Medium Cool is a weekly series related to popular culture, mostly film, TV, and books, with some music and games thrown in. We hope it’s a welcome break from the anger, hate, and idiocy we see almost daily from the other side in the political sphere.
Arguments welcomed, opinions respected, fools un-suffered. We’re here every Sunday at 7 pm.
Forget the holidays!
Tonight, let’s talk about the most uncomfortable, disturbing, surprising, shocking, or thought provoking scene or dialogue in a movie, play or TV show.
Note: for those new to Medium Cool, these are not open threads.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Omar’s death in “The Wire”: shocking, chilling and thought provoking.
arrieve
I loved, loved the Sopranos but I have never been able to rewatch the scene where Silvio kills Adriana. I know they had to do it, but it made me sick.
Raven
The rabid dog in To Kill a Mockingbird haunts me to this day.
brendancalling
“Tonight, let’s talk about the most uncomfortable, disturbing, surprising, shocking…”
Divine eating poodle shit off the street.
NutmegAgain
Sort of related … I wanted to give a copy of Charlie Brown’s Christmas to family members with little ones. But, since it’s all digital now, what to do? I mean I can pay for them to purchase it via whatever streaming service, but I was hoping for something a bit more permanent. Guidance & suggestions most welcome. Oh, and I love that movie!
WaterGirl
@Raven: Was it the symbolism, or the dog being shot (unrelated to the symbolism) that disturbed you?
WaterGirl
@brendancalling: I know all 6 of those words, but I have no idea what they mean all strung together.
Raven
@WaterGirl: The way it bounced down the street.
https://youtu.be/S2L0WQu2fEI?feature=shared
suzanne
The most uncomfortable movie I have ever seen was Million Dollar Baby. I will never watch it again. It was good, but I was miserable the entire time.
I also have declared a personal moratorium on any movie, TV show, etc. in which the death of a pet is a plot point. Nope. I’m out. Protecting my peace.
Josie
In the early part of Once Upon a Time In the West, when the Henry Fonda character and his gang kill the entire family, it is startling and terrible. You keep thinking that someone will be spared, and they are not.
narya
@brendancalling: I walked out at that point.
frosty
@WaterGirl: A scene in one of John Waters’ first movies. Divine is the drag queen actor he featured in his movies.
brendancalling
@WaterGirl: it’s the closing scene of the early John Waters film, “Pink Flamingos.”
Mr. Prosser
The entire film Closer with Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman, Jude Law and Clive Owen. We went in thinking this would be a high class rom-com but it was so much more, delving into the sexuality and relationships of (kind of) everyday human beings.
Scout211
@NutmegAgain: They still sell the Blu-ray.
brendancalling
@narya: Given that it’s the very end of the movie, that makes sense.
KatKapCC
In the film Life Is Beautiful, in which a Jewish father and his young son are sent to a concentration camp, and the father tries to hide the truth of where they are and why from the boy by telling him it’s this big elaborate game and doing little jokes and tricks and such. Obviously since this is about the Holocaust, there’s a lot of disturbing stuff, but because of the father’s antics for the boy’s benefit, there are also some moments of levity and sweetness. But I remember there was one scene where the father was running through the camp and it was foggy and kind of dark, and then at one point suddenly the fog is lifting and he realizes he’s looking directly at a massive pile of corpses. It wasn’t like…overly gory or graphic, but it was a real suckerpunch to the gut. I saw it in the theater with my parents and that was one of the hardest moments in the film, and we all started sobbing, as did many others in the room. For us, knowing that we lost relatives in the Holocaust and realizing that this could have been them…it was very very difficult, but at the same time, I am glad they had moments like that in the movie, to not let people shy away from the real truth of what it was all about.
MagdaInBlack
@Josie: That whole damn movie had a strange, surreal feel to it. The whole thing troubles me still.
Baud
@suzanne:
Come sit by me and watch movies where no animals suffer.
suzanne
I will also note that I went to see Breaking the Waves (Lars von Trier movie) in an arthouse theater, and it was really upsetting and I went into the bathroom and threw up in the toilet.
Mel
@NutmegAgain: Get them one of the DVD collections that are available. That way (assuming they have a DVD player) they can watch it whatever streaming services they have or not.
WTFGhost
@NutmegAgain: Technically, unless the copyright folks have changed things, as long as only one person is watching Charlie Brown Christmas at a time, you’re clear on your rights of fair use.
You can’t stream to video without there being a way to convert the stream to a DVD, but, there may not be a *lawful* way to do it in the US.
Obviously, feedback to the effect of “Why can’t I gift this video?” might make someone realize there are sales being left on the floor.
I also felt intensely uncomfortable that we didn’t see any character or backstory – we don’t even know WHO turned on the LIGHTS when Linus said “Lights ,please.”
(Well ,I know. His blanket. But don’t tell anyone.)
That’s why … uh… a charlie brown christmas had a really disturbing scene for me, so, I’m not violating the open thread.
raven
@suzanne: Strange movie with Procol Harem tunes.
WaterGirl
I have walked out of two movies in my life. Deer Hunter and Deliverance. Just couldn’t watch anymore.
raven
In God’s and Monsters we learn that James Whale’s lover is caught in the wire in the trenches and that the scene of the Frankenstein monster lumbering across the landscape is a homage to his friend.
https://youtu.be/Z34kdsYGxCw?si=Ewi7oqjX9eJui-qt
BellaPea
Well, this is more recent and not a movie, but when the first dragon was killed in Game of Thrones, I literally sat there in front of the TV and sobbed. I was telling my hair stylist about being so disturbed by the death of your basic CGI creation, and she said there was a scene in the second Avatar movie she watched in the theatre when some of the whale-like creatures were killed, she had to get up and leave. Modern times, I guess.
coin operated
Misery. When Kathy Bates ensures James Caan’s character won’t be walking away anymore.
