For me, oddly, it’s The Ring. The shitty american Ring that everyone agrees is really not very good and the ridiculous color filter slapped over the whole thing just makes it dreary and washed out and bad.

I know why this is, too. It’s because I watched it in middle school before I had any experience with horror movies. The Ring was the first actual horror movie I ever watched and I didn’t watch another until after college. As a result, I can’t watch The Ring without being transported back to being a scared middle schooler. If I’d first watched it later, after I had a handle on the kinds of scares to expect from a horror movie, it wouldn’t have affected me the same. Objectively, it’s not that scary and is mostly just kind of bad, but fuck me if Samara climbing out of a TV isn’t an image that scares me to this day, every time I think about it!

Hereditary

mainly since after i biked home baked at 3am thinking about it

It’s old hat now but the movie that scared me the most is Ring - the Japanese one. The atmosphere is constantly threatening, the visuals are scary but not in an easily comprehensible way, like something primal but unknowably wrong. I feel like very few movies can do what it did.

I don’t really watch horror so I’ve got a low tolerance, but It Follows scared me and left me spooked. Like being constantly stalked by that snail but it’s a sex snail that could be anyone freeeky deeky stuff.

Apart from that lol it’s The Grudge, USA remake. But I didn’t actually watch all of it cos I had to leave the cinema (uhh it was too scary for my younger bro) so after one my friends told me that apparently there’s a scene where there’s croaking ghost in a swivel chair and they turn it around and there’s a jump scare, and my house had a swivel chair, and it would often be facing back towards me when I entered the back room and for a month I couldn’t look into that room if the lights were off, I’d just avoid it so indirectly it’s The Grudge.

Probably Color Out of Space, based on the work by H.P. Lovecraft.

Really shook me by the end.

(The recent one, I mean.)

Honestly, for me, it’s probably Poltergeist. I watched that movie waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too fuckin young, like, still in grade school, and television static STILL bugs tf out of me as a result

When I was young it was the grudge, i had to sleep on top of the bed covers for ages. But recently rewatched it and its deffo more of an unintentional comedy.

Possum terrified me because its so very well made but its not the traditional kind of horror.

UK version of the office because my dad showed it to me and said “this is what life is like after school” yeah not a movie but yeah.

Probably that move Mirrors. I just saw it at the exact right age for that jaw ripping scene to scare the fuck out of me

If you’re claustrophobic: the descent might land you in the hospital. It’s also really funny

I couldn’t help myself but reply with a really long list. It has been a long time since I saw a scary movie, or one that scared me anyway, so the award is gonna have to go to Rec (2007), and prior to that The Descent (2005). Room 1408 (2007) also really scared me at the time, and I discovered when rewatching it last year that there are multiple different endings depending on the version you get.

Other honrouable mentions:

• The Blair Witch Project
• Event Horizon
• Alien
• Aliens
• The Ring
• The Grudge
• Eraserhead while high as a teenager was genuinely traumatising
• Arachnophobia if you are at all scared of spiders
• Jaws when the head pops out
• It (1990)
• 28 Days Later
• 28 Weeks Later when he pops his wife’s eyes out
• The Dead Outside is another one that I was too high when watching to remember the plot of, but it was also very traumatising
• Deathwatch is set in the trenches of WW1, and the scariest thing is other people

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Special shout out to American Horror Story opening credits, which never fail to make me feel deeply unsettled

If I am really honest though the things that scare me the most are movies like Hostel where people are getting tortured ;_; the guy getting his achiles tendon sliced through stuck with me for a very long time

the grudge has haunted me from a very young age, I just don’t like that noise holy fuck what a nightmare

Coraline because it made me realize I had an abusive childhood and later, an abusive marriage. I’ve never been so emotional effected by movie.

The Last Airbender

My mom used me for translating horrors from a very young age. It didn’t desentisize me at all. It gave me fear induced insomnia.

The Ring / Onryo cursed me for years until I had a dream that I killed the girl with a sofa by shoving her with it against a wall really hard, but it was very late into my teenage years and prior to that it kept me unable to sleep very frequently.

I also agree on the Mirror movie. It’s very fucking scary.

I think the scariest movies take an element of an everyday life and then twist it. I watched the Descent and liked it. What keeps me scared is having my view of everyday things poisoned, so I start being apprehensive of them.

I dont know the horror name but I saw a meme of a horror where I assume a parental figure is replaced in bed with a monster and a child is reaching out to wakeup said parental figure without knowing. This is terrifying to me.

Another one which fucked with me was the one which is named like Ikea furniture. I couldn’t even finish on my own and watched analysis after analysis.

Movie isn’t even that scary, but I watched it in elementary school and was terrified by everything for like a month afterwards. One Missed Call