Halloween is near, but there are plenty of times we’ve been scared by scary things during other occasions of the year. I asked around to see what the scariest thing people have watched, read, or played was.
I thought about my own experiences with the fictional world and what scared me the most. The scariest thing I’ve ever read isn’t a horror book at all. Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” made me scared of road trips for a long time. I mean, the family is traveling along when they have a wreck. A car full of convicts finds them, and the story ends tragically. The ending line chilled me to the bone: “She would have been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” I don’t think I was okay for weeks after reading the story. I don’t watch too much horror, although Paranormal Activity made me nervous about the dark for a few nights. I’ve had a few game jump scares but nothing that scarred me for more than a few days. Enough of my own stories. Here are some from Fandomania readers.
- Hands down, the scariest was Jaws. (I know, this dates me.) I couldn’t swim in the lake for the rest of the summer. Scariest recent movie would be seeing The Ring at the midnight movie. It wasn’t all that scary; however, walking out to my car, I have to admit, I had a case of the heebie-jeebies.
- Reddit pages of r/creepypasta.
- When I was 7 I wanted to be an astronaut. My mom bought me lots of great books about space, and one of them was talking about sun becoming a red giant one day, exploding, and destroying the Earth. I didn’t care that the prediction was it won’t happen for another millions of years, I got so scared that I abandoned my dreams of becoming an astronaut and had nightmares for months.
- Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem. The game had masterful immersion, including introducing horror elements breaking immersion — pretending to wipe your memory card and the like. The game had a sanity meter, and the lower your sanity meter got, the more ridiculous and horrifying things got. It also used a series of characters throughout time, so you never knew your fate. Dying horribly was always on the table. Turning to a villain was as well.
- Original Silent Hill terrified me. Just the dead silence got to me.
- Dracula, the original novel. I don’t know why, but I read it at about nineteen and it scared me to death for days! Every time I was near a mirror with my roommate or anyone else, I would check and re-check that they had a reflection.
- The [Doctor Who] episode “Blink”, not so much for the episode because creepy as hell, but when it ended we turned the TV off and we’re immersed in silence and darkness, we all just looked at each other and froze. Also “are you my mummy” — yikes. Finally, the one scene in Paranormal Activity… the latest one, with the kids under the bedsheets, that wasn’t the kid. Kids are scary haha.
- Stephen King’s book written under his pen name Peter Straub, The Floating Dragon.
- I am that black person who laughs and talks during scary movies, but The Exorcist scared the hell of me when it got released again in theaters when I was like 13. Me and my friend slept with the light on that night.
- For me, it is the recent videos of people walking up to kids and trying to run out of the store with them… Scares me so much!
- Black Mirror on Netflix. Episode about permanent recordings of memories that could be edited. Because being forced to play your memories for airport security would totally happen. It was too real.
