50 Scariest 2013 Movie Moments
Truly terrifying! SPOILERS follow...
Cold - The Last Exorcism: Part II
The Scary Moment: Something gets into bed with Jared (Judd Lormand) at the start of this silly-named sequel.
"Geeze, you're cold," he shivers, before realising it's not his wife. But what is it?
Hide Your Eyes When: The couple find Nell Sweetzer (Ashley Bell) squatting on the kitchen counter looking slightly worse for wear.
Chatty - Blue Jasmine
The Scary Moment: Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) chats to the woman next to her on the plane like they're old friends, and continues to chat to her all the way off the plane, into the airport and through the baggage reclaim, until the woman's husband arrives to pick her up.
Why's it scary? Well…
Hide Your Eyes When: It turns out Jasmine doesn't know the woman at all - she's just been blathering on for the entire flight regardless. This cuckoo has well and truly flown the nest…
Health Scare - Fire In The Blood
The Scary Moment: Director Dylan Mohan Gray reveals that pharmaceutical companies were so obsessed with turning a profit on antiretroviral drugs that they made them so expensive that only the rich were able to afford them…
Hide Your Eyes When: We discover that this led to 10 million people dying of AIDS in Africa.
Missing - Insidious Chapter 2
The Scary Moment: Renai (Rose Byrne) hears the baby crying somewhere in the house, but she can't find her anywhere.
Hurrying downstairs towards the sound, toys in the hallway suddenly leap up into the air.
Hide Your Eyes When: Entering the living room, Renai is confronted with a woman in white, who smacks her in the face and renders her unconscious.
Alien Visit - Dark Skies
The Scary Moment: A good old-fashioned boo scare as we follow Lacy (Keri Russell) into her son's room, only to find a terrifying, gangly figure standing over his bed.
And SCREAM.
Hide Your Eyes When: The skinny alien turns to look at Lacy. Shiver.
Phone It In - InRealLife
The Scary Moment: In this revealing documentary, a teen girl (whose identity is protected from viewers) describes her relationship to her phone, which gives a whole new meaning to the word 'dependency'.
Hide Your Eyes When: The teenager describes the harrowing things she did in order to get her stolen phone back. Unbelievable.
Kidnap - Eden
The Scary Moment: Hyun Jae (Jamie Chung) meets an attractive fireman at a bar and falls for his charms. But things take a turn for the sinister once he's got her to himself.
Hide Your Eyes When: Hyun Jae is thrown into the boot of a car and driven away…
Throat Slit - The Iceman
The Scary Moment: Richard Kuklinski (Michael Shannon) has just been on a lovely date with Deborah (Winona Ryder).
When he goes to the pool hall, though, a rude blabbermouth insults Deborah, prompting Richard to follow the blabbermouth out into the alley.
Hide Your Eyes When: The ignorant guy gets into his car, only for Richard to calmly open the door and slit his throat. Then leave without a word. Now that's cold.
Lost At Sea - The Deep
The Scary Moment: Gulli's (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) fishing boat capsizes off the south coast of Iceland and he's left alone in the freezing waters, miles away from shore.
Hide Your Eyes When: Gulli just keeps swimming. And swimming. And swimming. With no end in sight.
This is our idea of absolute hell.
Beach Prey - Paradise: Love
The Scary Moment: Holidaying in a beach resort in Kenya, Teresa (Margarethe Tiesel) leaves the safety of the resort to walk along the beach, where desperate locals crowd around her hoping she'll become their 'sugar mama'.
Hide Your Eyes When: The nagging attention of the young men refuses to abate and Teresa flounders in their midst.
Beaten Up - Simon Killer
The Scary Moment: Simon (Brady Corbet) has a massive row with his girlfriend Victoria (Mati Diop) and it looks like he's finally going to live up to the title of the film…
Hide Your Eyes When: Victoria lies motionless on the bed. Is she dead or alive?
Pigs In Blankets - Jack The Giant Slayer
The Scary Moment: A half-blind giant is making pigs in blankets using Elmont (Ewan McGregor), who's currently all wrapped up in dough alongside two actual swines.
Next: the oven…
Hide Your Eyes When: The giant starts sticking skewers in his delicacies, narrowly missing Elmont's crown jewels.
Stranger - In Fear
The Scary Moment: Tom (Iain De Caestecker) and Lucy (Alice Englert) are well and truly lost in the wilds of Ireland, and night has fallen.
Which is when they discover clothes spread out on the road. Lucy's clothes…
Hide Your Eyes When: A newcomer suddenly appears in the troubling form of Max (Allen Leech).
