Honestly, I think the movie that scared me the most may have been Scream or Saw. Two different times of my life.
Scream because I grew up in the middle of nowhere. I was a latchkey kid and for money, I would babysit out on farms in the actual middle of nowhere. It was really freaky to think that someone could be outside the house and what would I do? It was not my house when I was babysitting, so I did not know if everything was locked up or not. Cell phones did not work out there at the time. Landlines were also kind of spotty on windy days. Scream was probably one of my first introductions to the slasher/horror genre.
Saw came out when I was a young adult. When politics really started to pick up a lot of crazy rhetoric and a lot of inflammatory hate was going around, The idea that someone could decide you need to be taught a lesson because whatever they think you did bad was an offense punishable by death was jarring. I was really big into crime and serial killers way back then. A killer with a twisted moral compass was kind of terrifying for a young woman who worked in the justice system at the time and lived all alone. This was after working retail for years where I was accused of being a horrible person by about half of my customers and an angel by the other half. Retail is weird. Especially as the Saw franchise continued, some of the reasons for the people being put in the traps became very obtuse. It was also probably the goriest movies I had seen at the time, so it had a lot of impact. Gore is everywhere now, especially Netflix, so gore does not really scare me now as make me nauseous sometimes.
Being a young woman, you end up being threatened a lot by men for not giving them enough attention. Not smiling. Declining invitations. Thinking how someday you might set off the wrong person, I think is a very valid fear most women have. Especially knowing that if you become a victim then you will be blamed. As much as people try and tell you how to survive those encounters when your body and life are threatened, sometimes you wonder if it would be worse to survive.
After watching these movies, people walk away like if those people had nod done this or that then they would not have died. There is a lot of victim blaming with horror, which I do not appreciate. Everyone should reasonably expect to not be harmed for going about their lives.
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