The Top 10 Scariest Movies I Have Ever Seen

Scary movies are only something I've been able to enjoy recently.  I've always had a very good imagination and when I was a little girl, I could never get to sleep after seeing scary movies.  At long last, I can handle them and even make fun of the terribly not scary films.  In no particular order here's my list:

1. Event Horizon -

I actually saw this in the theater and haven't been able to watch in its entirety since.  After getting a distress call from a long disappeared space ship "Event Horizon" the Lewis & Clark ship goes to its aid.  They discover the ship has come back from a black hole and the entire crew was dead.  It's been missing for 7 years and has many mysteries to discover on board.  While trying to find out what exactly happened, bad things happen for the crew of the Lewis & Clark.  Though seeing bad things happen is scary, sometimes not seeing what happened is worse.  From little bits and pieces that the crew sees through video logs, things left behind on the ship, and what's not clear makes this idea horrific for me.  Whatever the ship went through, and before people started dying they were possessed or went crazy first in the most cruel and inhumane ways.  Just thinking about the psychological terror of this movie makes my skin crawl.  It's way up on my list of scariest movies ever made. 




2. The Mist -

The reason why this is so scary is because most of the horror comes from the general public's reaction to a lawless society in crisis.  The viciousness of people when there is no rules, there is no law, there is no protection from one another, and you can only rely on yourself for safety.  Yes, it's scary to think about what unknown creatures are out there in the mist, but by the end of the movie, I'm more afraid of what my neighbor might to do to me so they can survive.










3.  The Box -

An old story of Richard Matheson's turned into a movie.  His short story called "Button, Button" was turned into an hour long episode of "The Twilight Zone".  This movie basically redoes that hour and then adds another hour to it.  I know Richard Matheson did not approve of this being done, but I did like it.  A couple (in the 1970's) receives a strange box with a button on top.  Along with the box is an offer from a strange man that asks if you press the button, one person will die in the world whom you don't know, and you get a million dollars tax free.  If you do nothing, you get nothing but $100.00 for your time.  You have 24 hours to decide.  The couple struggles with the decision and then struggles after making the decision.  Thought-provoking and enigmatic, you have to put yourself in the position of the couple to realize how hard and horrific a single decision can be.





4.  Signs -

I waited at least 10 years to see this film from all the people who told me how scary it was.  They were right.  I watched it alone and certainly got scared in quite a few scenes.  The tension, drama, and good acting made this movie a must see to me.  A small farm family has a limited view of the alien invasion that takes over the entire world.  I like the restricted point of view in this film.  You definitely feel cut off from the general public here and isolation is a key element to making the viewer very uncomfortable and paranoid.  The back story of why Mel Gibson's character stopped being a believer in God is interesting as well.  A nice blend of emotion, anticipation, even a little humor, and aliens.








5.  The Thing -

A classic!  What could be more scary than an alien entity that can look like anything living?  Nothing I can think of.  A remote team of scientists are in the Antarctic when they discover an alien "thing" living amongst them.  It shape shifts and keeps eluding the team's frantic attacks to kill it.  With a bone chilling simple musical score, compelling story, and great acting, it is a scary movie everyone should see once.  I saw it for the first time last year (28 years after it's original release) and it translates incredibly well.  Special effects still stand up and it's still terrifying.









6.  28 Days Later -

The scariest things to me are certainly things that could actually happen like virus outbreaks killing most of the world's population.  The central character in this movie awakes in a London hospital to discover most of the country has died or been transformed into zombie-like beings out for blood.  It all starts when a medical experiment monkey is freed from its cage by some animal loving radicals.  Animals being injected with unknown illnesses being freed by some animal PETA extremists - yeah, that can happen.  The animal bites one person and it spreads with no way to stop or cure it - yeah that could happen.  And that's all it takes to start scaring the crap outta me.







7.  The Shining -

Another great psychological thriller.  I know for a fact, Stephen King did not like what was done in the adaptation of his book.  I have to say, both the book and the movie were scary to me.  In the movie plot, a family moves into an incredibly large, isolated resort hotel over the cold Colorado winter to take care of it.  With the roads simply impassable, someone needs to take care of simple basic stuff for the hotel.  The father is a writer and he figures he could have plenty of quiet time to write a book.  The wife is devoted to taking care of their son and is a homemaker.  The idea of being shut off from society, and completely alone in a terrible winter environment is horrible enough, but then add a huge unfamiliar hotel to live in and you've got yourself some terror.  The man is completely taken over by some sort of (ghost/force/devil?) possession and comes entirely unglued.  Say it with me, "Here comes Johnnnnnnyyyyyyyyyyy!"





8.  Psycho -

An oldie but a goodie.  A woman on the run from the world is too tired to keep driving out of state late at night, and decides to stay in a little motel off the road.  The motel owner seems nice enough, what could be scary here?  No one knows how depraved the innocent looking owner is until he starts acting funny.  Even so many years later this movie is still scary enough to make me not want to close my eyes in the shower.  Anthony Perkins knocked his performance out of the park!










9.  Misery -

Another Stephen King thriller, I know.  It's a horrific idea to me to be trapped in the middle of nowhere with an out of control fan who is willing to do anything to help you get another book of her favorite series out on the shelves, even if the author doesn't want to write anymore books.  Being tied to a bed with no one knowing where you're at and no way to communicate with the outside world?  Being tortured to do what someone else wants?  Ugh, that sledgehammer scene always gets me.










10.  Zodiac -

This isn't your typical scary movie.  The reason why I picked it was how unnerved I was at the end of it.  This is the true story of the Zodiac killer that terrorized the San Francisco Bay area for years killing randomly and sending cryptic messages to the local newspapers daring someone to figure them out.  The reason why this movie is so scary to me is to think about the depravity that the human mind can go through to produce a human being capable of torturing people for fun or because they need the "fix" again of killing.  They never caught the killer.  The movie focuses a lot on the lives of the people who are trying to figure out who it is before they kill again, but there's plenty of uncomfortable murder scenes.  It's disturbing because this actually happened, and can happen again all over the world at any time.  If you don't find that horrific then you're a stronger person than I.







I was also thinking of a few others but I just couldn't put them on the list, but they were close....
The Sixth Sense
Jaws