Coma. I will forever ask if I’m going into OR-8.
Snarki, child of Loki
Borat, in a thong.
raven
@WaterGirl: Deer Hunter was fucking awful except the wedding scene. Hint, there is nowhere in the mountains in Pennsylvania that is above the treeline. That’s just the start of the stupid shit in that movie.
frosty
@WaterGirl: I walked out of one movie (that I can recall) and it fits the topic: The Masque of the Red Death with Vincent Price. Too much for 12-year old me.
I have no idea what scene might have made me leave and I don’t care to find out.
NutmegAgain
Oh, and really disturbing scene? Hands down, Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man (1973). The scene where Malcolm McDowell’s character is in the hospital and discovers the man’s head … grafted onto a pig’s body. It’s all pre CGI/AI, obvs, and yet very convincing. Creepy as hell.
linky
Scout211
I was not prepared for the graphic violence in Bonnie and Clyde when it first was released. It was very disturbing to me.
WTFGhost
If you’re looking for candidates for disturbing plays, I can name a few.
The Goat, or, Who Is Sylvia? – a very weird play where a guy gets down with a goat, but is otherwise perfectly normal, and, how the discovery played out. Warning: this is *not* a play for animal lovers, and I don’t think you need any more warning.
“How I Learned To Drive” which includes, alas, how a teen girl got molested. (No idea, but I assume no animals get involved.)
I was traumatized by Harold and Maude. The suicide scenes were too upsetting, most emphatically the last two.
Family Guy took a special award with a diaper cleaning scene, but, I vastly preferred the ridiculously over-the-top take in Mallrats, and I feel that actually was a better scene. There was nothing for the networks to censor – but everyone knew what was happening. Kevin Smith uses your own brain to gross you out – chef’s kiss
(Um. I’m not suggesting that deliberate, hidden, gross, is okay, but, Kevin Smith will go for gross, so, now you’re forewarned, and hence, four armed, or something like that.)
kalakal
The CPR scene in John Carpenter’s The Thing
The Chestburster in Alien
They both shocked me
Liminal Owl
@narya: I heard about the scene and therefore never saw the movie.
The most disturbing scene I can think of was in Leaving Las Vegas. It was a class assignment, but I had read some reviews—none of which mentioned a graphic gang-rape scene.
(Later, I mentioned to my mother having seen the film and disliked it. She said yes, she thought the movie was really boring. And I said, um, the rape scene? And she said, “oh, that,” dismissively.’ Which was also disturbing, albeit typical.)
Spanish Moss
I think the biggest surprise I can recall is “the reveal” in The Crying Game. I didn’t see that coming at all. I won’t say what it is in case someone hasn’t seen it and wants to do so. I thought the move was excellent, and probably a bit ahead of its time, I wonder how it has aged…
mrmoshpotato
LOL!
Can I suggest an entire movie? – because I never want to see Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? ever again.
I’ve never seen another movie that just made me feel bad.
Josie
@MagdaInBlack:
Yes. In retrospect, that scene sort of showed us there would be no mercy.
nancy
Eo broke my heart – that poor donkey!
NutmegAgain
I walked out of Gorillas in the Mist. I really cannot do animal cruelty, and never could. Any movie with animal cruelty is right out. Folks have mentioned Pink Flamingos. I went to see that with friends when it came out. The doggy poop scene was just more hilarity. Gross, but weirdly funny. I was young, and it was the ’70s. Lots of things were gross in the ’70s…
KatKapCC
Hmmm…there’s a Game of Thrones one I want to mention, but I wonder about spoilers. It’s over now and debuted over a decade ago, but…if there might be a person who has never seen it and one day decides to, this would absolutely be a big spoiler. I’ll put it in white text, so if you want to, highlight below to read:
There was that massive moment near the end of the first season that was a big “who read the books and who didn’t” scene, because for the second group, seeing Ned Stark get beheaded was probably one of the most shocking moments of that whole series. For us who read the books, though, we knew it was coming and I remember feeling a bit of evil glee, anticipating the gasps of people who had no idea what was going to happen.
If only the book series were ever going to be finished -_-
Iain
@Mr. Prosser: The play is so much better. Still a bunch of broken people, but it just makes you care about them more.
Josie
@Baud: A friend and I went to the movies a lot at one time. Our rule was that no children or animals could be hurt. You would be surprised at how many movies we had to miss.
ETA: Our one big mistake was Slumdog Millionaire. Were we ever surprised at the opening scene!
narya
@brendancalling: I didn’t stay for the very end so I’ll take your word for that.
karen marie
When the birds come down the chimney in Hitchcock’s The Birds. I saw it on TV in the 1960s – I was maybe eight or nine. I had to leave the room before the end. I don’t think I’ve ever watched it from start to finish since. I do not watch horror movies. I never understood why people do.
mrmoshpotato
@coin operated:
Oh good lord.
oldgold
This scene:
Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, “You talkin’ to me?”
Rose Weiss
The old movie (I think I saw it at an arthouse around 1970) The Night Porter with the British actor Dirk Bogard. The entire movie is disturbing, but the ending is a real shocker. The core of the story is about 2 people who had been in a WW2 camp, one as a prisoner and one as a guard. Excellent movie, but quite disturbing and odd.
Kristine
Two scenes in 10 Cloverfield Lane. The first is when John Goodman’s character shoots and kills the man—I think it was Emmitt/John Gallagher Jr—who’s been living in the shelter with him and Mary Elizabeth Winstead. The shock is how the scene goes in one beat from the three characters talking to Goodman shooting Gallagher. Then a little later, Goodman emerges from the bathroom and a shocked and terrified Winstead sees that he’s shaved and cleaned himself up—he’d been pretty slovenly to that point. He seems to be indicating that he considers Winstead his daughter, but the cleaning up creeped me out because you learn earlier that his wife left him and took their daughter and that adds an additional layer to the possible reasons why. Yes, he’s nuts, but was there also some sort of SA going on?
