My favorite scary movie was a good old ghost story called The Changeling. It was made on 1980 and starred George C. Scott.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cETMR4cUp6c#

I'm with Bit on this one. Other than things that left an indelible stamp on me as a kid...seeing the reveal of Dr. Sardonicus for instance...I'm only temporally jarred by modern technology's attempts to scare the living daylights out of us. I'm much more frightened of portrayals of real, sociopathic nut cases than made up monsters or zombies.

The last time I was scared watching a movie was when I was thirteen watching Psycho. I miss that feeling, the enjoyable horror.
Since then I've seen many movies that have made me distressed/anxious in a way that makes me skip channel. Usually due to violence and sadism. In the lack of story telling skills it's become very common nowadays  to make movies and TV-series "seriously scary " by depicting crimes which are disgustingly brutal and sadistic.
 
The British and Swedish crime series are my favourites because they don't have that. That series are usually based on popular novels that have proven their quality already as books.

Most all the modern scare-fest movies don't scare me so I don't even bother to watch them. My daughter likes them.... They rely on gore and fast, in your face surprises for the scare.....
 
Go back a few decades ..... the camera moves into a dark room, and a coffin rests on a pedestal in the center of the room. A faint beam of light from somewhere barely illuminates the coffin.... the music is suspenseful..... slowly, the camera pans  to the coffin, as the lid starts to rise, fingers appear in the crack and the lid rises.... Inside lays Count Dracula..... eyes closed..... the camera pans in for a facial closeup..... his eyes pop open and every person in the audience screams....
 
I'll never forget the hair on my neck standing on end watching Dracula.
 
The scariest movies are the ones where you know it's coming and it's delivered in a masterful way and scares the living beegeebee's out of you anyway.
 
 
Yeah.... the Wizard of Oz's witch was a scary thing to a little kid..... and  the flying monkeys..... OMG the flying monkeys were the things of a kid's nightmares for months on end.

Scariest movie all time - my first wedding.  It wasn't the wedding itself, but the marriage that was scary.  YIKES!  Hee hee
 
Bob Bone

Hi,
"Far Worse Things Await Man, than Death." Bela Lugosi in "Dracula"
 
I used to watch, and even keep track of all the Hammer Films for a long time. The Dracula and Frankenstein series with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, were very nice, even if the stories sometimes were stretched a few inches to revive the Count. But "scary" was not exactly my feeling then, because by that time, I had already been a serious student of "Gothic Literature" going as far back as Ann Radcliffe, and Horace Walpole!
 
Of the standard "horror" fare, none of them does me in. But there were a couple of films that fit the description of this thread. For me, it was called (had different names, btw) "The Legend of Hell House" with Pamela Franklin and that McDowell guy. It was very well shot and defined and well presented in the film. The scene with the cat, comes to mind ... I've seen things like that happen!
 
But Jean Luc Godard, introduced a few things that are used in these films ... sound out of whack with the film, and specially the effects out of sequence, and this became a big thing in many a horror film, however, none of these were as scary as many other things in film that were far superior in its effect than any horror film that I have ever seen.
 
Gaspar Noe's "Je Suis Seul" is probably the one film where it is not only disconcerting, it is very tough to even watch, and half the audience usually walks out, because it is so harsh and off its rocker ... and very tough to sit through. It's a gun shot, as loud as a shotgun that goes off at various times, and it's not designed, planned, or has any relation to the story of the film itself, which, btw, takes place in the characters head, non stop all the way to the end. And it is an insane attack on the French anything! AND, this is not a film for everyone! Like some of the weirdest and most avant-garde things EVER done, this questions your movie going left and right, and your entertainment ideas as well.
 
But nothing, in any film, has ever come as close as Mathew Gregory Lewis book, "The Monk" ... that can't even be filmed because it is so descriptive of the horrors in it. I don't suppose that many stories about WW2 are any better, and many movies showed it for the past 50 years, in their own way. When you come from that, horror film tends to look rather ... cardboard!

