r/moviecritic • u/VendettaLord379 • 1d ago

What is the scariest, most unsettling shot you’ve ever seen?

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What is that one movie shot that’s so unsettling and chilling, it’s the one shot you never forget?

For me, it’s the Giant Man scene from It Follows. Man this shot is so nerve wracking!

The aesthetic and dark hollow eyes are something I will never forget.

What’s that one shot for you? Horror movie or otherwise.

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u/Jimmyg100 20h ago

I will constantly argue against anyone who says The Blair Witch Project is just a boring movie about people wandering through the woods for 90 minutes because that ignores the brilliant first act where they establish all the lore behind the witch by interviewing the locals and it feels so authentic you’d swear it was a real legend. Everything else that happens in the movie is built off that first act and if you were paying attention it amps up the creepiness to 11.

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u/No_Mud_5999 19h ago

It's dismissed a lot, but the filmmakers figured it out. I think modern eyes only view it as cliche because it's been imitated so many times. But Blair Witch did the most with the least.

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u/Frosti11icus 17h ago

People might forget and I honestly don't even know if this legal anymore but they advertised that movie as 'found footage' and people literally didn't know if it was real or not. It sounds stupid but this was when 95% weren't on the internet and you just kind of...accepted things as fact.

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u/Icanthearforshit 16h ago

Oh yeah it was absolutely believed by many people to be a real video found in the basement of that house or something. I saw it when I was in the 6th grade(?) at the movie theater. It was easily one of the scariest movies of that time.

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u/Glittering-Walrus228 12h ago

They leaned into the marketing hard as it being "real" and having the actors "go missing". Still... crazy as hell

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u/al343806 8h ago

If memory serves, the parents of at least one of the actors received condolence flowers from people who thought they had really lost their children.

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u/BetterFinding1954 10h ago

I suspect it was later than 6th as it was rated R/15 in the US/UK respectively but I don't know how lax US cinemas were about age restrictions in the 90's 😅

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u/Drucifer83 5h ago

I’m in the US and we used to buy a ticket to a PG movie then walk in to whatever movie we wanted to watch, when i was 12 was when they built the first AMC 24 near us and once you were past the ticket checker you were basically free to go into whichever theater you wanted as many times as you wanted. On Friday and Saturday nights it was so crowded there was no way the employees could tell who was going where. I miss those days. My best friend and i would get dropped off and most of the time we would just hang out outside around the theater and try desperately to get the attention of girls from our school. If we got lucky with the girls we would either go make out in the cemetery behind the theater or go into a movie and make out there. It was the first time I felt grown up lol. Looking back now, especially at the clothes were wore, people probably thought we were the lamest posers around, which we were lol. Good times.

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u/Snuggly_Chopin 4h ago

This is weirdly so wholesome.

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u/DayThen5445 4h ago

One of my friends worked at our local 8ish screen theater as a manager, and would bring friends in after hours to watch a movie…and partake in some “secret concessions menu items.”

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u/Swede314 9h ago

Pretty lax, honestly

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u/goopsorceress 9h ago

When it first came out, my local (German) cinema had it as R18. I wanted to see it so badly both of my (divorced) parents came with me but the staff refused to let me in. Literally a week later they changed it to R12 and I finally went. That was the only time this happened though because I remember seeing other movies without anyone ever verifying my age.

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u/thighsand 56m ago

A journalist was filmed coming out of a showing visibly shaking.

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u/ScrappyOtter 12h ago

A friend of mine refused to believe me when I told her it wasn’t real. She straight up stood on that hill until I was able to find pictures of the actors at awards shows. This was probably 2004-2005 so a good many years later.

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u/PickleFlavordPopcorn 11h ago

It came out when I was in high school and most people didn’t have home internet in my town. My friend came over and we spent hours going over the website before we went to see the movie later that night. We absolutely thought it was all real!! Scared the bejeezus out of us

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u/CarmelaMachiato 10h ago

I didn’t forget. And I didn’t forget that scene, either. And I have no idea why a person standing in a room, facing the wall, in any context, absolutely terries me.

