top-10-scariest-movies-ever

top-10-scariest-movies-ever

What does it take to make a really scary movie? What is it that makes you so scared you're afraid to sleep in your own bed at night? There have been thousands of scary moves made, yet probably less than 10% of them really put the chill or dreadful fear in us that makes it hard to sleep at night - even with a light on. So, what is it that makes a really scary movie?  I've come up with seven criteria, that I believe, are conducive to scaring the living crap out of us and keeping us scared for days afterwords:

  1. Danger and Suspense

    2. To be scared, you've gotta really sense a character's life is in danger. Having a little boy run from the fat bully at school playground simply won't cut it. There is simply no other way around life-threatening suspense, like a real bad guy hiding in the basement with an axe or a glaze-eyed Jack Nicholson running down a hallway chasing a couple of frantic children.

  2. Eerie and Creepiness

    3. A scientist puts a dead man's body back together and brings him back to life as a monster. Or a boy tells his mother he sees dead people. That's pretty eerie and awfully creepy.

  3. Believability

    4. The less believable it is, the less likely you are to buy into the fear. A titanic-sized dinosaur running down the street terrorizing the neighborhood might be exciting, but it's not exactly going to keep you awake at night worrying. Seeing a possessed teenage girl turn her neck around 360 degrees, however, might give you cause to look around your room at night - if not, several weeks

  4. The Supernatural

    5. This may be the most important element of fear. It is the fear of the unknown, or a world that appears in a way that is different than the way we know or understand it. Ghosts, demons, the afterlife, or anything that we don't expect to see every day - or want to see.

  5. Gore and Morbidity

    6. See any of the horror scenes from Jaws. Or imagine a scene like in Sixth Sense where the dead boy says, "Come on, I'll show you where my father keeps his gun." Gore is what makes us remember what might

  6. Shock and Surprise

    Nothing delivers a jolt to the nerves quite like a dead body falling out of your closet. Remember the scene in Jaws where they discover the dead man with the bulging eyes while diving in the water? Why do dead people always have to have bulging eyes?

  7. Twist, Disturbance and Irony

    8. The twist can be a surprise like in The Sixth Sense or The Others. Or it can be something very disturbing. Try The Fog, or any Stephen King story.