by Rachel Stockton

Created on: September 14, 2008

My brother and I regularly ask one another at family gatherings if we've "seen any good, scary movies lately." The key word here is "good." Movies claiming to be scary abound; but those that actually fit that bill are pretty few and far between. And, when referring to the moniker "scary", I'm not talking about gory, bloody, violence for the sake of violence movies, either. Which, of course, makes those that AREN'T violent, but that are scary nonetheless, all the more awesome? If you're a connoisseur, that is. Anyway, here are some of the very best "scanarios" (scary scenarios) of all time:

10. Alien (1979). There were several truly horrifyingly scary scenes in Alien, but two of the scariest occur fairly close to the beginning of the movie. The first one is when the crew first discovers the dying Alien aboard a deserted spacecraft. They find numerous eggs on the person' of said Alien, when all of a sudden one of them HATCHES, and lands on crew member Kane's face. If you're watching the movie for the first time you mistakenly think that this is the end of Kane. Nope. But, let's just say that it would have been better for Kane had this been the case; the worst is yet to come in another scene. More on that later.

9. Play Misty for Me (1971). Lonnggggg before Glenn Close and Michael Douglas engaged in a fling (Fatal Attraction) gone catastrophically wrong, Clint Eastwood and Jessica Walters had a dalliance with similar, dire results. However, I've always considered "Misty" to be much scarier than "Fatal." Maybe it was because I was younger when I first saw it. I don't know, but the scene at the end, when we THINK Walters is dead, but heaven help Dave (Eastwood), she isn't, stuck with me. It scared my poor husband to death, and he never forgave me for recommending it to him after we married. We're now divorced, by the way.

8. Dial M. for Murder. (1954). This one's is a Hitchcock classic, and is on many "best American made films" lists. The story of a husband who thinks he's planned the perfect murder of his wife, but things go "horribly" wrong and the would-be wife killer ends up getting stabbed by the stronger-than-hubby-realized wife. That scene is nerve wracking, and the scariest of the entire flick. It gets you so worked up that your edgy as the cops try to figure out what-in-the-h-e-double-toothpicks actually happened. Hitchcock's ability to maintain tension throughout is nowhere better depicted than in "M."

7. The Duel. Directed by (surprise) Steven Spielberg,

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