10 of the most terrifying moments in film

Judge Doom shows his true self in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988)

Robert Zemeckis’s live-action/cartoon Chinatown pastiche highlights the violence and sadism inherent in cartoons, with both “toons” and humans being electrocuted, stabbed, crushed, and generally traumatised in a variety of inventive ways. The final, horrifying scene features Christopher Lloyd’s bad guy Judge Doom being run over by a steamroller, before reappearing the other side as flat as a pancake, revealing himself to be a cartoon in disguise. He peels himself off the floor, walks matchstick-like over to a balloon pump to reinflate himself, and his eyes pop out to reveal blood red cartoon ones. He screams in falsetto as springs appear from his shoes, daggers pop out of his eyes, and he bounces across the room holding buzzsaws that have emerged from his hands. True nightmare fuel for a generation of children who saw the poster featuring a cartoon rabbit and pressed “play” expecting a Bugs Bunny-style romp. (Robert Freeman)

The big reveal in Speak No Evil (2022)

This chiller (which had an inferior Hollywood remake in 2024) will make you think twice about making friends on holiday. When a Danish couple become fast friends with a Dutch family in Tuscany, they soon take up the invitation to visit them in rural Netherlands. What follows is a masterclass in unease, a constant drip-feed of social interactions that are just a bit… off. The film ratchets up both the awkwardness and underlying sense of dread with every passive-aggressive comment by the hosts, brilliantly satirising the lengths we’ll go to in order to maintain the veneer of social politeness. “Maybe they didn’t really mean it like that.” “Maybe it’s just lost in translation.” The Danish couple try to explain things away. But the film never relinquishes its suffocating grip, culminating in the deeply disturbing scene that finally reveals what the hosts are up to – and even more terrifyingly, that even darker horror looms just around the corner. (Tom Heyden)

The Mount Fuji in Red sequence in Dreams (1990)

This Akira Kurosawa film is comprised of eight short pieces each inspired by the director’s own dreams. Scariest of all is the “Mount Fuji in Red” dream, which sees a nuclear power station behind the famous volcano exploding. One by one, its reactors are spiralling out of control. Hordes of screaming people are running in panic. Mt Fuji itself slowly glows red, as if about to erupt. The scene changes and the crowds are gone. Just five people are left by a shoreline, surrounded by the crowds’ abandoned belongings. A panicked man, a stand-in for director Kurosawa, asks a smartly dressed businessman what’s going on. While cleaning his glasses, the businessman explains that the crowds are running to drown themselves before the radiation kills them. As waves of coloured smoke blow over the rocky ground towards them, the businessman details with a mixture of dread and detachment the gruesome things each band of radioactive gas will do to the body. Never has a film played on our fear of environmental catastrophe so powerfully. (Martha Henriques)

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