Favorite Horror Scenes
Hi everyone! Good to see you all again!
If you caught my last newsletter, you’ll know I got hit hard with Covid for the very first time earlier in July. And despite managing to avoid it for four and a half years, I have nothing surprising to say about it. It sucked! I slept all day for a solid week and barely had enough energy to stay awake for the week after. I’m thankful I out of it without any serious symptoms, but still. I didn’t enjoy it! I don’t recommend getting it!
But since I’m feeling much better now, I wanted to talk about something I love that I haven’t gotten a chance to talk about before: horror! Scary movies! Halloween is still a ways away, but am not a patient man. This is something I’ve wanted to talk about for a while! Let’s do it.
MY FAVORITE HORROR SCENES
I can’t pinpoint exactly why I became obsessed with horror as an adult. I was an easily scared little kid, and it always felt like I’d get freaked out by things other kids wouldn’t: thunderstorms, a dark basement, Vincent Price’s monologue at the end of Thriller. It felt like I had an extra sensitivity to fear, like it hit me 5 times as hard as everyone else.
But now that I’m an adult, while a lot of those fears have mellowed, some of them still linger. And a lot of new, insidious adult fears have cropped up. Horror movies help me commune with those fears. They reflect my fears back to me, and help me process and understand them.
Also, if I’m being honest, sometimes it’s fun to watch a movie that you know would have scared the shit out of you as a kid. There’s a little bit of a masochistic streak in my love of horror, I guess you could say.
Either way, I wanted to talk about a few of my favorite horror scenes in movies. These scenes stick out to me not only as the scariest scenes I can think of, but they also reflect some of my own fears and help me feel a little less alone. It’s a great opportunity to talk about my deepest, darkest fears, for all of you to read and enjoy.
Also, something I realized after putting these scenes together: all the scenes I picked are not from what you’d traditionally label a “horror” film (despite being very scary for most of their runtime). This wasn’t intentional! These just happened to be the first few scenes that came to mind.
MULHOLLAND DRIVE - WINKIE’S DINER SCENE
I’ve always considered this scene to be my favorite horror scene of all time. David Lynch isn’t a horror director, but his movies will frequently descend into nightmare territory: Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, and many others will take sudden, sharp descents into pure horror that can hit so hard they take your breath away. Moments where your worst nightmare, the worst thing you could imagine happening, suddenly becomes real.
That’s what the Winkie’s Diner scene is to Mulholland Drive. I’ve seen the movie many times at this point, but honestly I couldn’t tell you the exact context of this scene - again, it would be like describing a dream. What I remember is that it pops up early in the movie, and while elements of it appear later on, the characters you see here never show up again. But it doesn’t really matter. What you’re seeing is a scene of a man who recounts a terrible nightmare he had, the most terrifying dream anyone could have, only to realize that the nightmare is real and he is inside of it. Every detail he recounts about his nightmare starts to actually happen to him, step by step.
And by the end, when he’s walking out to see “the man” behind the diner, you know what’s coming. You know there’s something horrible behind it, but you can’t turn away. You have to look. You’re going to look and see the horrible man’s face. You have no other choice.
The Winkie’s Diner scene really digs into that fear of mine: not only a nightmare becoming real, but becoming inevitable. The sudden realization that not only is something horrible about to happen, but that you are being inevitably pulled towards it, and you can’t do anything to stop it. As if you’re being beckoned by a mysterious force, there before you were born that will live on long after you’re dead. You’re just a helpless, weak little victim. You have no hope.
Winkie’s Diner sums that feeling up better than any other film scene I can imagine. Also, the way the sound gets muffled after the face reveal, like an explosion just went off? Hits every time.
DREAMS - THE WEEPING DEMON
Kurosawa is another director that, as far as I can tell, never directed a horror movie. But when he needs to deliver a terrifying scene, he really nails it. This usually pops up in any of his movies that have a supernatural element - one example being the scene in Rashomon where the murder victim’s testimony is delivered by a bizarre, demonic medium. But the horror scene that hits the hardest for me is the nightmare sequence, “The Weeping Demon,” from his anthology film Dreams.
Dreams is a collection of short films based on Kurosawa’s own dreams, so it stands to reason that he’d include a few nightmares. “The Weeping Demon” gets under my skin because of its unrelenting depiction of a post-apocalyptic world. Like the worst kind of lingering nightmare, it feels oppressive, gross, putrid. A bunch of demons wallowing in their own misery, in gigantic pools of blood, feeling constant pain but unable to die. This is all that’s left of the world now that the worst has happened.
