Your car should, hypothetically, be one of the least scary places on Earth. Not a ton of hiding places! You control everything! Impossible to get struck by lightning with four rubber tires! (Please don't fact-check the third one.) But what is the point of horror if not to take our safe spaces and turn them against us? For decades, our finest filmmakers have been assaulting our trusty motor vehicles with everything under the sun. Dinosaurs. Serial killers. Logs. (Logs are, somehow, the scariest one.)

Let's do what a lot of these characters should've done and take a look in the rearview. Without further ado, these are the 10 scariest car scenes of all time.

'Jurassic Park' - T-Rex Attack

Jurassic Park is such an enduring piece of spectacle and wonder that sometimes you forget that, whoops, it's like 80% a horror movie. Getting attacked by a 20-foot-tall killing machine? Pretty scary! The T-Rex's escape from its paddock is a masterclass in tension-building from Steven Spielberg, from that iconic ripple in the water glass to the moment the apex predator literally crashes into the scene. With all due respect to Martin Ferrero ("when ya gotta go, ya gotta' go"), the characters you care for are Tim (Joseph Mazzello) and Lex (Ariana Richards), two kids left to fend off a walking tow truck with teeth. The sight of the T-Rex's massive mug crashing through the roof of the Jeep is something that, all these years later, still hasn't been beaten in terms of pure monster movie nightmare fuel.

'Pee-wee's Big Adventure' - Large Marge

Shoutout to Tim Burton for sending an entire generation straight into therapy. In his whimsical feature-directing debut, Burton showed off his horror muscles after Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens) hitches a ride down a misty road with a mysterious truck driver (Alice Elizabeth Nunn). Honestly, if you've never experienced the Large Marge segment of this whimsical PG-rated adventure, I'd rather you just watch it first. (And you can, right here!) Just know that the climax is 1000% scarier than it needed to be. An all-time flex from ya boy Tim Burton right out of the gate.

'The Haunting of Hill House' - Death Nell

Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House was largely a slow-burner, a bump-in-the-night ghost story that didn't dig too much into the jump scare handbook. But when it finally did go full-bore into the jump scare, woo boy, many a pair of pants were soiled on that day, my friends. The moment came during episode 8, "Witness Marks", as the deceased youngest daughter of the Crain family, Nell (Victoria Pedretti) made her presence felt during a tense moment between her sisters, Shirley (Elizabeth Reaser) and Theodora (Kate Siegel). It is...one hell of a jolt, but the genius of Mike Flanagan's stellar Shirley Jackson adaptation is that even this moment doesn't sell short the truly haunting themes. Hill House is about the ways our past traumas stick with us, down deep, and burst to the surface at the most unexpected moments.

'The Stranger' - Dane-gerous Liaisons

The horror and thriller genres are just starting to tap into the endless potential of the utter lunacy that is ridesharing technology. The entire enterprise is built on people willingly getting into cars with strangers hoping they're not a serial killer. Leave it to Quibi, the streaming service that lives right next to your Uber app, to get it right. It Follows breakout Maika Monroe stars as a rideshare driver who picks up the homicidal passenger from hell, played by Dane DeHaan. The underlying dread of The Stranger is a result of how familiar it feels; the awkward small talk to start the trip, the obligation to keep a conversation going, the ingrained weirdness of sitting two feet from a person you just met. DeHaan plays a great creep, and the premiere's first episode hinges on his ability to go from 0 to 60 with one sneer. His character is charming. He's talkative. And out of the blue, he admits to a murder—echoing Rutger Hauer in classic thriller, The Hitcher—kicking off a night of tech-driven terror.

'Christine' - Flaming Fury

Plenty of horrifying scares happen inside of cars, but we simply have no chance but to stan the master John Carpenter's Christine, in which the car itself is doing the scares itself. One of the best Stephen King adaptations of all time, Christine is a story of a boy and his car; well, it's the story of the nerdy Arnie Cunningham (Keith Gordon) and his possessed 1958 Plymouth Fury that kills the people who wrong him. Tale as old as time. The visual highlight of the film finds Christine tracking down Arnie's most aggressive high school tormentor, Buddy Repperton (William Ostrander). A gas station explosion sets the Fury on fire, and Buddy finds himself pursued down a dark road by 2 tons of flaming Detroit-made steel. It's quintessential Carpenter: Terrifying, gorgeous, and unapologetically weird as hell.

