Disturbing Movie Scenes That Went Too Far
We want movies to move us. We want them to soothe us, and carry us through bad times; we want them to make us laugh, make us feel connected to others, and show us beauty and splendor we've never seen before. And, sometimes, we want movies to truly, deeply disturb us.
Never mind why; maybe we're numb and want to be rattled into feeling, maybe we're feeling too much and want to channel it all somewhere, or maybe we just want to believe the world is still capable of bowling us over despite of our defenses. Whatever the case, we all sometimes take to a movie specifically because of one particular moment in it that makes us feel horrible.
Conversely, we sometimes don't want movies to disturb us, and yet they do — when we're least expecting them to, or when we're making an earnest effort to meet them halfway, they might suddenly foist horrors upon us, intentional or not, that we never signed up for. And those horrors might open up new questions, upsetting in their own way, about whether the disturbance was productive or useful or morally sanctionable.
To account for that whole breadth of experience, this list compiles 15 movie moments that "went too far," whether positively or negatively. Some are brilliant, revelatory moments of aggression against viewer complacency; some are horror scenes that dare to ask what we even want out of horror; some are offensive miscalculations; some are existential cries of despair. Reader discretion is advised.
Revenge of the Nerds - Comedic sexual assault scene
The popular 80s American comedy "Revenge of the Nerds," directed by Jeff Kanew, depicts — and has always depicted — sexual assault as a comedic moment of heroic, unproblematic sexual conquest. That was true in 1984, when the film debuted, and it is still true now. It would not be accurate to say that the film's sexual politics were "okay" at the time, only to have been soiled in retrospect. The more accurate assessment would be that the voices who might have called out the film's blatant sexual assault apologism did not have as much space in mainstream media then as they do today.
In fact, what makes this sexual assault scene so upsetting, even in the broader context of such a misogynistic, racist, mean-spirited film, is precisely the fact that it's so utterly glossed over. Watching protagonist Lewis Skolnick (Robert Carradine) trick cheerleader Betty Childs (Julie Montgomery) into having sex with him by disguising himself as her boyfriend Stan (Ted McGinley), and then watching Betty beam in delight at Lewis' sexual prowess and reward him by becoming his girlfriend at the end of the movie, feels like being gaslit by an entire film production, nay, by an entire era of patriarchal culture. Everything about it horrifies, and yet, in this hugely popular film, it's all passed off as good, harmless fun. Many other films feature much heavier and more violent sexual assault scenes, but few couch those scenes in such cynical indifference.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood - Massacre of the cult teens
The climax of "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" sees heroic macho stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) and his dog viciously massacre two girls from the Charles Manson cult (played by Mikey Madison and Madisen Beaty). It's a buff middle-aged man visiting crude, noisy, humiliating violence upon teenage girls — while their male acolyte, played by Austin Butler, gets a quick, non-sensational kill. But even leaving that aside, the scene fails to provide the trademark Tarantino catharsis of "Inglourious Basterds" and "Django Unchained," instead landing on nausea, because there's nothing cathartic about it within the film.
Yes, in real life, a group of Manson cultists murdered a pregnant Sharon Tate with similarly shocking cruelty. Yet, in this film, not only has nothing of the sort happened yet — the teens have even pivoted to targeting Booth — but the cult is entirely divested of the real-life context that made it so evil; no mention is made of their white supremacism, for instance. Instead, they're depicted as a sinister matriarchal force, antifascist-posturing countercultural shrews with too much power and too many ideas, Manson himself largely receding into the background. The best Tarantino climaxes are imbued with a sense of retributive glee, of lopsided — societal — brutality finally flipped on its head. By contrast, this film exploits the memory of a horrible tragedy to justify making a spectacle of an old-fashioned American man putting girls in their place.
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer - Home invasion
Extended sequences depicting the slaughter of innocent, impotent victims are a dime a dozen in horror; to some extent, the entirety of the slasher genre seems predicated on the terror of defenselessness against murder. But even when a whole film revolves around watching a psycho killer slay the members of a group, there is usually a certain implied empathy to the proceedings. By and large, slasher films take the victims' perspective, with the killer as a force encroaching from the outside in and disturbing the characters' established normality.
