The Scariest Movie Ever?

I have been a fan of horror movies for a long time. The very first movie to get me to love movies qualifies as a horror movie. I was a kid fascinated by sharks and whales and marine life and I had book upon book about them, which I would read for hours. I was born in 1971 and a sensation was created while I was still a kid when the movie Jaws became a smash hit. I wanted to see it so bad, but my parents would not take me to the theater. I didn't care. I was fascinated anyway. I eventually got to see it on video tape in the late 70s and it was as great as I always knew it would be.

Soon, video rental places were popping up and it became a kind of tradition for my family to visit the little place near us once a week. Back then you chose the VHS or the Beta side. We had a Betamax machine and we would pick one movie the whole family could watch and then pick one horror movie for me and my dad. Soon, I was telling people my favorite movie was Alien.

The thing is, the debate over what is the scariest movie ever made is one that, truly, cannot be answered. In fact, I have to admit, up front, that I have not seen even a fraction of the horror movies that have been made. I am not sure it is possible to see every horror movie ever made. More importantly, I have to admit I have never seen what many consider to be the scariest movie ever made from beginning to end in one sitting and that movie is The Exorcist. I have seen it in bits and pieces over the years and read the book and know what it is about, but have never sat down and watched it from start to finish.

That being said, I wanted to talk about the movie that gets my vote for the scariest movie ever made. More than likely you true horror fans out there are going to get to the end of this article and then come marching after me with torches burning like a mob out of a Frankenstein picture. I understand that. My vote is for a very strange, unconventional, not-typical horror movie that fright fans and gore fans will vehemently oppose.

Recently I saw the Dario Argento movie Suspiria mentioned as the scariest movie someone had ever seen. Look, I wrote an article about ten scary movies everyone should see and that movie has a prominent place on that list. For fans of horror, it is an important movie to see and it does have some genuine scares, but seriously, the scariest movie ever? To me, the flaws in the movie far outweigh the scares and, thus, have to remove this movie from the list.

First, there is the opening scenes which, for many, are the scariest. A frightened woman arrives at a friend's house. She is running from someone, which is obvious, but you are not sure why. Her friend lives in an apartment very high off the ground and when the woman goes into a room and stares out the window, suddenly, in the middle of the air, eyes appear. Hands break through the glass and grab her, smashing her face against the glass until the glass breaks. Cut to her friend wondering what the noise is about. Then cut to a mysterious man stabbing the girl on a rooftop including one scene where we see the knife stab directly into her beating heart. Finally, a rope is tossed around the girl's neck and she is thrown through a large stained glass window and is left hanging there, bleeding. Then the camera pans slowly down and we see her friend, down below, with a huge piece of glass impaling her, the blood an insidious bright red, like maraschino cherries. And all of that is just an opening for a movie about a coven of witches running a school for girls in some foreign land.

Pretty scary stuff, huh? Well, sure, if you don't really look at it. The problem, for me, is that the movie doesn't earn the scenes we just saw. Let me give you an example. We see one shot of the knife plunging right into the beating heard of the girl. The flesh and breastbone is gone and we see the knife plunge straight into the bright red heart, then there is a sickening sound as blood sprays from it. OK, but what is this shot? Has the killer magically removed her breastbone and ribs? Has he carved this giant hole in her chest? Or is this some pre-CSI, interior wound shot? It is never explained. You aren't supposed to care.

Then there are the random scenes that have nothing to do with the movie. At one point, for no reason, maggots fall from the ceiling on several of the girl students. Why? No reason other than director Argento thought it would be gross and shocking to dump maggots on his actresses. Or then there is the scene where the bat flies into the room of the main protagonist. Is this scene seminal to the plot? No, it has nothing to do with the plot, it too is random. If you removed either of these scenes you would still have the movie.

