What’s the most disturbing scene you’ve ever watched in a movie?
I’m not necessarily talking about straight up gore. I mean disturbing in the holistic / emotional sense as well … though if it’s garden variety gore that does it for you, then by all means, be my guest.
Tom ain’t gonna like it, but my pick is the scene involving the three year old kid and his parents in Under The Skin.
I was channel surfing and caught about 20 minutes of Open Water 2: Adrift. Then the baby started crying, and ugh, I had to turn it off. I still think about (obviously).
Aw come on. Open Water Two? These things must never be spoken of.
I gotta take a Star Wars approach to this: no other movies exist, or were made. Open Water is the only movie in that series.
The needle scene from Audition.
Trainspotting and “the filthiest toilet in Scotland”.
… and the dead baby on the ceiling is a close second.
I’m going to say Schindler’s List, the scene where Schindler is watching from his window while the guards are shoving the naked prisoners around. The whole movie, really, could qualify. There’s a reason why the next time I watch it will be when my kids are old enough to understand it.
Bone Tomahawk. You know the scene. It’s a hard one to forget. Honorable mention: the first victim in Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). So brutal, like watching (I guess) a snuff film.
The animal autopsies in the Nekromantik movies, I guess.
Un Chien Andaleu. If you’ve seen it you know what I’m talking about.
I’ve had deeply visceral repulsion reactions to a handful of movies over the years. I refer to them as movies that made me feel like less of a human for having watched them.
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover: Wall-to-wall, this is probably the most horrible movie I’ve ever seen. Most of it merges into a smear in my head, but I think it peaked in a long dinner table scene where the gathered are cutting into a beautiful dish made of human while Michael Gambon rolls on a never-ending tirade of shouty emotional abuse. Whew! A little too close to home!
Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom: This movie taught me that I should not uncritically watch items from the Criterion Collection. This is straight-up torture porn. World War 2, the falling star of Italian fascists retreat into the hills and torment the literal shit out of their victims. And then make them eat it. One time I was at Wendy’s, eating a chicken sandwich, and you know how their buns tend to get wet and stick to the sides of your mouth? I’m chasing a nasty, wet clump of bun off the roof of my mouth, and the scene where the slaves are forced to eat their own shit pops into my head. I spit out everything in my mouth and stopped eating fast food for years.
Most of mine go back to watching movies that weren’t really age appropriate. To wit:
Obviously, seeing Kane have a xenomorph punch it’s way out of his ribcage in the first Alien was rough. But also the whole “impregnating” cycle, with the facehugger attaching itself to your face and pushing itself down your throat to plant its embryo? Man, there is nothing not freaky about that. Whoever dreamed up that whole thing had a vice grip on my primitive fear center.
Murphy’s death in Robocop. It’s not the goriest scene you’ll ever see, but the whole aspect of Murphy dying alone, surrounded by sadists who just wanted to see him suffer, is still hard to watch for me.
Sleepaway Camp, if you’ve seen it, may inspire a chuckle at my including in the list. But while about 90% of the movie is a pretty silly 80s B movie, the ending when you find out that sweet little Angela wasn’t always sweet little Angela, well … it’s a pretty effective sucker punch of an ending.
Leviathan. The first time a monster appears, it shows how it has absorbed other beings. This is not a new concept in horror/st stuff and I’m sure I’ve seen it in some other graphic novels and movies somewhere but when I saw this in Leviathan I just thought it was disgusting.
That scene in Attack of The Clones on the beach where Anakin says, “I hate sand, it gets everywhere”. Chills just thinking about it.
The scene where Jesus gets whipped in Passion Of The Christ just went on for a little too long, to the point where I just felt sick.
There was an Iranian film I saw on Netflix a few years back about a woman whose cheating husband alleged SHE was having an affair and the film ends with her being stoned to death. That scene also went on for too long and was quite graphic.
I can deal with extreme violence (and gore) but when it’s in a prolonged scene it disturbs me greatly.
Though there was a really short scene in The Devil’s Rejects that just comes out of nowwhere that I found disturbing, involving a truck.
I can handle fright and gore until the cows come home, but my answer is the couch scene at the end of Kids. Made me nauseous.
A scene in the movie Elephant about a school shooting, where you see kids running flat-out. Isn’t cinematic at all. It felt real. Very disturbing movie.
This. Although a lot of that movie is pretty fucked up. As are quite a few other Miike movies. Something for everyone in Visitor Q, for example.
Thankfully I’ve buried all the really bad stuff I watched in films, but for some reason what I thought of first when I tried to think of something for this thread was the scene in Robocop where Clarence Bodicker shoots his hand off and he wanders around clutching the stump. Up to that point I’d been hoping to see a cool cyborg movie, I didn’t realize how violent it was going to be (as a pre-teen), and that’s probably why I actually enjoyed the new Robocop so much, as it was more of what I assumed the original film would be in some ways.
Oh, also almost all of the latest Rambo movie. Fuck that movie.
Oh hell, I had completely forgotten about that one. Probably on purpose.
I would like to hear @tomchick and the podcast people cover this question if they haven’t already in a 3x3?
Only one that comes to mind right now is the knife scene in Saving Private Ryan. You know which one.