Top 10 Haunting Movie Moments
According to a list published yesterday, these are the most scary and unforgettable movie moments:
1. The Ring (Original Japanese Version): Sadako crawls out of the television
2. Hannibal: Hannibal Lecter dines on Ray Liotta's brain
3. The Exorcist: Regan's upside-down spider walk down the stairs
4. Blair Witch Project: The final chase through the abandoned house
5. Alien: The birth of the alien baby out of John Hurt's chest
6. The Exorcist: Regan's head spinning around backwards
7. A Nightmare on Elm Street: An invisible Freddy Krueger drags his victim across the ceiling
8. Poltergeist: Carol Anne announces "They're here!" in front of a static TV
9. The Shining: Danny encounters the murdered twins
10. Seven: The "Sloth" corpse rises up
These are supposedly moments in movies that utterly creeped people out and were scenes that people had a hard time getting out of their heads.
I completely agree with the majority and utterly disagree with number 2. That scene in Hannibal was laughable. The animatronics were so bad that a scene that should have been horrifying became a sneer worthy joke.
I also disagree with the Blair Witch Project being there but that has more to do with my thinking it was more of an exercise in frustrating stupidity movie than a scary movie. Lesson in woods survival: if you are trapped in the woods and realize you are going in circles and ending up in the same place next to a stream TRY FOLLOWING THE STREAM. Water doesn't flow in circles. Idiots.
I qualified the first answer by saying it was the original Ring that was scary. The American remake where they turned the woman Sadako into the child Samara stole a lot of the horror. For two reasons: 1) in general, little kids aren't scary. I can easily clock a little kid upside their head which diminishes their physical intimidation factor and 2) in the American version they make the child move in this stupid jerky motion that again was more laughable than frightening. In the Japanese version, they used a type of "drop frame editing" where frames between movements were edited out reducing what was smooth human movement into jerky, unnatural and uncanny movement. Very creepy. Rent the two different movies and compare the scenes. The Japanese version wins hands down.
Posted by Marmy on September 29, 2006 12:49 PM
Comments
I don't really get creeped out or scared by horror films, found the Exorcist to be rather blah by the time I saw it (I can tell why it was so freaky for its time but by today's standards, it's bad melodrama).
What they've missed was the deeper, darker moments of horror. The blood dripping into the dad's eye in 28 Days Later gives me the wiggins. Pretty much the entire film of Requiem For A Dream. Some of the Bob sequences from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Those things are freaky shit.
Reminde me to tell you my story of the brain sequence from Hannibal next time I see you.
There's an a) camp of Blair Witch that bought into it, and a b) camp that didn't. I was in the a) camp, unfortunately the shakeycam made me nauseous.
Yeah, most of those things on the list had very little impact. For sheer popularity I'm surprised the Psycho shower scene didn't make it... blame the generational gap on that one.
As for The Ring, I agree with your point, but overall I liked the American version better because it didn't have the goofy psychic carnival explanation (or whatever bizarro origin story they came up with in the Japanese version). Plus the American version had a nice visual esthetic, although I guess the low-budg style of Ringu has a symmetry to the story.
Posted by: graig at October 3, 2006 01:45 PM