Alas, that is not the case with "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer," the notoriously blunt indie horror film that first gave the world Michael Rooker. Following Henry (Rooker) as he embarks on a random killing spree in Chicago alongside his old prison friend Otis (Tom Towles), the film became notable for the joylessness and matter-of-factness with which it depicted the duo's various acts of inhumanity, culminating in the infamous scene in which Henry and Otis watch a video they recorded of themselves breaking into a family home and cruelly murdering everyone in it. The horrifying, arbitrary end to the family's time on Earth is depicted as little more than a diversion for the film's protagonists, seen by us strictly from their POV, only after it has been already carried out and cannot be changed. The sheer futility of it is enough to leave even the most inveterate gorehound feeling spent.
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom - Renata's humiliation
There remains little controversy among film academics as to the artistic worth of Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom" — the granddaddy of all extreme horror exercises. A potent condemnation of fascism and its sociopathic logic, the film utilizes intense violence and scatology to comment upon the absurdity of a system in which humans are rigorously organized according to the futile whims of the powerful.
To speak of any scenes in "Salò" crossing moral lines through the lens of what is being depicted would, therefore, be moot. The whole point is to show how low fascists can stoop. But several moments in "Salò" do elicit a different, more alarming kind of revulsion due to how they depict what they depict. Because Pasolini cast young, non-professional teen actors as the film's helpless torture victims, what we as viewers see when the four libertines terrorize them are real teenagers exposed to a non-negligible measure of horror. Sometimes, Pasolini employs editorial discretion, such that only the adult actors partake in the "raw" violent and sexual content. But then there are scenes like Renata's (Renata Moar) extended humiliation, in which she's verbally abused, brutally undressed, and forced to eat human feces as Pasolini lingers on a lengthy take of her kneeling and crying. The poop wasn't real, of course — but the question of how real the actress' distress is does hover uncomfortably.
The Piano Teacher - Walter attacks Erika
It's disturbing enough to watch Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert), who has spent all of "The Piano Teacher" longing for a bottomless, all-consuming, impossible submissive sadomasochistic relationship with student Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel), suddenly get attacked, beaten and sexually assaulted by Walter in her home. But the real root of Erika's despair at the end of the most upsetting Michael Haneke film (talk about a weighty title) is not so much what has happened to her as what hasn't.
Specifically, at the film's end, Erika has starred down the barrel of the deep self-destructive fantasies that a lifetime of psychological abuse has stirred in her — only to discover that the banal material reality of those fantasies has not brought her any solace, satisfaction, or catharsis. Of course, although Walter observed the instructions Erika gave him earlier, what she experienced with him was non-consensual, and done with the deliberate intent of punishing her for her desires — it's what makes the scene in question a sexual assault scene instead of an S&M sex scene. But for any abuse and/or sexual assault survivor who watches the film and identifies with Erika's pursuit of relinquished control and unlimited pain as coping mechanisms, the feeling of emptiness she's left with may ring hauntingly familiar. On some deep, unspeakable level, Erika got what she thought she wanted — but it didn't save her. Here is a film about journeying to the bottom of the abyss, and finding only more darkness.
In the Realm of the Senses - Climactic castration
Decades ago, before the internet made pornography as unoriginal, accessible, and profit-optimized as soda pop, the line between pornographic film and erotic art was a lot less defined. The great erotic films of the time took advantage of audiences' more curious, less consumer-minded outlook on cinematic sex to tell stories in which arousal was as much provided as it was questioned and subverted. Among the greatest examples of that: Nagisa Oshima's 1976 masterpiece "In the Realm of the Senses."
Ever the pot-stirrer, Oshima designed the film as an investigation into the repression of modern society and the ways in which it manifested through lust. Several scenes in "In the Realm of the Senses" became famous for the sheer transgression to which Sada Abe (Eiko Matsuda) and Kichizo Ishida (Tatsuya Fuji) surrender themselves in the pursuit of primal pleasure and adrenaline. But the one that really made the movie's name is — naturally — the climax. Once the entire outside world has fallen out of view and all Sada and Kichizo care about is each other's bodies, they arrive at the natural conclusion of their experimentation: Sada strangles Kichizo to death, and cuts off his penis so that they can be "together forever." In that moment, the film pushes beyond the safety of consumable titillation; Sada and Kichizo's sex becomes singularly disturbing because it has decisively become just sex, pleasurable only to them, untethered to any sort of performance for the viewer.