Then there is the plot itself. A school run by a coven of witches including a head witch who is ancient and evil. They kill anyone who finds out about them or threatens to reveal their secret. Given what a piss-poor job they do throughout the movie of keeping their secret hidden, you would think the student population each year would be reduced so dramatically by the end of each term word would get around about this school.

Finally, at the end, our heroine succeeds in defeating the witches. The building seems to be falling apart around her. She staggers outside, into the rain, of a street crammed with buildings. Does she faint? Does she scream? No, she just sort of staggers, brushes her hair back, sighs, and walks off screen. Huh?

Once again, don't get me wrong. Much of the movie works. The soundtrack and score provided by the creepy group Goblin is effective. The bright colors gives the blood and gore a surreal, terrifying feel. I am just saying, to me, the movie doesn't earn the suspension of disbelief it wants you to have right from the beginning. What do I mean by that? Let me give two movies as an example.

The first is Jaws. The movie is a classic now and I can recite the damn thing from beginning to end. It is legendary how, Bruce, the mechanical shark, did not work for much of the filming, forcing Spielberg to rely on other methods to show the shark. These turned out to be much more terrifying. So, you don't even really see the shark until the movie is more than half over, when it jumps out while Chief Brody is chumming. The scare is effective. However, the movie, at the end, turns preposterous. There is no shark, no matter how great or how white, that can stand on its tail and jump on a boat and wait for the food to fall into its mouth the way the shark does here. Also, thanks to the show Mythbusters, we know that the way in which Brody kills the shark is impossible.

At the time the movie was filmed, the man who wrote the novel, Peter Benchley, was on the set and he was upset with the ending Spielberg had come up with. It was unbelievable, he said. Spielberg agreed but then he said something very true, he said, "If I have the audience with me this far, they'll be willing to go with me the rest of the way." In other words, if he had done right during the first part of the movie, they would willingly suspend their disbelief and accept the tail-dancing shark and the exploding air tank. He was right.

The second movie does this much less successfully and that is the movie Signs. Yes, I know it stars Mel Gibson and M. Knight Shaymalan's last movie was such an appalling train wreck that all copies should be burned, but he was still doing something right here. The movie is effective for most of the length of it because the aliens are just menacing clicks and noises on a baby monitor, a movement in the shadows, a leg seen briefly here, a hand seen there and a blurry video from South America. This builds tension and it isn't until Shaymalan steps too far by showing us a full-on alien at the end (and that it is a truly disappointing and unsatisfying alien) that we are taken out of the film and we then have questions we cannot suspend. Why can these aliens cross space and not break through wooden doors? Why do they have no technology to fight mankind? Why would they pick a planet mostly covered with water if it was acidic and deadly to them? It is not quite as effective as Jaws, but until that end moment, it tries hard to earn it. It almost succeeds.

For me, horror is not about gore. The gore and the monsters are secondary. Rarely is blood by itself scary. Yes, it may make you go "ew" but if it doesn't make you jump, what is the point? Or, even more importantly for me, if a movie doesn't haunt you for days, weeks, maybe even years after you see it, then it really isn't that effective. Most modern horror does not do that for me and certainly not the torture-porn movies that have, inexplicably, become so popular with so many modern audiences these days. I am sorry Mr. Roth, but Hostel is not scary, it is just gross and that ain't gonna do it for me.

No, my pick for the scariest movie is a movie that none of you gore fans and supposedly "true" horror fans are going to agree with. That's OK. I am prepared to take the heat for this and I knew when I started writing that I would get pilloried and raked over the coals for my choice. It was a movie I saw in the theaters when it was out and it had me wide-eyed and open-mouthed in the seat. Not once did I really jump during this movie, but the overwhelming sense of dread and terror began to creep over me shortly after it started and it kept building at a relentless pace until, by the end, and it's truly horrific ending, I was a mess. Scenes from this movie have haunted me for years and, upon recently seeing it again on cable, the movie has become more terrifying and haunting as I have gotten older. This movie is David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers.

