What’s The Scariest Movie You’ve Ever Seen?

By The Hairpin October 14, 2015

by Alexandra Molotkow

But first: What is scary? In my view, there are three basic categories thereof.

One is the Body Scare. Quite simply, a scare that engages a basic lizard-brain response in the viewer, normally shock or disgust. You might call this the Cheap Scare, since it’s the most reliable way to get a rise out of your audience, but it doesn’t have to be cheap: think of Inside, Tetsuo, the Iron Man, early Cronenberg, or, I might argue, the Saw franchise, which at its best is pretty neat-o in a Chip’s Challenge sort of way, and really funny. (Even a stupid, cheap, unimaginative body scare is better than a smart, soulless, and indefensible body scare, like Irreversible or those movies about Unit 731, which I haven’t been able to watch.)

The next two categories involve scary movies that rely on your thinking brain. I divide these into Good Scary and Bad Scary. Good Scary is, simply, a scared I like to be, from a safe remove. Bad Scary is a scared I don’t like to be, because it relies on an inborn concept that needs no material reinforcement. Good scary needs a premise, Bad Scary doesn’t.

Good and Bad Scary don’t divide along genre lines, and they often appear in the same movie (Hellraiser, in which demons sexually torture their summoners for eternity, is a notable combo.). They’re a little tricky to tease apart, so — my apologies — I’m going to fall back on undergraduate philosophy here. Heidegger, if I’m remembering right, distinguished between existentiell and existential matters. The former has to do with existing, verb, and the latter with existence, noun: beings in the world, versus Being itself.

Existentiell death involves pain and suffering and, you know, not getting to do the things you do as a living person. Existential death has to do with not being. So existentiell (Good) horror is about things that could happen — even fantastical things that almost certainly won’t — while existential (Bad) horror is about eternity and oblivion, which are much scarier, in my view.

These categories don’t actually say much about scare factor. A very scary movie like Session 9, which deals with the absolute worst-case “existentiell” scenario (highlight for spoiler: you go crazy and murder your loved ones), can be less disturbing than a movie that isn’t even supposed to be that scary, like Drag Me to Hell, in which (highlight for spoiler: a perfectly nice girl makes a series of innocent mistakes and gets dragged to Hell), or, uh, The Devil in Miss Jones (Horny Jail: not all it’s cracked up to be!)

Event Horizon is all three kinds of scary, and it is very, very scary. Here is the premise: a space vessel called Lewis and Clark follows a distress signal to a seemingly abandoned starship called the Event Horizon — a state-of-the-art vessel that travels (I think) by creating black holes through which to bound spacetime. Once they find, and board this ship, very strange and awful things start happening to the Lewis and Clark crew, including terrible visions and the discovery of video diaries featuring the missing Event Horizon crew members gouging out their eyes and tearing each other apart. Turns out the Event Horizon accidentally travelled into “a dimension of pure chaos, pure evil,” which, to quote Wikipedia, has given it “a horrible telepathic sentience that torments its occupants and compels them to return to this Hell.” Hell is basically a series of horrifying, rapid-fire images you can’t not see, hence the eye-gouging. You can guess the rest! (It’s worse!)

There are many, many body scares — um, eyes being gouged out, plus vivisection, and good old high tension. And there are many Good Scares, including the ghosts of dead loved ones, and the classic trope of stumbling upon evidence of something horrible that might soon happen to you.

The Bad Scares are legion. Consider the tagline: Infinite Space. Infinite Terror. Space movies are hard for me to begin with because, without even trying, they get deep into themes of nothingness and eternal isolation (horror movies set in Australia get me, too). This one has a lot of nothingness, a lot of isolation, and a lot of… Hell. Actual Hell. I’m not sure how the science holds up, but if you fancy yourself impervious to religious themes, this one gets to Hell by other means. And it’s not even about sex murder.

So, there you have it. Event Horizon: the Scariest Movie I Ever Saw. How about you?