Patience - Short Term 12
The Scary Moment: Grace (Brie Larson) well and truly oversteps her bounds as a staff member at a foster care facility when, on something of a psychological meltdown, she breaks into Jayden's (Kaitlyn Dever) house in order to help her escape her dad.
Hide Your Eyes When: Grace takes up a baseball bat and smashes the car belonging to Jayden's dad. He's going to hear any second, surely…
Sicko - Compliance
The Scary Moment: We discover that Officer Daniels (Pat Healy), who has been speaking with the manager of a fast food chain over the phone, is actually a fraud. He's at his family home while he makes a call requesting the manager to strip search Becky (Dreama Walker).
Hide Your Eyes When: Daniels orders the manager's boyfriend, Van (Bill Camp), to force Becky to perform oral sex on him.
Opening Kill - Maniac
The Scary Moment: Psychopath Frank Zito (Elijah Wood) follows a young woman home and corners her just outside her apartment door, where he attempts to assure her that she's going to be OK.
Hide Your Eyes When: In fact, she's going to be quite the opposite as Frank swiftly buries a knife in her throat and peels off her scalp.
Fog! - The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
The Scary Moment: Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence), Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), Finnick (Sam Claflin) and Mags (Lynn Cohen) face their first trial in the 75th Hunger Games when a deadly fog sweeps through the trees.
Hide Your Eyes When: Katniss's hand erupts in crippling sores the second the fog touches her.
Meanwhile, Mags saves them all by wandering selflessly into the fog to be consumed by it.
Electrocution - Curse Of Chucky
The Scary Moment: Jill (Maitland McConnell) is webcamming with Barb (Danielle Bisutti), with whom she's having an affair.
Then Barb spots something running along behind Jill - a something that turns out to be Chucky, who electrocutes Jill using a bucket of rain water…
Hide Your Eyes When: Jill fries and Chucky looks on with an evil grin on his face. Six films in and he can still be scary…
Release The Beast - The Purge
The Scary Moment: "Release the beast, boys, let the killing commence!" yells the brilliantly-named Polite Leader (Rhys Wakefield), who decides the time has come for he and his comrades to break into the house of James Sandin (Ethan Hawke) to kill a man James has given refuge to.
Hide Your Eyes When: While Mary Sandin (Lena Headey) hides, doors are smashed and a masked assailant enters with a machine gun.
Dinner Carnage - You're Next
The Scary Moment : A family's reunion dinner is thrown into disarray when Tariq (Ti West) is killed by a crossbow and some unseen force outside the window starts loosing arrows into the dining room.
Hide Your Eyes When: Drake (Joe Swanberg) ends up with an arrow in his back.
Colonel Stripes and Stars - Kick-Ass 2
The Scary Moment: Though he's one of the coolest characters in the film, Colonel Stripes and Stars (Jim Carrey) bows out as Motherfucker (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) and his posse storm his lair and kill him.
Nobody's safe…
Hide Your Eyes When: Mother Russia (Olga Kurkulina) decapitates our favourite Colonel.
Death - The Wolverine
The Scary Moment: Still only a mere mortal, Logan (Hugh Jackman) uses Yashida's X-ray machine and discovers that there's a robotic parasite attached to his heart, which is messing with his regenerative abilities.
Cutting himself open to remove the parasite, Logan dies…
Hide Your Eyes When: Shingen attacks and things are looking bleak. But then, of course, Logan springs back to life…
911 Call - Blackfish
The Scary Moment: The anti-SeaWorld doc opens with an unsettling 911 call reporting that whale trainer Dawn Brancheau has been killed by Tilikum, one of the whales. As the call plays, we see footage of Dawn with Tilikum…
Hide Your Eyes When: Cover your ears, more like. Though we're spared the sight of Dawn's death, the call itself is chilling to the bone.
Feast! - The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug
The Scary Moment: The dwarves and Bilbo (Martin Freeman) enter Mirkwood, where they quickly find themselves going around in circles - Bilbo starts hallucinating that he's walking backwards and has a double.
Then the spiders attack…
Hide Your Eyes When: Bilbo's trapped in a web and cocooned by a hungry spider who wants to feast on him…
The Deep - Iron Man 3
The Scary Moment: The Mandarin attacks Iron Man's cliff-side home, which is blown to smithereens.
As it slides down into the ocean, Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) attempts to escape the wreckage, but he can't seem to find a way out…
Hide Your Eyes When: Iron Man's dragged down into the depths, with the remnants of his home piling on top of him.
