The scariest movie ever made?

A Warning to the Curious (1972)

The first batch of the BFI films arrived and I started off by watching this short movie from the BBC series called A Ghost Story for Christmas. A friend of mine highly recommended it to me but at first I was a bit suspicious as it's a short movie made with a low budget straight to TV, is it going to be worth the price of the DVD? Well I ended up ordering it anyways and I have to say it was money well spent. This movie pretty much defines horror, it's a master class on how to build up suspension and create tense scenes. The funny thing is that there's many things wrong in this movie. The low budget shows quite bad on most parts, the acting could have been better, the ghost itself wasn't that scary and overall the time hasn't been kind to it. But you just don't care about them as the movie is built so brilliantly to be as scary as possible. And I'm not talking about the usual boogie man jumps out of the closet scary for a second, it's constantly building up tension to the ultimate finale where it goes on levels rarely seen on any movie. And it's not building up the horror with any of the modern ways of pounding it in your head with visual and audio assault, it takes it's time and carefully increases the level so that you just feel more and more uneasy untill you're scared as hell. Would love to see more of that in modern horror movies too, but I'm afraid that's not really likely. I kind of felt sad after watching this movie as I realized that today's average moviegoer would most likely be bored watching it as it's in such a fine tune with very little to offer unless you look close enough. So if you are going to watch it, take your time and focus on it, I promise it will scare the crap out of you.
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