What I Learned from the "Bravo 100 Scariest Movie Moments List"

I was not a normal child, and an even weirder teenager. My sole goal in life was to know everything, especially if that knowledge would keep me from feeling excluded. I hated not understanding references to pop culture phenomenon, even if the thing itself was really stupid or cheesy. I called the Netflix Queue of DVDs my “cultural education” and oftentimes would try reading huge Russian novels that I didn’t really grasp as a fifteen year old Wisconsinite.

Around that same time the Bravo channel released a special in 2004 entitled “Bravo’s 100 Scariest Movie Moments,” which they first aired around Halloween of that year. I already had an affinity for horror, having grown up with “The Twilight Zone,” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” I plowed through all five installments and then tried to go to sleep, which proved to be very difficult, which I realized was the intent of the special. I hadn’t heard of many of these films which fueled my penchant for being a know it all, and a lot of them actually looked really good. Though I didn’t know it then, the special had made an indelible mark on me, and throughout the next eleven years I would seek out these films, good and bad, and eventually watch all one hundred of them.

The first film I watched off the list would be “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” which I saw in my childhood. Honestly, after that, I’m not sure how I progressed through the list, or what I saw when. I know I saw movies like “Jurassic Park,” “Jaws,” and “Alien,” pretty early on because they’re not really horror movies to begin with. Other early watches were probably seen via cable, like “Creepshow” and “Child’s Play.” I probably saw about half of the list throughout my teens as I would remember one of them for that one shown scene, from the special.

The actual need to watch everything on the list probably germinated when I started college, and there were more resources available for me to actually track all of them down. I watched a lot of them on Netflix’s streaming service my freshman year of college, including “Black Christmas,” “Suspiria,” and “Rosemary’s Baby.” Netflix probably contributed to some twenty of the seen films. The second largest resource was the public and university libraries I was allowed to use in college. Through them I saw “Freaks,” “The Haunting,” and “Jacob’s Ladder,” among others. (Libraries don’t get the credit they deserve, especially when it comes to their resources, which are innumerous.)

Courtesy of Eva Halloween at theyearofhalloween.com

I didn’t start getting really obsessed until a year ago when I re-subscribed to Netflix DVDs for the first time in years, just so I could get hard to find films like “When a Stranger Calls,” “The Hills Have Eyes,” “The Last House on the Left,” and “Peeping Tom.” Because I was a slave to the list I ended up watching a lot of films I would never have watched otherwise, including the thrillers “Pacific Heights,” “Single White Female,” and “Marathon Man.” Though the moments themselves were pretty frightening, or at least threatening, the rest of the films were not very scary, or even sometimes, not all that interesting. I felt seriously jipped several times throughout the past several years as I narrowed down the last thirty or so films I needed to watch to finish this list.

Any time I would start to talk about my love of horror I would end up talking up this list, and how I was hell-bent on finishing it. I started to refer to it as “The Bravo List,” or that I wanted to watch a “Bravo Movie.” Though the actual special is pretty dated, and there’s little prestige in watching all one hundred of a cable network’s Halloween special, I was adamant on finishing. I had come this far. Just one month ago I still had to watch nine or so films to be able to write this piece, and the fervor was all that much more ridiculous. I started tracking down the last couple of films, either through Amazon rentals, the library, or buying them outright. The main question I got near the end of this process was “What do you have left to see? Probably the worst of the list, right?”

Actually no. As of yesterday there were two left for me to see. The first was “Phantasm,” a film that I had started watching via Netflix Instant years ago and never finished. Oh, how I wish I had finished it then, because the struggle to finally watch it all these years later was brutal. I went to rent the film through Amazon Prime and it wasn’t available. Then I tried looking up a place to stream it, but all I found was a Spanish language version with no subtitles. Then I tried to use the public library system, and the only copy was in a city library three hours away, which wouldn’t ship to my library in time. So, I did what I had to do and went to buy the DVD off Amazon. Sadly, there was only one copy, for less than five dollars, and it was from a seller in Germany. All other copies were between thirty and sixty dollars, and every one of them was used. You know where this is going: I spent forty dollars on that one DVD, for you. You’re welcome.

The other film, which was the absolute last film I watched, was one I didn’t want to watch in the first place. As I have stated on this site before, I do not like being scared, and what scares me most are movies featuring torture or really scary ghosts, like “The Grudge,” “Hostel,” and “Saw.” I prefer films like the ones on this list, which are often psychological, old school gory, or just plain suspenseful. There is only one entry on this Bravo List that is actually super horrific, and though most of the film is framed as a mystery and not a horror film, the imagery of the film is horrific. That film is “Audition (Odishion)” which is a 1999 Japanese horror film about a widower who holds an audition for a movie that will never be made, so he can find a wife. One of these women is actually a crazy hermit who tortures men who trick her. It’s only the last twenty minutes that are horrific, but it’s pretty awful. I watched the whole thing through tightly woven fingers.

Though I definitely don’t agree with everything on the list, I would recommend it to anyone who wants a crash course in horror. There were so many films on it that are now some of my favorites, including “The Fly,” “The Haunting,” “Wait Until Dark,” “The Exorcist,” and “Re-Animator.” There are also so many foreign films on the list that don’t get all that much attention, including “The Vanishing,” “The Devil’s Backbone,” “Audition,” and “Diabolique.”

Some people want to know if I’m going to conquer Bravo’s two subsequent specials entitled “30 Even Scarier Moments,” and “13 Scarier Movie Moments.” I really don’t know, because some movies included are “Hostel” and “The Devil’s Rejects,” which I would really rather not see. I can barely imagine watching “Audition” again and it was pretty tame. I have seen quite a bit of the “30” special, including classics like “Oldboy,” “Videodrome,” and “A Clockwork Orange,” so I suppose anything is possible. Below are links to Youtube videos of all three specials. For those who are weak willed, maybe just watch the specials, and for everyone else, Happy Halloween.