To celebrate Halloween, our writers creak open the casket on the scariest movie experiences they have ever had in their lives.
Hereditary (2018)
Congratulations to my runner-up contenders (the first time Lupita Nyong’o speaks in Us, the first time you see ET in the cornfield in ET), but Hereditary remains the most terrified I have ever been while watching any movie. It was a quiet night at St Lukes Event Cinemas and my horror buddy Jordan and I quickly took to holding each other in a tight embrace as Ari Aster’s generational trauma horror unravelled into pure depressive demonic chaos before us. I had a scarf over my head, I was crying out of one eye, and there was one moment where I got such a fright that I did a full body crunch as if sitting on an invisible Ab King Pro. When I got home that night I had to check all the corners of our house for Toni Collette, and I don’t think I slept comfortably for about a week after. A bleak and genuinely bone-chilling experience. Five stars. / Alex Casey
The Exorcist (1973)
Like almost every other sleepover in the 90s mine always seemed to involve a new and terrifying film. I watched more horror movies between the ages of eight and 12 than I have as an adult and looking back, I can maybe see why. The Exorcist was one of my first and most scarring. I’ll never forget the stabby crucifix, or the pissing on the stairs, or the feeling of being utterly overwhelmed by shock. I know there are much worse bits in that movie but I genuinely think my small brain tucked them into a black hole never to be released again. I’ve seen worse since then, like The Ring, but nothing gripped me as wholly as sweet little Linda Blair being transformed into an unimaginably terrible ghoul. / Claire Mabey
Help! I’m a Fish (2000)
This animated “children’s” film is solely responsible for my continued inability to swim confidently. In it, siblings Fly, Stella and their cousin Chuck are washed out to an island after fishing in high tide, and meet an eclectic scientist trying to turn himself into a fish. Stella stumbles upon his magic fish potion before he gets to it, and it’s her mind-bending transformation scene that always freaked 5-year-old me out, because how fucking terrified would you be if you turned into a fish and your brother flung you into the ocean, perhaps never to be found again? I did not have a positive relationship with large bodies of water after that, and sometimes I Google “movie where children turn to fish” to remind myself it’s more than a nightmare. / Lyric Waiwiri-Smith
Return to Oz (1985)
I don’t know what my parents were thinking when they sent me to the movies to watch Return to Oz at the age of seven – unsupervised, I might add – given I had already screamed in horror all through the original Wizard of Oz. What followed were the most terrifying two hours of my short little life. Return to Oz saw a young Dorothy sent to a psychiatric hospital to get electric shock therapy (tied to the bed, what the absolute fuck Disney), swept away in a raging river and trapped in a dystopian Oz where everyone has turned to stone. She then befriends a pumpkin who has eyeholes but no eyes and finds a room of severed talking heads, all while being chased by a mob of petrifying baddies called Wheelies. Every single scene was horrific, and watching the trailer again this week instantly gave me the shits. “This is the Oz you’ll want to visit again and again,” it promises. Wrong, on so many levels. / Tara Ward
Requiem for a Dream (2000)
As a tween, I would wander into my older brother’s room to hang out until he got sick of me. He was nearly 20 and seemed infinitely cool and mature, which meant he had a massive stereo system in his room and computer monitor to watch movies on. On this fateful day, I walked in to his darkened room at 2pm on a Saturday to see the opening scene of Requiem for a Dream, except I didn’t know what it was called or what it was about. But the scene was sunny and dramatic so I figured it was a middling drama. Another brother and sister were already in there, perched awkwardly on the edge of the single bed, so I sat on the floor in silence, not daring to ask what it was we were watching. Two hours later, I emerged into the sunlight traumatised and shaken, having watched the most horrific movie of my short life. None of us discussed it after, since we never stopped the movie as it got scarier and scarier (sunk cost fallacy), and I would find out later that we had watched the director’s cut, with scenes even more graphic than the cinema version. Visuals from it appeared in my nightmares for months and I have refused to watch it again, but 20 years later I can still vividly picture Ellen Burstyn in that hospital. / Madeleine Chapman
The Sixth Sense (1999)
Before The Sixth Sense my experience of horror movies was limited to 90s slasher blockbusters like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. M Night Shyamalan’s masterpiece, while not strictly even a horror movie, offered something far scarier to my young mind: miserable fucked up ghosts. Even though the movie’s big twist had been spoiled by Nathan Rarere on Ice TV I was still spooked out big time when Haley Joel Osment started seeing those dead people, and it turns out I would spend the rest of my life chasing that spine-chilling thrill. Some have come close (The Babadook!!!), but The Sixth Sense still hasn’t been beaten. / Calum Henderson
Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (1998)
Nothing in my sheltered little seven year-old’s life could have prepared me for going to a sleepover at my best friend’s new best friend’s house and being exposed to the power of an ice skate. It was sliced right through the teenage neighbour’s (Jimmy Howell played by a young Joseph Gordon-Levitt) face, and the camera did not shy away. I do not remember the rest of the movie, probably because I simply hid in the sleeping bag. This was a tough start to horror and slasher films, and I avoided them for almost three decades, until earlier this year, when my interest was piqued by the New Zealand movie Grafted. The scene from Halloween H20 was consciously playing out in my mind as I wondered what depths of my psyche this one would reach, but luckily, I enjoyed the thrill this time around and I think I am no further traumatised. / Gabi Lardies
Smile (2022)
I don’t really get “scared” but I do have an insane jump-scare-reflex and basically spent all one hour and 55 minutes of Smile bouncing up and down on my couch as people jumped out at the screen and loud music played. Smile is pretty much just an extended version of that “relaxing car drive” YouTube video or that scary maze game – it has no real plot but is a stitched together series of setpieces that are meant to make you go “aah!” even though you absolutely know something is about to happen. It worked on me, I hate to say it. Honourable mentions for films that are actually good and freaky: The Babadook, Barbarian, and Talk To Me. / Stewart Sowman-Lund
Dark Water (2002) & Ringu (The Ring) (1998)
I’ve seen a lot of horror movies in my life, but the only two directors with the ability to truly give me the shits were Hideo Nakata, director of The Ring and Takashi Shimizu, director of The Grudge. The Japanese know what’s scary, and it’s not a former ice-hockey player or a red-headed doll. I watched most of The Grudge with my hands over my ears and a blanket over my head. It didn’t help that one of my high school friends had perfected the art of descending the staircase like this. Once I was watching Dark Water at said staircase-descending friend’s house (allegedly haunted by the one and only Michael Joseph Savage) and it was pouring with rain. The movie features a haunted child in a yellow raincoat. We nearly died when his neighbour knocked at the door in the middle of the night, wearing a bright yellow anorak, to ask if our power had gone out. I haven’t watched any Japanese horror movies since. / Hera Lindsay Bird