Because if you can sit through the moment Heather discovers Mike standing in the corner of that abandoned house and not tear the leather off your La-Z-Boy’s arms then you’re a much tougher horror-watcher than we are. (Photo by Artisan Entertainment/courtesy Everett Collection)Īnyone who tells you this super-low-budget 1999 phenom isn’t actually scary just hasn’t watched it all the way to the end. Sound and darkness work overtime to drum up the suspense before the Babadook himself appears, jerkily terrorizing the woman on the edge of a breakdown.

On paper, it’s nothing we haven’t seen in any Conjuring or Insidious movie, but as executed by director Jennifer Kent and acted by Davis (robbed of an Oscar nom, and yes we’re still sore) it’s almost un-watchably tense. Take the scene in which the Babadook (dook, dook) taunts Amelia (Essie Davis) in her bedroom. But in the midst of the think pieces and the movie’s surprising afterlife, one thing often goes overlooked: The Babadook is just a really, really scary traditional horror flick, too.

(Photo by IFC Midnight/Courtesy Everett Collection)Ī lot has been written about The Babadook: It’s a story about grief, and it’s a story about feminism it’s less a horror film than a domestic drama and somehow through it all its central bogeyman has emerged a wonderfully camp gay icon. As the crew enjoys a meal together, Kane suddenly begins to choke and convulse on the table, and a small, lizard-like creature bursts through his chest and scrambles away, effectively birthing a horror villain that would terrorize space crews for decades to come. But the moment that became indelibly stamped in pop culture history comes just a few scenes later, after the facehugger has detached itself and Kane is recovering from the incident. So it comes as a shock to the system when a “facehugger” hurtles out of an egg and attaches itself to John Hurt’s Kane, puncturing the atmospheric dread with a visceral jump scare. One of the things that sets Ridley Scott’s sci-fi nightmare apart from the other horror fare of its era is its relatively slow burn, playing on the claustrophobia of space and the fear of the unknown. What’s the scariest movie scene you’ve ever seen? Tell us in the comments. These are the 29 scariest movie scenes of all time. These are the stuff of nightmares, what we see when we close our eyes at night. And work not just at producing a moment of fear, but sustaining that fear, sometimes for minutes on end, to drill deep into our psyche and staying there for decades. The one common thread between them all: They work.

A few feature amazing monster makeup and effects. Others deliver unnerving calm and quiet before shattering the senses. There’s all manner of method to the madness in our selections of the scariest movie scenes ever.

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