Spooky Scenes & Jump ScaresRanking the scariest, creepiest, goriest, most traumatizing, gut-wrenching, and heartwarming scenes ever to pop up in horror movies.
Updated October 23, 2023 13.8K votes 3.2K voters 247.4K views
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Vote up the movies that got under your skin without any bloodshed.
Horror movies are scary. At least, they are when they're doing their job right. Often, that fear comes from a reminder of our own mortality or the fragility of our bodies - which is to say, death and gore. But there are plenty of horror movies that have managed to give us nightmares without slathering on a lot of the red stuff. These scenes sent shivers down our spines and had us covering our eyes with our hands, often without spilling so much as a drop of corn syrup blood. Vote up the scenes that traumatized you without a lot of viscera.
Few things are more elementally frightening than when something is where it should not - maybe cannot - be. That's a fear James Wan knows how to put to work, and he does so often in both the Insidious and The Conjuring franchises, but perhaps never to greater effect than in the first Conjuring flick when Carolyn hears what she first takes to be her children playing "hide and clap" in the night.
Becoming trapped in the basement, she huddles at the top of the stairs, her back against the door, desperately lighting matches to drive away the darkness, when a pair of hands appear out of the shadows at her shoulder and clap in her ear.
It's been called the "greatest jump scare of all time," and this unforgettable moment from The Exorcist III doesn't feature even a drop of blood - at least, not shown. In a long, single sustained shot, a nurse working at her station leaves and goes to check a nearby room. She opens the door, goes inside for a bit, comes back out, closes and locks the door behind her, only for it to suddenly open as soon as she turns her back.
A figure dressed all in white comes out of the door where the nurse has just been, walking purposefully and holding what looks like a giant pair of scissors at head level. The next thing we see is a decapitated statue of Jesus, and the implication is pretty clear.
In many ways, the precursor to all modern haunted house movies is this 1963 classic adapted from Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House and directed by Robert Wise. Notorious for its use of suggestion to send shivers down our spines, one of The Haunting's most effective moments uses nothing more than sound and implication. Awakened by strange noises in the night, a frightened Eleanor asks her friend Theo to hold her hand. As the noises continue, the screen shows us only patterns in the woodwork that seem to look more and more like a face the longer we stare, until finally Theo turns on the light - from across the room where she has been sleeping.
Terrified, Eleanor looks down at her own hand and asks the same question we're all asking: "Whose hand was I holding?"
Considered by many to be superior to the 1956 original, Philip Kaufman's 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is regarded as a classic in its own right, and perhaps no scene in the entire picture is more memorable than its nihilistic ending.
We have already seen our ostensible protagonist, Elizabeth, destroyed and replaced by the pod people when one of the only other surviving characters finally encounters Matthew, played by Donald Sutherland, who we have followed almost as exclusively as we previously followed Elizabeth. To her horror and ours, he reacts to her presence by pointing and shrieking, revealing that he, too, has been replaced by the alien invaders.
Ari Aster's feature debut, Hereditary, was billed as being so scary it actually did a "heart rate challenge" as part of its promotional gimmicks. Despite this sort of William Castle-esque ballyhoo, the film was met with nearly universal acclaim from critics and most audiences alike, enjoying an 89% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.
While it may be as much family drama as horror flick, Hereditary is certainly not without its terrifying - and sometimes gruesome - moments. Not every scare in Hereditary is accompanied by the red stuff, though, such as a particularly startling scene when a seemingly possessed Annie (played to the hilt by Toni Collette) appears in the corner of the ceiling.
One of the most ingenious aspects of It Follows is its low-budget solution to the monster. Rather than a weird creature that follows the protagonists around, the sinister and deadly force - which can be passed on through sexual contact - is invisible to anyone except those who are plagued by it, and to them it can look like anyone, from people they know to random strangers.
Sometimes, this means that the entity takes on wholly innocuous forms. Other times, not so much, such as when it appears in a bedroom door as a hollow-eyed giant of a man.
