The Bad Penny (beta)

Three of the scariest horror films from the past 30 years deeply affected audiences for radically different reasons.

With 1994’s In the Mouth of Madness, John Carpenter paid tribute to H.P. Lovecraft with a cinematic rendering of mental insanity unlike any other director before or since.

Twenty years later, David Robert Mitchell dished up the scariest psychological horror film of the century with It Follows. That is, until Ari Aster came along with Hereditary four years later and shook up moviegoers with a vertebrae-tingling trip into the bowels of the occult.

Different as they are, the three modern-day horror masterpieces share a disturbing and very specific ingredient: In a pivotal scene that rattles viewers into paying closer attention, a strange and terrifying figure appears in the distance, in the middle of the screen, focused exclusively on the protagonist. They then slowly approach the unaware hero (or apparent hero), who sits in a seemingly safe environment while those around them don’t see what’s happening. Terror ensues.

Check out the creepy similarities in these equally bone-chilling, unsettling — and, notably, blood-free — scenes from In the Mouth of Madness, It Follows and Hereditary:

This entry was posted on 01/31/2023 at 10:14 pm and is filed under Doppelgängers, Features with tags Ari Aster, David Robert Mitchell, Hereditary, In the Mouth of Madness, It Follows, John Carpenter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.