mother! - The crowd viciously beats Mother
As it turns out, there are things in this world even more upsetting than a baby getting eaten. Beyond any metaphorical readings, what makes Darren Aronofsky's "mother!" inarguably effective as a piece of shock cinema is that he rendered it entirely through the perspective of the titular Jennifer Lawrence-played character. For the most part, that single-mindedness is "mother!'"s greatest strength, eliciting inescapable empathy for Mother's plight regardless of whether one finds said plight to be tasteful or interesting in design. It also makes the film's strongest argument against accusations of fetishization of female suffering — no matter how dire things get, we're always with Mother, taking in the world's horror alongside her, instead of watching from afar as she endures it. But when Mother is thrown to the ground, beaten, and verbally abused during the climax, it suddenly gets much harder to defend the film's gender politics.
Unlike the preceding 110 minutes, which got at genuine points about patriarchal society by methodically cataloging various iterations of disempowerment, gaslighting, and dehumanization, that scene makes no real point. Not only that, but, if we previously felt the violence committed against Mother because it was psychological and moral in nature, the escalation to physical violence renders the first-person POV moot as an empathetic device, because we don't actually feel the pain Mother feels. Her pain, in that moment, becomes completely abstract, a kitschy sensory simulacrum of oppression — and in that way, yes, blithely consumable.
The Plague Dogs - Opening
As Martin Rosen's follow-up to "Watership Down," 1982's "The Plague Dogs" had great expectations to live up to when it came to pushing the limits of what was usually seen in American animation. And, to be sure, the film's very first sequence showed that it meant business. Centered around Snitter (John Hurt) and Rowf (Christopher Benjamin), two dogs who flee an animal research laboratory and attempt to survive while being hunted, the film opens with Rowf's grisly everyday life in the laboratory, which involves getting repeatedly drowned in a claustrophobic metal tank. Rowf and Snitter eventually escape their cages and proceed to sniff their way through the facility in search of a way out, passing by apes, rabbits, and mice who are essentially being tortured, before finally finding an exit... to an incinerator, which they just barely manage to escape.
Much like "Watership Down," "The Plague Dogs" is conscious of the fact that, for most Western viewers, animated talking animals are primarily a source of comfort. The images of suffering and cruelty that the film shows us in its very first minutes feel almost like they shouldn't be allowed, like they're breaking some kind of rule — cute cartoon dogs shouldn't be put through this! In Rosen's artistic philosophy, liberating the potential of animation implies awakening fully to the horror it can engender. Even if that horror is just one step in the story, the havoc it wreaks upon our understanding of the medium lingers.
Pink Flamingos - Chicken scene
When entering the world of "Pink Flamingos," one must leave some things at the door. The ultimate act of provocation by John Waters, American cinema's grand duke of queer subversion, this film will almost invariably succeed in shocking and outraging anyone prone to being shocked and outraged by something like it. Hysterical violence, 80-decibel screaming matches, incestuous fellatio, unsimulated consumption of feces, you name it — there's nary an act of depravity that this film doesn't depict with gusto. And don't you dare say a word about "morality" while you're here; to even evoke the concept would make you the butt of the joke.
Well, for the most part, at least. Even fans of "Pink Flamingos" — the kooky film buffs who take to its anarchic debauchery as the ultimate middle finger to greedy, plastic, heteronormative America — concede that one scene crosses over uncomfortably from tasteless to outright objectionable. And no, it's not Divine eating dog poop, as that hurt no one. The scene that drives a moral wedge through its gleeful amorality involves Crackers (Danny Mills) crushing a live chicken between himself and Cookie (Cookie Mueller). Whatever challenges the film wanted to pose to mainstream "good taste" with its images, after all, that poor chicken had nothing to do with it, and watching it bleed and writhe live on camera for our entertainment proves pretty difficult to take in stride.
Eyes Without a Face - Face removal
What makes gore truly shocking? The originality? The ugliness of the wounds? The volume of blood? That question inevitably comes to mind when looking at the history of cinematic gore — specifically, the way that it escalated in the 1950s, and reached a decisive turning point in 1960's "Eyes Without a Face."
In a way, this Georges Franju horror classic enjoyed an immediate advantage as far as envelope-pushing gore was concerned. After all, the imagery of faces skinned and left uncovered — evocative, as it is, of identity and essential personhood destroyed — is inherently taboo. But that's not the only reason "Eyes Without a Face" remains such a major milestone for disturbing film content. