Eighteen Film Buffs Talk About The Scariest Movies They’ve Ever Seen
Even film critics watch these movies with the lights on.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
Luke Buckmaster, Crikey/The Guardian
Scary movies are obsessed with mentally ill people for good reasons. There are few things more frightening than being trapped in a helpless predicament (you’re strapped to a chair, say, and locked in a grubby basement) with someone with whom you cannot possibly reason.
Imagine if you were there, soaking up the sheer sadism of it, the moment Mr White told that poor cop in Reservoir Dogs, “All you can do is pray for a quick death, which you ain’t gonna get.” The monstering of human beings can be truly terrifying, which is one of the reasons I regard Tobe Hooper’s grisly 1974 classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as possibly the scariest movie of all time.
There is a nihilistic perversity to it that itches like a rash – a hideous, hideous rash – made all the more intense by the film’s cold-blooded, meat-hook realism: Hooper’s seemingly intuitive reluctance to comfort us via a blanket of fiction or contrivance. He wants us to believe this shit is real. The result is a film that hurts like hell.