If I had to pinpoint my greatest fear, it would be nuclear war. Unlike a lot of other fears I have, there’s nothing supernatural or irrational about it - nuclear bombs are real, they have been used before, and they could very well be used again. We’ve been living in the threat of that very scenario for almost a century now. Kurosawa obviously felt a lot of the same fears, and they’re all over Dreams - even the vignette right before this one, "Mount Fuji in Red," is a terrifying depiction of a nuclear reactor melting down (this was shortly after Chernobyl, after all).
But “The Weeping Demon” hits me a little harder. The scariest thing about living in a post-apocalyptic world is trying to survive in a society that has been completely destroyed, with no food, no shelter, no resources of any kind. And in a situation like that, I feel like I’d become like one of the weeping demons - wailing in a pool of blood, a screaming helpless mess. I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels that way.
The short ends with the demon asking the protagonist, “would you like to become a demon?” The protagonist tries to escape, collapsing down the cliffside in a panic, while the scene begins to fade and degrade the way a nightmare does when the dreamer starts to finally wake up. But even if the dream continued, where else could he go? Everything is over. The world decays the same way the dream does, and the only escape is annihilation. With the exception of a movie like Threads (another movie I need to talk about in the future), it’s hard for me to imagine an apocalyptic scenario more brutal than this scene. No wonder it’s stuck with me for so long.
BE INVOKED - STOP CRYING
This might be the most left-field choice for a scene on this list. But you know that I couldn’t resist getting some scary anime in here.
Be Invoked is the feature-length finale movie to Space Runaway Ideon, a sci fi/Super Robot anime series from Yoshiyuki Tomino, the creator of Gundam. It’s hard to get too into the nitty gritty of this scene without completely spoiling the show, but considering that its a 40 year old anime currently unavailable on streaming services* I feel like I have a little freedom to dish on some details. So note that there are going to be some big spoilers ahead for Space Runaway Ideon.
*(I do recommend seeking the show out if you’re into mecha anime! It’s a little slow paced and there’s plenty of reused animation, but the back half and finale movie are fantastic.)
Context for this scene: the heroes’ ship is being beseiged on all sides by their sworn enemy, the Buff Clan. In the midst of the chaos, two main characters of the show are suddenly shot and killed by the enemy, including Karala who is pregnant with captain Bes’s child. Up to this point, the crew was under the impression that the big robot Ideon was giving Karala’s unborn child some kind of divine cosmic protection (long story), but shockingly that appears to no longer be the case.
While the remaining crew huddles around their two dead crewmates’ covered bodies, Rapoh - a minor character who is typically very calm and composed - desperately tries to make some sort of sense out of what just happened. She looks to answers from Bes and Kasha, both characters that typically exude confidence, but neither can offer her anything. Bes is crying, and Kasha is staring at the bodies, stunned. Rapoh screams at Bes to stop crying, almost as if she’s scolding him for showing emotion during such a tense moment.
One of my favorite ways to convey terror in a scene is not to show something scary, but to show the reaction to something scary. Seeing terror in the faces of characters who are normally calm and composed is unnerving, a signal to the audience that something is very wrong. It’s like what the dreamer in the Winkie’s Diner scene says to his friend: “You’re in both dreams and you’re scared too. I get even more frightened when I see how afraid you are.” The character you previously looked to for comfort is no longer your anchor, and you’re now both helpless in the face of terror.
The faces on Bes, Kasha, and especially Rapoh in this scene are such an accurate depiction of hopelessness that they send a shiver down my spine. They hit in a way that only animation can - the widened eyes, the dead pupils, the lack of definition or movement. You can see in their eyes that they’re processing the worst possible scenario: the protection they thought they had is gone, and there is no hope. They are going to die.
I’m also reminded of what might be my favorite piece of horror anime of all time: The Curse of Kazuo Umezu. This girl’s wide eyed look of terror has haunted me ever since the first time I saw it.
We need more animated horror, folks! I’ve been sayin it.
I’d love to talk more about Kazuo Umezu but I think that might deserve its own newsletter, maybe around Halloween season. For now, I’ll leave you with these three scenes as some of my favorite ever horror scenes. I have so, so many more that I could talk about, and I’m sure I will in the future. Maybe I could turn it into a series! That would be fun!
Thanks for reading, my friends. I’ll see you in the next one.
