Best of '15: Most Memorable Scares. Boo!
Tuesday, December 29, 2015 at 2:42PM 
Jason from MNPP here for more Year in Review madness.
Truth be told 2015 was not the best year for horror movies. There were some smaller successes but only a couple of classics born, and out of those only one - David Robert Mitchell's It Follows would classify entirely as a genre exercise. But there were plenty of Scary Scenes, whether inside the horror genre or knock knock knocking on the door, and that's what we're here to celebrate.
The following moments aren't necessarily in hard order, save the top few, because What Scares Us is subjective to not just each individual person but to each individual moment that person is experiencing -- I might feel like "No thank you, Bugs" today but tomorrow it might be all like "I said NO THANK YOU, Cannibals!" instead. Fear's a funny thing like that.
Anyway beware spoilers below, as we'll be discussing in a little bit of detail the money-shots of the year in "Boo!"
The 15 Scariest Scenes of 2015
from all sorts of films after the jump...
15. "The Twist" in The Visit
When you think M. Night Shyamalan you think plot twists, and ones with decreasing payoff at this point, so how I was taken by surprise by The Visit I'm not sure - maybe I'd reached a point where I could again underestimate him? Meaning to say I wasn't paying close enough attention and he was waving his hands one way, allowing the sucker-punch to come from where I wasn't expecting it, even though I feel silly in retrospect for missing the signs. (SIGNS.) Anyway there are some fun jump scares and silliness littered through this weird little flick but somehow its final act rug-pull, it's own spin on 'The call is coming from inside the building," totally got me.
14. "Sunday Service" in Sinister 2
Sinister 2 is not a great horror movie but it is a good enough one, making improvements to the first film (which I didn't like) by upgrading from Ethan Hawke (who I don't like) to James Ransone (who I do) and turning on some damn lights (good grief the first one was murky). It also uses Ghost Kids in a smarter way - they're notsomuch jump-scare jack-in-the-boxes, popping out of corners, than symptoms of a strangled mind a la The Shining. Anyway that's neither here nor there as the scares in the Sinister movies are truly with its snuff films and this one's got a doozy involving rats in a bucket, borrowed from Medieval torture and also recently seen on A Game of Thrones. One of the few times I've had to watch something from between my fingers this year.
13. "Getaway Car" in We Are Still Here
The greatest trick the devil ever played was making an audience like clearly doomed characters in a horror movie, and We Are Still Here has got a great big middle-finger of this sort up its sleeve at its midway point, introducing a nice enough person and tossing her unexpectedly into a great big clusterfuck of a haunted house situation. And director Ted Geoghegan goes above and beyond the call of duty, giving us a fake-out escape only to let us in on the news for the first time that hey, these bad guys, they can follow you out of the house and into your car and down the road. A great good old fashioned jump scare.
12. "Baby Napping" in The Hallow
"This ain't your Grandma's Fairy Tale!" should've been this Irish movie's tag-line, as it digs its faeries up from the muck and primordial earth and unleashes them on an unsuspecting sweet little family - the movie's sense of atmosphere drips with foul dirt and dead things, a literal rot and decay that seeps into your home and hearth and oh yeah then there's the root-like baby-snatching talons, let's not forget them! If you learn one thing from horror movies in 2015 let it be this - don't hide your baby in a closet, people.
11. "Call For Help" in Unfriended
I watched Unfriended on my laptop in bed at night totally alone in my house, the way the devil intended, and it worked on me like gangbusters. Leave a few windows open on your screen in the background - I suggest that's how you watch it! Anyway the best sequence is one that's as funny as it is scary, as hopeless as it is hilarious - when there's nowhere else to run, head to Chat-Roulette of all places? Where nobody can hear your screams over the sounds of their own loud public masturbation.
10. "Wolf Mask" in Creep
This movie manages to breathe fresh life into several ol' standbys from horror movies - there's a scene where our main character's forced to sneak around a supposedly-unconscious maniac that stretches that tension to fun heights, and another where the maniac is suddenly seen hovering in the background that got me to jump. But nothing tops the sheer unsettling strangeness that it achieves when it plays with the horror movie mask concept - like the movie surrounding it is so weird that it's funny until it circles all the way around to too weird to deal with again.
9. "Goodnight Daddy" in Crimson Peak
One of the main complaints, wrongheaded as they were, about Guillermo Del Toro's throwback Gothic was that the ghosts weren't scary (nevermind the ghosts are clearly intended to be mournful figures). And yet (in typical Del Toro fashion - he sure does love head trauma) there's a scene having nothing to do with the ghosts that shook me pretty deeply, one that fits in with the more practical, emotional story the film was offering (to many viewer's chagrin) - when Edith (Mia Wasikowska) is forced to go to the morgue to identify her beloved father's body and is confronted with a half-collapsed, crushed-in head, Del Toro makes you feel the weight of the horror in this moment in wretched detail. And when Charlie Hunnam starts poking around in it in front of her forget about it!
