The Shining is very creepy and the first time I saw it I was terrified, right up until Jack goes mad with the axe. I saw it again last year and, armed with a little more knowledge about Kubrick than I'd had the first time (I'd also seen
Barry Lyndon recently), I saw the whole film in a very different way, though it still retained its powerful effect.
I wrote about what I took from it on this occasion at some length on my blog. Very speculative and possibly completely pretentious, but I do think there's something to my interpretation.
I found
Suspiria frightening in spite of the terrible acting/dialogue and so on. Interestingly, I think if I saw it again now I'd look at it much more in terms of the way it was directed, since this is something that interests me a lot more now than it did when I saw it years ago (as was the case with
The Shining). I think the thing that scared me the most about it at the time was the music-box style theme, those long periods where a girl is walking down a corridor with that insane music playing, knowing something nasty is going to happen (barbed-wire related). Returning to video games, there's a great bit at the start of
Silent Hill 2 where you run along a foggy woodland for several minutes and nothing happens except that you hear sinister noises emanating from the mist. (Actually its just struck me that there's a bit in the aforementioned
The Woman In Black which resembles this, when the fog has covered the moors and the hero can hear loads of sinister noises coming from an unseen place.
Incidentally, since Stephen King has been brought up, I'd recommend his book about horror
Danse Macabre to any fans of the horror genre. Obviously its a very personal view of horror on King's part, but there's a lot of interesting ideas about the purpose of horror, what it speaks to in audiences and so on. I'd like to read Kim Newman's book on horror too (
Nightmare Movies I believe is the title), its very expensive though.
Oh, and I just remembered -
Dark Water (the Japanese version, haven't seen the U.S. remake) is very scary. Actually, it becomes markedly less frightening the more the heroine discovers about the reason behind the haunting, as is often the case, I find. An exception to this 'rule' is
Ringu, where things just seem to get worse and worse. That was definitely one of the scariest films I've seen... there's a great bit where the lead character (I think) is sat on a bench outside, looks up to see feet close to them, and then looks up to see - DAH DAH DAHHH! Nothing. That film gives me that sense of constant queasiness and tension that I think is the ideal effect a horror/ghost story can have on you. It interests me, the way that your senses are heightened as a viewer when you're expecting something bad to happen - Carpenter (along with countless other Directors) exploited that so well in
Halloween, where your always searching the empty spaces in the frame for the boogeyman.
Paranormal Activity scared the bodilyfluidofsomesort out of me with this technique - the feeling that
somewhere in that darkness beyond the bedroom door there's something, and if you can see it before it comes out you'll have saved yourself a scare.
Annnd: has anybody mentioned
Audition yet? Orrible.