10 Greatest Horror Scenes Of All Time
By James Elens

I've gotten some requests for lists, so here's a list of my 10 All-Time Greatest Horror Scenes.  Every one of these films is certainly worth watching for more than one scene alone, so if you haven't seen any of them, hit up Blockbuster, shut off the lights, and get near something or someone to hold onto because these are all gems of terror and suspense!

(Listed in no particular order)


There's A Dead Girl In My Tent
("The Sixth Sense")
    Our poor little ghost-seeing boy has built his own shelter from the horrors plaguing him.  The red tent in his room seems to be his only escape, but wouldn't you know it, those damned ghosts found a way to get in.  M. Night Shyamalan works one of the most potent camera pans ever as the clips holding the tent break one by one until we're face-to-face with a vomiting little girl, her eyes pleading and her face as terrified as we are for looking at her.  It is suspenseful simplicity at its finest.

Sloth
("Se7en")
    It says something about our cultural numbness that the horrifically decayed creature laying on the bed as Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman enter the room doesn't do much more than give us your average movie gross-out.  We've seen dead bodies on the screen before.  But then this one jumps.  The moment is terrifying not just for the visual and auditory shock value, but for everything it reveals about the victim's previous fate.  Like all of the murder scenes in David Fincher's masterpiece, seeing the final result leads us to visualize the unthinkable suffering and grisly mayhem that came before our detectives arrived on the scene. 

Spiderwalk
("The Exorcist")
    This scene was actually  edited out of the original theatrical release.  It's hard to imagine why, since I can't see how it would be viewed as any less tasteful than a girl jamming a cricifix into her crotch.  But boy, is this one a doosy.  Like many great horror scenes, its effect is heightened by simple, long-shot editing (well, long for horror shots).  We're allowed to just sit and gawk at this child spiderwalking down a staircase as her mother watches in horror.  The walk is just so genuinely disturbing that it lingers in your mind long after the scene is over, which is saying a lot considering that the film is packed with many other scary and off-putting moments.

Containment Failure
("28 Weeks Later")
    Both of the films in this franchise get a lot of mileage out of easy shock scares and buckets of gore, but I don't think I've ever seen a longer, more consistently harrowing horror scene.  The grisly chain reaction amongst the people trapped in the below-ground containment chamber as the "Rage" virus rampages through their ranks is one of the greatest extended moments of horrific chaos ever filmed.  Seeing the mixed hordes or both infected and uninfected rush into the streets, feeding on each other as they're shot up by snipers and machine guns, adds another heart-pounding chapter to this bloody depiction of "containment failure".  It's a real-world hell unleashed onto the streets of London, and you'll find yourself taking a long exhale when the pace finally slows down.

Face The Wall
("The Blair Witch Project")
    The film is often a punch-line nowadays, but a lot of that is due to the absurd amount of hype it received before most people saw it.  If you're able to just sit down and watch this film for what it is, the last scene is one of the most genuinely disturbing sequences ever.  Of course, we're all waiting (in vain) to see the witch in question, but having the camera jitter by hand prints all over the dirty underground chamber and then reveal a silent man staring into the wall is enough to send a series of shivers down the spine.  And it's done without fancy special effects, cheap jump cuts, or loud noises.

Chestbuster
("Alien")
    After nearly three decades of constant replay and discussion, this infamous scene may have lost some of its scare value.  But it's still one of the legendary horror scenes of all time.  If you didn't know it was coming, the little bugger bursting from the guy's chest was a genuine punch to the gut and was almost guaranteed to lift you out of your seat.  It sends the film off at high speed into a horrifying new direction.  You'll never look at heartburn the same way again.

Don't Open The Closet
("The Ring")
    I didn't include a picture with this scene because a still of it would just degrade the scene's effect too much (plus it's just too messed up), but those who have seen it know what I'm talking about.  It starts with Naomi Watts listening to your ordinary bizarre tale of a woman's daughter being found dead in her closet after watching a video tape.  Then it flashes back to the mother opening that closet door.  The corpse inside, with it's twisted, gut-wrenching facial expression, is one for the books, and the brevity of the scene only adds to its power, as well as its ability to linger in your head long after the film is over.

Under The Knife
("Hard Candy")
    Ellen Paige may have won over a lot of hearts in "Juno", but you'll never look at her same way after seeing her take a scalpel to a presumed child molester in this movie's most cringe-inducing scene.  Let's just say she's trying to make sure he'll never have the balls to abuse kids again.  I'd assume the scene affects the men a bit more than the women (fellas, you'll be covering your crotch with a kitchen pan the whole time), though it's stomach-churning no matter who you are.  But is the whole ordeal just a cruel psychological trick?  The film leaves that unanswered, but it'll still make every guy back away faster when he sees a teenage girl with any kind of blade.

The Bag
("Audition")
     This scene represents one of the great thematic and tonal shifts inside any film.  Before it, the story seems innocent enough.  Widower Japanese television producer trying to find himself a new wife, then finds himself a beautiful, mousy Japanese chick.  Everything seems cool.  Right?  Then there's that big white bag behind her as her phone rings with the producer on the line.  And then the bag jumps, and it's a whole new ballgame.  Just like that, this is a horror flick, and one of the greatest ever made.  From there we get a front row seat for this sinister beauty's revenge against patriarchal tyranny, and though many terrors await, they've been set up expertly by that damn jumping bag.  Those Japanese sure can scare us.

Big Wheel Ride To Hell
("The Shining")
    I know I used to ride my Big-Wheel all the time as a kid, but fortunately I never ran into a couple of creepy dead girls holding hands after they've been hacked up with an ax.  "The Shining" is filled with horrifying and disturbing moments, and I actually found some more disturbing than this one (Shelly Duval seeing the guy in the bear costume going down on the gentleman in the suit tops my list).  But no scene in the film epitomizes the terrors of that mountain retreat more than those two little girls.  That and the reaction we see on the boy's face as he sees both them and their grisly fate (which could be his own).  Stanley Kubrick's expert pacing and razor-sharp editing just make it that much better.  A classic horror scene from of the greatest horror films of all time.