Some people love scary movies. The anticipation builds slowly, with ominous music pulsing like your heartbeat – and then the unexpected fright that makes you scream. But some scary movies take “scary” to a weird new place and give us a bizarre intensity. Here are examples of ten scary movies that will make your day in a weird new way.
1. Teeth (2007)
This movie’s heroine, Dawn, takes a purity pledge. Although she tries to maintain purity, she’s strongly attracted to a handsome boy named Tobey. When she almost surrenders to their shared passion, she pulls back in fright.
An aroused Tobey wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer and begins to rape her. He discovers- to his horror — that Dawn has vagina dentata: teeth inside her vagina. Dawn’s vagina bites off Tobey’s penis, and she runs away in horror. Dawn later seeks solace from Ryan (a classmate), and his kindness results in learning her vagina doesn’t bite when she’s relaxed.
She agrees to another sexual encounter with Ryan, but when he angers her, he loses his penis, too. After this, Dawn seduces her creepy stepbrother, Brad – resulting in the same fate for Brad’s penis. The story ends with Dawn hitchhiking and being picked up by a man who thinks he’ll score with an attractive teenager – but this weird scary movie’s end hints strongly of the driver’s bloody fate. After seeing this movie, I’m not sure if you’ll see your next dental cleaning in the same way.
2. Freaks (1932)
‘Freaks’ is the story of Cleopatra, a beautiful but mercenary trapeze artist, and her beloved: Hercules (the circus strongman;), who look down on the circus sideshow’s performers. A dwarf named Hans is in love with Cleopatra. Cleopatra pretends to love Hans when she learns he’s received some money. Cleopatra conspires to kill Hans after their wedding and contemptuously kisses Hercules in front of Hans -right after she and Hans’s wedding vows.
The other sideshow performers, who know Cleopatra’s disdain for them, taunt her by saying she is ‘one of us!’ She angrily humiliates Hans, who realizes Cleopatra has played him for a fool. Although Hans can’t help loving Cleopatra, he vows revenge on her and Hercules. Hans and other sideshow performers chase after the faithless Cleopatra.
The sideshow performers eventually catch Cleopatra and turn her into a horribly deformed ‘human duck.’ The resulting creature has no legs or tongue, and a tarred-and-feathered body. This weird scary movie ends with Cleopatra’s implied future of being exhibited as a circus ‘freak’ – the thing she most hated. With a bird girl, a skeleton man, a “living torso,” and Cleopatra you can only imagine the sideshow doctor’s comments on their medical cards.
3. Shivers (1975)
The story begins in an apartment house, where a doctor murders a younger girl named Annabelle by slicing open her stomach, pouring acid in the wound — and then killing himself. When another doctor at the apartment building discovers the bodies, he questions the deceased doctor’s partner. The partner admits he and the doctor had experimented with genetically engineered parasites, which they had hoped to use as organ replacements.
It soon became apparent many in the apartment building were sick with intestinal symptoms and convulsions. It becomes clear that the parasites can infect others by traveling to and from those they infect. As more information is gathered from the victims, it is learned the doctor, had been having sex with young Annabelle — and that she, in turn, had passed on the parasites, sexually.
The story then reveals Annabelle’s promiscuity was caused by the parasite. Infected apartment residents writhe in alternate periods of sexual frenzy and painful symptoms. You can easily imagine all the infected residents scrambling to call a local personal injury lawyer. Instead, the weird scary ending implies the victims go on to have sex with — and infect — many others in nearby towns.
4. Suspiria (1977)
Suspiria tells the weird scary story of Suzy, who travels to Germany for ballet lessons. As she arrives, she sees another student running from the school. At school the following day, the police arrive and report a nearby murder, and Suzy suspects she’d seen the murdered woman: the one running from the school.
A few days later, as Suzy and a friend eat lunch, maggots fall from the ceiling. Infected food is found upstairs, apparently the maggots’ origin. As more people die, Suzy learns that the school was once the site of a witch’s coven — and Suzy suspects it still operates as a coven.
Suzy hears the headmistress plotting her death — as a human sacrifice. To save herself, Suzy kills the headmistress. As Suzy flees, we see the school destroyed by fire. Perhaps Suzy might have been looking for a criminal attorney to defend her against the murder of the headmistress.
5. Eraserhead (1977)
Henry Spencer is first seen as a face superimposed on an unidentified planet. A “spermatozoon-like” creature swims from Henry’s mouth. We next see Henry in his girlfriend Mary’s home, where he learns Mary has given birth — and says Henry is the father. The deformed creature borne by Mary looks like the sperm creature seen earlier.
Henry and Mary try caring for the child, but it won’t eat, and Mary flees. Henry has a vision in which the Lady of the Radiator sings to him, and his head pops off. Henry’s head then falls from the sky and is taken to a pencil factory and turned into erasers. When Henry approaches the child and removes its blanket, he sees the creature is a skinless mass of internal organs.
A repulsed Henry stabs at the child’s organs, which causes the child’s body to ooze blood everywhere (you might be dreading to imagine the job in store for Henry’s carpet cleaners). The child’s head becomes the planet from the beginning of the movie, and breaks open, evoking white light. In the end of this weird scary movie, Henry embraces the Radiator Lady as the screen fades to black.
6. Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988)
One night in Lover’s Lane, Mike and Debbie see a weird scary object land nearby. When they investigate, they find a spaceship full of clown-like aliens who call themselves “klowns.” The couple escapes and notifies the police.
