Inspired by the creepy new trailer for Rings—the sequel/reboot/whatever of the 2002 J-horror remake The Ring—I decided to watch the original (well, the original American iteration) last night. While watching, I tossed off a tweet that it was probably one of the five scariest films of the last 30 years. This, of course, inspired people to ask what the other four were.
And ... I wasn't quite sure! So I thought about it a bit. It's a harder question to answer than you might think; "scariest" horror film is different from "best" horror film. For instance: I think The Witch, It Follows, and The Babadook are among the best horror films of the last 30 years, but I'm not sure any of them are really the scariest. They're great pieces of filmmaking, but I didn't find them super-frightening.
It's also an oddly intimate question, one that rests on both viewing experiences and what freaks you, personally, out. I guess what I'm saying is, a lot of you will think this list is dumb. But since I don't care what you losers think, well, here goes nothing.
5. House on Haunted Hill (1999)
I'm more than happy to admit that House on Haunted Hill's finale is something of a CGI-fueled dumpster fire (the whole Chris Kattan The Friendly Ghost thing just didn't work). But there are a bunch of really creepy images from this flick that just freak me out, man. For instance, when the ghosts that Mrs. Pete Sampras can only see through her camera look at her:
or whatever this was:
BLEH
Anyway, director William Malone's whole aesthetic gets under my skin in ways I can't quite articulate. His 2002 followup Fear Dot Com is a kind of hilariously dated idea of what Internet-infused horror might look like, but it drips with the same kind of imagery. No me gusta.
4. The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Sure, the found footage aesthetic is played out. Fine, there's a super-shaky-cam thing in this movie that's apt to induce motion sickness. But it was something else to watch this in a theater opening weekend, late at night, with a hyped-up crowd of horror fans. And the whole closing sequence still freaks me out. For pure, creepy, unexplained terror, this is a helluva final shot:
3. Paranormal Activity (2009)
(I'll be honest: I'm not 100% sure that's a shot from the original film, but there's one just like it that still haunts my nightmares. There's nothing scarier than someone looming over you for no good reason while you sleep.)
Again, this is another one of those flicks that functions as a memory of when and where I saw it as much as what was in the movie itself. Opening night in D.C., a late-night (midnight, perhaps, IIRC) showing, the theater filled to the rafters with horror junkies: it was nuts.
Set aside the sequels, which exist on a sliding scale of bad. The original is an impressive piece of minimalistic horror: there are a lot of static shots where we just see creepy things happen and a pretty basic concept, which boils down to "What if those noises in your house aren't just creaking floorboards?" Also, women be evil yo.
2. Event Horizon (1997)
Like House on Haunted Hill, Event Horizon is a movie that's extremely effective for about 80 percent of its running time before totally falling apart at the end. But when it's good, it's great. And by great, I mean creepy af:
nope nope nope nope
NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE
The uncensored version (NSFW, probably, unless you're a pencil-pusher in Hell) of the movie was way more intense.
1. The Ring (2002)
AH AH KILL IT WITH FIRE
Seriously, though, the thing that makes The Ring so good is that it builds mood without resorting to cheap scares. The prologue is one of the tensest bits of horror I've ever seen and it accomplishes the whole effect by barely showing you anything: a brief glimpse of the monster, a quick shot of the dying-from-fright girl.
I dunno if the remake or sequel or reboot or whatever Rings is will be any good. But its predecessor was, at heart, a film about the ubiquity of screens and the immorality of frightened people. So it could be the first reboot in history to be a better fit for the times than its predecessor.