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The scariest thing about fear is how it can manifest itself. After you've seen a scary movie or TV show, went to a haunted house, had someone jump out at you from behind a corner, or walked down a dark street alone, the fear, and your fight-or-flight reactions, kick in. For some it feels physical—instant panic, maniacal crying, sweating and faint limbs. For others it's mental—looping thoughts of the image, the inability to dislodge the horror from one's skull and the knowledge that it may never leave.
So, what truly scares you? It's a question that came up in a Complex Pop Culture Official Meeting™, so here's just a few of the things that truly did (and possibly still do) scare the shit out of us.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Tobe Hooper’s 1974 rural slasher, is the scariest movie I’ve ever seen. I’ve had visceral responses to movies before—I fainted during the amputation scene in 127 Hours—but what I felt watching the group of teens try to escape from Leatherface, the overgrown and unwell monster played by Gunnar Hansen, stands out as something different. Moments of actual danger in my life have been thankfully few, meaning I don’t have much to compare this to, but I think I experienced the fight-or-flight response the first time Leatherface appeared on screen.
As I recall, there’s a lot of build up. The flashbulb-lit grave robbing. The empty road. The hitchhiker the teens pick up who turns violent with a straight razor. There’s the arrival at the house full of bones and bird feathers. It’s daytime when the first murder occurs, and it was late in the afternoon when I watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. My memory may have bent to the will of the movie, but I remember that it got dark in real life almost in sync with the sun setting on the television.
But that was later. When Leatherface shows up, it’s bright. Meaning you can see everything. Horror movies are almost entirely about what you see and when you see it; how clear it is and how long it lasts. Appropriately, when I first saw him, the inside of my head went stupid and spastic. Everything was a single looping phrase: I don’t want to watch this. I don’t want to watch this. I don’t want to watch this. I don’t want to watch this. I wanted to get up and turn off the TV but I couldn’t move—the images were too powerful. I’d never felt anything like it. It wasn’t like watching, say, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, something I saw years later. In one scene, Henry and his partner sexually assault and kill a family in their home. That made me feel physically ill, like I’d ingested something toxic; I thought about turning it off, but there was no urgency. I didn’t feel afraid or like I was in actual danger, like I did during The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as silly as that may sound.
I’ve never seen the movie again. I don’t want to. Not because I’m nervous about feeling that way again. It’s the opposite. I’m afraid it won’t affect me as much, and that scares me way more.—Ross Scarano
Scream 3 (2000)
I haven't been really scared—like "Nah, I can't go to bed tonight" scared—in a pretty long time. I blame my rationality, my unceasing ability to be like, "Dog, this isn't real life." It's a gift and a curse. But what it really means is that most of my memories of being scared shitless by movies or TV shows are from when I was pretty young, and they're all pretty embarrassing in hindsight. Thinner scared the crap out of me, and I just rewatched the trailer and it looks wildly awful; the Boy Meets World Halloween special where Feeny got scissors in the back shook me. And the ghost of Maureen Prescott in Scream 3 fucking terrified me.
It was my 11th birthday and Scream 3 had come out the same weekend, so for my party my mom took all my friends and I to the theater. I don't really know how—like, who was letting 8-year-old me watch the first two Screams?—but I was big fan of the franchise, so I was very amped for this party. Everything was going well—I was shotgunning Sour Patch Kids and someone in a Ghostface mask was slashing dudes—and then all of the sudden Ghost Prescott rolled up on Sidney's nice, isolated house in the mountains, howling "Siiiiidney" and floating around the backyard in a generally creepy way, as ghosts do. What the hell, Wes Craven!? Ghosts weren't on the menu! I only signed up to see generically handsome guys be really meta whilst gutting people! I wasn't prepared for this! It totally threw me off my game on my birthday, and I had to spend the rest of the movie making sure I didn't look too scared in front of all my friends.
Like Thinner and that Boy Meets World episode, I'm sure this part of Scream 3 is laughable now, but at the time, Craven freaking got me, man.—Andrew Gruttadaro
Minority Report (2002)
What's the scariest thing I've ever seen? When I'm posed that question I take it seriously and genuinely. It's deeper than watching a horror film for the first time wherein edits and piano stabs are designed to make me jump. That's a one and done affair. I'm talking about lasting shit, shit that instills dread, makes me cringe even when I've already seen it a dozen times. To that end when Lit Pop Culture Aunt, Kerensa Cadenas asked me, not one quote unquote scary movie actually came to mind. I drew a blank...and then settled on a movie that is decidedly not billed as horror and/or scary came to mind. Fucking Minority Report, fam. Definitely not a movie in my must-watch-every-October list.