'The Hitcher' - Because I Cut Off His Legs

The most chilling thing about psychotic hitchhiking serial killer John Ryder is how Rutger Hauer plays the character completely, bone-dry normal. This could be a dude, any dude, you pass by at a roadside diner, sipping coffee and thinkin' about cutting people's heads off. The entire tone of both the film and the performance is set as soon as Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell) picks up the lonely hitcher on the side of a West Texas road. Ryder forces Halsey to drive past another stranded car. Halsey asks why, and it's the sheer matter-of-factness of the answer that chills you long past the end credits: “Because I cut off his legs. And his arms. And his head. And I’m gonna’ do the same to you.”

'Final Destination 2' - Log Jam

The scene that singlehandedly changed the way humanity drove behind trucks. The greatest strength of the Final Destination franchise is making the audience forever distrust the simplest of household items—"could everything in my bathroom contribute to my death?" etc etc—but nothing changed everyday reality like the opening to Final Destination 2. College student Kimberly Corman (A.J. Cook) is on the way to spring break with a van-full of friends when she has a vision of the logging truck's cargo becoming untied in front of her, causing a gruesome multi-car pile-up that ends with a whole dang tree to the face. It's been 17 years and I still pretty much think about it every time I merge on to a highway.

'Urban Legend' - Axe In the Back

A story that's been passed around thousands of lantern-lit sleepovers for decades got the big screen treatment in the 1998 slasher gem, Urban Legend. The set up is so simple—and owes a lot to the equally chill-inducing opening to 1979's When a Stranger Calls—but will have you checking rearview mirror just a little more often than usual. College student Michelle Mancini (Natasha Gregson Wagner) stops at a gas station in the middle of a thunderstorm to make a phone call, only to discover she's been locked inside by the creepy, stuttering attendant. (Played by one of horror's most dependable icons, Brad Dourif) In one of the deadliest case of "don't judge a book by its cover" in history, the attendant was actually trying to help. His last cry to Michelle's fleeing car is the most hair-raising five-word phrase in horror: "Someone's in the back seat."

'Hereditary' - Pole Position

The dull ka-thunk heard 'round the world. Ari Aster's demon-cult horror/family drama Hereditary is absolutely a film you can call "scary", with the understanding that sometimes scary means "earth-shatteringly upsetting in a way that makes me both nauseous and sweaty." Aster, who cares not for your feelings, establishes this early into Hereditary in one of the most shocking horror scenes of the last decade. Peter Graham (Alex Wolff) speeds home from a party after his younger sister, Charlie (Milly Shapiro), has an emergency reaction to a peanut allergy. Desperate for air, Charlie leans out the back window just as Peter swerves to avoid a dead deer. Aster's cruel masterstroke is only letting the audience hear the sound of Charlie's head colliding with a telephone pole, keeping the camera on Wolff's face as the reality of the situation sinks in. It's not even the worst sound of the sequence. That would belong to Toni Collette as Peter and Charlie's mother, Annie, who finds her daughter's remains in the backseat and lets out a sound that I'm not comfortable calling human.

'Duel' - Tailgating

Before he scared the human race right out of the ocean, a young Steven Spielberg turned the open road into a nightmare with his feature-directing debut, Duel. The film follows a salesman, David Mann (Dennis Weaver), who finds himself in an inexplicable game of cat-and-mouse with a massive tanker truck and its unseen driver. Spielberg keeps things as simple as possible, even during Duel's 15-minute centerpiece chase scene, avoiding any overt explanations or plot twists. That's the film's most effectively frightening quirk, the idea that any ill-advised merge can land you in a fight for your life.

This article is presented by Quibi.