20 90s Movie Scenes That Traumatized Us All

14. Ring - Enter Sadako

Something coming through the screen to get us has always been a universal fear. When we first started watching TV, it's likely many of us had scary thoughts of the bad guys crossing that threshold, and in fact, there's a legend that some of the very first film viewers were alarmed by a film clip of a train arriving at a station, for they thought the train was going to crash into them. 1998's J-Horror masterpiece Ring takes that idea and turns it up way past 11. 

Compared to many ghost stories, Ring is a proper slow-burn. Scares, in the traditional sense, are often absent, though this has enough atmosphere to carry it for miles. Nonetheless, it needed a big ending to pay off all of that slow-building suspense - did it get that? 

Oh, yes. 

The Ring concludes with one of the scariest scenes in movie history, as ghostly Sadako literally crawls out of the television to claim her latest victim, secondary lead Ryuji Takayama (Hiroyuki Sanada). Once again, it's already a horrifying idea, and Ring did it justice on every conceivable level. 

The chilling music, the nightmarishly creepy visuals, the drip-drip-drip of dread, and Sadako herself; everything about this is scream-inducing perfection. The final close-up of Sadako's hate-filled eye staring at her unfortunate victim through her iconic curtain of dark hair is the cherry on top of the cake, a final needle-sharp shock that'll send everyone diving behind the sofa.