The police discover the klowns using ray guns that cover people with sticky cocoons. Other klowns shrink people and load them into bag with miniature klowns. When a policeman attempts to arrest a klown, he’s turned into a ventriloquist’s dummy. Mike and Debbie narrowly escape.
Mike’s friends jump into a truck and meet a klown called Jojo the Klownzilla, who destroys the truck. One of Mike’s friends, Dave, pierces JoJo’s nose, and the klown explodes. The explosion causes a clown car to drop from the sky — wheels and all — and all of Mike’s friends escape from the car — alive. As the movie ends, the friends watch the fireworks caused by the klowns’ destruction.
7. The Evil Dead II (1987)
Ash (a zombie hunter, from the first Evil Dead movie) and his girlfriend Linda are enjoying a romantic weekend when they discover a tape. The tape was made by the cabin’s previous occupant: a professor, reading from the Book of the Dead. The book unleashes an evil spirit that possesses Linda. Reluctantly, Ash decapitates Linda for his own safety and buries her.
After Linda’s burial, Linda becomes reanimated. Her severed head bites Ash’s hand while her torso attacks him, but Ash uses a chainsaw to kill her again and to amputate his possessed hand. The professor’s daughter, Anne, comes to the cabin with friends, who are drawn into the chaos and attacked by Ash. One of the friends is dismembered by Ash after he is possessed. Ash has encounters with several of Anne’s friends, only stopping his rampage after seeing a necklace that reminds him of Linda.
In the final section, Ash welds his chainsaw to his wrist while battling with Annie. Annie prays an incantation which sends the possessing force back to its origin – but the same force causes a mass tree removal, which also siphons an Oldsmobile and Ash. Ash is transported through time to the 1300s, where he kills a deadite (the evil parasite he battled in the first Evil Dead movie). Realizing he must now relive the horrors of both weird scary movies, Ash ends the film screaming, ‘NO!
8. Creep (2014)
Aaron is a freelance photographer hired to film the last words of a dying man. He meets the employer, Josef, who first disrobes and bathes in front of an uncomfortable Aaron. After the bath, Aaron and Josef go for a walk and return to find Aaron is missing his keys, so he’s forced to stay overnight.
As Aaron tries to sleep, he hears Josef confessing to having raped his wife while wearing a wolf’s mask. When Aaron confronts Josef with this behavior, Josef runs down the hall to grab the mask Aaron runs home and later receives a package of a stuffed wolf, which holds a picture of Aaron and Josef, both naked and dancing in a tub filled with blood.
Josef calls and confesses he loves Aaron and asks to meet him in a park. When they meet, Josef puts on the wolf mask and buries an axe in Aaron’s head. In the end, we see Josef add his videos of Aaron to a long row of other videos, as he calls another photographer for an appointment. We can conclude that — at the very least — Josef needs the best murder attorney he can find.
9. Dead Alive (1992)
Lionel and his girlfriend, Paquita, visit the zoo with his mother, Vera. Vera is bitten by a Sumatran rat monkey and begins to turn into a zombie. Although Lionel tries to keep his Vera in his basement, her physical condition worsens, and her skin peels off. When Vera appears to die, she completes her weird, scary transformation into a zombie.
Once Lionel buries Vera, he must walk through the cemetery headstones in the graveyard and repetitively tranquilize her, so she will remain dead. Lionel is attacked by a group of hoodlums, but Vera bursts through the grace to kill the ruffians. When the hoodlums become zombies, Lionel tries to hide them in his basement. Paquita wants to help and suggests Lionel poison the zombies.
Unfortunately, the ‘poison’ was an animal stimulant that reanimates the zombies. Lionel uses a lawnmower to shred the zombies, and Paquita tries to pulverize their bodies in a blender. A now-enormous Vera chases Lionel and Paquita to the roof, where Lionel confronts Vera to tell her he knows she killed his father. An angry Vera envelops Lionel into an opening in her stomach, but Lionel bursts back out and pushes Vera into the now-burning house — and then, walks into the sunset with Paquita.
10. Reanimator (1985)
Herbert West is a medical student in Massachusetts. His interest in reanimation leads him to reanimate his landlord’s cat – and later to reanimate a human corpse. When Dean Halsey comes into the lab, the Dean is killed by the corpse. Herbert destroys the reanimated corpse with a bone saw and resurrects Dean Halsey.
The Dean becomes a zombie and is placed in a padded cell. While attempting to lobotomize Dr. Halsey –- who he thinks is insane, Dr. Hill – an asylum doctor – discovers the weird, scary truth. Dr. Hill then tries to bribe Herbert, but Herbert murders, decapitates, and reanimates Dr. Hill. The severed and reanimated Dr. Hill decides to capture Dr. Halsey’s niece, Megan — and his head attempts to orally rape her.
Herbert and Dan free Megan and give Dr. Hill a lethal dose of reanimation fluid. Dr. Hill kills Herbert while Dan rescues Megan. When a corpse kills Megan, Dan reanimates her, only to have her scream in horror when she realizes she’s been reanimated. Many scenes would require biomedical waste disposal if this were a true story.
If you’re a scary movie fan intrigued by these movies’ descriptions, watch them satisfy your inner ‘weirdness.’ Some of these movies are considered cult classics, but all are worth the time to watch them. Don’t settle for scary this Halloween –- satisfy your craving for something weird and scary.