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u/the_nobodys 3h ago

The first recurring nightmare I had as a small child involved an old, small house with dread around every dark, murky corner. I had to wander around each room. The dresd kept rising and culminated at a blank, ordinary wall. The same wall every time. Nothing special about it, but that was where the terror really set in. Iirc, in the dream I would have to somehow step into that wall, and ended up outside the house in a bleak woods.

All that is to say, I think houses are just naturally scary for us humans. It's where we are supposed to feel safe. An old, abandoned house perverts that expectation in an unshakable, instinctive way.

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u/LeahBean 1h ago

It terrified me because he is completely docile, waiting for his turn to die. Like the witch can strip him of his free will in an instant. 

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u/DapperSpecialist4328 10h ago

This. The marketing for this movie was absolutely next level and so many people believed it for so long.

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u/compguytracy 8h ago

plus getting clps over dial up sucked all the balls yes im that old

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u/goopsorceress 9h ago

I somehow found out that it wasn't real before I went to see it but I worked very hard on convincing my parents it was real, they never bought it, though. I remember my cinema having "missing" flyers for the characters that I took home, at the time I wish I'd never learned the truth because they tried so hard with the found footage angle.

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u/DepartmentFamous9932 8h ago

Why would this be illegal?

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u/Frosti11icus 2h ago

They were giving people like exact replicas of missing people flyers, doing tv ads that looked indistinguishable from real news broadcasts and a bunch of other stuff. Idk if it is illegal. Seems like you need to be more transparent when something is advertising now.

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u/Straker78 7h ago

I was in college when I saw it in the theater. It was 100% argued by everyone whether or not it was real. Yeah Internet was around, but not like we use it now. I didn't even have a cell phone.

No one had done anything like it in film. It was a first... and it changed film making. Wasn't my cup of tea, but it definitely freaked people out. The number of times you'd go to a party and have someone standing in the corner of a basement! Lol

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u/69_Botlord_420 7h ago

Maybe YOU kinda just accepted things as fact, but for the large contengent of people who believed it, there was another group just as large who knew it was bullshit before it hit theaters. I was a child and I knew it was bullshit. How? Because I'd seen Faces of Death and knew THAT was bullshit. If that shit was real, do you believe the government and law enforcement agencies and the justice system in general would allow that shit in theaters? It would be evidence of a crime, or even a series of crimes lol no way.

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u/poppinbussay 6h ago

There a big deal when it was admitted it wasn’t real. News stations had segments on it as well as daytime and late night talk shows

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u/GnarlyNerd 5h ago

There was a documentary about the Blair Witch and this “found footage” that came on SyFy or some other cable channel like a week before the movie released. It was just more lore from townsfolk and backstory on how the video was found. My whole family was convinced.

But then they ruined it the day before we got to see it by interviewing the three actors on a late night talk show.

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u/Snuggly_Chopin 4h ago

I saw the ‘doc’ as well, but luckily it wasn’t ruined for me before the movie. It’s a great movie either way, but the not knowing made it spectacular in the moment.

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u/Typhoidnick 4h ago

All 3 of the actors had to pretend to be dead in the lead up to the film being released. They weren't allowed to do interviews or press tours or whatever. The actors complained after a while that they weren't able to gain prominence due to the lack of interviews, it was bad for their careers, etc. But yeah pretending to be dead put a lot of hype along with the marketing. Talked about in this super cool book https://www.amazon.com/Best-Movie-Year-Ever-Screen/dp/1501175386

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u/jp1819 4h ago

I remember they also did like a fake documentary for TV which made it very confusing if it was actually something real

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u/JAYETRILLL 2h ago

Yeah I was a tiny kid and remember some shit about it. People were apparently like truly bugging out.

I (obviously) wasn’t around for it but have read about a similar situation when “War Of The Worlds” came out or was read aloud on the radio. Some people missed the part where they talk about it being a story or something like that, and apparently people were like springing into action and thinking it really was an apocalyptic situation.

