Marti Noxon

ONE of the great things about childhood is how easy it is to access the distinct delight of being scared out of your mind. Adults just have more trouble getting goosebumps. That’s because experience is the enemy of true terror. You may shriek the first time you see “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” but the second or third time you might only shudder. That’s why dedicated horror fans sometimes have a hard time finding a really nerve-rattling movie. They’ve already seen it all.

Those who make horror movies may face the greatest challenge. They know what goes into the engineering of a scary sequence, and they have a good idea what’s coming around that corner. And since they presumably went into this line of work in part because of the pleasures of trembling in the dark, they have seen more than their share of horror movies.

The end of summer has lately been a bonanza for chillers: this month has already seen “Fright Night” and “Final Destination 5.” Still to come are “Shark Night 3D” (Sept. 2) and “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” (Friday), a remake of a 1973 haunted-house tale that Guillermo del Toro, a writer and producer of the new film, has called the scariest television movie he ever saw. But what about all-time most terrifying? When I polled a diverse collection of filmmakers about the scariest movie they’d ever seen, their passionate answers made it clear that their standards were very high. Here are excerpts from their e-mails.

TI WEST, director of “The House of the Devil” and “The Innkeepers”: The image of those two oddball little girls from “The Shining” in their matching powder-blue dresses standing in a bleak, floral-wallpapered hallway has been burnt into my retina ever since the first moment I laid eyes on them. “Come play with us Danny ... Forever and ever and ever....” I can still hear the chorused voices of those little Grady twins almost as well as I can recall some of my favorite songs. “The Shining” was the first film to actually make me uncomfortable with the idea of ever watching it again. To this day I have never met a single person who when those twins are brought up doesn’t shudder and share a personal terror story of their own. That is some achievement. Way to go Kubrick, you ruined us all.

JOHN WATERS, director of “Mondo Trasho” and “Serial Mom”: No film can come near “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s” snuff-like power to horrify. Just saying that great title out loud should give even real serial killers the creeps.

HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS, director of “Blood Feast”: Way, way back in prehistoric times I saw the original “Dracula,” Bela Lugosi’s watermark on the pages of cinematic history. I recall only a few scenes, plus my insistence that the lights in my bedroom be left on all night long. The motivator had to be purely cosmetic, the way he glowered, plus the strange accent atop brutal word delivery. Some years later I saw this film again and laughed at the characterization. That’s how sophistication spoils pseudoreality.

JAMES GUNN, director of “Slither”: I saw “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer” in a theater when it first came out, and it was so gritty and dark I felt sick to my stomach for a couple of days afterwards — like the evil of it stuck to my soul. Part of what was so frightening was Michael Rooker’s incredible performance. We normally distance ourselves from villains, but I almost felt for him as Henry. The last thing you want to do is identify with a serial killer. That’s scarier than anything jumping out of the corner of a film frame.

JOHN LANDIS, director of “American Werewolf in London”: It’s a toss-up between “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “The Exorcist.” I am not a Catholic and do not believe that the Devil exists, but William Friedkin created a complete suspension of disbelief in “The Exorcist.” I was really scared, but then went home and slept like a baby. My friends, lapsed Catholics and former altar boys, had nightmares for weeks! The supernatural is not real, but psychopaths, murderers and cannibals are. Tobe Hooper’s masterpiece [“Texas Chainsaw”] is a rough ride for the audience, although parts of it are very funny. The soundtrack and action are relentless. And for a film with no real on-screen violence it generates an ambience of true terror.

MARTI NOXON, screenwriter of the remake of “Fright Night” and writer and a producer of the television series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”: Many, many films kept me up at night as a child, not the least of which was “Soylent Green,” half-viewed from under our backseat at a drive-in theater. “Soylent Green is people!” was seared into my young mind, and I still think of it when faced with an unidentifiable food product. But I recall only two movies that have kept me awake as an adult: “The Exorcist” and “The Blair Witch Project.” Both stay really grounded in characters we like and relate to while delving into a supernatural world. Their helplessness and human failings in the face of something truly malevolent gets under my skin every time. And “The Exorcist” remains one of the most visually creepy films around. Those flashes of demonic faces, the suffocating fog. It’s brilliant.

JOE CORNISH, director of “Attack the Block”: “Picnic at Hanging Rock” had a big effect on me as a kid. I thought it was going to be an idyllic movie about some pretty girls in nice dresses having a picnic. But it was genuinely unsettling and disturbing. It was a great example of outdoor horror and daylight horror, using the light to terrify. It’s nothing explicit. It does what it does through technique. It makes nature frightening. That’s something you can’t escape.

LARRY FESSENDEN, president of Glass Eye Pix, director of “Habit” and “Wendigo”: The scariest movie I ever saw was the “Night of the Living Dead.” A relentless and escalating sense of dread prevails over the film, as the horror keeps closing in. None of the old rules apply: one character after another meets a gruesome fate regardless of their heroism or function in the story. With its hopeless ending, it was a fulcrum between the morally ordered scary movies of my youth and the horror films to come.

JOHN SAYLES, screenwriter of “The Howling” and “Piranha,” and director of this month’s “Amigo”: The scariest movie I ever saw was John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” with special effects by Rob Bottin. The theater was full, and I had to sit in the front row.

EDGAR WRIGHT, director of “Shaun of the Dead”: I have vivid memories of watching an uncut version of John Carpenter’s “The Thing” on network TV when I was 10 years old. My brother and I couldn’t have been more excited. The only images I knew of the movie were its poster and a still of Kurt Russell with a lamp.

ERIC RED, screenwriter of “The Hitcher” and “Near Dark”: Having a little girl hacking her privates bloody with a crucifix, sticking her mother’s face in it, and then turning her head 180 degrees around is without question the most horrific and transgressive set piece in American horror. That the sequence in “The Exorcist” was staged in broad daylight added to the terror, as did the incredible subliminal sound work. This unequalled masterpiece remains a great influence on my work, and I’m always trying to achieve that sense of reality and suspension of disbelief.

MR. DEL TORO, director of “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “Hellboy”: Stanley Kubrick’s absolute control over the medium turns his rock-solid framing and tense timing into real weapons pointed directly at the unsuspecting audience of “The Shining.” No one has ever used the Steadicam as perfectly as he did in the tracking shots behind Danny Torrance’s tricycle. He uses the soundtrack brilliantly, fusing concrete music with sound effects and score to unsettle and position the uber-mannered, hyper-real performances of his actors. And, refreshingly, Kubrick is not above moments of Grand Guignol: the elevator doors spilling blood, the axe on the chest, the Grady twins bathed in blood or the old undead crone festering in the bathtub. He proves that great horror can be both shocking and a highly artistic endeavor.