The phrase "terrifying sight" is correct and can be used in written English.
It is often used to describe something that is very frightening or scary to look at. Example: As the sun set, the abandoned carnival rides took on a terrifying sight in the fading light.
Where there had been a glimpse of tarmac, there was instead a terrifying sight — the waters of San Francisco Bay.
And that terrifying sight followed hot on the heels of Iron Man 3, which featured one of Iron Man's fancier rescues, as he scooped up 13 passengers sucked through a hole in the fuselage of their jet as it made its way across the Pacific.
Heartbroken, enraged and looking for some way to process what had happened, I wrote a piece arguing that despite the victories the LGBTQ community had secured in recent years, a gay kiss ― even in 2016 ― was still considered a stunning, terrifying sight for too many people.
It was a terrifying sight to witness.
A witness of a terrifying sight, for example, may become oblivious to all sounds.
A chairlift in July is somehow a terrifying sight — another uncanny gift, from Oregon.
Once, the sight of a Viking prow coming down a river was as terrifying a sight as any European could imagine.
Whatever terrifying and extraordinary sights he may have seen in battle, George, typically for his generation, rarely spoke of them.
It must have been terrifying and yet the sight of his massive gleaming tusks probably left them salivating with greed.
No other cinema I know of has a resident cat: Marzipan, who patrols the theatre while the films are on, terrifying anyone who catches sight of her out of the corner of an eye while watching a horror.
A first-time visitor to Lagos, he says, could be terrified by the sight of the mass of humanity; but it's no different from the Lower East Side of New York a century ago: "Wagons, storefronts, stands, selling, buying and just as exciting".
