Dial S for Scary: Alfred Hitchcock's 10 most terrifying movie moments, ranked

Another masterpiece built off a simple premise, is about photographer L.T. Jefferies (Jimmy Stewart), who passes his time while healing a broken leg by snooping on his next door neighbors with binoculars and a camera. Before long, he’s convinced that one of them, Thorwald (Raymond Burr), has murdered his wife. When Jefferies’ girlfriend sneaks into Thorwald’s apartment to investigate, she’s caught, and Jefferies is spotted. With all the action seen from the photographer’s POV, Hitchcock destroys the fourth wall with the murderer directly leering at the audience. It’s a guaranteed “Oh shit!” moment for anyone watching.

While every other moment on this list is intentionally frightening, with this scene from it’s hard to tell. The movie’s not a horror but a lavish blockbuster, starring James Stewart as a private investigator who falls in love with his client’s wife—and later her doppelgänger. In the modern age, the scene in which the investigator demands that said doppelgänger pin her hair back so she can exactly resemble his recent love is uncomfortable viewing, demonstrating near-abusive control. However, Hitchcock famously had problems with women that he projected onto his characters and actresses. Was this scene another case of that, or was it knowingly creepy? Who knows?

is full of visceral horror. There’s the infamous shower sequence (we’ll get to that), as well as the revealing of Mrs. Bates’ corpse and the murder of private detective Arbogast. The only reason the latter two don’t make it onto this list is that time has aged their practical effects. However, as distressing today as it was in 1960 is the ending. Alone in a prison cubicle, Norman Bates—now fully convinced he’s his mother—stares menacingly at the camera. “They’ll say, ‘Why, she wouldn’t even harm a fly…’,” a female-voiced monologue promises, chillingly implying he’ll feign docility to get an early release.

1960s gore effects rarely hold up in the modern day, but ’ grisliest kill is the exception proving the rule. In between the random bird attacks that plague the California beach town of Bodega Bay, Lydia Brenner (Jessica Tandy) visits her neighbor’s house. There she finds shattered windows, dead gulls and a man lying motionless with his eyes completely gone. The camera cuts back and forth between Lydia and the corpse to gradually reveal the horror, while the lack of a soundtrack makes the scenario feel all the more realistic. Don’t worry, Lydia: we’d dash out of that house, too.

You knew it’d be here. The shower scene in Psycho is arguably the most influential and iconic three minutes in the history of horror—not to mention the most shocking. At the midpoint of the film, when the audience hasn’t had a single scene without Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane, the protagonist is shockingly murdered. Bernard Herrman’s strings are striking, the cinematography is as erratic as it is artistic, and the remainder of the film is suddenly impossible to predict. Every slasher movie of the next two decades would try and fail to be half as hard-hitting as this, and it remains Hitchcock’s signature sequence.

The Psycho shower is the most infamous and influential moment of Hitchcock horror. However, we’d argue that the ominous ending of The Birds is infinitely more haunting. Throughout the film, Bodega Bay and its residents have been victims of random bird attacks. It all peaks with an avian assault so intense that the main characters need to board themselves up in a house to survive. Then it ends as inexplicably as it began. When the party ventures outside, thousands of gulls and crows are waiting silently. They can only drive their car away at walking speed for fear of bathing the road in bird blood and restarting the horror. Then come the credits. Will the birds strike again? How widespread are the attacks? Do our protagonists survive? We never know. While Psycho wraps up with an explanation of its plot, The Birds never explains itself—and what’s scarier than the complete unknown?