My Personal Horror: The Playlist Team Picks The Films That Scare Them Most

On the off chance you haven’t literally tripped over a pumpkin in the last five minutes, we’re here to remind you that tonight we celebrate the single greatest excuse ever invented to get trashed and wear skimpy clothing: Halloween. But of course, in addition to its status for some as a nationwide night of consequence-free hedonistic abandon, for others, Halloween has a deeper, more rarefied spiritual function: as a time to discover the limits of rationality; to test the boundaries of your relationship with the unknown and unknowable; in short, to scare yourself shitless.

Horror movies have long held a, well, hallowed position when it comes to the weird but primal desire to peep into the abyss, and if you’re searching for ideas for this week, you can certainly check out our rundown of 10 New Horror BluRays To Haunt Your Halloween, or look into the 5 Best and 5 Worst Horror Remakes, or learn how to shriek in Japanese with 10 Foreign Language Horrors or even take a look through Martin Scorsese’s 11 Scariest Films. But rather than do another list this year, we thought instead we’d gather around the Playlist campfire and tell each other stories of our own personal scariest films. If you’ve peeled enough grapes for the eyeball bucket and staunched the bloodflow from your carving injury, why not pull up a stick and a marshmallow and join us.

“The Descent” (2005) — Kimber Myers
I am a city girl at heart; the closest I’ll get to a cave is a basement apartment, and the nearest thing I’ve done to camping involved drafty cabin with a hot plate and dusty fridge. So if “The Descent” were only about six adventurous women trying to find their way out of an undiscovered cave system, I’d be terrified enough. But in fact the moment early on in Neil Marshall’s film where Sarah (Shauna McDonald) is stuck in a particularly tight tunnel is just where I begin to unravel, and it only gets worse from there. Once the women begin to be hunted by the cave’s freaky and freakish denizens, it’s all over for me. The sounds of their primal clicking and skittering across the cave floor has me moaning, which at least provides a nice break from screaming-devolving-into-nervous-laughter. What makes it worse for me is watching the bonds of friendship between the women quickly dissolve while the ever-dwindling number of survivors discover how far they’ll go to stay alive. On my most recent viewing, I was finally smart enough to watch with the lights on, which is probably a disservice to the dark palette director Marshall and DP Sam McCurdy created. That said, I still full-on screamed a half-dozen times. And then I stopped counting. Unlike the American edit, the original ending doesn’t give any release and so I spent the rest of the night jumping at shadows and the sounds of the kids next door scurrying across the floor.

“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974) — Katie Walsh
At age 21, I was cultivating myself as a horror buff and had a lot of catching up to do on the classics. That summer I was living with my grandparents and interning one day a week, so I had a lot of time on my hands, which I thought could be put to the good use of my education. By “education,” I mean walking to the local video rental store to rent horror DVDs. One night I decided to finally go for the notorious “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” which I had long planned to watch but had never gotten around to seeing… perhaps by design, even just the title terrified me. They only had it on VHS, so I rented it and took it home to watch on the VCR in the guest room. So there I watched it, alone, sitting cross-legged about a foot away from the TV (I didn’t want to turn the volume up, lest my grandparents worry about the sound of screaming/chainsaws buzzing). “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” didn’t scare me in the jump/scream way that slashers do. No, the jump/scream is far too easy an experience, allowing the flood of relief that comes from the reveal of fake scare, or of rooting for a final girl as she scrambles just out of reach of the killer. Nope, “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” wasn’t that push and pull of suspense and catharsis, it upset me on a deeply existential level, permeating my body and brain with a sick sense of dread that lasted for days (years?). Most truly scary horror films will be successful because they tap into some kind of spiritual, existential, or physical anxiety that troubles a core belief we hold about life or humanity. For me, with “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” the scene that is still seared on my consciousness is when wayward Pam finds herself in a room where the furnishings and decorations are made of human bones and body parts. The idea of the human body being used for some purpose other than what it is intended to do is one of the most disturbing, unsettling, and just plain philosophically wrong things I can conceive of. For other people, it might be different, perhaps amputation or the emptiness of space or claustrophobia or cannibalism. For me, it’s human bone lamps. That it’s such a mundane item exacerbates the sheer wrongness of it all. And that director Tobe Hooper was inspired by real events, included the serial killer Ed Gein, makes it even worse. The grungy, dusty, worn-down, pseudo-realistic aesthetic, and the warning that “the film you are about to see is real,” (I knew it wasn’t real, guys) added to the simple but shockingly effective execution of this classic. “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” proves all you need is a compelling idea (and to stick to it) in order to truly scare audiences. And no, I haven’t revisited it.

