Spooky Scenes & Jump ScaresRanking the scariest, creepiest, goriest, most traumatizing, gut-wrenching, and heartwarming scenes ever to pop up in horror movies.
Vote up the monologues that are more chilling than any graphic violence would be.
Movies routinely show us scary things. Horror movies obviously do, but thrillers, action films, and even straight dramas sometimes do, too. A major reason we watch movies is for the emotional release that comes from confronting our fears in a safe way. Whether it's Hannibal Lecter getting loose from his cage in The Silence of the Lambs, or a possessed mother terrorizing her own children in Evil Dead Rise, the sights films show us can rattle our nerves.
Sometimes we don't even need to see anything to get disturbed. The following movies all contain very descriptive monologues in which a character relates a ghastly story. Hearing them describe it proves more distressing than seeing the events could ever be. Part of that is due to the strong acting - another from the sharp writing. But most of all, it's because what we see in our minds as we listen to these narratives is far worse than any visual could convey.
Seven (also written Se7en) stars Brad Pitt as Detective David Mills and Morgan Freeman as his partner, Detective William Somerset. They're on the trail of a serial killer who stages each murder to represent one of the Seven Deadly Sins mentioned in the Bible. Every crime scene they come across is gruesome.
It's a surprise when the so-called “John Doe” (Kevin Spacey) turns himself in. Even more surprising is when he reveals his true motive. He's got the severed head of Mills's wife in a box, and he hopes to spur the seventh and final murder - representing wrath - by getting Mills to shoot him in retaliation. To taunt Mills, he says:
I visited your home this morning, after you left. I tried to play husband. I tried to taste the life of a simple man. It didn't work, so I took a souvenir - her pretty head.
Decapitating Mills's wife is barbaric. Taunting him about it and inferring he may have attempted to sexually assault her is insult added to injury. Doe delivers his speech with sadistic glee that makes a chill run down viewers' spines.
In Halloween, a masked serial killer named Michael Myers has returned to the town of Haddonfield, IL, to wreak bloody havoc on October 31. Specifically, he has an interest in teenage babysitter Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis). Because Myers doesn't speak, the film needs another way to establish his psychotic nature. That comes in the form of a monologue from Dr. Samuel Loomis (Donald Pleasence), a psychiatrist who treated him as a child. Loomis describes the nature of Myers's being to a police officer, saying:
I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply evil.
Delivered by Pleasence with perfection, the monologue makes it clear to the audience that Myers has no compulsion about killing. He lacks morality, empathy, and compassion. Hearing the unnerving description plants a psychological seed of fear in our minds early on in Halloween, letting us know this killer will show zero mercy toward anyone.
In Steven Spielberg's Jaws, Roy Scheider plays Martin Brody, the chief of police on Amity Island, a popular vacation spot. When a shark kills a woman, he wants to close down the beach. However, Mayor Larry Vaughn, determined to cash in on the lucrative July 4th weekend, refuses. After another shark incident, Brody receives permission to kill it. Together with oceanographer Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), he calls in the services of Quint (Robert Shaw), a grizzled local shark hunter.
During an alcohol-fueled meeting in the cabin of Quint's boat, he reveals he was a crew member of the USS Indianapolis, which was sunk by two Japanese missiles, leaving its passengers adrift in the water. As Quint put it, “1,100 men went into the water; 316 men come out. The sharks took the rest."
The monologue has power thanks to Shaw's nuanced performance. His facial expressions combine with his voice's shift from tough to vulnerable, suggesting the intense trauma of the situation. Up to this point, Quint has appeared fearless. Listening to him talk about his colleagues helplessly becoming shark food reveals not only his reason for evolving into a shark hunter, but also the horrific inner pain that has driven his life.
George Romero's horror classic Night of the Living Dead finds a group of people boarded up inside a house as waves of zombies swarm outside. They need to find a way to survive the onslaught - a task made difficult by the creatures' unrelenting drive. One of the characters, Ben (Duane Jones), relates how he encountered the zombies before arriving at the house. He witnessed them going after a truck, whose driver tried to speed away, crashing through a billboard and into a gas pump, where it caught on fire. Ben says:
I can still hear the man screaming… these things just backing away from it. I looked back at the diner to see if there was anyone there who could help me. That's when I noticed that the entire place had been encircled. There wasn't a sign of life left.
Ben then describes dozens of zombies staring at him, as well as how they “scattered through the air like bugs” when he drove his car through them. His monologue offers a chilling warning of what's to come. Zombies are scary enough; thinking about how fast they can converge upon a victim is even scarier.
In Predator, Alan "Dutch" Schaefer (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is a soldier of fortune hired by the US government to lead a team into the jungles of Guatemala to rescue a foreign cabinet minister and his aide, both of whom are being held captive by insurgents. A bigger threat exists in that jungle, however - an alien creature has come to Earth and begins picking off Schaefer's men.
Partway into the movie, he encounters a guerrilla named Anna Gonsalves (Elpidia Carrillo), who claims to have encountered the predator when she was a little girl living in a local village. She warns that, during the hottest years, villagers would be found without their skin - describing it as the work of “the demon who makes trophies of men.”
The movie certainly could have shown this gruesome fate. Instead, it sticks with Gonsalves, whose raw fear comes through loud and clear. The terror in her voice reveals that whatever Schaefer and crew are going to face is something that deserves to be approached with a sense of dread.
Gremlins finds Billy Peltzer (Zach Galligan) fending off trouble when he breaks the rules of caring for his new pet mogwai. As a result, a horde of aggressive mogwai are spawned, and they proceed to run amok in his town at Christmastime.
In the midst of this mayhem, Peltzer's girlfriend Kate Beringer (Phoebe Cates) tells the story of her worst Christmas ever. As a girl, her father went missing on Christmas Eve. A few days later, they found him dressed in a Santa suit inside the family's fireplace, arms filled with presents. He'd slipped, hit his head, and perished instantly while trying to surprise her. “And that's how I found out there was no Santa Claus,” she concludes.
Showing the scene would have run the risk of coming off as comical, as it's such a bizarre way to die. Listening to Beringer tell the story in a stunned manner drives home what an unfathomable tragedy it was to her younger self. She lost her dad and had Christmas perpetually tainted by the painful memory.
