That scared the crap out of me

[AndyC]

I can't say there are many movies out there that can scare me. When I was a kid, even the commercials for horror movies used to give me the creeps, but today, it's a rare thing.

Still, under the right conditions, you'd be surprised what a movie can do. A few years ago, I was sitting in bed late at night, reading a horror story (Lovecraft, I think), and had The Exorcist on TV. It was a little stormy outside. As I'm reaching a tense point in the story, the power goes out. I'm sitting in the dark for a few minutes, and then the power comes back on, just long enough to show an extreme close-up of possessed Linda Blair snarling at the camera. Then I'm plunged back into darkness.

It took me a while to get to sleep after that.

Anybody else have an experience like this?

[Ellie]

The only thing that comes to mind..is also from watching The Exorcist. I was living in a foster home at the time and that evening after coming home from the theater we went to bed. The curtains fluttered and the window wasnt open and I could have sworn I heard breathing and I was alone in the room. I can honestly admit that that movie scared the#@%! out of me.

[Ash]

LOL!!!!!!!

That was hilarious Andy!

I make it a point to press the power button on my remote whenever the power goes out.....the TV always startles me when it comes back on so I make sure it's shut off.

[scarface]

dr phil scares me, honestly, he's a very scary guy.

[Fearless Freep]

The first time I saw "Heavy Metal", I was in a completely dark house and was basically fading in and out of sleep.  The B-29 story through my semi-conciousness was very frightening

[Drezzy]

I got one even funnier than seeing Linda Blair...

I was watching my DVD of The Ring, and viewed the Easter Egg of the actual Samara video. After the video was over, my phone rang.

[Neon Noodle]

Mine was also from The Ring, but it was the Japanese version. I fell asleep watching it after a long day of work - I woke up 3 seconds before the EXTREME eyeball closeup.

I still have trouble watching this movie.

[akiratubo]

The Ring gave me the creeps when I saw it in theaters.  When I bought it on DVD, I'd had a long day and was falling asleep while watching it, so I turned off the TV but not the DVD player.  After I came back from dozing off, I had totally forgotten what I was doing before and turned on the TV.  It was right at the part where Samara jumps out of the TV.  Scared me fully awake, sure enough.

Not movie related, but ...

Not long ago, I was driving home from a visit to a girlfriend.  It was nearly midnight.  Exactly at the stroke of midnight, the music on the radio stopped and an angry voice screamed, "I'M GOING TO KILL YOU!"  Then the music came back on.

[Dunners]

hahahaha! hilarious, I wish I had a story like that to share.

[Mofo Rising]

Drezzy wrote:

> I got one even funnier than seeing Linda Blair...
>
> I was watching my DVD of The Ring, and viewed the Easter Egg of
> the actual Samara video. After the video was over, my phone
> rang.
>

Was it your actual phone, or the phone from the end of the video?  I know the DVD has a phone ringing sound after the video is over.

[Kory]

You guys took my answer...

Mine was the Japanese version "Ringu"    When Sadako came out of the TV at the end , I actually got goosebumps.  I work in Law Enforcement and things just dont scare me.  This did!

[Neville]

I don't use to find things that frightening, but a few weeks ago my sister and her husand visited us and we started watching lots and lots of DVDs, and one night it was the turn of "Session 9". I had seen the film on a theatre long ago, in broad daylight, and didn't find it that scary, but watching it at night with people beside you who are scared s**tless is a different story. My sister specially hated the part when that worker founds the tapes from the patients' therapy and starts playing them. Damn creepy.  

So we went to sleep, and that very night my sis was so scared she had to ask Denis, my bother in law, to walk her to the bathroom. Their footsteps partially woke me up, and since I didn't know, half-slept as I was, that it was them, I had nightmares as well. I dreamed I was a member of a scientist team who were sent to an enchanted house.

Lesson learned: Not to mix "Session 9" with reading Richard Matheson's "Hell House", as I was doing back then.

[Susan]

Something that comes to mind for me was "Exoricst III". While in itself not very scary there is one particular scene in the halls of a darkened hospital where the nurse goes from room to room and there is that drawn out anticipation something will get her. Nothing does and she writes something on a clipboard or something and walks off..as she does the hooded guy with the giant pair of head scissors floats up to her..a little freak out music with a quick zoom in and the scene cuts abruptly.

This was many years ago and I was watching with a friend, and I kept rewinding that scene to freak her out because i'm very cruel and enjoy tormenting people. Later that evening we were sitting outside talking and the movie came up, I joked that wouldn't it be funny if that scene played itself out and a killer came out of the shadows with those giant scissors, again I was trying to give her a hard time. Well, karma....

Just at that moment I heard loud stomping and as I glanced to my right a man literally flew just feet from me out of nowhere. I was so startled that I fell right out of my lawnchair, I think I yelled out because I caught him so offguard the poor man tripped and looked like he saw a ghost. He was a late night jogger and had cut through the houses. I'm not sure in that moment who was more frightened, him or us.

[Brother Ragnarok]

Seems like "The Ring" is a pretty common answer.  The first time I watched it, I was alone in my dorm room, no lights, towel under the door, barricaded in.  The second the tape ended, my phone rang.  To add to the atmosphere, my copy is a bootleg version obtained from eBay long before it got a domestic release.
Also, watching "Gates of Hell" for the first time alone in my house at 2 a.m., struggling to stay awake, was pretty horrifying because that movie is just so damn surreal it's hard to tell what's in the movie, what's in your head.

Brother R

[Evil Matt]

My wife always gets freaked out upon viewing the "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" sequence of "Twilight Zone:  The Movie".  We were watching it one night while we were living at my parent's house, and after the movie we climbed out on the roof from our bedroom window to smoke a cigarette (as was the M.O. back then, because my parents couldn't stand the fact that we were both smokers).  As I was messing with her about being scared of the gremlin that terrorized John Lithgow on the wing of that plane, I started to realize that it was really dark outside and that I couldn't see around the corner of the house, and I KNEW that that stupid gremlin was just around the corner, ready to kill me, or whatever it is gremlins do.  In tormenting my wife, I'd inadvertantly reduced myself to a six-year old kid who was jumping at shadows.  So I guess karma DOES work, whether you believe in it or not.