In the Shining, I found Jack Nicholson funny and a little buffoonish. ("I'm not gonna hurt ya! I'm just gonna bash...your...brains in!") But the corpse-lady coming out of the bathtub, the spooky twins...those still haunt me.
The Omen gets me every time. Especially the scene where they are in the cemetary digging up the grave of Damian's "real" mother. It was just so incredibly creepy.
The Sentinel was another 70's horror flick that freaked me out when I watched it. Particularly the part where the girl decides to go upstairs to the apartment overhead to investigate the weird noises.
The part in Alien which still scares me is the air vent sequence. Hurt's chest-bursting scene is awesome, but you know it's coming and you can expect it now. I rewatch the part with Tom Skerritt and still feel nervous.
It's the Ring for me. I don't see what's so good about the Jap version but the US version scares me just fine. The well scene is just scary especially when they finally show the whole thing.
Jaws hit my list too, but I'd have chosen the scene when the shark's head comes out of the water at good old Roy.
One problem that most films listed above suffer from is COLOR. Maybe it's just because I grew up with and old Black & White TV, but I've always found that B&W made for a far scarier picture. I had nightmares for years after scene that I saw from an old movie on TV when I was around 4 or 5 of a bear decapitating a cowboy.
I'm just about immune to fear (must be a paladin thing), but I did find some parts of the Ring worth mention. Unlike a couple of the posters on this thread, I found the whole "crawling out of the TV" scene incredibly goofy and the worst of the movie. Give me suspense and cerebral horror any time. When you can see what's coming, it stops being scary, at least for me.
That's one reason "The Omen" tops my list of scary movies. Not because of anything that's on-screen, but because of everything that's implied and left open to the imagination.
A few more scary scenes I wrote down, but didn't post:
Exorcist 3, with the decapitating-tool being outstretched to chop heads.
The House on Haunted Hill (remake), when the girl is videotaping, and sees the unneeded operation being performed thru the camera viewer, but can't see them getting closer to her when she looks with her eyes.
Prince of Darkness, when the IT is emerging from the church in the static-filled TV telecast from the future.
Event Horizon, those rapid-fire recordings of atrocities was quite unsettling...
Probabaly a bit late but one of the scariest movies (definately scariest vampire) I ever saw was Nosferatu (1922 F.W. Murnau). Saw it a film festival once and the thing is just so awesomely creepy. - no blood, no killing just amazing use of shadows
the scariest part (maybe cause I was getting sleepy at 1 am) is when the on the ship when Count Orlok rises from his coffin! - sent a tingle up my spine anyway...
Just saw the Ring tonight. The first two thirds of the movie I spent chuckling at it, because it was downright goofy. Oooooh, some people die mysteriously. Because they watched a "student art film". Bah.
And then, by the end, they've figured out what's going on mostly, and solve the puzzle, and everyone is fine and you get the pseudo-denoument, which drags on a little longer than it should, and I'm starting to think, shouldn't the credits have rolled by now?
The actual
girl crawling out of the TV, and the dessicated dead bodies, even falling down the well
weren't very scary, and the twist wasn't very surpising, but that little boy was damn scary. He was so intense all the time, and like somebody else posted earlier, when he looks at the mom and says "You helped her? Why did you do that?", well, that's pretty much the reason that it's 5 hours later, and it's almost 6AM, and I'm still awake. Darn creepy little kid. And I think I may have to lock my TV in the closet for a while.
So, I was wondering, the rest of the plot had its own internal logic, but what did the phone call have to do with anything? It's not like
the evil mother suffocated her daughter, then threw her down the well, then tossed down a cell phone so she could call her and say "you're going to die in seven days".
So what's with the phone call? Very wierd.
We also wondered what would happen to people who saw those still shots the mom printed out from the film. Watching the whole thing would kill you, so if you saw a still, did
Samara crawl out of the TV seven days later, sneeze on you, and give you a cold?