Cronenberg is a selection that many horror fans will agree with as a horror director. He certainly made enough gross-out horror films long before he made this tale. He made movies about a woman who has fangs in her armpits and he made a movie about a man who develops a slit in his stomach in which he inserts videotapes. He also made the remake of The Fly with Jeff Goldblum and raised the bar on gross-out in a way that had not been raised since John Carpenter's The Thing.

However, this movie has none of that. There is almost no blood at all. There is one very, very brief dream sequence with a bit of grossness and then an ending that is shocking because of the blood, but it is certainly not a splatter film. No, this is a movie that takes place entirely in the mind and it takes place within the mind of twin gynecologists named Elliot and Beverly Mantle. They are world-renowned for being able to make women who are unable to conceive, have babies.

It is a bravura performance by Jeremy Irons who plays both brothers. It was a performance that should have garnered him an Academy Award, but the academy ignores horror. He won the following year for Reversal of Fortune and in his acceptance speech he thanked Cronenberg and everyone who saw Dead Ringers knew why.

These twin brothers share everything. Elliot is the shark, calm and collected, who appears to have no ability to connect to people while Beverly is the emotional one. They have a way of sharing everything, including women. Elliot seduces them and then Beverly comes in and connects to them emotionally until they are both bored and then they move on. However, things go wrong when they seduce the actress, and prescription drug addict, Claire Niveau, played by Genevieve Bujold.

Beverly falls in love. Then, as he continues his affair with Claire, who is a functional but hopeless addict to prescription pills, she gets Bev hooked on pills as well. Since Bev is unable to handle this emotionally, he begins to lose his grip on reality. As Elliot attempts to save the face of the Mantle medical practice, his brother begins to spiral out of control in a haze of love, addiction and, finally, utter madness.

We soon see that even though Elliot tries to play it cool, he is addicted to his own brother. We see him when Bev collapses, push his girlfriend off of him and scream, "He's MY brother!" Then, he starts to take pills as well. He says this is so he and Bev can be on the same level again, and then he can bring them both back to sobriety and sanity together. Soon, both brothers are entering the same spiral and it is shocking, terrifying, sad, and haunting to watch.

Bev becomes so insane he comes to believe that the women in his office are mutants. So, he designs some of the most terrifying medical instruments you will ever see and has a local artist make them. He calls them "Gynecological Instruments for Use on Mutant Women." The scene where he attempts to use these on a patient will make most women who see it avoid seeing their own doctor for probably much longer than they should.

The descent is utterly terrifying and it is one of the most shocking and graphic portrayals of madness and addiction ever filmed. Irons throws himself into these characters and the film methods used to make it seem like both brothers are on the screen at the same time, in a pre-computer-generated-effects world, are remarkable. The final scenes are a haunting mix of humor, sadness, terror and madness. The scene where both brothers are walking, one after the other, through a garbage-strewn apartment, in their shirts and underwear, both shooting up is just haunting. Then comes the final, shocking, horrifying scene and I swear to you, once you see it, you will never forget Bev walking around the apartment, eyes wide in terror, saying, "Ellieeee......Elllieeee......Elllieeeeee...." And if you look in the background....well, you had better just see for yourself.

It is a movie that most of you horror fans out there might watch and then mock me for suggesting this as the scariest movie. I understand that. Obviously, I am in the minority here. The gory, splatter-heavy, torture films still make great money at the theaters. They are still making Saw movies. Most horror fans don't want to have to think too hard and they want their gore and their horror laid out for them in bright colors and broad strokes. I get that.

However, if you think you can handle something a bit more subtle. If you think you can handle a horror that is, quite frankly, all too potentially real, then Dead Ringers is a movie you should see. It will haunt you. It will terrify you. It will remain in your memory long, long, long after the movie is over.

On the other hand, if you like more conventional horror, it might also bore you to death. Still, it gets my vote and that's just my opinion.