Okay, you want to know the scariest movie of all time? No problem. Just give me a minute to think ...
When I was about six years old, I watched this movie called
Frogs. Scared the crap out of me. Seriously. Scariest movie of all time. Except ... I just looked it up on IMDB, and the cover actually shows a giant frog with some dead guy's hand sticking out of its mouth. And it gets worse--here's the actual tagline: "Cold green skin against soft warm flesh ... a croak ... a scream! FROGS." Believe me, I couldn't make this up. I think at the end of the movie there was one guy who survived. He somehow managed to escape the malevolent frogs and made his way to this little rural road where he hitched a ride with some oblivious family that happened to be passing through. He climbs into the car, lets out a deep sigh of relief, and then turns to look at the kid sitting next to him. The kid with a turtle in his lap. The turtle slowly turns and glares menacingly at our lone surviver ... and cut to black. It's scary, all right. Scary bad.
Scariest movie? Okay, got it. A few years after my
Frogs experience, I was spending the night at a friend's house when this movie called
Prophecy came on. It was rated R--and my parents had been very clear that I wasn't allowed to watch R-rated movies--but my parents weren't around, so of course I watched it. The gist of the storyline is this: some irresponsible company is pumping toxic waste into the environment (mercury, if I remember correctly), and this causes the local wildlife to mutate and gives rise to some kind of giant killer bear-thing. I can still remember this scene where the monster shows up at a campsite and starts dragging campers out of their sleeping bags and ripping them apart. Scary, right? Except apparently I've enhanced the movie in my mind, 'cause when I saw it recently, it was more than a little cheesy. The monster looked like some fifth-grader's Halloween costume. So
Prophecy--definitely
not the scariest movie of all time.
What then? How about a real classic--something that gets lots of recognition? I remember, one night when I was an undergrad in college, a few friends showed up with a copy of
The Exorcist--something I'd actually never seen up to that point. So we popped it in. It was the perfect night for watching a movie about demonic possession--dark, stormy, and the lights kept cutting on and off because of the storm. Now that is one scary movie--especially if you believe in things like demonic possession, which I did at the time. Just as we were finishing the movie, the power cut out completely. It was more than creepy. A couple of years ago, I watched it again in the theater when they released the new re-edited version. It had definitely stood the test of time. Still scary. And there was some great new footage of Regan scuttling backwards down the stairs like some kind of demonic spider. I couldn't figure out why they hadn't included that footage in the first place. As it turns out, they cut it because they thought it would be
too creepy for audiences back then.
The Exorcist has
got to be the scariest movie of all time--right? Actually, no. There's one that's scarier:
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.
Never heard of it? When one of my roommates brought this movie home from the video store, we couldn't stop mocking him. What a stupid title! They couldn't come up with a better name for a serial killer than
Henry? How scary could it be? Then we watched it. Oh, boy. As it turns out, that was exactly the point they were trying to make. This wasn't some dude in a hockey mask. He was just a normal-looking guy like you and me--on the outside. But on the inside something was clearly broken, so he goes around killing people.
Violently. The thing is, guys like Henry really exist--they're out there, mingling with us sane folk. You'd never suspect these guys. They work with us, go to our office parties, live in the house across the street--they might even date our sisters. Now
that's what I call scary. Scariest movie of all time.
Baudelaire Jones is a playwright and freelance journalist. For further browsing on this subject, he suggests
movie trivia and
crime stories.
