Retrocrush gets scary

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.

Article Author: James Russell

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