Airlock Trouble - Gravity
The Scary Moment: Having run out of oxygen in her spacesuit, Dr Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) struggles to open the airlock to the International Space Station, where she'll be able to replenish her supplies…
Hide Your Eyes When: Stone makes it inside, but the depressurisation takes an age to kick in…
Death Bed - Behind The Candelabra
The Scary Moment: Scott (Matt Damon) goes to visit Liberace (Michael Douglas), who says that he's sick.
We know that he's dying of AIDS, and the sight of Liberace, a man so preoccupied with his appearance, ravaged and withered by the disease is thoroughly upsetting.
Hide Your Eyes When: You won't need to hide your eyes because you'll be crying throughout anyway.
Space Race - Star Trek Into Darkness
The Scary Moment: Kirk (Chris Pine) and Khan (Benedict Cumberbatch) launch themselves through the vacuum of space toward the USS Vengeance with nothing protecting them except for flimsy spacesuits.
Hide Your Eyes When: Kirk's screen starts to crack and he no longer has any idea if he's heading in the right direction…
Grub's Up - We Are What We Are
The Scary Moment: Sisters Rose (Julia Garner) and Iris (Ambyr Childers) take on the responsibilities of their dead mother, heading to the dingy lair where they've been keeping a woman captive.
See, she's on the menu tonight, and the girls have their raincoats on in anticipation of red stuff…
Hide Your Eyes When: The messy bit happens. Really upsetting.
Dragon Time - The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug
The Scary Moment: Dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch) is revealed in all his fearsome glory when Bilbo (Martin Freeman) enters his gold pit.
Absolutely humungous and sneering, he's the scariest lizard we've ever seen…
Hide Your Eyes When: Smaug decides he'd like to warm Bilbo up, and belches a belly-full of fire right at him.
Scry Hard - A Field In England
The Scary Moment: Screaming. Lots and lots of screaming, as Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith) howls inside a tent, having been forced to scry for hidden treasure by O'Neill (Michael Smiley).
Hide Your Eyes When: Whitehead emerges from the tent, attached to a rope, and staggers forward grinning madly while Black Mass' 'Chernobyl' plays. Haunting.
Shaky Landing - Flight
The Scary Moment: An inebriated Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) battles severe turbulence that threatens to destroy the plane he's piloting.
After he falls asleep, the plane takes a nosedive…
Hide Your Eyes When: Whip decides to take an unorthodox approach to landing by rolling the plane in mid-air to minimise damage and land as safely as possible.
Transformation - Antiviral
The Scary Moment: Syd (Caleb Landry Jones) hooks up to a console and begins to hallucinate that he's attached to the machine by tubes that enter his forearms.
Meanwhile, his mouth is replaced with a sinister metal grill.
Hide Your Eyes When: Blood starts oozing out of the mouthpiece…
To The Dogs - Django Unchained
The Scary Moment: Calvin J Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) reveals his true callous nature when he reprimands one of his slaves for running away by feeding him to the dogs. Literally.
Hide Your Eyes When: The dogs start tearing into their screaming prey while Django (Jamie Foxx) watches helplessly on.
Monkeys - The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
The Scary Moment: Things get considerably worse in the 75th Hunger Games when Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence), Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) et al are attacked by a slathering horde of baboons.
Hide Your Eyes When: It seems that the baboons are going to win…
In The House - Mama
The Scary Moment: Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Wakdau) discovers the house that his twin brother, Jeremy, took his two daughters to.
Only when he finds them, the girls are feral and not a little creepy.
Hide Your Eyes When: The children scuttle around like vermin, sticking to the shadows…
Box Cutter - V/H/S/2
The Scary Moment: In Gareth Evans and Timo Tjahjanto's stand-out segment, Father, the founder of a cult, declares the "time of reckoning" has arrived and strips to reveal he's covered in cuts. Then he takes up a box cutter and kills the cameraman…
Hide Your Eyes When: Father pounces and it all goes very wrong…
Training Pool - Blackfish
The Scary Moment: Tragedy strikes when a killer whale trainer is riding one of the whales, only for another whale to leap out of the water and land right on top of both whale and trainer.
Hide Your Eyes When: The two whales collide with the trainer caught in the middle.
According to an onlooker, the only thing keeping the trainer's body together after the carnage was his wetsuit…
Taking Flight - V/H/S
The Scary Moment: This compilation's scariest segment is its first, as three friends pick up a couple of girls and take them back to their motel room.
