For Halloween: Our Votes for Scariest Movie

In honor of Halloween, the Maine Crime Writers offer two group posts to talk about our favorite scary movies and our favorite scary  books. We hope you’ll leave a comment to share some of the titles that have sent you running for cover, or hiding under them.

[image error]Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson: Discounting The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958)—I was looking over my shoulder for the cyclops for weeks after seeing that one, but it isn’t generally regarded as a horror film—my vote goes to 1963’s black and white classic, The Haunting, starring Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson, and Russ Tamblyn, not to be confused with the remake with Catherine Zita-Jones taking the role Claire Bloom played. That one certainly had more blood and gore, but wasn’t anywhere near as frightening. What makes the original, based on Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, so scary is what we don’t see. It’s what we imagine that terrifies us. The moment that gives me chills just thinking about it? Claire Bloom and Julie Harris are in together in a pitch-black room and Julie Harris says, “If you’re over there, who’s holding my hand?”

[image error]Susan Vaughan: I remember well the above movie, and that same movie line chilled me just as it did Kaitlyn/Kathy. I’d read the book and had felt the same shock when I read that line, but hearing it in Julie Harris’s trembling voice was equally terrifying. My scariest and favorite scary film is apparently a favorite of many because it’s the seventh highest grossing (not gross) film in North America. Of course, it’s Jaws, starting Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw, and Murray Hamilton. We all remember the classic line, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” The iconic theme music evokes dread every time it’s played, even in jest. The giant shark itself was a mechanical device that was pieced together and nearly fell apart during filming. But it did its job making everyone in theaters jump and shriek when it rose out of the water.

Kate Flora: I was a timid ten years old, and the nearest movie theater was sixteen miles[image error] away in Rockland, when, as I remember it, Brother John hatched the idea of going to the Strand and seeing The House on Haunted Hill, the 1959 version. Somehow, he convinced us that Vincent Price was a comic actor and the movie would be funny. We had no money, and had to search old purses, pockets, and even vacuum the registers to find enough to pay for tickets. And then, as five strangers are locked in a haunted house with an acid vat in the cellar, offered $10,000 if they can survive the night, I sat in my chair and was scared to death. There were locked rooms, and skeletons, and a mysterious hanging and disappearances. I was so scared that I don’t think I’ve seen a scary movie since.

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Jen Blood: When The Blair Witch Project came out, I drove to Portland to see it with a friend, then returned home to the cabin in the woods where I was housesitting. Alone. That night, I woke to a noise outside the cabin in the middle of the night, then tried to turn on the lights…except the power was out. Heart pounding, I grabbed my dog Moonshadow and hightailed it to my pickup truck. I put my contacts in while locked in the cab of the truck, then drove promptly to my mom’s house in the next town. It was about midnight by then, and there was a blackout in the area – I remember driving along completely darkened streets to my completely darkened childhood home and, while mostly aware that I was being ridiculous, also being about sixty-percent certain that the Blair witch had wiped out my entire neighborhood. Thankfully, my mom was awake reading by candlelight when I got there, though she was understandably a little freaked out when I showed up. She did, however, let Moonshadow and me sleep with her that night.

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