“The Beyond” (1981) — Gabe Toro
A movie like “The Beyond” isn’t remembered like a movie, it gets remembered as a dream. For a short while, I was convinced I hadn’t actually seen the film as I sat down and watched the Lucio Fulci classic, but that I had shut my eyes and allowed it to play in the deepest portions of my subconscious. The picture’s story, involving a gateway opening into Hell, feels like borderline free association, with gauzy sequences melting into each other as they are guided by the spooky-inconsistent dubbing. But those images are unforgettable, as it always is with Fulci’s films; “The Beyond” is the sort of film that makes you scoff at the cheap gimmick of 3D, with the trademark Fulci eye violence here the product of an itchy tarantula, taking you inside a hellish world where man and animal are no different in their savage goals. It’s the first death that lets you know that “The Beyond” isn’t child’s play, and it starts an avalanche of nightmarish ideas that proves no one quite knew zombies as well as Fulci. As they shuffle back to life, Fulci’s zombies decay and lunge towards the screen, and there’s something existentially troubling about that never-ending horde, escaping from a transient mist as if rejected from Hell. The ending to “The Beyond” is the rare final scene that seems ambiguous at first, and more maddeningly vague each further time you see it. It is a move from the real into the unreal, a shift from what you know as a movie to a bent reality where you can’t truly move from your seat until you acknowledge that Fulci has done the impossible and shattered the boundaries between the viewer and the horror. It’s the only movie I can’t watch with the lights off.

“The Blair Witch Project” (1999) — Jessica Kiang
With so many undeniably brilliant films here, it’s humbling to have to admit that when I think about fear in the cinema, I don’t go to Kubrick or Friedkin or Roeg or even to slasher or to giallo, instead I see that pre-millennial version of myself squirming away from the screen in abject, unprecedented terror at the image of Mike standing in the corner at the end of Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez‘s “The Blair Witch Project.” But just as you can’t pick who you love, you can’t pick what scares your face numb, and so braving the derision of the consensus that seems to have retrospectively agreed that it’s like, totally lame, I state for the record that this was the film that broke me. It may not be the best scary movie ever, but it was the movie that was best at scaring me. Bear in mind, while contemplating the purchase of a pair of jelly shoes and worrying about Y2K, or whatever I was doing in 1999, I had really never been genuinely scared by a film—I mean, I’d jumped and been momentarily creeped out by stuff , but nothing had ever wormed its way into my brain and lain across my torso like a cold dead thing. And after two horror courses as part of my film degree, I was pretty sure I was invincible. Hearing about it first via its innovative (for the time) viral campaign, I had duly snickered over the reports of people “thinking it was real” and at the stories of faintings and I dunno, hearts exploding during screenings—God, people could be such pussies! Ha. Joke was on me. Palms sweating, blood rushing in my ears, I remember pulling out all sorts of tricks to try and calm myself: for a while I only looked at the top right hand of the screen; I started reciting high school poetry under my breath; I went to the bathroom (which I never do mid-movie); the last 10 minutes I watched through my fingers with my thumbs in my ears; none of it worked. It was inside my head. And worse, somehow, was my isolation: at one particularly unbearable crescendo moment (handprints), I glanced, choking on my own pounding heart, at my friend Ado. He was yawning. Now, I had earlier peeled a banana for this guy because he has some sort of phobia about banana skins, so, yeah, he’s afraid of fruit, and he was yawning through the film. I felt so alone. Yes, a good portion of my reaction was probably that it was one of my first encounters with shaky cam (some poor chap a row ahead actually vomited). But that doesn’t take away from the film’s uncanny achievement: while for many it’s little more than a punchline about snotty crying, and genre aficionados roll their eyes and delete my number from their phones when I tell them, in “The Blair Witch Project,” for reasons I can’t explain, I absolutely met my horror Waterloo.