Eighteen Film Buffs Talk About The Scariest Movies They’ve Ever Seen
Even film critics watch these movies with the lights on.
The Crawling Hand
Garry Maddox, Sydney Morning Herald
As a child I remembered being terrified by a movie on TV about a severed hand that strangled people. I’ve just looked it up and discovered it must have been Herbert L. Strock’s The Crawling Hand from 1963. On IMDb, it’s rated just 2.8 out of 10, so I suspect it would be comically dreadful now, but it felt nightmarish then.
There was another one too – a thriller about a man arriving in a small town to discover that, despite signs of life everywhere, it’s abandoned. Googling reveals it must have been a Twilight Zone episode called “Where Is Everybody?” And I can see my memory is flawed. I thought he discovered the town was about to be obliterated in an atomic bomb test – another frightening scenario for a boy. But it had a different ending so maybe I was sent to bed, too haunted to sleep, before it finished.