One of those girls is Lily (Hannah Fierman), who starts to undergo a strange transformation…
Hide Your Eyes When : Lily's transformation is complete - avec bat-wings - and she swoops up into the sky, carrying Clint (Drew Sawyer) with her.
Windscreen Wiper - The Counsellor
The Scary Moment: Reiner (Javier Bardem) tells a story about ferocious female Malkina (Cameron Diaz) who, one night, climbed onto the pair's car and proceeded to, um, have sex with it.
Hide Your Eyes When: Malkina does the splits on the windscreen…
Spinning - Gravity
The Scary Moment: Having survived the initial carnage of the space debris, which destroyed the space shuttle Explorer, Dr Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) has become detached from, well, everything, leaving her floating in space.
Hide Your Eyes When: Ryan just keeps spinning and spinning off into space, and we're there right with her the entire time.
Bed Time - You're Next
The Scary Moment: Kelly (Margaret Laney) sits with Aimee (Amy Seimetz), whose dead body has been laid out on a bed.
Then she hears a noise under the bed…
Hide Your Eyes When: A psycho in a fox mask appears out of the shadows under the bed and makes short work of killing Kelly.
Demon Dick - This Is The End
The Scary Moment: Trapped in the middle of the apocalypse, Jonah Hill prays for Jay Baruchel to die, then promptly falls asleep.
Which is when he receives a night-time visitor of nightmarish proportions.
Hide Your Eyes When: A hell beast climbs onto Hill while he's sleeping, its sizeable man-meat ready to do something horrible.
Infestation - World War Z
The Scary Moment: Director Marc Forster plunges us straight into hell as Gerry (Brad Pitt) and his family get stuck in Philadelphia traffic, only to discover that there are mad people on the loose trying to eat other people.
Hide Your Eyes When: Gerry watches as a guy is bitten, drops to the ground and within seconds has transformed into a rampaging flesh-muncher.
Lifeboat - Captain Phillips
The Scary Moment: The tension's ratcheted up something chronic as Paul Greengrass' thriller comes to a head.
With the Navy SEALs attempting to get a clean shot on all three of the pirates in the lifeboat, time is running out for them, and Captain Phillips (Tom Hanks).
Hide Your Eyes When: Shots are fired and blood splatters all over Phillips…
Bathroom Bother - Evil Dead
The Scary Moment: Olivia (Jessica Lucas) is possessed by dark forces while she's in the bathroom.
Pretty soon, she's smashing mirrors in order to mutilate herself…
Hide Your Eyes When: Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci) finds Olivia in the bathroom - she's used a mirror shard to saw off half her face.
Baboons - Oz The Great And Powerful
The Scary Moment : Evanora, the Wicked Witch of the East (Rachel Weisz), sends her flying baboons to take down Oscar Diggs (James Franco).
Hide Your Eyes When: Those snapping jaws get ever closer to our intrepid anti-hero.
Don't worry, though, Glinda (Michelle Williams) is on hand with some bubbles.
Scalping - Maniac
The Scary Moment: Frank Zito (Elijah Wood) breaks into the apartment of Rita (Jan Broberg), who he discovers having a bath.
After almost drowning her, he ties her up on her bed and prepares to do even worse…
Hide Your Eyes When: With Rita still conscious and terrified, Frank runs a knife across her forehead and peels off her scalp…
Under The Bed - Sleep Tight
The Scary Moment: Clara (Marta Etura) greets her apartment concierge Cesar (Luis Tosar) and admits she's been finding it difficult to get up in the morning.
We discover exactly why when, that evening, Cesar conceals himself in her apartment and drugs her when she falls asleep so that he can lie with her all night…
Hide Your Eyes When: Cesar unexpectedly emerges from his hiding place under the bed…
Clapping - The Conjuring
The Scary Moment: Carolyn Perron (Lili Taylor) hears clapping in the house and thinks that it's her girls playing games, but she finds them all asleep, and the clapping continues…
Who's in the house?
Hide Your Eyes When: Carolyn's locked in the basement with only a match to provide light. And there's something in there with her…
Josh Winning has worn a lot of hats over the years. Contributing Editor at Total Film, writer for SFX, and senior film writer at the Radio Times. Josh has also penned a novel about mysteries and monsters, is the co-host of a movie podcast, and has a library of pretty phenomenal stories from visiting some of the biggest TV and film sets in the world. He would also like you to know that he "lives for cat videos..." Don't we all, Josh. Don't we all.