Well, surely it is relative. It has to do with my age when I saw it but I would have to say some of the scenes, probably in the windmill in The Brides of Dracula. I was maybe 6 or 7 YO and on vacation. We went to a drive-in theater and saw it. That night back at the hotel, I had to sleep between mom and dad. Then until I was 17 or so I could not sleep at night without the covers wrapped tightly around my neck.
 
Movies don't scare me anymore, they are sometimes disgusting or interesting. I really enjoyed PHANTASM and I have all of them on DVD now but have not yet watched them all, but I will.
I had a strange attraction to the Hellraiser movies, I think because they were so um... I can't think of the right word but they were different.
I liked The Dunwich Horror, the original from the 70s, but I like all of Lovecraft's work.
The worst horror movie I ever saw was Love Story. It was horrible.
The old shock movies 2000 Maniacs and Blood Feast (Drive-in "B" movies) were pretty cool. I have an original handbill for Blood Feast.
I like horror movies but my wife hates them so I rarely get to watch one. She has a hard time watching The Following.

If you ever get a wild hair - take a 'scary movie' and watch it with the sound off.  It makes it seem funny without the shock music dissonant chords and sudden screams and such.
 
I remember when my son was about 7-8 I was flipping through channels and happened across Chuckie, right in the the middle of him saying he wanted to play.  Freaked out my son so bad that for several YEARS afterward he was genuinely mad at me for even having the maybe 1 minute of the film up on the screen where he could see it.
 
Bob Bone
 

I was frightened of the weirdest things when I was a kid. It could have been something as innocuous as a particular style of drawing or animation. For instance, I lived in mortal fear of kid's cartoon called Mary, Mungo and Midge. It was about as twee as children's BBC shows go, but for some reason the style of it just haunted my dreams. However I was fascinated with my own fear of it. My dad once told me that when I was 3, I'd wake him up super early on Sunday mornings to watch it with me, and he'd settle down on the sofa all bleary eyed watching it only to look around and find that I'd fled the room in terror and was hiding under my bed. 
 

 
I looked at it on YouTube not so long ago and was surprised to find that I'm still a little spooked out by it. These things stay with you. Although I did think the opening and closing music was awesome. 
 
There were also some very creepy public service announcements aimed at kids in the 70's and 80's which were renowned for striking terror into children. Creepiness was the 70's forte, I believe. But the worst one was in the 80's, when the government released a horrible ad to warn kids about smoking. It was called "The First Natural Born Smoker" and it was eventually pulled because they got so many complaints about it traumatizing children (they'd show it in the ad breaks of kids' TV shows):
 

 
It had this creepy sci-fi feel to it which along with the audio track and the horrible face of the smoking dude, really spooked me to the point where I would get that metallic shock taste on my tongue when it came on. I think I was about 12 but still not past the childhood terror stage. 
 
One other thing I remember being afraid of when I was a kid was (and this is really weird) - non-standard windshield wipers. If there was only one, or if moved inwards toward each other instead of parallel with each other (i.e. /\ instead of //) then I was freaked. It made for a very interesting first trip to France.
 
Sometimes though, kids have good instincts. I was absolutely petrified of Jimmy Savile.  
 

Guitarhacker
... 
Go back a few decades ..... the camera moves into a dark room, and a coffin rests on a pedestal in the center of the room. A faint beam of light from somewhere barely illuminates the coffin.... the music is suspenseful..... slowly, the camera pans  to the coffin, as the lid starts to rise, fingers appear in the crack and the lid rises.... Inside lays Count Dracula..... eyes closed..... the camera pans in for a facial closeup..... his eyes pop open and every person in the audience screams....
 ...

Go back some 50 years still ... a gun points at the camera, and folks in the audience scream, and half of them left the theater in fear! Happened in many places!
 

robert_e_bone
If you ever get a wild hair - take a 'scary movie' and watch it with the sound off.  It makes it seem funny without the shock music dissonant chords and sudden screams and such.
 ...

 
Ohhhh, you taking GOBLIN's music out? At least keep that ... forget the visuals and the movie itself!