Real life is full of real scary things, like layoffs, newly discovered lumps, registered letters, or grown-up children threatening to come back home. While we hope to avoid these things, Halloween is a time when people consciously seek out scary experiences as a form of entertainment.
If you’re the sort of person who wants to be scared this year, below are my recommendations for the scariest Halloween movies ever.
- Psycho: Somehow I saw this Hitchcock movie, accidently when I was about 10 years old. It’s a good thing we didn’t have a shower at the time or I would have been stinky until high school.
- The Exorcist: I read the book first and it gave me nightmares. When the little girl’s head spun completely around in the movie, I almost displayed what they call in the Haunted House trade a loss of “yellow control”.
- IT: Pennywise, the demonic clown played by Tim Curry, is the scariest character ever. I still don’t look down storm drains, because he just might be there, looking up.
- The Amityville Horror: After watching the begining of this movie, Diane and I actually walked out of the theater , so we could rush home and check on our children.
- The Pet Sematary: I started this book, but never finished it. When I got to the point in the book where the little boy gets run over by a speeding transport truck, I threw the book against the wall and never read another word. A friend at work, who had read the whole thing, asked me, “Haven’t these people ever heard of a fence?”
- The Shining: Who can forget Jack Nicholson bursting through the door, screaming “Heeere’s Johnny”.
- Alien: I could never get past the scene where the alien creature bursts from John Hurt’s chest.
- Jaws: My popcorn went all over the theater, when they found the corpse in the sunken boat. I still swear that they flashed a picture of a shark in that scene, right before they showed the body.
- Frankenstein: When I was a kid my older brother Norman insisted on watching all of these old Universal horror movies on a local Friday night television show called Spook Spectacular. I was terrified.
- The Turn of the Screw: I never really understood the book, nor the film version, called The Innocents, until it was explained to me. Now I think the ghosts were real and it’s very creepy.
Finally if you prefer something a little more current you might try the Paranormal Activity 3, The Grunge, or The Ring. Happy Halloween!
It is interesting that all the villians have the “square mouth” expression that psychologist Paul Ekman indentified as signalling unbridled rage as in the illustration below.
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