REVIEW: Everyone has at least one. A shocking scene that will send a shiver down your spine, avert your eyes, or just haunt you for weeks after you first saw it.
As a viewing veteran of far too many – good and bad – scare films, I have many. From Psycho’s iconic shower scene to Wes Craven’s New Nightmare’s phone coming to life, Hitchcock’s murder of crows gathering on the school bars and The Shining’s bloodlift, I’ve got four decades of nightmare-inducing images to draw from (I’ve seen Watership Down though when they are only six years old – after all).
So I was more than a little fascinated with the premise of a new eight-part docu-series The 101 Scariest Horror Movie Moments of All Time (which has now started streaming on genre specialist service Shudder).
It brings together a cadre of academics, critics, filmmakers and stars (everyone from Netflix’s go-to horror meister Mike Flanagan to Gremlins’ helmer Joe Dante, The Thing star Keith David and Candyman himself Tony Todd) to discuss and dissect about what makes certain sequences of images stand out, resonate and sear in your memory. Each “moment” gets its own time in the spotlight, giving viewers the chance to learn how they were made — and why they had such an impact.
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Psycho’s shower scene is widely regarded as one of the scariest movie moments of all time, but where does it make the list in this new series?
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Jack Nicholson gave viewers a lot of chills with his performance in The Shining.
From the same team that created the three-season Eli Roth’s History of Horror, what’s perhaps most impressive about the roster is how broad it is. Spanning more than seven decades, the 13 titles in the opening episode (from 1940s classics like The Wolf Man and Cat People to near-contemporary chillers like It Follows and The Strangers) aren’t just your traditional Hollywood horrors.
There’s Christopher Lee Hammer doing it in Dracula’s Horror, ghostly Spanish events in The Orphanage, the Italian anthology of fears that is Black Sabbath, and the techno-soaked nightmares of Japan’s Pulse. There are even some entries that you may not have thought fell into the genre, but once you listen to the arguments, you will be more than convinced.
Delivered
The Strangers’ portrayal of a home invasion as a random act is what makes it so chilling.
This will no doubt help aspiring and dedicated horror fans find new thrills, but just on its own terms, it’s hard not to love a show that embraces the belief that a good scare is “something elusive, emotional — not something you’re cynical about.” can recreate’ and that ‘what the public can imagine is sometimes scarier than what you can show them’.
The 101 Scariest Horror Movie Moments of All Time can now be streamed on Shudder.