That movie. I’m glad I saw it, but I never want to see it again. I always thought of Goodman as a comic actor to that point and damn. The whole movie is tense from start to finish, but those two scenes stuck with me.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Another one just popped in:
The scenes in ‘Shoah’ where the director, Lanzmann, has a hidden camera and mic and is interviewing a Polish concentration camp guard who escaped any prosecution after the war. So matter of fact in his recounting not to mention the general sense one gets from watching the film that a lot of people there weren’t sorry to see their Jewish neighbors disappear.
Splitting Image
The shower scene in Psycho was shocking when the movie first came out, but it’s still uncomfortable to watch when you know what is coming. (Hitch could probably fill an entire thread on his own.)
Harry Lime’s speech about the ethics of profiting by watering down medicine in The Third Man is disturbing, and still relevant today.
For thought provoking, I’d offer Rod Serling’s speech at the end of “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” on The Twilight Zone.
AM in NC
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Absolutely. But before that, when Wallace is killed, that was a total shocker to me (and a gut punch) and maybe the first time the show killed off a significant character. And so symbolic of the utter waste the drug explosion and the war on drugs wrought.
narya
I’ve not seen many of the movies in this thread, and I’m glad about that.
Baud
The stillbirth and ocean scenes in Roma.
Another Scott
I haven’t seen lots of movies, and many that I have seen I’ve forgotten too much of the plots.
One surprising thing (to me, at the time) was the Catherine Zeta-Jones character in Traffic. When the change comes, OMG, look out!!
:-)
Best wishes,
Scott.
Suzanne
@Josie: I just can’t with the animals. I remember SuzMom and I went to see I Am Legend with Will Smith. We didn’t really know anything about the movie (mistake) but we had some time to kill and we were near a theater. Within five minutes of the start of the movie, we meet his character’s amazing dog, and I thought to myself, “They’re going to kill the dog in this movie.”
I was not wrong and it made me really upset, and that was when I instituted that rule.
ETA: Uhhhh, spoiler alert, sorry.
ETA2: I don’t remember a single other thing about that movie.
dlwchico
The parking lot scene with Hank in Breaking Bad was very memorable for the amount of anxiety it caused me while watching it.
In 1977 I was 12 years old and we were stationed in Ft Ord.
My dad, having grown up on war movies and westerns took me to see a new war movie that just opened up called Cross of Iron. By Sam Peckinpah, who makes very different war movies than John Ford.
I was way too young for that movie and I suspect a good therapist would find it did some lingering damage to my psyche. I have never rewatched it.
Quaker in a Basement
This goes back a ways: The scene in Patton where the general beats the soldier with PTSD. I couldn’t stand to see George C. Scott in anything for years after that.
Also, all of everything ever by David Lynch.
Rose Weiss
@Spanish Moss: Yes! My honey and I almost walked out of the movie after just 20 minutes or so, because the Irish Troubles angle was not at all interesting to us. But then the story took a totally different turn! It’s definitely a movie which has stuck in my mind even all these years later.
WTFGhost
@mrmoshpotato: one can view the final scene, with a big lie burst, as an opportunity that they might reconcile, according to an actress who played the elder lead. But it was *not* a good play for people who have tended spots for dysfunctional relationships, in my humble opinion
Kristine
@Suzanne: I’ve avoided that movie for the same reason.
mrmoshpotato
@WTFGhost:
I’ll take your word. :)
zhena gogolia
@suzanne: Me too. It’s such a cheap plot device anyway.
zhena gogolia
@narya: I sat through it, but I couldn’t today!
frosty
A good friend of mine and I went to see Eraserhead when it came out, thinking it would be a funny gross-out like John Waters. Uh, no. I’ve stayed as far away as possible from David Lynch ever since.
zhena gogolia
@WaterGirl: I walked out of The Draughtsman’s Contract.
I made it through Deliverance. I couldn’t today.
Omnes Omnibus
The worst public toilet in Scotland scene in Trainspotting. Spud changing the sheets in Trainspotting. The curb stomping scene in American History X.
A scene that always grates. When Ilsa refers to Sam as a boy in Casablanca.
stinger
Nightmare at 20,000 Feet: William Shatner sees a creature running around on the wing of the airplane he’s on. Nobody believes him. Then he looks out again, and the gargoyle face is pressed right up against his window. Gave me nightmares for weeks. The very best of Twilight Zone.
coin operated
Going to add one more…scene in Robocop2 where Cain punishes one of his minions, a corrupt cop.
Former nurse here…medical procedures gone wrong (deliberately or by accident) will always freak me out.
MagdaInBlack
@Omnes Omnibus: Oh, that curb-stomping scene still makes my stomach clench when I think of it.
wenchacha
@NutmegAgain: That one! Yes!
Suzanne
@zhena gogolia: It’s totally cheap, it’s the worst kind of emotional manipulation.
I don’t watch many movies these days.
Almost Retired
I was traumatized by a really stupid movie called “Frogs,” which I probably shouldn’t been allowed to see at age 10. It was a preachy environmental horror movie in which various reptiles and amphibians kill members of a genteel Southern family at their plantation home.
A lady that looked like my then homeroom teacher was drowned by a vengeful snake. And Ray Milland or Raymond Burr (I still get them mixed up) had a heart attack in his wheelchair when hundreds of pissed off frogs were hopping towards him. Etc. I think there may have been death by bugs, too.
At my young age, I took it as sort of a documentary on Southern fauna. This was problematic because we were due to go on a family vacation to New Orleans and Florida the following month.
The stupid movie left me with fear of the South into adulthood – which has stayed with me – but now for different reasons.
Melancholy Jaques
@arrieve:
I loved, loved the Sopranos but I have never been able to rewatch the scene where Silvio kills Adriana. I know they had to do it, but it made me sick.