8. "Welcome to the Cave" in Bone Tomahawk
There is a scene of body horror in Eli Roth's cannibal flick The Green Inferno that I almost included on this list, until I remembered this scene from this woefully under-seen western, which leaves all other scenes of body horror this year crumpled in the dust, literally and figuratively.
7. "Sweet Dreams" in Goodnight Mommy
The entire final act of Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz masterful portrait of familial disintegration is a headlong plunge into stark icy sadism but it's earlier in the movie when my brain broke - namely, to poison a fun phrase the folks at Portlandia gave us, they put a bug on it. No no no no no no no.
6. "Mad Mission" in Embrace of the Serpent
Not to pick on Eli Roth but whereas The Green Inferno gets under our skin by literally getting under the skin, never burrowing much deeper than that, Ciro Guerra's film turns our full brains inside out, dropping us into a white imperialist nightmare that renders all of our familiar signifiers meaningless - it sniffs out real true honest-to-goodness insanity and makes us dance with it. A school full of brainwashed children left to their own devices for forty years carve out their own religion in isolation, a mixture of the Christianity they were taught to love and the cartoon "cannibal" past they were taught to hate, and what's birthed is unsettling, to say the least. [Embrace of the Serpent, an Oscar Foreign Film finalist this year, opens in February 17th, 2016]
5. "Border Crossing" in Sicario
Denis Villeneuve's film is not a horror movie but it owes enough of a sick-making debt to David Fincher's Se7en to certainly feel like one at times, whether it's digging up corpses from the walls of a one-story home in the desert or Jóhann Jóhannsson's sinister score making every bird's-eye angle feel like Judgement Day come home to roost. And all that tension comes to a head earlier than you're anticipating as Emily Blunt's carried off in a caravan across the border to and from from Juarez, which is painted something like the sandblasted center of Hell itself. And like Hell, getting out is never easy.
4. "The Attic" in Krampus
Director Michael Dougherty has poisoned yet another holiday with his gleeful wickedness, bless him - his Christmas-centric follow-up to his Halloween-themed Trick 'r Treat is every bit the bouncy blast that one was, just with a slightly bigger budget. Which gives him the opportunity for some for-the-ages creature design (I cannot wait to have toys of these suckers), which Dougherty unleashes after a slow-build with a sudden torrent of shock-and-awe as our main characters do what characters in horror movies never should - go investigate strange sounds coming from the attic. This is where hiring great actors is key - Toni Collette can now add "sanity-shaken pure terror" to her long long list of can-do's as she sells the shit out of this scene, alongside Adam Scott and Allison Tolman.
3. "Fire Pit" in Son of Saul
László Nemes' film is one long gut-punch, excruciating in its verisimilitude but also exhilarating in its movie-making at the same time. But when dealing with something dealing in real-world atrocities it can feel oh let's say flimsy, in the face of such weight, to shuffle it in between demonic gingerbread men and STD hauntings. But still, in the immortal words of the Last House on the Left poster, it's only a movie, it's only a movie, a fictionalized telling of a tale, and so I'll try to not feel guilty using it here. And when I close my eyes and think of Son of Saul I see that fire-pit, the black forms of bodies swirling around and inside it, the gunfire and the screams and the roar of flames blurring into one endless piercing shriek.
2. "Opening Scene" in It Follows
While the movie that follows is a gorgeous nightmare from start to finish filled with scares that'll have you climbing into your neighbor's lap, it's the start that gave me my favorite horror movie scare this year, plunging us deep off the diving-board into its dreamlike what-the-fuckery with skillful precision and snapped limbs akimbo in equal measure. Out of all its sequences its the opening I come back to the most, making elaborate theories about why the girl is wearing what she's wearing (she's clearly fancied herself up for a romantic interlude) and where she really figures into the film that follows' chain of contamination. And from a quiet sobbing on the beach comes that brutal edit, redefining brutal, as the hardest cut of the year.
1. "Jack Escapes" in Room
Nothing but nothing got me sitting on the edge of my seat like the sequence where Jack plays dead, is wrapped up into a rug, and tricks his way towards freedom, his sobbing screaming wild-eyed mother echoing in his head. In all of our heads. Director Lenny Abrahamson plays the scene as the little boy stumbles across the wet grass, with the enormous figure of Old Nick (that name conjuring the Anti-Klaus of Krampus) stomping behind him and a barking snarling dog (it would have to be a dog) in his face his only escape, with the slow-mo molasses movements out of a nightmare - they could probably fumigate the movie theater while showing this scene since not one single person watching it is taking in a breath until its over.
