Goosebump Moments at the Movies

I like movies, and I especially like thrillers.  This is probably because I was raised on Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents and liked being scared (but not too much).  Not slasher stuff or torture porn or Nelson Eddy-Jeanette McDonald musicals.  Just well thought out plots with at least one intelligent character and some genuine frights.  So I'm listing my favorite scary scenes, or in some cases mere moments, in ten of my favorite thrillers.  (Finally, I'm only using actors' names because I can't always remember the characters'.)

10.  Kiss of Death:  A young Richard Widmark (his first role, I believe) as a giggling psychopath who ties an old woman into her wheelchair and shoves it down a flight of stairs.  Yikes.

9.  Wait Until Dark:  Famous for the Big Moment between Alan Arkin (the leaper) and Audrey Hepburn (the leapee), but there's one that's even creepier in a more cerebral way.  Blind Hepburn has broken all the light bulbs in her apartment to put psychopath (yes, another one) Arkin on an even footing with her.  In a brilliant twist, she lights matches in the dark while Arkin has to feel his way with a cane.  It all makes sense, believe me.  But, as Arkin discovers to Heburn's horror, she forgot one bulb, and the moment it lights up what had previously been a blank screen is when we all hit our collective foreheads and go, "Of course!"  This is the one movie I've seen more often than any other.  Want to know how often?  The number of the pay telephone across the street from her apartment is 242-4598.  That, my friends, is often.

8.  The Window:  I wish more people knew about this nourish nailbiter from 1949.  In the scene I like most (among several), young Tommy has been locked in his room for telling what his parents believe are tall tales about a murder he saw committed by the nice couple upstairs.  He's the only one home, and he pushes the skeleton key out of the lock so that it falls to the floor on the opposite side of the bedroom door.  Now he slides a coat hanger under the door to try and coax the key back to him so he can get out.  But the guilty husband is standing on that side of the door watching all this, smiling but not with his eyes.  He bends over and places the key inside the hanger's range, and Tommy can feel it and pulls the hanger out of sight.  A moment later he opens the door.  "Hello, Tommy."

7.  Experiment in Terror:  Lee Remick is being blackmailed by yet another lively psychopath, Ross Martin (The Wild, Wild West), who wheezes with asthma and whom Remick has learned to take very seriously.  She's to meet him in a restaurant where FBI agents are waiting to nab him.  But time is passing, and no psychopath.  So she gets up to use the women's room.  While she's at the sink, an old woman, dressed in black and stooped over, enters and closes -- and locks -- the door.  He turns around, and it's  -- the psychopath!  Maybe anyone could have pulled this off, but Martin's face in those granny glasses is truly terrifying.  After he's done having his little chat, he puts the glasses back on, stoops over, and in a moment that really unnerves me, actually goes back into character as a harmless old woman as he leaves the restroom.

6.  Don't Look Now:  Another movie I think deserved greater popularity.  Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie are in Venice mourning the accidental death of their little girl.  At the same time, a serial killer is lurking and striking throughout the city.  During the climax, Sutherland discovers a child running loose through the streets alone at night, wearing the same red raincoat his daughter wore the day she died, and he sees his one chance for redemption.  What happens next is just too freaky for words.

5.  Diabolique:  The famous French shocker that predated Psycho with the scariest scene in a bathroom.  Many believe it was the inspirational spark that lit Hitchcock's fuse, which led to the latter film.  I might prefer Psycho for sheer shock value, but boy, the bathroom scene in Diabolique is no chucklefest!

4. Blue Velvet:  David Lynch's love-it-or-loathe-it examination of the dark side of an American small town.  I loved it.  Dennis Hopper is possibly the most maniacal and surely the most profane of all our psychopaths so far.  But the creepiest scene-stealer to me has to be Dean Stockwell.  It's just one scene, but it disoriented me in a way no other film scene had or has since.  He plays Ben, a friend whom Hopper refers to admiringly as "one suave ****."  Ben, looking effeminate and acting stoned, switches on a very special lamp and begins lip-syncing to Roy Orbison's "In Dreams," using the lamp as a makeshift microphone that eerily illuminates his face.  I had no idea where I was or what to expect next, so I had no choice but to let Lynch take me by the arm and lead me on to the next scene -- which was possibly even more surreal than the last.

3.  The Silence of the Lambs:  I don't think I had ever experienced the kind of sheer movie tension I did when Jodie Foster's FBI trainee found herself in the pitch-black basement of a serial killer who can see her, but she can't see anything. 

2.  Rear Window:  It was inevitable that Hitchcock should reign in the top two.  This is actually my all-time favorite movie shot, but I put it here because Psycho has it beat for sheer terror.  Grace Kelly is in Raymond Burr's apartment along with the police.  James Stewart has suspected that Burr murdered his wife, and now Kelly has the proof:  she sneaked into Burr's apartment while he was out and found the woman's wedding ring.  Burr comes back unexpectedly, mayhem ensues, and the cops arrive just in time.  The shot:  Stewart is looking through Burr's window from across the courtyard using a telephoto lens.  He focuses on a close-up of Kelly's hands behind her back, one hand pointing to the ring on a finger of her other hand.  Then Stewart's -- and Hitchcock's -- camera pans up just far enough to show Burr looking down at the ring, and then directly at us.

1.  Psycho:  Yes, the shower scene, but not that moment in the shower scene.  For me, the true stuff of nightmares is our view of the bathroom door opening beyond the shower curtain, and a figure approaching the unsuspecting Janet Leigh.  Sometimes what I fear most is not what happens, but what is about to happen.


OK, I can't resist -- here are some leftovers, briefly:


Vertigo:  The big plot twist as Kim Novak remembers it, and the movie isn't even over.

Jaws:  Those barrels, so much scarier than the shark itself.

Die Hard:  Some great writing -- bad guy Alan Rickman encountering good guy Bruce Willis for the first time.

No Country for Old Men:  Javier Bardem and the filling station scene.  "Call it."

Mulholland Drive:  The Cowboy.

When a Stranger Calls Back:  The opening sequence, a brilliant variation on the old babysitter-home-alone formula, much more frightening than the original film because both the babysitter and the stranger outside seem so intelligent and empathetic.

Dirty Harry:  Villain Andy Robinson's look of fear right before getting beaten up by the guy he paid to do it.  It makes him human just for a moment, which helps flesh out the character but also makes him too real for comfort.

Marathon Man:  Former Nazi dentist Laurence Olivier loose in the Jewish diamond district of midtown New York.

Charade:  George Kennedy and Cary Grant battling it out on a high rooftop, both trumped by Henry Mancini's barely audible but very tension-inducing score.  Less really is more.

North by Northwest:  Just a few seconds before the third pass the crop duster makes over Cary Grant, as both are hurtling toward the receding camera and we feel totally helpless.

The Night of the Hunter:  The two children fleeing up the basement stairs with villain Robert Mitchum right behind them, arms outstretched before him like every child's worst nightmare.

The Dark Knight:  Two ferry boats, two bombs,. but the detonators are on the opposite boats.  A great moral dilemma from a superhero movie, something I never expected to see.

Notorious:  The moment Ingrid Bergman realizes she's not simply under the weather -- she's being slowly poisoned.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre:  More horror than thriller, but worth it for the very final shot: a man and his running chainsaw on a country road, twirling in a frenzy of death like two dancers set against a rising red sun.  We just know he's never going to stop killing, because he loves his work.