The hardest for me was when Ralphie beat Tracee to death. I stopped watching the show until friends talked me back into it for the final season. (Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.)
Miss Bianca
Three things come to mind from when I was a wee one:
Suzanne
I will note that, especially when I was in undergrad and I was taking a bunch of graduate-level art history and visual culture classes, I watched a lot of well-respected and artsy-ish movies. Lots of David Lynch, Louis Malle, etc. Eyes Wide Shut came out during that time, so I went with one of the girls in my dormitory to see it. It was not only uncomfortable as hell, it was totally fucken boring. Like, Kubrick made kinky sex the dullest, most tedious thing on earth. I swear the goddamn Titanic sank faster.
kalakal
I think the film that most had me on edge throughout is Don’t Look Now. There’s almost no violence, but it’s genuinely scary, really scary
The final scene of Blackadder goes Fourth – totally heartbreaking
NotMax
To name a few -which floated to the top of the memory pond –
Several such scenes in Forbidden Planet.
Recently watched a British series set in the the early part of t5e 19th century which had people throwing around f-bombs like confetti.
The scene in the dimly lit living room in Play Misty for Me when the housekeeper switches on a table lamp.
The priest approaching the Martian ship in War of the Worlds.
Mr. Morden asking “What do you want” in Babylon 5.
How we found out who Salino was in The Sting.
The first episode in which Hexadecimal appeared in ReBoot.
Learning (this one from a book) that the laundress employed in the fort where Custer’s Seventh Cavalry was assigned was a transvestite who successfully passed himself off as a woman..
Just look at that parking lot
Paths of Glory, the 1957 film by Stanley Kubrick , has a scene where the French military authorities has three of their own soldiers executed so as to set an example to other French soldiers that they need to fight harder. The generals believed it was the soldiers incompetence, not their own, that was why they couldn’t defeat the Germans.
One of the solders was even unconscious due to a head injury from the previous day when they were lined up, blindfolded and shot.
The next scene had the French officers commenting to each other how well the men had died.
Miss Bianca
@Omnes Omnibus:
OMG, yes! I just re-watched it again a few months ago and that *so* leapt out at me. And I found myself thinking, “she’s European, that character wouldn’t be pushing that ‘boy’ crap – that’s totally Hollywood pandering to its American audience.”
Almost Retired
@Miss Bianca: also the line “you do the thinking for both of us.” Still a great movie.
Robert A Savell
So many disturbing movies, so little time… But for some reason, the only thing that springs to mind at the moment is the scene in Private Ryan where the German murders the soldier with a knife while the American watches- too debilitated by fear to act.
Bigredwookie
For me, one of the most disturbing scenes in a movie was the dental scene in Marathon Man. The rest of the movie was “meh”, but that scence gives the shivers everytime I think about it.
Old Dan and Little Ann
I watched Cujo on HBO when I was about 7. That movie haunted my for years. When the mom and son are trapped in the car and Cujo was trying to break in . YIKES!
edited for spelling.
zhena gogolia
I was terrified by an exploitation film called Lady in a Cage. Olivia de Havilland trapped in her home elevator and being terrorized by James Caan & Co.
Suzanne
@Bigredwookie:
Oh damn. This is a movie I refuse to watch, for this very reason. I hate going to the dentist. I would, for real, rather go to the gynecologist.
TBone
Dead Ringers starring Jeremy Irons as both brothers in a pair of twin gynecologists. The entire movie is seriously creepy, but especially when certain new gynecologic surgical instrument(s) appear on scene.
Daoud bin Daoud
@Josie: watching the Henry Fonda character shoot the little blond kid was gut-wrenching.
Comrade Scrutinizer
Hmm. The whale in Pinocchio.
trollhattan
@WaterGirl: @frosty:
This is my Pink Flamingos story. Good buddy and I are at a San Jose video rental place (remember those?) picking movies for the long weekend—extra fun, Wally’s mom is up from LA visiting.
We go through the typical 95:5 uninterested/seen it: maybe? ratio collection, picking things out and on seeing Pink Flamingos I told Wally, “my brother says this is funny, we should check it out.”
And thus, we spent a Saturday afternoon sitting very quietly for a couple hours, watching our first John Waters movie, also our introduction to Divine and the rest of his crew of misfits. In the company of a likewise silent Marvel, Wally’s mom.
And I can always thank my brother.
I don’t know what film/teevee show stupefied me most—first that pops to mind is A Woman Under the Influence by Cassavetes starring Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk. It is relentless and I’ll compare to The Bear episode with Jamie Lee Curtis. Think that was rough to get through? Try the two-and-a-half hour version.
schrodingers_cat
Anurag Kashyap’s Black Friday was traumatizing but riveting. It covered the simultaneous bomb blasts in Mumbai in the early 90s and the investigation. I lived through that and it brought all the memories back. I don’t think the movie was ever released in India. Danny Boyle has ripped of several scenes from this movie in his Slumdog movie almost a decade later
Also the ending of Deepa Mehta’s 1947 Earth. Deeply disturbing.
Trivia Man
Maybe the hive mind can help me name the movie. It had the Harryhausen special effects like in Sinbad (1958), but I watched that recently and it wasn’t in there. An evil magician shrinks himself and is in a doll house. At the appropriate time, he enlarges and busts through the roof of the dollhouse. Terrified my for many months. I was very young, maybe 3 or 4 and we saw it in a theatre. It could have been a re-release of something from the 50’s as my dad liked retro stuff. Definitely Pre-1970 movie.
Any guesses?
Side note – in one of my psych classes I read that morphing is especially terrifying for kids of that age. Something about object permanence or perhaps just a grasp on what is real or solid or reliable.