Reader Comments (19)
I couldn't agree more on your #1 - and I had even read the book! I knew what was coming and I was still on the edge of my seat, biting my nails, practically watching through splayed fingers. That's some damn good filmmaking right there!
Why Old NIck dropped Jack there? Didnt understand that. Scared of dog?
Damian -- i viewed it as panic. realized he had raised too many suspicions wanted the hell out of there.
Jason -- LOVE your #1 choice. i wwould have never have thought of it for such a list (from genre blinders) but it's so true. as for SON OF SAUL. I can't really specify one scene -- even that one -- since it felt like one single scene nightmare throughout.
i actually really liked IT FOLLOWS surprising myself. but i thought the scariest scene was... well... it was the same as SON OF SAUL actually. i was just on nerve throughout looking at every piece of the frame to try to make sense of the nightmare.
Totally agree on your number 1! I think that the whole preparation for the escape was just as excruciating. Definitely one of the best scene/sequences of the year. Genius directing
What about The Witch?
Marcello -- i keep forgetting if Jason has seen that but since it doesn't come out until next year we can save it.
I HAVE NOT SEEN THE WITCH YET, STOP RUBBING IT IN
I'm so glad that you included The Visit on here,because I thought that was BONKERS!
Love the inclusion of Bone Tomahawk, just watched it the other night and really enjoyed it. With a search party storyline on par with western greats, a frightful thrilling finale, and great performances all around (Richard Jenkins is particularly good as the old talkative deputy) it's become one of my favorite hidden gems of the year.
How about "The Tribe?"
As I tried to convince Jason to do, people should watch THEY LOOK LIKE PEOPLE. Excellent lo-fi horror, that.
I haven't seen all of these yet, sadly (many not out here yet), but I mostly agree with everything that I have. Except CRIMSON PEAK. That movie is dopey.
The Gift
Mark -- The Gift is great and would def. make my runner-up list, which I def. should've included. Also on it off the top of my head - Anomolisa and Nasty Baby and The Final Girls.
T-Bone -- I missed the screening of The Tribe I was supposed to see so I haven't seen it yet, very sad to say. I am dying to though.
Mike Troutman -- Richard Jenkins performance in BT is absolutely wonderful and it made me so happy when the Spirits nominated him for Supporting Actor since it is not the sort of film that usually gets awards attention at all. LOVE
Nothing scared the utter shit out of me this year like "Heaven Knows What". I've never done any type of drugs and that movie made me want to go hide in a corner with my cardigans.
Sorry JA, The Witch is a 2016 movie all right. Hope you enjoy when you ser it!
Good work! Great end of the year article.
I agree with you about the escape in ROOM and he in the cop car looking through the rainy window. I too held my breath.
Here's some of my favorite 2015 scares:
When Petyr the Nosferatu look-alike is awakened in WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS. I've watched WWDITS many times and he always makes me jump.
The bride's revenge dance in WILD TALES.
The oven in THE VISIT
Tom Hardy stabbing to death one of his fellow thugs in LEGEND
The reoccurring Dream Men in THE NIGHTMARE
The father's interview in THE WOLFPACK
Oral Violence in GOODNIGHT MOMMY.
Teen Violence in BREATHE
Indian Violence in BONE TOMAHAWK and THE REVENANT
Hipster Violence in THE NASTY BABY.
This was fun!
Really wonderfully written piece. That scene in Bone Tomahawk is the single most shocking thing I've seen in a movie in a very long time. It would be even more horrific and effective if it happened to one of the main characters, but it would probably be actually unbearable to witness then
I'm glad to see that there are those who appreciate Unfriended and The Visit the way that I do. They may not be anywhere near the overall best films of the year, but they exceeded my expectations and provided me with some of the most fun I had in the movie theater all year.
When Marquis runs out of bullets in The Hateful Eight in one of the last shootouts, with music from The Thing blaring in the background, I almost threw up from the anxiety. I was also high at the time, so there's that, but a second sobre watching was almost even more horrifying. 99 Homes terrified the beejezus out of me during almost any of the eviction scenes, but the very first or last ones will probably haunt me for the rest of my life. I don't watch Horror movies because I'm jaded toward the genre (Why the hell would I want to give myself nightmares? But I should overcome this, I still haven't seen the Babadook), the only one I watched this year was that new Insidious movie, and it wasn't anywhere near as scary as the highway scene in Sicario.