I can remember how gobsmacked I was when I came out of the cinema after watching Alien. A truly groundbreaking movie. H R Giger was a twisted genius.

The first Alien movie.  Tom Skerritt was crawling around in the ductwork of the spaceship for some reason.  He turned around and the creature was right in your face.  I spilled my ... er, beverage ... all over my lap.

ampfixer
Nobody mentioned Alien yet. That movie (the original) had a lot of Gotcha moments that really made me jump. In the horror genre, the one that made me look away was Andy Warhol's Frankenstein 3D. It was disgusting and had everything from hanging entrails to necrophilia. I don't know how it ever got released.

Most people don't know that one, "Flesh for Frankenstein" I think it was without searching.
"I'm going to (get) me some spleen!" lol
And the tragic monsters suicide was great!
 
He did a few, that one, "Dracula", and "Bad" were the most famous ... and "Bad" was as described.... opening scene or close to it, the woman chunks a crying baby out the window.... I think that's the only time I ever turned away from a flick for real. lol
 

Moshkito
 
 
"Alien"
 Is not that great a film, since it degenerates to a just plain horror film and gore.
 

 
I disagree. It's a masterclass in building suspense with a few well placed shocks. It's a 'haunted house in space' film really, and along with 'Silent Running' it revolutionized the sci-fi genre.

jamesg1213

Moshkito
  
"Alien"
 Is not that great a film, since it degenerates to a just plain horror film and gore.
 

 
I disagree. It's a masterclass in building suspense with a few well placed shocks. It's a 'haunted house in space' film really, and along with 'Silent Running' it revolutionized the sci-fi genre.

For my tastes, it was too obvious, and not that much fun, and the whole thing, just became another horror film for me. Mind you, it was extremely well photographed, because they had the budget that most of the other films here did not. And they could pay an artist and other folks to create what was an incredible bunch of visuals and designs.
 
Far more scary, for me, were the psychic events in "The Double Life of Veronique", which did NOT become a horror film, and it easily could have, and it was handled sensibly by Kieslowski, and placed it in a situation that was a bit more literary and involved "parallel" lives ... with some unbelievably wonderful scenes, and music by Zbigniew Preissner. In the hands of an American person, that film would have become a horror story, instead of anything else.
 
I guess I see more horror in the minds of people and their ugliness, than I do in many films, that pray on your (and mine) ability to fear something or other, that we are not capable of imagining. This particular space, is almost the same that creates art, music and literature, however, when it is distorted, and corrupted by bad books and non-sensical information, this is the true horror of life for me. The maliciousness behind it all as a way to control people and their ideas. And excuse it as God's world is even worse!

The last scene in "Angel Heart" when washed-up private eye Mickey Rourke, after investigating and coming to the realization that he himself murdered his own daughter (among others) finds himself locked in a metal elevator cage slowly descending into hell ..................down,down,down.

Mesh
My father said the scariest movie he saw in the theatre was the original Dracula with Bela Lugosi......I've yet to see it, but his description of it always made me think twice (when I was younger).

We have been so desensitized to the "classical' bela legosi style vampire from decades of parody that i doubt it can even scare small children anymore. Still an enjoyable movie.

As a child i found most religious themed horror movies the scariest because I was told these things could or will happen.  The Omen was presented to me as a fictionalized account of what's to come and was similar in nature to the scary films they used to show us in sunday school about the rapture and such. It was easy to dismiss ghost, vampires, zombies, etc, but being told ,matter of factly that "Damien" was probably alive and could be one of my classmates kept me up many a night.