Retrocrush have an interesting top 100 list of the scariest moments in films. It's interesting because the list actually isn't restricted to horror films as such (the pink elephants from Dumbo being a notable example), although there are a lot of those. That said, I find myself wondering what's particularly scary about some of the moments they've chosen. (I should add the page is profusely illustrated, sometimes unattractively as well. You may wish to consider yourself warned.)

For example, among the top 100 is the infamous gut-puking scene from Lucio Fulci's City of the Living Dead; Fulci makes another appearance with his equally notorious eyeball-skewering from Zombie Flesh Eaters. Plus there's the exploding head from David Cronenberg's Scanners (illustrated with a GIF animation of the scene). And there's Linda Blair's green puke from The Exorcist and Luis Bunuel with his razor in Un chien andalou. I've not seen any of these films apart from the last two, but even so I have to ask: what is actually scary about these scenes as such.

Back around the time I was at uni I discovered my local library held a book by a fellow called Peter Nicholls called Fantastic Cinema (published circa 1983, now presumably long out of print; a pretty good book for its time, though, if you want to go looking for it). It was a history of the whole SF/horror/fantasy genre, and it had a rather interesting way of appraising films in the guide at the back of the book, giving them not one but two ratings: one for overall quality and one (where merited) for gore content. And he made what I thought was an interesting point as his justification for this, namely that fear is one emotion, disgust is another, and although you can mix the two, just because a scene is icky (someone's head exploding or guts bursting forth) doesn't necessarily make it scary. Which leads me to wonder whether these scenes I've highlighted are necessarily scary as such or just squicky.

For example, I found The Exorcist scary when I first saw it on TV, but the split pea soup was not frightening, just kind of ugh. Similarly, the eyeball stuff in the Bunuel film is more biologically yuck than scary. Maybe it's a bit scary for people who don't know that it's coming... the first time I saw it was in a university lecture theatre with a bunch of people who mostly didn't seem to know what lay ahead; that occasion provided proof that a film made in 1928 still has the power to make people scream with horror. Hmm, horror, there's that word again. Apparently Boris Karloff didn't like Frankenstein being called a horror film as he thought "horror" had connotations of physical nastiness rather than the emotion of fear. He suggested "terror film" as an alternative name for the new genre but it never caught on. Maybe he was onto something, though.

Anyway, the eyeball stuff in Chien strikes me as more of a shock thing than anything else, which, I suppose, then begs the question, just how much of a difference is there between shocking a viewer and scaring them. Some examples again. The shower scene from Psycho tops the list. There's also the scene from The Birds with the dead man with no eyes, that rather bravura opening murder from Suspiria, and Lon Chaney's unmasking in The Phantom of the Opera. These are, to be sure, shock moments... but are they scary? Or am I just splitting hairs here? I don't know because I don't actually have an answer to that question, so "splitting hairs" may actually be the valid response here. Still, thought I'd throw the question out anyway.