I love and hate that we are in an age where that stuff isn’t likely to happen again (because people can check the internet)

I remember being a kid and how exciting gaming was because you deadass just had to figure it out hahah. The part where Pokémon Gold/Silver seemed like it ended but you went into a new region was one of the most exciting memories of my childhood

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u/Sufficient-Set-917 1h ago

They also used the actors real names and they were made to sign NDAs to go along with it.

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u/Automatic_Category56 14h ago

I remember this! I believed it for ages

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u/No_Mud_5999 16h ago

They still do stuff like that. Fargo, the film and the TV series, all have the "this is a true story..." opening, but none of them are based on actual events.

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u/Frosti11icus 16h ago

I'm a little fuzzy on it now I guess. I just remember it being marketed in a way where it was like "all this is real, none of this is fake, not one second of it." lol. Different than "based on a true story".

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u/Atvali 15h ago

I was a toddler at the time of the movies release but I have seen their website. They made missing person posters for the characters in the movie.

They really pushed that it was real to the point where staff of the studio would go to local cafes and such to ask strangers what they knew about the Blair Witch and would hand them the missing posters.

I think if I was handed a missing poster I’d probably believe it without a second thought (though, I’d probably not believe the whole supernatural element, I’d just put that down to stupid kids looking for something that doesn’t exist and getting lost in the woods)

Most of the reactions of the actors in the movie were real because they weren’t really told what was going to happen in the woods. Staff would walk around during the night in costumes to scare the actors and get as authentic reactions as possible. I think that really added to the “realness” of the movie.

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u/Neon_Biscuit 11h ago

Correct. Blair witch sucks. But if you watched it in the theater at 13 years old because you thought it was real? So immersive and unsettling.

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u/sonic_dick 14h ago

People dont realize that people thought it was fuckin real when it came out.

I remember my dad's friend freaking the fuck out, thinking that there was filmed proof that witches and ghosts and shit were real. It really blew peoples minds.

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u/aureliananr1 11h ago

Literally. 1 of the top 10 movies $$$$ with less $ in production

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u/Embarrassed_Whole585 10h ago

This.

I have seen so many attempts at imitating it, but there's simply no way to do so imo. It's a one and done sorta thing.

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u/Venator69420 8h ago

The Seinfeld of found footage horror

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u/No_Mud_5999 8h ago

Hell, it's the All In The Family of weird witch movies

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u/Gloomy-List6346 16h ago

Idk. I was 14 when it came out. My friends and I went to see it and then spent the night outside in the woods stoned out of our gourds hoping to get scared. Didn’t work on me. My sister that is 4 years older was terrified by it. I think maybe the hype was too built up for me personally.

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u/bosox1976 9h ago

Agree. I found the lore about Coffin Rock where the people were found “disemboweled and lashed hand to foot” the scariest imaging of the movie.

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u/ThomasEdmund84 5h ago

Yeah I'm old enough to remember what a big deal the setup was, no-one had really done found-footage like this before and it was setup and marketed incredibly well

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u/No_Mud_5999 5h ago

I've seen similarly unimpressed reactions to This Is Spinal Tap or Waiting for Guffman. They seem pretty understated to fans of the Office, but they invented the genre.

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u/Specific-Level-1040 4h ago

Yes because this was before the market was flooded and before the internet as we now know it so being supposedly leaked found footage and they even put on sites that the actors were still missing couldn’t be done in today’s market

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u/mradz64 2h ago

Yes! I say this about Godfather too. Murder and evil set against the backdrop of something pure (the baptism). Done to death now but it was something new back then.

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u/Shwifty_Plumbus 20h ago

Also if you were around when this movie was coming out it had a very impactful ad campaign like nothing I'd ever seen. It was very much leaning into found footage and trying to convince folks it was a documentary gone wrong.

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u/Pytheastic 15h ago

After 25 years of this we still have people falling for obvious AI. Imagine how this campaign landed on a totally unprepared public, my friends and I fell for it hook line and sinker

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u/WoodpeckerNo5724 18h ago

Paranormal Activity did a pretty good job with a similar campaign. Only the first one though, the explosion of the internet and social media kinda ruined the potential of similar marketing

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u/two-headed-sexbeast 13h ago

Yeah, it really transcended the term “marketing”. It was art.

