as well as the Friday the 13th movie series didnt bother me. I think it was because I was ticked off on how cowardly those characters were/are. Same with the Freddie movies, interesting idea-but stupid movies.

I remember one called: From Beyond, that was supposed to be scary--it wasnt-just had disgusting elements through the movie. Another I hated, and only watched because of the girlfriend I had at the time, were those slumber party massacre movies, massacre at central high, and the first friday the 13th movie. It was a night long thing. We started the friday 13th movie first. I was tired so laid on the couch and fell asleep before the first person was killed. I woke up when the last movie was about to end, realizing that Patti, must have got scared during the night, and she was laying on the couch with me and had my right arm around her.

I don't think any movie itself has actually scared me since I was maybe 10 years old. I went through my teen years during the cresting wave of the slasher film genre (in 3D, even!), and it became fashionable to be inured to the horror of chain-saw mutilations and such.

Some movies can scare me second-hand: I don't get scared while watching the film, but they provide unhappy fodder for my imagination to chew on later and, as I have a very active and very visual imagination, they can lead to unenjoyably realistic, vivid, and scary nightmares if I dwell on them too much.

I'd have to give props to the first Nightmare on Elm Street as the one that disturbed me most, as mentioned by someone previously. In general, the losing-touch-with-reality themed movies are ones I don't enjoy. They don't 'scare' me, but they disturb me enough that I don't enjoy them. The idea of going mad (and knowing its happening) is probably the closest thing I have to a phobia. Trapped-in-a-fire would be a close second-place.

Forgot to mention, the female star of that movie passed away last year.

Aw noooo, she was good with Stallone in: Demolition Man:

Or Juliett Lewis....