MattF
Umm… Eraserhead. ‘In heaven, everything is fine.’
getsmartin
Last Exit to Brooklyn was one of the more gawdawful, sensibility-challenging movies I’ve ever endured.
kalakal
Dr Who when I was a kid used to scare the hell out of me on a regular basis.
This was ( mostly) the Jon Pertwee era and there was a paricular set of episodes called The Daemons that had me terrified. I’ve seen it since and the evil spirit is quite literally a white bed sheet on a bit of string.
Joy in FL
I saw Old Yeller when I was in high school, 1974ish. I don’t remember why I went; I think the theater was showing “old movies,” because this would have been about 17 years after the film came out.
Anyway, I loved animals and had a Great Dane who was my heart, and I must have been completely in the world of the movie. The boy and the dog and their relationship was so real to me. And then… I had had no idea what would happen to the dog. And my heart broke for the boy. I don’t think I stopped crying for quite a while. It was devastating to me.
I’m with all the others who won’t knowingly see a movie where an animal is hurt or killed. I don’t watch violence in general, but violence to an animal is a hard NO.
I saw Cabaret when I was in high school or college; I don’t remember for sure. But the scene when they were at the beer garden and people started singing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” gave me a nightmare that night… something like knowing the evil power that was emerging and that it was going to engulf everything and there was nothing that stop it. It was one of the scariest dreams I remember having. I really liked that movie, but I never want to hear that song again.
This has been a fascinating thread. Thanks to everyone who has contributed.
Almost Retired
@Joy in FL: Totally agree with the suddenly relevant resonance of the “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” scene in Cabaret. I feel like the old man in the beer hall shaking his head in disgust. Michael York’s line “Still think you can control them?” is prophetic.
hitchhiker
A Clockwork Orange, the scene with the old people — that’s the only film I’ve ever walked out of. I’m unable to appreciate whatever it is that people admire.
KatKapCC
@Trivia Man: The only thing I can think of is The Incredible Shrinking Man because I recall he was in a dollhouse at some point, but I don’t think the character was a magician…
NotMax
BTW, before I forget, Happy Festivus Eve!
trollhattan
@Trivia Man:
Oh man, I can’t help but mentioning Sinbad reminds me of the drive-in with the family when I was a sprat. Between films they ran a trailer for what I now know was Sinbad and those fucking skeleton soldiers haunted my dreams for ages, afterward. They must have been on the screen for all of five seconds—plenty enough to horrify me.
trollhattan
@NotMax: Thanks. Am all jacked on HGH for the Test of Strength this year.
p.a.
Don’t watch horror but can’t avoid some previews or commercials: when people’s bodies are twisted/corrupted and crawl around crab-like. A similar scene in Carpenter’s The Thing with a version of the alien spiderlike with a human head.
X Files show with the incest, amputee mom kept on a mechanic’s creeper under a bed.
schrodingers_cat
@p.a.: The most disturbing X-files episode ever.
Sure Lurkalot
“Sounds to me like you guys a couple of bookies.” Billy Ray to Randolph and Mortimer Duke
trollhattan
@Suzanne:
My dentist, on my mentioning Steve Martin and Bill Murray in Little Shop of Horrors.
“Man, we finally get past Marathon Man and now this?!?”
Have the very rare hilarious dentist.
kalakal
@Almost Retired: Spitting Image ended their 1987 general election special with a remake of that scene with their puppets of Thatcher and her ministers as the Nazis. It was terrifying. I won’t link to it but it’s easily found
Joy in FL
@Almost Retired: Yes. it was actually haunting to me tonight to remember that song and the effect it had on me.
Way too much like current events.
trollhattan
@kalakal: I was always “Just walk away from the Daleks, they’re slow!” and then they morphed into flying Daleks.
My scheme, it was kaput.
The little zombie girl with the gardening trowel in Night of the Living Dead comes to mind.
coin operated
@Just look at that parking lot:
This puts me in mind of “The Execution of Private Slovik” where they had to load a second volley because the first one didn’t do the job fast enough.
Poe Larity.
Dad was really into 2001 when it came out. Took me twice. I was 6.
Now you know the rest of the story.
Also, too, the ending of the Korean flick, Slayer. But pretty much the ending of every Korean flick.
MagdaInBlack
@p.a.: Gah! @ that X-files episode.
trollhattan
@MagdaInBlack:
Can I get a little love for Flukeman?
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Baud: I once read a book in which the dog died, and I swore I’d never read another book by that writer. And I haven’t!
MagdaInBlack
@trollhattan: I had forgotten that one til I googled it and yes, you get a “Gah!”
But the one mentioned was called “Home” and the scene that got me was when the sheriff and his wife were killed.
mrmoshpotato
@trollhattan: LOL!
Omnes Omnibus
Any Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come scenes from any version of A Christmas Carol.
I am a sucker for that story.
Trivia Man
@KatKapCC: thanks, checked it out and it is too modern. I suspect my memory/ original watching experience does not accurately reflect the movie I am describing. (Shocker! Unreliable eyewitness testimony!) I bet it was Sinbad because it has the right vibe. Princess imprisoned in a dollhouse by evil magician, elaborate and exotic sets and costumes – everything but the suddenly growing and busting through the house.Maybe it was just the helpless feeling of being tiny and imprisoned that gave me the nightmares. But I have had fun looking.
moonbat
@AM in NC:
“Hey, String, where’s Wallace?!” Haunts me to this day.
moonbat
@Quaker in a Basement: “They’re not even sure it’s a baby!” from Eraserhead ALSO haunts me to this day.
RevRick
The invasion of Omaha Beach in Saving Private Ryan and the trapped copter scene in Blackhawk Down.
Those replicated actual battlefield carnage.
Twelve Years a Slave
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@kalakal:
Back when I was one of the few civilians in the masters program at the USMC Command & Staff College, we had to do an end of year project typically using visual elements.
