I'm not a huge horror movie fan, but oddly The Ring is the last movie that legitimately scared the shit out of me, when the first girl that died was shown briefly in the closet and head flopped down. The head flop did me in.
The head flop, then when she came out of the TV, but the worst for me was when Noah tried to run and suddenly she "blipped" across the stage right into him. I about fell off the sofa the same time he fell over.
(Worse, I'm watching this alone after midnight. And at the end of the DVD, it's programmed to ring a phone in stereo sound. It literally sounded like my phone was ringing in the kitchen, I was just like, "I am NOT answering that!")
What helped was that the entire movie's tone (the visual/coloring, the pacing, the sound, the secondary characters especially Brian Cox), well, it was all unsettling.
... another movie that came out about the same time was The Grudge remake with Sarah Michelle Gellar. Some really creepy moments there too, just really awful ones. (The little boy ghost hissing; the female ghost coming out of the dark and from under the covers; the female ghost slithering down the steps... ugh.) And of course I was watching it after midnight by myself in a pitch-black room.
DUDE. Oh man. I watched this movie for the first time in my living room at like 3am in the morning. Unbeknownst to me, my brother had army-crawled behind the couch I was sitting on. When Samara started coming out of the TV, and I was visibly freaked out, he reached up behind me and grabbed the back of my neck and dug his nails in.
I -screamed- like I was being murdered. My folks came running out of their bedroom, my step-dad had a baseball bat, because he thought someone had broken into the house or something.
Scared the shit out of me.
Oh, that's rich.
Your brother should be flogged.
viridian said:
2) The rabbit from Donnie Darko, especially when the title character begins stabbing the air in his house;
Yeah, that was eerie as hell.
Again, it's about tone -- the movie itself was kind of dream-like and unsettling, with a sense of impending doom. So small scenes like that really popped out. I thought the scene in the movie theater where he asks Frank why he's wearing the rabbit suit, and Frank replies, "Why are you wearing that man suit?" was creepy too, along with the music. Just so much there.
5) The entirety of Black Swan. Madre de Dios, what the hell was that?
ROFL! Yeah. It was really a mind-trip. Definitely creepy, though. Especially when you start mixing creepiness with sex. It throws everything on edge, like mixing sweet with sour.
As a weird one, "Drag Me to Hell" by Sam Raimi, despite the camp factor, actually was really creepy, starting with the original scene with the boy getting dragged into the fiery pits (another "WTH WAS THAT????" moment). And then later, when all the stuff is happening around her (her house is being destroyed by the spirit, etc.) While the other movies were more about building suspense, this movie was so over the top unexpectedly, that's what was getting to me.