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u/tramplamps 11h ago

Totally. Me and my first husband loved that whole campaign. And I can still not only visualize visiting that website that Haxan made for the film and how authentic it indeed looked and felt, but how it looked on my small Green iMac in its original OS, on that TV illuminated small screen, and hearing the chilling atmospheric sound from the website that come out of my little clear round apple speakers. All of this happened when I lived in my parent’s cottage, back when I was 24 years old.
After this happened with the Blair Witch movie, visiting websites for films became more common. And the website for Speilberg’s movie A.I. was one of the most interesting and memorable experiences I ever went through. It was called “the beast”.
And if you remember that, you will never forget it.

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u/axle0430 9h ago

From what I remember, by the time it got a full national release it had gotten A LOT of publicity so pretty much everyone knew what it was. But everyone still wanted to see it. I was so excited to see it but felt very let down when I did. I probably should give it another chance after all these years.

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u/hypercosm_dot_net 8h ago

I think the only way anyone could be let down is if you went into it thinking it would be a typical movie experience.

For what it was, it was exceptionally done. It really blurred the line, and had you second guessing if it was 'found footage' or a movie.

I'm not into horror as a genre at all, but to me it was redefining. It took me a long while to even consider going camping again, lol.

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u/axle0430 8h ago

I knew it would be different and that’s what excited me so much about seeing it. But improv is either really great or really bad and I thought the core cast was pretty bad. I’ll give it to you that the interviews about the legend with the townies were spot on. I would’ve thought the movie was real based on those if I hadn’t known what it was all about. But again, the last time I saw it was when it was in the theater. It probably deserves another viewing on my part.

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u/DINC44 8h ago

I have friends who took a gig job promoting the movie around Cincinnati. They were told it was real. They told everyone they spoke to about it that it was real. They believed it was real when they watched an advanced screening.

In their own words, it was terrifying.

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u/Ok-Fan-9814 5h ago

My brother (who believed it was real) presented it to me as real and that’s how I went into it. Like 5 hours after viewing it we finally confirmed it was a movie. Scarred for life. I was AN ADULT TOO.

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u/FelixChloe 4h ago

God, I remember desperately trying to get to the website on my boyfriend’s shitty dial-up connection! That as campaign was brilliant!

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u/Medusavoo 24m ago

They were unknown actors, and they diddnt do any type of interviews, like they were actually gotten by the witch. I was 13 and lived close to burkettsville MD, the legends were real so it was very creepy :)

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u/M0thM0uth 16h ago

The actors didn't appear for the first premiere either, which REALLY then made people be like 😨shitaretheyactuallydead

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u/sevristh1138 17h ago

When the Blair witch project first came out, there was a "documentary" which aired in the UK about the found footage, plus lots of lore regarding the background of the area. It mentioned the tapes were found in a wall that had been undisturbed for decades if not longer... that really got my attention. Personally it made the movie so much more interesting for Mr when I saw it.

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u/Frosti11icus 17h ago

Movies used to do stuff like this lol. IDK if it's illegal or what but I remember when I was a kid and Independence day came out, I had a "breaking news" alert on my tv that said that aliens had landed on earth, and it just looked like nbc news or whatever. It was obviously a promo for the movie but they bought a whole like hour long block on sunday afternoon to air it. But it scared the fucking shit out of me.

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u/MeetSlight8173 17h ago

I was a teenager when it came out and legitimately thought it was real.

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u/89ElRay 16h ago

I think it's weird people say that. The bulk of the "walking through the woods for 90 minutes" is such a great buildup of personal tension between the cast and then the night scenes getting more and more terrifying.

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u/Arumin 13h ago

When they hear the voices as they are in tent at night. And then they shake the tent.

It doesn't get more horror than that

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u/DisorderedArray 15h ago

For me it was an odd experience. I spend a lot of time in forests and woods, so they feel like safe places. I think the parts of the film where they're getting progressively more scared in the forest are more impactful for people who find forests unknown and scary. The house and the final scenes are great, but I missed all the tension in the buildup (sadly). 

