by Ted Sherman

Created on: September 11, 2008

Maybe maybe the top scariest movie scene I've experienced recently was last month, when I saw that each ticket cost $12.50. I'm old enough to remember back in the Saturday afternoon movie days when we paid ten cents to get to see the newsreel, a cartoon short, a serial chapter, a cowboy movie and the main feature.

Most of my favorite movie scares go back a generation or two, but I still believe they beat all the high-tech, digitalized moments now up on the screen. Here are my favorites, but not necessarily in order of my preference. They're all great.

1. Psycho (1960). Alfred Hitchcock thrilled us all with an historic shower scene that happened one scary night at Bates Motel. Crazy killer Tony Perkins, wearing his dead mom's clothes, slashed Janet Leigh through the bathtub curtain. I never wanted to take a shower again.

2. The Exorcist (1973). The little girl spoke with the Devil's voice, floated in the air, turned her head 360 degrees and puked up buckets full of stuff. When the priest jumped out the window, I jumped out of my theater seat and ran out to buy a bucket of popcorn. I never went back in.

3. Young Frankenstein (1974) When Dr. Fronkensteen (Gene Wilder) arrives at the Transylvania train station, and out of the fog comes the screen-filling, bulging-eyed face of Igor (Marty Feldman), my terrified son went screaming out of the theater. We had to get our money back, take him home and go see it another time. It was particularly disturbing because at the time my son was 32 years old. Seriously, he was just five.

6. Rosemary's Baby (1968) shows the Devil at work again. This time he impregnates Mia Farrow, which scares her almost as much as when she found out Woody Allen had run off with their teenage adopted daughter. But that's a whole nother story. The birth scene at the end is quietly horrifying when Rosemary discover's she's the mother of Satan's child.

7. Alien (1979) This one has another, even more horrifying, baby birth scene. When astronaut John Hurt dies as a slimy, baby alien creature bursts from his chest, it is a combination of fascination, humor and gruesome shock that makes it memorable. Some critics theorize that the scene was an intentional reversal of sexes, mocking all the movies about women having difficult moments when their babies are born.

8. The Shining (1980 has many scary, supernatural moments, but the most frightening one is a flat-out murderous moment when Jack Nicholson is bashing in the door with a hatchet, then sticks his crazy face through and shouts, "Here's Johnny". It was almost as frightening as when the real Johnny Carson hit the image of singer Ed Ames in the crotch with his hatchet.

9. Jurassic Park (1993) had many, many frightening scenes when dinosaurs chased cars, overturned them and roared like a truck full of lions. The scariest scene was when two kids were hunted through the science station by two hungry velociraptors. Those killers were the same prehistoric beasts that had just eaten the fat mailman from "Seinfeld".

10. Jaws (1975) opened with a horrifying scene, and accompanied by the famous thumping music, it just got more thrilling until the great white shark ate the boat captain. The movie started with a naked girl out in the ocean at night. All very tranquil and sexy until her face reacts in horror as she's jerked suddenly under the surface. She comes up again and again, but each time is pulled under again, all the while screaming in terror. Because of this movie and "Psycho", I didn't ever want to take a shower nor go for an ocean swim again.

Learn more about this author, Ted Sherman.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.