PROMPTuesday #169 – Top Five

Haven’t done this in a while, but I’ll answer SanDiegoMomma’s recent PROMPTuesday challenge, even though it’s a couple days late.  The challenge is to come up with a Top Five list.  Something I can easily do.

In the spirit of Halloween, my Top Five will be the five scariest scenes in movies I’ve seen.  These are scenes which have stuck with me for a long time and, even to this day as an adult, still give me the willies even after repeated viewings.

#5) Alien – Captain Dallas meets the Alien
IMHO, the best sci-fi horror movie of all time.  Until 1979, when this movie was released, nobody imagined just how scary the dark corners of a spaceship could be.  It also had one of the classic gross-out scenes of all time (the infamous “chestburster” scene), but the part that made me jump the most was when Tom Skerritt’s character went hunting the alien in the eerily dark airshafts of the ship, only to get turned around and confused to the exact location of the alien.  The result, of course, was him turning around with his flashlight and totally illuminating the alien, reaching out to him and shrieking out what might be translated as “SURPRIIIIISE!!!” in Alienspeak.  No matter how many times I’ve seen this movie, I always jump at this scene.

#4) When A Stranger Calls – “Have you checked the children?”
This movie kinda loses steam towards the second half, because they try to make the killer somewhat of a sympathetic character, but the first part of the movie is unforgettable and utterly terrifying.  The claustrophobia builds as Carol Kane’s character slowly realizes she’s dealing with more than just a crank phone caller and barricades herself in the house, only to discover the terrifying truth when the police call back telling her “we traced the call and it’s coming from inside the house!”  I could be sitting in a well lighted room surrounded by family and friends partying it up, and just thinking of that last line will send shivers down my back.  Just typing it right now does so as well.  Yikes.

#3) Salem’s Lot (the original) – The first appearance of Barlow, the head vampire
Based on Stephen King’s second book, which was a slow creepout of its own, this was a not-half-bad miniseries adaptation, though with some deviations from the book.  A few tense scenes, often punctuated by jump-music (you know what I mean), but the one that gave me nightmares for years was when the head vampire Barlow appeared to the guy in jail, the one that had just beat the crap out of David Soul’s character.  With the exception of the original Nosferatu (which he was undoubtedly based on) the screen adaptation of Barlow suddenly showing his face will always be the scariest looking vampire to me for all time.

#2) Carrie – The hand from the grave scene
Need I elaborate any further?  Many have seen this movie so many times that they can describe frame by frame everything leading up to this scene, but that dream sequence of the bloody hand coming out of the grave to grab Amy Irving never fails to make them jump.  Myself included.  This scene has spawned many pale imitations (the final scene in the original Friday the 13th is one of the few that comes close) but this one is the original end-of-the-movie jump scene, and it still works to this day.

#1) Jaws – Ben Gardner’s head
It took a long time for me to get over this one after first seeing it as a seven-year-old kid in 1976, and it still creeps me out to this day.  Brody and Hooper out on a boat at night, their fish-finder showing a large object nearby (Ben Gardner’s wrecked boat, obviously worked over by the shark), Hooper diving in to check out the hull, accompanied by the trademark ominous music, finding a shark tooth imbedded in the hull, and after further investigation having the bloody severed head of Ben Gardner roll out of a hole in the bottom of the boat.  After countless viewings, I still can’t get completely desensitized to the terror of this scene.

Honorable Mention: The Exorcist – Captain Howdy
I don’t know exactly what to call that quickie two-frame shot of that pale, bloodshot-eyes face that they show a couple times in the movie, but Captain Howdy sounds as good as any.  I made the mistake once of freezing this frame on my VCR, thinking that it wouldn’t look quite as creepy as a still shot.  Wrong.

Any other creepy scenes out there that anyone wants to share?