(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Tue 12 August 2025 15:45, UK
Martin Scorsese has never made an outright horror film, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a huge fan of scary movies.
The filmmaker has come closest to the genre with various psychological thrillers, like Cape Fear and Shutter Island, but we’re yet to see Scorsese explore the world of monsters, ghosts and ghouls. Perhaps in the future he’ll tackle a proper scary movie, but for now, he prefers watching them, and he cites two horror films as some of the most terrifying pieces of cinema he has ever seen.
What makes a horror film truly scary? This is a question that depends on who you ask, because we’ve all got different triggers that make us tick. Perhaps for some, it’s haunted mansions and ghostly presences that scare them the most. For others, it’s a masked killer wielding a knife – something that poses much more of a realistic threat than a spectre gliding through your walls.
For Scorsese, it’s two vintage horror films that have scared him the most, including House of Wax by Andre de Toth. Released in 1953, the classic film follows a ruthless murderer as he creates a wax museum full of real corpses. Discussing his love for the movie, the director told Film Comment, “It’s the best 3D film ever made—and Andre de Toth had one eye! Throughout the first third of the film, the camera keeps tracking around Vincent Price, and around the wax figures, who look very much like real people.”
He continued, “And every time somebody comes into a frame, you don’t know whether it’s a dummy or a real person. When the wax museum burns, and the eyes start to fall out of the dummies’ eye sockets, it’s tremendously effective. The whole movie is so outlandish, so outrageous. And I like that it takes place on Mulberry Street—my old neighbourhood.”
By blurring the lines between what’s real and what’s not, House of Wax becomes incredibly unnerving, and it’s no wonder it has endured as a classic for years – even if it did initially receive bad reviews. Several remakes have emerged since it was released, however, and the general consensus is now a lot more positive. It’s an undeniably haunting movie, revelling in one of the things that makes all humans feel on edge – the uncanny.
Scorsese also finds The Uninvited, released in 1944, a terrifying movie, calling it “even scarier than House of Wax.” The director went as far as to call Lewis Allen’s film “the best ghost story ever made,” explaining, “It’s so frightening that Ray Milland has to crack a few jokes now and then, just to keep everybody in the theatre.”
The movie was a huge success, becoming one of the highest-grossing titles of the year and noted for its exquisite black-and-white cinematography. It’s a classic tale of people moving into a house, only to discover that they might not be the only inhabitants. Scorsese thinks it’s genius – even if it is rather tame compared to today’s scary movie standards.
Still, it’s not hard to imagine how unsettling The Uninvited would’ve been decades ago, with its brooding atmosphere, which suggests that we can never be quite sure if we’re alone.
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