My classmate and close friend, he was a Royal Marine and faught in the Falklands, used that last scene for his project.
Riveting.
moonbat
@Almost Retired: Speaking of Ray Milland, was anyone ever traumatized by “X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes”? I was unfortunate enough as a youngun to see one of the alternate ending versions when, tortured by cosmic visions of Lovecraft’s elder gods or whatever, Milland’s character tears out his own eyes and screams, “I can STILL see!” Brrrrrrr….
prostratedragon
@arrieve:
That scene echoes (deliberately, no doubt) one from The Conformist [Il Conformista] that has one additional element which makes it even more disturbing.
moonbat
@getsmartin:
Amen.
barbequebob
@Almost Retired: Great movie, a classic of the genre, “Abused Nature takes it’s Revenge”. Production is a bit amateurish, but the ominpresent frogs, actually Giant Marine toads, are haunting. I saw it as an adult and a student of amphibians and reptiles, so I was on their side. It was a very old Ray Milland and a young sam Elliot in the lead roles. The family holiday get together it plays out during has a “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , down on the Bayou” feel.
moonbat
@trollhattan: I adore Flukeman. So much so that I have not used a Port’oJohn since the first time I saw him.
Gin & Tonic
Gene Hackman playing the sax at the end of The Conversation.
CliosFanboy
Good shock: the end of The Sting.
Jump Shock: When the ghost first appears in The Changeling. I had my hand on my girlfriend’s leg, and when the ghost appeared i grabbed so hard I left a bruise.
I can’t believe they killed that character shock: The AI in the Blade Runner sequel
Just plain shocking: the end of The Pawnbroker when he forces his hand down on the spike.
Glory b
@Miss Bianca: The Mr Magoo version is the best one & I will entertain no disputing this fact.
Emily68
@raven: Someone told me that the scene was filmed on the North Cascades Highway, aka US 20, in Washington state.
Kristine
@moonbat: ::waves::
I was a kid when I saw it. That scene got to me too.
Saturday cartoons—I think it was the Lone Ranger. A villain called the Puppet or the Puppetmaster. He shows his face at the end of the episode and all I remember is the smooth skull and the sing-song voice. I blocked his face from my memory.
I mean, it was a Saturday morning cartoon—it shouldn’t have been that bad. But it got to me.
prostratedragon
@Rose Weiss:
I think that one is told from an unreliable point of view. Kind of like The Conformist, come to think of it. As if there are things that simply cannot be admitted out loud.
Kirk
Another “the whole movie” entry, Grave of the Fireflies. One of the movies I’m glad I watched but will never watch again if I can help it.
randy khan
@WTFGhost:
That scene in How I Learned to Drive really is disturbing.
For a movie, there are parts of Blue Velvet that were just so weird it was hard to watch them.
In a broader context, the crimes in Criminal Minds got progressively more and more macabre and bizarre, to the point where my wife, who loved the characters, just couldn’t watch the show any more.
opiejeanne
Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. I was disappointed, thought the whole thing was pointless and the characters were empty at the end.
The movie that traumatized me when I was 6 or 7 was Journey to the Center of the Earth, in the theater, the one with Pat Boone. THE GLUTTON KILLED AND ATE THE DUCK!!! DINOSAURS!!! and lava. Many years later it came on tv and before the title came up I knew what it was just from the sunrise shot at the beginning.
opiejeanne
@Kristine: There was a Superman cartoon where two people (Lois and someone else?) were slowly being lowered into … boiling oil? Lava? And the stupid thing was part of a serial so I never got to see how they got out.
prostratedragon
@Suzanne:
Eyes Wide Shut, a Blue Xmas special, along with Brazil and a couple of others that have escaped my memory for the moment.
Kristine
@opiejeanne: I’m assuming they were saved because otherwise it would’ve been way too much for a kids’ show
But some of those cartoons were a little too intense.
prostratedragon
@TBone: You know that one’s based on a true case. They were surgeons at New York Hospital (Cornell) and lived in that neighborhood.
Quaker in a Basement
@moonbat: I once knew a guy who rented Blue Velvet thinking it was a sequel to National Velvet. Settled down to watch with his in-laws. Got as far as Dennis Hopper ‘s first hit off the nitrous tank.
Omnes Omnibus
@Glory b: The Alistair Sim version. I am watching it now. I am correct.
Kristine
@Omnes Omnibus: The Alastair Sim version is the One True Version.
Sister Inspired Revolver of Freedom
The book American Psycho . I haven’t finished it, & I’m not sure I ever will. TW animal abuse. I have never attempted to watch the movie. An excellent recent article in The Mary Sue explains the difficulty beautifully.
Spoiler Alert for something that happens in the Steven Spielberg/Tom Cruise version of War of The Worlds that is shocking & totally pointless. Then again that entire movie is pointless & a waste of time & talent.
Several times in the beloved anime movies by Hayao Miyazaki things get stomach churningly awful. Princess Mononoke is particularly bad for this, but it pops up in other movies of his.
Alien was not a movie I was prepared for. Fortunately, it’s so well made I enjoyed it after all. Many scenes in the Donald Sutherland remake of Invasion of The Body Snatchers are very disturbing, especially the legendary last one.
Sister Inspired Revolver of Freedom
@Kirk: A lot of people say that. It must be the most infamous anime movie ever. I still haven’t watched it & I’m not sure I ever will.
WTFGhost
@Kristine: Well, the Disney Pinnoccio (or hwoever it’s spelled) had a nightmarish scene of a half-child, half-donkey, crying for his mommy.
I think that scared the blazes out of me as a young child, three or four years old, where my concept of “what is real? What *could be* real?” wasn’t too firm, but the memories are vague.
So it’s not just a recent thing, that cartoons might be *intense*. I think what’s changing is what you can be intense about.
Splitting Image
@Miss Bianca:
This one?
