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If you’re one of those crashing bores who claim never to have been scared by a film, you have just gone down markedly in my estimation. Your lack of imagination and willingness to suspend belief for a couple of hours are not attributes to be particularly proud of. For the purposes of argument here, I am going to assume that you’ve come close to a heart attack watching some cinematic knuckle whitener. I know I have.

Scariest film of all time? It’s a matter of personal preference of course, but I know where my money’s going. I’m going to work up to it though, or I’ll never hit 600 words.

Scary films split broadly into two categories. No, hang on, three. The first is the simple ‘bad people doing bad things to other people’ genre. Lots of good contenders here. Deliverance, Badlands, Race with the Devil, the torture scene in Pulp Fiction, The Hitcher (the original Rutger Hauer one, not the hopelessly inept later remake), The Vanishing (again the original, not the fairly recent remake.) They can get your armpits moist.

There’s a sub-category. Good people driven to the edge of reason and doing bad things in the name of good, to protect themselves or loved ones. Straw Dogs scares me badly, not because of the Peckinpah violence and bloodshed, but because of the way Dustin Hoffman’s meek and mild college professor  goes utterly mental. It’s a very scary transition, all the more so because I find myself thinking, ‘Yeah. Hell yeah, I could do that.’ Falling Down fits in here too.

Then we have the supernatural terrors. I’m just a bit cynical about these, because I don’t believe in ghosts or any deity, but some are very scary indeed. The Exorcist rattled my cage. Don’t Look Now. Candyman. Oh my goodness. I’ve tried to stand in front of a mirror and say ‘Candyman’ three times in a row, and know what? I can’t do it. Silly but true. The ending of Carrie still makes me jump, even though I know the arm’s going to pop out of the grave. Eeeeeeekkk!

I think, for the sake of simplicity, I’ll include vampires and zombies here, and quite frankly I’ve yet to see any film that features the undead that has made me do anything but chuckle. You may disagree. Good. Let’s get a discussion going here.

As an aside, an update on my zombie post. A blogger who seems to know about these things reliably informs me that the only certain way of killing a zombie is to destroy its brain. If you have a gun, this will simply require a headshot. If you’re a bit squeamish about brain splatter, you can enlist my friend Victoria Wright to help you out. She’s a dab hand at blowing people’s heads off. Miss Whiplash and Ellie Hendren are hard as nails too, so they’d probably use their bare hands.

Back to the business in hand. Lastly we have the non-human agents genre. The scenes in the factory at the end of Terminator are very tense indeed. When Tom Skerrit goes exploring the air ducts in Alien, armed only with a jury rigged flamethrower, I start hyperventilating. Aliens is also a two hour sweatfest, and Aliens3 deserves a mention, even though things are beginning to get a bit tired by this point. I even like John Carpenter’s The Thing, which is kind of Alien On Ice. The remake, obeying the general but not invariable rule of remakes, is total garbage. Don’t bother.

So, three genres. Bad people. Supernatural goings on. Non-human entities. Yet I have to tell you the scariest film of all time doesn’t fit into any of these, because at the end you genuinely do not know what’s been going on. It’s only about 90 minutes long and was shot on a budget of about ten quid.

When I went to see The Blair Witch Project, I was prepared to be disappointed. All the internet hype (clever marketing by the way) couldn’t really be justified, surely? How wrong I was, and my admitting I’m wrong is a moment for you to treasure. Nothing had prepared me for the sheer bowel loosening terror this film evoked in me. I don’t know if you’ve ever scared yourself very badly; a close call when you’ve been driving, perhaps. If you have, then you know the smell of fear. It’s very real and immediately recognisable. I came out of the cinema absolutely honking. As did my wife. We both had to go home, shower, and get a skin-out change of clothes. I was petrified by that film. If you’ve never seen it, I suggest you correct that situation as promptly as possible.

So there’s my twopennorth. Any other nominations?