The 1923 version staring Lon Chaney maybe considered the monster movie of the Hunchback pantheon but the 1939 have a far more scary-ish scene.
Ok, it’s not scary but it has a very dark moody tone that make it’s uneasy. As Esmeralda flee from Notre Dame after seeing Quasimodo, he stalks in the dark narrow streets. If we had seen Quasimodo before then so we did know what lurked in the night it would have been more scary. Of course that means we would have had the King of Fools scene so yeah that would have happened. But the dark slow-paced unsettling quality of that makes it feel more scary than anything in the 1923 version. Though Monster Movie doesn’t equal horror but still.