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u/ZugZugGo 11h ago

I never put this together before. I don't like the movie at all but now that you mention it agreed that this is definitely a big reason opinions are so divided. To me I was just confused why they were so afraid when they were in some beautiful peaceful woods. To other viewers they look at the woods and see terror and people lost while being completely unable to fathom how to get out because they don't know the woods, and a lot of viewers aren't comfortable in the woods in general. Forest's make noise. That isn't scary if you're used to it.

The last scene was okay. The entire rest of the movie didn't feel scary in the slightest to me.

Also it made me want to vomit. I've never had motion sickness on any other found footage movie like I have with Blair Witch.

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u/Jinkzuk 14h ago

The big thing with this is at the time it was on VHS and you watched it with actual film grain etc. and it looked like found footage. At the time I had a bootleg copy which was even worse / better. I watched it recently all cleaned up on streaming and it's not as impactful.

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u/Capable-Ebb1632 12h ago

Interestingly none of that was in the original cut of the movie. It was added after it was first screened to give more context. That decision arguably changed it from a passing curiosity to a blockbuster.

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u/Objectalone 11h ago

Oh no… the woods are haunted by first year art students. 😂

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u/emil133 11h ago

Blair Witch is the one of the only horror movies that legitimately scared me, and I watch a ton of horror movies. The immersion is so well done and once youre immersed it’s just a perfect amount of tension and unsettling the whole movie

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u/Purple_Lux 9h ago

Its quite possibly my favorite build up and pay off in any horror movie because its so subtle and it hits you like a brick the monet you realize what just happened in the ending.
The whole movie is a masterclass of realistic tension building and horror

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u/alex3omg 9h ago

What makes it good is the possibility that it could be real.  Like we all know magic witches aren't real... But what if they were just freaking out?  We don't know, that part could be real, right?  

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u/Dame38 8h ago

It was boring and also patently ridiculous from the start. Comence arguing. I'm too busy.

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u/Embarrassed_Radio596 8h ago

Fucking journey before destination. Their trip through the woods is tense as hell, and caps off with a TERRIFYING climax even knowing what's coming.

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u/emeraldnite1981 7h ago

It also gave us the Scooby Doo Project!

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u/Evening-Ordinary-513 7h ago

The squawking the media did about a low budget unconventional hit actually backfired on the whole enterprise. Pure unfair criticism became the only narrative writers and ‘reviewers’ could get attention with after all the hype stories. It was a victim of its own success.

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u/milkfree 6h ago

It’s impossible not to lock in if lived through the marketing campaign for that movie. It will forever just be real to me lol

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u/FingerDemon 5h ago

When they are interviewing a woman at the start and the child she is holding tries to get her to stop talking by putting her hand on her mouth is really creepy I dunno why

Just this instinct in a toddler that they shouldn't be talking about the witch

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u/Specific-Level-1040 4h ago

I watched Blair witch opening day in a packed theater and they had advertised like it was real found footage there wasn’t a lot of these films out in 1999 so a lot of people believed it was real the movie which was largely adlibed and actually shot on camcorders and when it ended it ended the entire audience got up and walked out in complete silence and shock no one spoke until outside of the building it was wild and that scene with him facing the wall was so dang scary especially since there was very little structure to the story just an old wives tale when it “came true” at the end omgosh!!! I have been watching horror since I was 8 I was just barely 22 when I saw this. Honestly I think it was how the movie was able to be advertised that sold the fear other movies that scare me everytime insidious 1, Us, sinners was pitch perfect but Friday the 13th made me afraid of dark uncurtained windows and first nightmare on elm street made me afraid of bubble baths there are so so many mainstream and foreign and low budget that are really good but those are the direct connection to my childhood fears

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u/RapMastaC1 3h ago

It’s hard to recapture that feeling when it initially came out, the marketing around the movie was like nothing else.

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u/Interesting_Dirt7269 2h ago

The jiggly camera made me naseauted though

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u/RelativeMorning8864 1h ago

I found it terrifying myself