But there's one sequence in that movie that terrifies me every single time since it became an insta-fave when I saw it in theaters in 2002. The murder of Anne Lively, which lowkey drives the plot of the film, as seen multiple times by Tom Cruise's lead cop and the shook, weirdo bald chick precog he partners up with is simply haunting every time it plays out—which happens sometimes in reverse as Anderton works to solve the murder and ascertain its significance. The score, with its baroque, wailing voices, literally makes my hair stand up. And when Anne's attacker runs up on her in the middle of an inherently creepy woods setting to drown her, I lose it. Horror film? Maybe not. But when I watch Minority Report alone, suddenly my tendency to watch movies in the dark dissipates and I'm going straight for the lights. RIP Anne.—Frazier Tharpe
Candyman (1992)
I was probably dumb young when I first got into horror films; we're talking seven or eight years old, living in the north side of Trenton, NJ. Life wasn't gunfire, but it was rough. The thing was, horror films (and most media in general) didn't relate to me; it was hard to trip on Freddy Krueger terrorizing these kids in the suburbs, because that wasn't really my life. Even 1991's The People Under the Stairs, which featured a protagonist that came from a similar area (although his life was way rougher), the actual action took place in a bugged-out madhouse in the suburbs. I got dude, but it still felt foreign.
Then Candyman dropped in 1992.
Sure, the entire movie takes place all over (with blood being splattered all over everything), but the idea that I lived near projects that resembled the Chicago's Cabrini Green housing project where we learned more about this diabolical monster always sent chills down my spine. It made the movie feel more "real," because it began as this urban legend that was actually true af. Like, I would start saying "Candyman" in my bathroom mirror and have to stop myself before he appeared behind me.
Sure, I was young—11 years old—when that film dropped, but its always stuck with me for how it connected to the life I saw outside of my windows on the way to school. And that was terrifying.—khal
Trouble Every Day (2001)
Being Complex's resident horror creep, it takes a lot to truly scare the shit out of me. (I laughed my way through The Ring as a small child, if that helps contextualize anything.) With most horror films, I'll tense up in the moment, briefly enjoy the sensation of almost pissing my pants, and then move on with my life. But the one movie that truly, nauseatingly horrified me, to the point where I will probably never bring myself to rewatch it, is Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day, a New French Extremist film about cannibalism and blood-thirsty subjects.
Béatrice Dalle's Coré character is a maneater (quite literally) and I've always found acts of violence during sex to be the hardest to watch (a close second choice for this list would have been the first vignette in V/H/S). I just can't get the vomit-inducing image of Coré biting off her lover's tongue during fornication and then poking her finger through his cheek out of my head. There's just so much goddamn blood in this movie. And oh god, all the pained screams! So much pain and suffering. Equally disturbing is Vincent Gallo's sex scene with a maid at the end, in which he...literally...eats her out. Like, he bites off her—you get it. I respect the hell out of Claire Denis and have loved her other films, but Trouble Every Day actually still troubles me...every day. I guess my first mistake was deciding to drink red wine while watching it.—Kristen Yoonsoo Kim
It (1990)
If It’s “inter-dimensional predatory life form” (as Wikipedia so eloquently puts it) wanted to freak me out it would take the form of the movie’s VHS tape. I watched dozens of horror movies as a kid before reaching ten (probably a sus decision on my dad’s part), but none had me as fucked up as It. Truth be told, I can’t even tell you much about the movie itself. Most of the actual details have been repressed because letting Stephen King’s orb of terror take permanent refuge in your dome just isn’t healthy.
What I do remember is the aftermath, laying wide awake in bed for at least a week. Pennywise’s long, clawed digits were gonna rise up and snatch me down from my bunk bed. I knew it. And storm gutters: I never looked at those the same again. You could drop my Yeezys down one, and I’d walk away like, “I guess I don’t have Yeezys anymore.” The only thing I’m less likely to do than spending some face time with a storm gutter is watching this flick again. Keep that VHS, DVD, mp4, Netflix tab, or whatever the hell away from me.—Ian Servantes
Twin Peaks (1990-91)
David Lynch's bizarre, surrealist, horror soap opera Twin Peaks isn't really that scary, I'll preface with that. The world that Lynch created around the aftermath of the murder of popular teen dream, Laura Palmer, for the most part feels like a Peyton Place parody—filled to the brim with the types of crazy quirky characters like the Log Lady (RIP) who generally permeate Lynch's greatest visions. The steaming underbelly of Twin Peaks is where the show's horror lies, seen in the dance moves of Leland Palmer, a white fan constantly running, and more than anything, the vague details of Laura's death.
Lynch's world-building of the rainy Washington town where Twin Peaks is set probably aids in making Laura Palmer's murder in the first episode of season two one of the scariest things I've seen. On a grainy VHS tape, I watched Ronette Pulaski's dream about Laura's murder—filled with flashes of Laura screaming with blood caked in her mouth and BOB (maybe the most terrifying onscreen presence ever?) howling and pummeling her body. It ends with a slow pan over Laura's lifeless, bloody body with a terrifying freeze-frame of BOB's snarling face before fading to the end credits.
What terrified me about it was that you couldn't completely see what was happening to Laura. You knew, that despite seeing her suffer and BOB's terror/face, there was even more happening between the artful flashes. And after watching for 14 episodes, I knew Laura—her traumas and her flaws—and what she had gone through to that point. Even though I anticipated her murder, I couldn't handle watching it. When the episode ended, I decided I had I to take the garbage out. I shakily walked down a damp, low-lit alley in the middle of the night. It was the worst choice I could have made.—Kerensa Cadenas