The Guardian brings us a new poll of the Scariest Movies, but whoever they polled was largely wrong, so I had to make a new one. You'll quickly see that my taste runs towards atmospheric creepiness: yes, I know these aren't all technically "horror" - some of them are "psychological thrillers," or "suspense." But they're still amongst the scariest movies I know. I'm not listing The Shining, Carrie or The Exorcist, just because you've already seen them.

In no particular order:


Don't Look Now Blind psychics, Venice, trippy camera-work? Why yes, this is the best scary movie ever. And I'm not even getting into The Sex Scene.


Bunny Lake Is Missing Two words: doll hospital. I think that awful The Forgotten was a ripoff of this, but not nearly as creepy, atmospheric or genuinely suspenseful.


Vertigo Well, gosh, you've gotta have a Hitchcock. And for my money this is the scariest. Also, Midge's apartment is fantastic.


Wise Blood Not technically horror, but the Southern Gothic to end all Southern Gothics.


The Innocents Terrific, terrifying adaptation of Turn of the Screw. You really can't beat inscrutable Victorian children, can you?


The Haunting The Shirley Jackson novel is of course fantastic, too. The remake is fairly crap, but this is scary in that way only early-60s movies could be. And I do love a good spinster.


Eyes Without A Face Believe the hype: as beautiful and creepy as any film ever made - plus, if it could be done, the best Halloween costume.


The Wicker Man (original only!) Despite the unfortunate remake and the equally unfortunate part in the inspiration of Burning Man, this is so odd and amazing and, yes, genuinely scary, that it deserves a place in the pantheon. Remote islands, animal masks, ancient rites and Christopher Lee cannot be ignored.


The Others So the best scary movie of the past decade, although you can really only watch it once. I mean, obviously, you can watch it more than once if you want, but there's nothing like the fright of that first viewing. And Nicole Kidman is perfect! Why don't more directors understand that "remote island" plus "creepy kids" is solid gold?


Night of the Demon This '57 Jacques Tourneur is definitely "B," but it's also definitely scary. It's an adaptation of M. R. James' 1911 Casting the Runes and all I'll say is it involves Satanic cults in England.


Something Wicked This Way Comes For kids, you say? Trust, it holds up.


Night of the HunterScrew Stepfather. Unless he's singing sinister hymns and living in a fanciful black and white universe, he's got nothing on Robert Mitchum's terrifying villain!

The Shining 'Scariest Film Ever', Poll Says [Guardian]

What impact this had on our sex lives I don't know, but I do know that as adults my brother and I obviously have to scream this at random intervals whenever we're together. These things make an impression. A piece on MSNBC talks about the dynamics of watching TV together. And forget Where the Wild Things Are. New findings suggest that watching TV with parents can freak kids out.

While it seems logical to protect a child from something scary by watching together, in fact a lot of kids take their cues from parents, and a skittish mom can only add to anxiety. (Like, even flinching; you don't need to be terrified by Dumbo, although some of us are.) "The researchers suggest that well-intentioned parents might be inadvertently turning up the volume on fear. That can happen simply because children are watching their parents' reactions." This logic applies to many facets of childrens' fears, and a lot of it's pretty intuitive: we've all seen a small child "decide" how bad a fall or scrape is - what might have been a small incident if dealt with matter-of-factly can become a screaming tantrum if an adult reacts with excessive concern or panic.

The piece details the various ways coddling can reinforce fears, the way a parent can communicate his own neuroses - and makes the point that the opposite "tough-it-out" extreme's not great, either. Common-sense stuff, for the most part. The TV findings are really interesting though because it's fascinating to think how much of fear is natural and intuitive, how much it's influenced by circumstance. I've seen young children in the same family react completely differently to The Wizard of Oz, and for that matter I have strong memories of being so terrified in a theatre showing of The Black Cauldron that my aunt had to take me out of the theatre; to this day I think of it as the scariest movie in the world.

The article doesn't get into it, but it's hard not to think about that other scary parent-movie scenario, sex scenes. I wonder how much of that squirming discomfort is natural, and how much is communicated by our parents. A friend tells me that sitting between her parents through Don't Look Now remains one of the more traumatic memories of her early-teen years. "But that wasn't even just the normal squirm," she writes, "because my parents kind of looked like Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, so it was doubly awful." Scary indeed.

Mom And Dad Make Scary Movies Even Scarier [MSNBC]

"When Don't Look Now was released, the big screen was the only place that people might expect to see sex scenes in which they were not personally involved," Lawson argues. "Now, any act involving any actors - animal, child, living, dead - is available online. Philip Larkin, a poet subsequently revealed to be keen on porn, immortalised the view that 'sexual intercourse began in 1963'. But, for cinema at least, sexual intercourse ended in about 2005, when the most explicit images possible became as readily available as television." Sex in cinema still has erotic power in my mind because of the medium more than the message.

Sure, you can download any sort of DIY banging you want from the confines of your own home. But there is something powerful, and transgressive, about sitting in a room with a bunch of other people witnessing an explicit act of sex. Because the end game (unless you're Paul Reubens) isn't the consummation of your own sex act, you can appreciate the artistry of the director, the bond between the actors, and the reactions of the people around you.

I saw the notoriously horrendous Brown Bunny in a theater with a platonic dude friend. The explicit blow job scene between Chloe Sevigny and Vincent Gallo was, in person, shocking and sort of funny. It comes out of nowhere in the context of the movie, which is largely ponderous and dialogue-free. Sitting in a room full of people, shifting in our seats and giggling nervously, made the viewing of that cinematic BJ an experience. Had I seen some XTube clip of that same scene, divorced from the rest of the film and viewed from my couch, I'm pretty sure I would have just thought, "Huh. The Sev's giving a BJ to some greasy looking dude. Gross."

I agree with Lawson that there has been a "sexual desensitisation" since the days of Don't Look Now, and perhaps there is something "passe" about the sex in Roeg's new release, Puffball. But as someone who never had a chance to see Don't Look Now on the big screen, there's still something transgressive about watching sex on the big screen.

The End Of Cinematic Sex [Guardian]