21 Obscure Horror Movie Moments That Are Way Scarier Than Your Faves
WARNING: Due to the nature of this post, there are descriptions of disturbing scenes ahead. Please proceed with caution and take care of yourself!
There are plenty of iconic moments throughout the history of horror, like Freddy Krueger’s wide-armed alleyway walk, Psycho’s blood-curdling shower scene, and the beheading heard ‘round the world in Hereditary.
New Line Cinema
There have even been numerous unforgettable scares from more recent fright flicks as well, including viral sensations such as Skinamarink, Terrifier 2, and The Outwaters.
BayView Entertainment
But there is plenty of nightmare fuel to be mined from the darker corners of the horror genre — from obscure indie horror offerings to macabre movies from around the world — and there are plenty more independent genre gems looking to make a killing in 2023, including Enys Men, Poundcake (pictured below), and Destroy All Neighbors.
Onur Tukel
So, with this in mind, we’ve assembled 21 terrifying horror movie moments from movies you probably haven’t seen…but will definitely never forget.
Vortex Productions
Here we go:
1."The Call," The Witch in the Window (2018)
2."The Drop of Water," Black Sabbath (1963)
3."The Cold Open," The Nightmare (2015)
4."The Peeling," Haunt (2019)
Produced by Eli Roth and directed by the writers of A Quiet Place, Haunt is an incredibly intense and brutal horror offering following most Halloween fanatics' worst nightmare: What if the maniacs behind a haunted attraction...were actual maniacs? The frightening film has a number of genuinely scary and inventive moments, but none will send a chill down your spine as much as the film's first jaw-dropping reveal, when the haunt's operators show their true colors and a particular employee in a creepy ghost outfit asks a secluded man, "Want to see my face?" The tension reaches a fever pitch when he eerily utters, "I think you'll like it." What follows might be harder to scrub from your memory, and is definitely NSFL.
5."The Woman in the Mask," Hooked Up (2015)
6."Father's Day," Holidays (2016)
7."Vengeance," Hunter Hunter (2020)
Hunter Hunter is a gut-punch of a horror film that sadly flew under the radar of many due to its mid-pandemic release in 2020. The chiller stars Devon Sawa as a reclusive hunter living in the forest with his wife (Camille Sullivan) and daughter (Summer H. Howell) who begin to experience a number of unusual events in the nearby woods, attributing the carnage to that of a nearby wolf. However, there's a greater threat to the family lurking in the woods, and the film creeps toward a truly unforgettable final scene of gruesome retribution that will get under your skin in a major way.
8."The Supermarket," Messiah of Evil (1973)
9."Flossing," Anything for Jackson (2020)
10."The Accident," Southbound (2015)
The Orchard
Produced by the creative team behind the V/H/S films, Southbound has a similarly impressive pedigree behind the camera, including a pair of segments from Scream VI filmmakers Radio Silence. Nevertheless, Southbound's horrifying highlight comes in the film's third segment from The Night House director David Bruckner, in which a man accidentally hits a young woman during a night drive down a desert highway and his desperate attempt to save her life. An exercise in high tension that will have you chewing your fingernails 'til there's none left, "The Accident" is the kind of horror that will scare you and devastate you in equal measure.
11."Under the Hood," They Look Like People (2015)
Gravitas Ventures
The demented brainchild of up-and-coming filmmaker Perry Blackshear, They Look Like People follows a young paranoid man who becomes convinced that the people in his life are being replaced by evil doppelgangers. Fitting psychological horror elements into the frame of an indie drama while forcing the audience into the shoes of the main character by questioning just how real the threat is, the payoff comes in the form of its genuinely unsettling grand finale, where the main character must decide if he wants to kill his best friend, who he suspects of being possessed. It's a scene that's hard to watch, harder to bear, and borderline impossible to shake after you've seen it unfold.
