An unsanctioned list by author unknown
The degree of scariness for said below author may actually be the opposite of the order in which these flicks have been listed. But instead of beating around the bush, let’s cut the crap (worthless ceremonial verbiage) and get right down to the nitty-gritty.
It’s like this, see:
“Frankenstein” (1931)
This thing, heartbreakingly played by Boris Karloff, meant to be the death-defying scion of misguided genius, turns out to be a monster from Hell. In addition to being a physically gruesome aberration, it is completely mentally deranged. The result is pure terror. Of a night in your living room easy chair, with the TV quietly transmitting “The Late Show” or the ten millionth rerun of “Seinfeld”, you wouldn’t want to momentarily nod off only to snap awake and find HIM standing behind you.
“The Omen” (1976)
That fucking little kid is scary.
“The Exorcist” (1973)
You know malice this pure and hatred this deep can never really be destroyed.
“The Shining” (1980)
It goes without saying that Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall put in star performances. Unquestionably, the hotel is a center of evil. But the scariest part of the movie is its director, Stanley Kubrick, whose visionary reimagining outshines disgruntled loser author Stephen King’s original.
“Freaks” (1932)
It is a circus of special people, carnival sideshow performers, who are not like most others. A ‘normal’, physically beautiful trapeze artist decides to trap a gullible and trusting wealthy midget into marriage to murder him and inherit his money. At their marriage feast, the freaks pass around a large chalice of wine and chant, “Gooble gobble, gooble gobble, we accept her, we accept her, one of us, one of us,” which infuriates the bride. The chant itself is awkward, embarrassing, eerie, unsettling, and to a degree terrifying, but it is perhaps the best in the way of good will that a collection of scary freaks can muster. Then they get wind of her evil scheme to do away with their friend and go after her. The final scene shows her as a sideshow attraction more sickening and appalling than any of the freaks heretofore shown in the movie. Inside a small pen, she is revealed as a legless squawking chicken woman, or, as Wikipedia describes her, a ‘human duck’. “The flesh of her hands has been melted and deformed to look like duck feet and her lower half has been permanently tarred and feathered.” Somehow, the movie makes it possible to believe that a thing like that could really happen. If the final image not only unsettles you but fills you with a sense of outrage against the freaks, then this movie has worked its demented spell. You will shudder.
“Night of the Living Dead” (1968)
Everything about this movie is simple, perfect, and correct. The truth told by its every moment carries the horror from beginning to end, culminating in the undead, or living dead, easily tearing the flesh off the newly dead and living people and eating it. An undead child, for example, murdering her mother and eating her father.
“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974)
The chick screams, and screams… and screams. Her eyes just about pop out of her head, the veins in her throat are strained to bursting. It’s a wonder she didn’t die from the exertion – in real life. The screaming is freaky, blood-curdling, and in-and-of-itself scary. The unimaginable horror of her predicament – being held captive by an all-male family of inbred bloodsucking cannibal lunatics, including a flesh-rotted dead-undead grandpa, who cheerfully hack, saw, and torture their victims to death – is convincingly and terrifyingly conveyed.
August 16, 2014