Scariest Movies Ever

I've spent too much time and money trying to find the scariest movies ever. And then I find out there are already a bunch of lists around, like this one from Entertainment Weekly. It has most of the safe ones that appear in everyone's best of list, like the Exorcist, and Psycho. It's kind of like saying Citizen Kane is the greatest movie ever; after enough people in Hollywood repeat it ad nauseum, we just learn to accept it as fact. "The Exorcist is the scariest movie ever." Why? Because a list told us so? There are plenty of people making their own lists, with most of them existing just to list movies that are the opposite of the industry faves - cheap and bloody.
But what about damn good scary movies, the kind you have to watch through a hole in your blanket? The ones where watching it in the reflection of a mirror seems safer than looking at it straight on? Where you instinctively lift your feet on the couch because you're worried something might be waiting to grab them underneath? There's a good list of the 100 scariest movie moments of all time at retroCrush, and a completely different, but similarly titled list from Bravo, which get closer to the heart of the matter. But for a movie to be truly scary, it needs to have an effect on you which grows throughout the entire film, until by the end, you're just completely freaked out and can barely sip your milk.
One film which does this extremely well is The Haunting. I mean the original, not that Catherine Zeta-Jones travesty. With its incredible atmosphere and effective visuals, it manages to instill fear without actually showing anything. Everytime I watch this, I wet my bed retroactively.
Number two, in no particular order, would be Rosemary's Baby. Again, without anything being made explicit, it still manages to create this horrible feeling that something is incredibly wrong, even before the nosy old people show up. The whole film is an exercise in paranoia surrounded by what should be the complete mundane.
In the Mouth of Madness is much more visually a horror movie. John Carpenter seems to be some kind of horror genius with the unfortunate affinity for cheap rubber monsters. Yet in spite of this, or maybe because of it, his movies are genuinely scary. Except for They Live which was total crap. Ok, he actually has more crappy movies than he has good ones. But this one is good. When he hits the kid with the old man mask on the bike in the dark, I can literally smell my own fear. It's like the Eqq Theory song says, "Old bald midgets on bikes are spooky."
There it is, my top three. I've never actually seen the Exorcist, even though I own it, which sounds dumb. So the only reason I can't comment on it is from my own sheer laziness. Laziness of the worst kind - too lazy to watch TV. Now that's lazy. Coming up next week - the Laziest Movies of All Time.