This is the 1971 version produced by Chuck Jones and starring Alistair Sim and Michael Hordern reprising their 1951 roles.
If this is the one, take some satisfaction that you got scared by experts.
kalakal
A whole movie one
When the Wind Blows – emotionally devastating, brilliant but unbearably sad
JustRuss
Monster’s Ball. Halle Berry is having a pleasant conversation with Peter Boyle when he drops an incredibly lewd and racist remark. Was not expecting it, such a gut-punch.
VFX Lurker
Kristine
@Splitting Image:
Wow, this is the first I’ve heard of this version. I will definitely need to watch it.
The 1951 version is my traditional Christmas Eve movie. “I must stand on my head! I must stand on my head!”
A Streeter
The scene in “The Godfather” where Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone murders the corrupt policeman and, with the same act, his own soul.
I’m deaf and first saw the film long before there were such things as English subtitles for English-language films (aka “captions”), so the scene came as a surprise which intensified the shock. But seeing the movie again many years later with subtitles, the anticipatory dialogue (and of course knowing it would happen) made that scene, if less of a surprise, even more disturbing.
WTFGhost
@opiejeanne: If it was George Reeve, he’d say “Great Scott!” and fly just fast enough that it’s a photo finish, between the lava and Lois/Jimmy (the usual captives). Um. I hope that’s not a massive spoiler.
@randy khan: Yes, I had a similar reaction to Criminal Minds. It became a “not if I’m stuck in the living room,” show for my wife.
@hitchhiker: IMHO, A Clockwork Orange was a *great* movie, an amazing one, but if you wanted to sit back and eat popcorn and be entertained, it was a *bad* movie for a lot of folks.
@MattF: Eraserhead is one frankincensed up movie. (Blessed Christmas profanity filter.)
Citizen Alan
@WaterGirl: Divine was a drag queen who was the star of several Jon Waters films, one of which (“Pink Flamingos” I think) featured the aforementioned “poodle shit” scene. With that info, the rest should be self-explanatory.
I am aware of the scene in question but have never seen the movie.
NotMax
@Sister Inspired Revolver of Freedom
Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend:. No contest.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@kalakal:
I’ve watched that movie! God, it affected me for a few days after I saw it. Super depressing movie. It was based on a graphic novel, same title, by Raymond Briggs. Briggs based the old couple, Jim and Hilda, on his own parents.
The whole movie is pretty painful to watch because of the Boggs’ naivete on the nature of what nuclear warfare is. They end up making literally every bad decision you could make in a nuclear war scenario. Their “inner core or refuge” shelter is a joke because Jim didn’t understand you have to build it in either an interior room with no windows or a cellar/basement (which they even had!). They’re exposed to lethal levels of radioactive fallout even before they leave their shelter. Then they leave it after only a few days because they didn’t gather enough food and water and start drinking the rainwater from a storm!
It was gut wrenching watching them slowly succumb to radiation poisoning. I’ll never forget the last scene where they climbed into their potato sacks/garbage bags (really makeshift body bags) the government pamphlets told them to have on hand as they were dying and praying.
There’s a debate online in Youtube comments whether it would’ve mattered if they’d used their root cellar, had enough food and water to last out the two weeks for the radiation levels to drop, and never left the cellar during that time. They might’ve survived and avoided acute radiation poisoning, but what kind of world would they have emerged to? The glimpses we get of the outside world look pretty dead and bleak. They lived in the country but I got the sense they lived near a town. Nobody seemed to be coming for them. Their stores of supplies wouldn’t have lasted forever and they’re fairly old. Damn, not a fate I’d wish on my worst enemy.
Great movie with a great soundtrack. David Bowie, Roger Waters. I thought the 2-D characters and the 3-D house interior was a cool style
SFAW
@stinger:
Your comment tracks my experience. The result of Shatner ripping back the curtain had me hiding under the covers, and not looking out my bedroom window, for weeks or maybe even months.
Citizen Alan
@kalakal: Speaking of Doctor Who, I literally cannot watch the David Tennant episode Midnight, which is so tense and claustrophobic that the first time I watched it, I thought I was having heart palpitations. It is possibly as close as the Doctor ever came to dying without actually going into a regeneration, and it was at the hands not of evil monsters but of a terrified mob of humans driven to lynch mob hysteria by the real monster (who never appears in person or give any hint as to its motivations or even says anything other than repeating what other people are saying.
Most thought provoking is another DW episode from this past season: Dot and Bubble. When it starts off, it appears to be a mildly silly allegory about “kids these days” who spend all their time engrossed in social media and oblivious to their surroundings … until the end, when there is a shocking subversion and you realize that the society under attack is actually a viciously racist and classist society. and entire planet of white supremacists who were so awful that their own social media apps became disgusted with them and set out to kill them all.
Citizen Alan
@WTFGhost: I first saw Clockwork Orange as a freshman in college and it messed me up for days.
NotMax
@Kristine
The Sim one is a better movie but the 1935 film with Seymour Hicks (in full-length b&w, not the truncated colorized print) ain’t chopped
liverfiggy pudding; it’s truer to the book,Not to be confused with the barely watchable Hollywood 1938 one with Reginald Owen which TCM insists on running ad nauseum.
currawong
@suzanne: My daughter always checks the website ‘Does the Dog Die?‘ to make sure she’s not going to be triggered by a movie or TV series.
I admit to having to fast-forward in an episode of Chernpbyl when they were shooting the family pets that had been left behind.
m.j.
The Mole People.
As a kid watching a late-night horror flick the thought of simultaneously being captured, dragged, drowning, and suffocating was a little much.
frosty
@WTFGhost: I’ve been waiting for someone to mention Pinocchio. The boys get turned into donkeys and never turn back … WTF???? This is a kid’s movie? That scared the shit out of me. Fuck Disney. Fuck the Rodent. Fuck the theme parks.
