The Scariest Scene I've Ever Watched

It's a question we all get.

If you write horror, write about horror, or even just count yourself among the legions constantly walking around in John Carpenter t-shirts and posting Hereditary memes, someone has asked you a version of the question.

"What's the scariest thing you've ever seen?"

The trouble with this question is that our definition of "scary" changes radically just as we do with time and experience. The scariest thing I saw when I was 5 does not hit my brain the same way it would now, at nearly 40, and the things that scare me as a husband and father are not the same things that scared me in my late teens, when I hit video stores looking for the nastiest gorefests I could get my hands on.

But with fear, as with love and hunger, some things are just permanent. They lodge in the folds of your brain and defy shifts in perspective, insisting that they must always persist in the same crystallized form, lurking between your temples, waiting for you to close your eyes.

So, when a close friend of mine asked me The Question not too long ago, I dug deep into those moments, looking for a sincere answer rather than an off-the-cuff remark clouded by recency bias and a desire to sound cool.

And I thought, as I so often have, about Nosferatu (1922).

Nothing about this is surprising. F.W. Murnau's silent classic has been a horror touchstone for more than a century, and the response to Robert Eggers' 2024 remake (and Werner Herzog's before that) made it quite clear that we're not done picking apart this haunting, almost impossibly atmospheric film. Even if you've never seen it, Nosferatu hovers over all of modern horror like a long, clawed shadow.

Much of that impact is, of course, in the visuals Murnau and company were able to conjure up out of ruined castles and abandoned, plague-dusted ships, all of it revolving around the demonic visage of Max Schreck as Count Orlok. People much, much smarter than I am have written reams about the cinematic craft applied to the film, and it's all deserved, but there's something else about Nosferatu that comes with the benefit of hindsight and a basic understanding of film history. The film is, infamously, freely adapted from Bram Stoker's Dracula without the authorization of his estate. Florence Stoker, the author's widow, went to war with the creators of the film, fighting them in court even as the film's reputation started to spread, crossed oceans, infected the blood of early cinephiles like a vampire bite.

Florence Stoker's understandable litigiousness in the face of Nosferatu's early screenings meant that the film was almost permanently lost, its prints wiped from the Earth. There is a world in which Murnau's film would have been little more than a famous case of copyright infringement ground into dust by the long arm of the law, but some prints survived, and so Nosferatu took on a certain punk rock tone, a rebellious streak that other more traditionally respectable silent horror films didn't have.

Put simply: It's a film we were, quite literally, not supposed to see, and that knowledge colors the experience, gives it heft and a certain esoteric quality even beyond the occult rumblings laced into the tale by producer and designer Albin Grau.

Even without this context, when I first discovered Nosferatu on an October night in my late teens, amid other monsters on Turner Classic Movies, it felt like I was watching an artifact from another world. The texture of this near-century-old (this would have been 2001 or 2002) piece of art looked to my untrained eyes like something dug up from a pit, raw found footage dredged up from the ruins of a haunted house given form by intertitles and a pulsating pipe organ score. So when I saw the scariest scene I've ever encountered in any film, it felt like I was glimpsing something through a grainy portal, a living shadow reaching out to touch me.

We are all familiar by now with the scene in Dracula in which the vampire stalks and feeds on Jonathan Harker for the first time. It's arrived on film in many forms, and with many actors. In Nosferatu, Orlok (Schreck) does the same to Thomas Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim), Murnau's Harker stand-in. Having just dined and done paperwork with a very strange, monstrous-looking nobleman from Transylvania, Hutter retires to bed as dread settles in over him, fed by skittish locals and the hypnotic eyes of his host.

Murnau lingers here for a moment, savoring Hutter's rising fear, allowing the audience to take in everything this man is thinking. He's far away from home, the love of his life is not near him, he's trying to bear something deeply uncomfortable for the sake of his family's future. We have all been Thomas Hutter in that bedroom, a bit alarmed by whatever might be lurking outside the alien walls of our temporary resting place, but determined to persist, to endure until the cleansing arrival of sunrise to fill in all the shadows.

Then he looks outside.

When we think of Nosferatu in terms of its most lingering imagery, the shots that emerge time and time again for horror movie montages and discussions, we think about Schreck's Count Orlok in action. His shadow coiling up the walls on his way to Ellen Hutter's bedroom. His frozen form levering itself up and out of a coffin onboard a ship. His wide, animal eyes as he walks out of the shadows of his castle to meet Thomas for the first time.

These are all frightening, eternal images made all the more haunting by the frame rates of the silent era, when hand-cranked cameras captured the action in that slightly stuttery, uncanny way that makes the horror of the age so memorably unsettling. But when I think of Nosferatu, and what truly terrifies me about it, I think of Thomas in his bedroom for the night, his dread rising, and the moment when he chances a look out the door.

There, at the other end of the hall, frozen as if carved from pure white marble, is Orlok, not hunting but haunting, hungry, an appetite at rest.

Why does Orlok do this? What's to be gained from this silent, statuesque tableau he engineers for his guest and victim? We know, because pop culture has taught us, that vampires feed on humans because they need our blood, because it's the thing that gives them something passing for life. If that's true, then all this vampire should be concerned with is the moment of the feeding, and it's clear that he already has Hutter ensnared in his web. Even if he wanted to, Thomas could not escape save to hurl himself to his death below the castle walls. So why does Orlok wait?

We could certainly dream up explanations, build out the lore. We could reason that the fear of human victims "seasons" Orlok's meals, or that he grows bored with simple feeding and wants to draw things out, let his prey know beyond all doubt what's about to happen to them. Fleshing out a vampire's personality is, after all, a key part of the last 125 years of horror storytelling.

But I prefer to leave that space blank and simply allow Orlok to exist down there at the end of that hall, quiet, coiled, ready to feed but also ready to usher in a new age of nightmares. In this moment, after we've seen him as an eccentric and eerie nobleman but before we've seen him as the ratlike monster he ultimately reveals, Orlok simply is, inevitable and unmovable as the seas over which he'll travel to wreak havoc on the populace. It's a moment of unmatched potential and dread that echoes through every horror film that's come after it, and as someone who's been afraid of darkened, alien hallways since before I can remember, it remains the single most frightening image I've ever seen in any film.