I’m going to make you laugh. I love scary movies… but I refuse to watch them in the dark.
This wasn’t always the case, and for a lot of the horror movies on this list, I either watched them in a dark theater, or in the darkness of my room. But, for somebody who can openly admit that I find the first Jumanji movie a little scary (and don’t even get me started on Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker), I honestly don’t think I can handle super scary movies anymore at night, because guess what. They’ll give me NIGHTMARES!
And, I’m saying this from experience, because all of the movies on this list made me sleep with the lights on for a very, very long time. So, here are five films that made me swear that something went bump in the night.
The Ring
I saw The Ring opening weekend back in 2002, and oh, my God. I don’t think I’ve ever had a longer sense of dread when watching a movie than I had with The Ring. Seriously, for a horror movie that is only PG-13, The Ring had no right to be this scary. I mean, look, I’ve seen entire horror franchises that haven’t unnerved me like The Ring did back in the day.
And honestly, it’s just one freaking scene that spooked me! The film itself, which is about a curse centralized within a video cassette, isn't even that creepy. Honestly, the creepiest thing about the film is that the plot device centers around a technology (A VHS tape) that went the way of the Blockbuster many moons ago.
However, arguably the scariest moment of the movie happens super early, which put me on edge for the entirety of the film. Even hearing the words, “I saw her face,” gives me goosebumps. A closet door is opened, and one of the scariest faces I’ve ever seen was revealed on the big screen, and oh, dear God, I couldn’t get that face out of my head for days. DAYS!
The scene is maybe only a second long, but that second haunted me for the rest of the movie, and long after I went home to sleep with the lights on.
The Grudge
The Grudge, or, what I like to call The Ring 2.0, is about a million times scarier than The Ring. Because unlike in The Ring, which really only scared me once (thoroughly, but still, only once) The Grudge is consistently terrifying, from the very beginning to the startling conclusion.
The story of The Grudge is basically a haunted house story. A family travels to Tokyo, and moves into a house where a terrible murder occurred. The curse of that incident lingers with the new occupants, and follows them wherever they go.
We get two ghosts for the price of one with The Grudge, as both the wife and her son were brutally murdered by the husband/father, leaving them as spirits who wander the land. Sounds can be even scarier than visuals, and we not only got some horrific sights with the ghosts in The Grudge, but also the sounds that they made, which would linger with me long after the credits rolled.
Like The Ring, I also saw this movie when it first released in theaters back in 2004, and you would think that I would have learned my lesson after the nightmares I had with The Ring, but nope. Not at all. The whole movie terrifies me, but the scene that stayed seared behind my eyelids the most is when the ghost of the mother is actually in the bed with her victim! Not only could I not sleep with covers that night. I couldn’t even sleep at all! So much for a good night’s rest!
Mulholland Drive
Now, I didn’t see Mulholland Drive when it first came out in 2001 since I wasn’t a David Lynch fan back then. I had just turned 18, and I was still on my Stanley Kubrick kick at that time, so Mulholland Drive wasn’t even on my radar.
No, it wasn’t until I watched Blue Velvet (One of my high school chums had a T-shirt of Dennis Hopper huffing through a medical mask that intrigued me) that I thought, whoa, who is THIS director? I then went through his entire filmography, making sure to end with Mulholland Drive since it was his most recent film at the time. This was around 2003, 2004ish, when I was still in college.
I’ll never forget watching the film for the first time. I was in my best friend’s basement, and we had the lights off, and about five or six of us were sprawled out on his massive couch. The film itself was perplexing (though, not as perplexing as Lost Highway had been), and we couldn’t make heads or tails of it at the time. It was something about a woman in a car crash who developed amnesia, and then these strange events that follow.
Well, there was a major jump scare early on that startled me, but it wasn’t until a scene at a theater that really made my heart pound. A woman was singing Roy Orbison’s “Crying," and then fainted on the stage. But here’s the thing. The singing never stopped. It was this moment that truly made me think that Mulholland Drive was actually a horror movie, and not just some bizarre drama.
And the strange thing is, I can’t exactly explain to you WHY this moment set me on edge and kept me up all night. I just kept hearing that song, and seeing that woman collapse, while the song continued to play without her. It still gives me the chills to this day! There is no band!
Hereditary
Hereditary is legit the scariest movie I have ever seen in my entire life. And guess what. I actually watched this movie DURING the daytime, with the sun shining outside my window and everything. I’m dead serious. There was even a glare on the screen since my shades weren’t entirely closed, and I was still rocked to my very core after watching this movie. How is that even possible?!
I once pit Hereditary against Midsommar to see which was the better Ari Aster film, but honestly, it’s really not even close for me since while I enjoyed Midsommar (I actually kind of found it funny), Hereditary was no laughing matter, and it disturbed me like no other film.
The movie, which came out in 2018, is about a family dealing with the loss of a loved one, and all the strange -- one might say, demonic -- occurrences that happen afterward. Hereditary is a heavy film that deals with grief in a very sober way. There are of course shocking moments, but it’s the quieter scenes that really ratchet up the tension. But nothing would prepare me for the climax of the film, where the son is being violently chased by his mother.
He makes it up to the attic, but there’s a horrible banging sound, only for us to find out that it isn’t a fist, but rather the mother’s head pounding against the ceiling. Even with the sun shining, I was STILL terrified, and I couldn’t sleep for days!
The Shining
I want to close with what was definitely the first horror movie to ever give me nightmares, and that was The Shining. When CinemaBlend initially ranked the best horror movies of all time, we put The Shining at the very top of the list, and for good reason. The Shining, which came out in 1980, is about a writer who brings his family to a haunted house, and then gets haunted himself (Or does he?).
The beauty of this movie is that unlike the Stephen King novel, which is DEFINITELY a ghost story, you could argue that maybe the Jack Torrance in the film version is really just having a mental breakdown, and the supernatural events could really be something else at play -- like a child’s wild imagination, or a father on the brink. This sort-of ambiguity is just one of the many reasons why Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick couldn’t exactly agree on the story of The Shining.
But, it’s because there’s this ambiguity that my young mind couldn’t grasp why Jack Nicholson’s character would be in the picture at the end of the movie, since it’s dated from the past.
Yes, the scene with the twins in the corridor was spooky, and yes, the naked woman in the bathtub gave me the willies, but it was this scene at the end, which I saw when I was way too young at like, 6 or 7, that really did a number on me, and kept me awake, forcing me to knock on my sister’s door and sleep in her bed that night. Honestly, it still haunts me, even to this day.
And, that’s the list. How many (if any) of these movies kept YOU up at night? For more news on all things spooky, make sure to swing around here often!