Ruckus
@KatKapCC:
to not let people shy away from the real truth of what it was all about.
This is a major concept. Or at least it should be. We make up stories to try to make things not sound as bad as they are – that’s humanity.
Life can be rather shitty some days, for a lot of reasons. Over human history it has often been about people thinking they are the head of the class when actually they have no class whatsoever. And no humanity. A long time ago most every human faced death from any number of reasons. Lack of food or drinkable water or wounds that no one had a clue about fixing. Or even helping. Or greed and the ability to talk (or scare) people into doing their bidding. And of course this still happens to this day, what with greedy bastards who will use most any concept to get wealth and power. We do have a concept of how to control that but then we also have people that want to elect people with zero concept of helping anyone but themselves. (I give you our next president – please take him!) I’m absolutely convinced that this is the reality of humanity – selfishness taken to absurd levels, such as long as everyone else gets hurt more/worse than me – it’s all cool. I don’t understand it but then my IQ takes me far from idiot. Of course my IQ is around 25 but still. I didn’t say which direction it takes me……
Ruckus
@karen marie:
Likely because the horror movie is worse than their lives.
It’s a “Life can always be worse” moment. If you are watching someone being a lion’s snack it’s always nice that it isn’t you…..
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
I’ve watched a lot of the older movies mentioned here and the one thing that I always understood was that movies rarely actually have a lot of truth to them. Even given reality of some/many humans. I believe the point is often to make you squeamish, make you look at the world around you – or hide in your bed with the covers over your head.
Kathleen
@hitchhiker: I closed my eyes for 90% of that movie. It was the most powerful and repulsive movie I have ever seen. Underneath my horror was a visceral feeling that it accurately channeled very dark, ugly currents and accurately presented elements that explain the phenomenon of Trump and the far right movement.
TBone
A lot of scenes from On The Beach with Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner (and, Fred Astaire surprised me in this film) where there is such an erie silence when they take the submarine to search for any signs of life.
rikyrah
There are movies that I am glad that I saw, but will never watch again.
12 Years A Slave
Rosewood
Schindler’s List
Sophie’s Choice
Million Dollar Baby
My Girl
Sister Inspired Revolver of Freedom
@kalakal: You should try reading the book. Don’t!
Sister Inspired Revolver of Freedom
@NotMax: My bad. I have never even heard of that one. Which sounds like a very good thing. Yikes!
Ivan X
You want trouble in your mind, see Possession, with Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill in a deteriorating marriage with a lot of shouting and lot of weirdness, real weirdness, all set in a very depressing early 80’s West Berlin. The whole movie is upsetting as hell, but its two centerpiece moments are not something you’ll forget anytime soon.
Could not make it through even half of Salo, and I understand that’s even before it gets bad. I mean I can’t see any film that’s just an exercise in relentless cruelty, even if it’s got some supposed point to make.
For out and out what the fuck just happened, there’s a moment in Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. that you do not see coming. At all. There’s also a scene of so much tension in the same director’s Sorcerer that you wonder whether you’ll suffocate.
The moment in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead when the zombie husband in the projects regards his still human wife as food, well. And, the gut-munching in the mall. The opening scene of that film, of just total breakdown in a local TV studio, is one of the most jarring and disorienting intros to a movie I can think of.
The end of Brazil.
I was haunted for days after Donnie Darko, but it’s not like it’s one scene, it was the whole vibe.
As for the end of Pink Flamingos — sure, that was gross, but Divine has so much charm!
raven
@Emily68: Yep, totally stupid.
stinger
@JustRuss:
Ah, maybe this is why I can’t stand Peter Boyle, even in comedy roles in popular sitcoms.
JML
The character resolutions from Requiem For a Dream . Just disturbing AF.
artem1s
I felt that way after reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. My take away was that he did a phenomenal job of showing just how ridiculous the Hollywood phantasies are about apocalyptic events. That there are no such things good decisions or way to prepare. The most shocking part of The Road for me was that none of the characters had any idea what actually had happened and in the end it didn’t matter. There was no good resolution to any situation. And any planning for a future event even as little as an hour away was completely pointless. It was a perfect encapsulation of what it means to accept that death is inevitable and the futility of thinking anything any of us do will matter.
I love his prose and many of his books are shocking and hard to read because he’s just so good at it. I’ve never been so depressed by a book in my life. But that’s part of what makes it so terribly wonderful. I have no interest in seeing the movie. I’ve avoided it even more than I usually avoid seeing an adaptation of a book I love (hate). I fear it will be watered down with some disneyfied ending. I think it would do mankind (especially second amendment, burn it all down and Bible literalist assholes) a grave disservice to pretty up that book. Not wishing for an apocalypse should be the first Commandment and actively trying to make one come about is the purest form of evil I can think of.
Miss Bianca
@Omnes Omnibus: Yep. I will have to see if I can find the cartoon version I mentioned upthread – some jackal or other kindly tracked it down for me on Youtube a few years ago, and it was definitely as spooky as I remember.
ETA: Muppet Christmas Carol is the One True Version.
Miss Bianca
@Splitting Image: OMG, *yes*! Bless you, that’s the one!
Miss Bianca
@frosty: Believe it or not, Guillermo del Toro’s version of Pinocchio, which I was expecting to be extremely twisted given his usual subject matter, is both beautifully-animated and much less upsetting than the Disney version (and definitely the original book). Check it out sometime!
Theron Ware
@stinger: I love that episode! Totally agree.
Paul in KY
@brendancalling: 2 Girls, 1 Cup…
Paul in KY
@Snarki, child of Loki: The fat guy he wrestled with!
JohnRM
@Trivia Man: The movie you are looking for is Jack the Giant Killer (1962).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a10V_vKZkB4
It terrified & thrilled the hell out of me when I was 6/7 years old.
First time comment at any site, for any reason. Back to my cave now, to lurk.