12."Bobby," Dead of Night (1977)
13."Feldman's Final Blink," Butterfly Kisses (2018)
14."Car Trouble," I Saw the Devil (2010)
Magnet Releasing
The most clever and spine-tingling serial killer thriller of the past 15 years, I Saw the Devil pits a national intelligence agent (Squid Game's Lee Byung-hun) on a journey of brutal revenge against the serial killer (Oldboy's Choi Min-sik) who murdered his fiancé. A brutal and often shocking horror film that flips the genre on its head, there's numerous scenes from the film that will burn themselves into the recesses of your brain, including some particularly nasty bits not for the faint of heart, but the opening scene depicting the aforementioned murder remains one of the most intense and unforgettable tone-setting horror scenes in recent memory, as you're sitting alongside the stranded woman in her snow-bound car and you watch every person's roadside nightmare unfold.
15."Cut," Three... Extremes (2004)
A triptych of visceral visions from East Asian filmmakers, Three... Extremes is exactly as you might think, with truly provocative, boundary-pushing segments from some of the most acclaimed directors in the genre. Out of the three segments, the most accessible (and, somehow, most outright blood-curdling) is Park Chan-wook's "Cut," in which a film director and his pianist wife are kidnapped by a sociopathic extra, who forces them into an unthinkable ultimatum. Stylish in an incredibly harrowing fashion, its strength lies in building the tension between the extra, the director, and the pianist as the situation gets more and more horrific, and that sinking feeling that there will be no happy ending eventually evolves into palpable terror.
16."Storm Drain," V/H/S/94 (2021)
Cinepocalypse Productions
You could argue that the majority of the V/H/S franchise deserves to be on this list with one segment or another, from "Amateur Night" from V/H/S, "Safe Haven" from V/H/S/2, and "Suicide Bid" from V/H/S/99 all delivering in big and bold ways. Yet in terms of the kind of imagery that will keep you checking your closet and under your bed before you shut out the lights, there's no denying that "Storm Drain," a V/H/S/94 segment that surrounds a news team investigating a local cryptid, provides you with a creature effect so absolutely wretched and alarming that to spoil it here would be a shame in and of itself. This writer suggests you go in blind and see for yourself.
17."The Human Boombox," Sound of Violence (2021)
18."Welfare Check," Last Shift (2014)
Skyra Entertainment
From prolific genre filmmaker Anthony DiBlasi, who is coincidentally "reimagining" the film under the title Malum for release later this week, Last Shift follows a rookie police officer who is assigned with the last shift at an storied police station prior to its permanent closure. Filled with terrifying twists and turns, the film's most hair-raising moment comes midway through the film when the officer is visited unexpectedly by a senior officer on a welfare check, knowing full well the horrifying history of the soon-to-be-condemned station. Without spoiling anything, the scene's payoff will be one that's guaranteed to leave you gasping.
19."Tug of War," Altered (2006)
Haxan Films
The second film of Blair Witch Project co-director Eduardo Sánchez, Altered is a chilling hidden gem from the mid-'00s that changed the formula of alien abduction films, with the survivors of a previous abduction deciding to trap an alien to exact their revenge. The film itself has a little bit of something from every kind of horror fan, from subtle "trapped in a dark house with a monster" horror to more grim and upsetting body horror, but Altered's crowning achievement comes in a marriage of both aesthetics in a sequence in which a wounded character engages in a particularly gruesome game of "tug of war" with the vicious extraterrestrial, which has escaped its captor's grasps. It's a scene with some stark imagery you won't soon forget, especially for the more squeamish viewers.
20."The Locker Experiment," We Go On (2016)
21.And finally, "Right Behind You," Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (2018)
Hive Mediacorp / Showbox
Undoubtedly the scariest found footage movie of the last five years, Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum became the third most-watched horror film in South Korea's history for good reason: It will mess you up over and over again. The film follows a web series production crew that travels to an abandoned asylum for a live broadcast, but of course, what starts as an opportunity for orchestrated terror becomes terrifyingly real. There are many moments from Gonjiam guaranteed to give you nightmares, from the petrifying POV possession sequence to the breathtaking flashlight sequence, but for this writer's money, the climactic scene is the one that will be the hardest to shake, especially once you see a face you absolutely won't forget emerging from the shadows behind the film's final victim.
