1. The Exorcist - This movie had me at the soundtrack. I saw it when I was 15 years old and it was still in it’s first run. I will never forget sitting between my friends, Steve Maddox and Gerry Rosen, both of whom had already seen the movie and were there just to watch me go pale.
Of course, being a boy-man I had to make a brave showing of it (otherwise I would have bolted for the exist the first time Linda Blair said “mommy, my bed is shaking”) so I sucked it up and somehow managed to make it through every blood-curdling, bone-chilling, trauma-inducing return by Max Von Sydow to that hellish bedroom with that hellish little head-spinning girl in it.
I remember thinking to myself, “please, for the love of God, don’t go back into that room.”
See the Trailer .
2. Psycho – This movie did for showers what Steven Spielberg’s Jaws would later do for body-surfing. Hitchcock, a master at combining the banal with the truly horrifying (a technique Mr. Spielberg himself would use repeatedly in his own movie-making career), gives us the story of a pretty bank teller on the lamb (Janet Leigh) who stops overnight at a little roadside motel. Unbeknownst to her the establishment’s proprietor (Anthony Perkins) has, shall we say, a bit of a mommy problem. This movie loses it’s power to frighten once you know the secret, but I have no doubt that now, 45 years later, it still can freak out the first time viewer.
See the Trailer .
3. Carrie – They peeled me off the theater ceiling after the final scene of this flick. Carrie (Sissy Spacek) is a shy and sheltered high school girl. Her mother, played brilliantly by Piper Laurie, is an insane, fanatical Christian who stuffs her daughter in a closet with a Jesus shrine and makes her pray for forgiveness for merely talking to a boy. Naturally, Carrie seems a dash odd to the other girls and, as teenagers are wont to do, they tease her.
They wouldn’t have, though, had they known what she would reveal to her mother in a later scene:
“I can move things, momma.”
That’s right, Carrie is a skilled practioner of telekinesis - the movement of objects with the mind – a talent she’ll make good use of later in the movie when she decides it’s time for a little payback.
See the Trailer.
4. The Shining - “Redrum.” This movie is just plain weird. I think it would have been scarier, though, if an unknown actor had played the Jack Nicholson role. But it’s plenty scary as it is. The thought of being alone in a large, vacant building always did give me the beejeebers.
See the Trailer.
5. Rosemary’s Baby – I hate to acknowledge anything directed by that pedophile, rapist, Roman Polanski, but this movie has to be on the most creepy list. A thinking man’s horror flick, it tells about a coven of witches who have bribed a new husband (John Cassavetes) to give his first born child to them for witch purposes. The movie doesn’t say exactly what those witch purposes are, but the possibilities make you shudder.
See the Trailer
2 responses so far ↓
1 cajajo // Nov 2, 2009 at 4:01 pm
The original House on Haunted Hill still has me afraid of little old ladies. That and almost anything with Barbara Steele.
2 Peter // Nov 2, 2009 at 4:26 pm
cajajo,
Thanks for visiting.
I haven’t seen House on Haunted Hill, but I’ll netflix it.
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