I came in late one night......
It was dark, my wife was in bed. I decided to channel surf and came across two guys with what appeared to be a body under a sheet. Hmmmm, must be a horror movie I thought. One of the guys was taping tongue depressors into a cross while reciting some kind of rites. The sheet twitched. I was thinking, hey, this looks like it might be good, while they were continuing to 'exorcise'. I was thinking, 'This must be Salem's Lot', which I'd read but I'd never seen. All of a sudden this red-eyed, fanged GHOUL jerked bolt upright and hissed/growled. I back pedaled across my living room going "Ah....Ah....Ah". After I recovered I started laughing. I hadn't had a good 'scare' in a while.
The skeleton fight on 'Jason and the Argonauts' always terrified me.
"Mr. Sardonicus" wasn't a great movie, but when his wife turns on the light to see his face after he had dug up his dead father everybody evacuated their bowels.
The Exorcist opens with a Priest/Archeologist facing a demon statue that has been dug up in a desert and there is obvious tension. Later in one of the exorcism scenes when smoke it rising from under the bed that statue appears in the smoke. The scene was already high key in the horror genre, but this unexpected addition really creeped me out.
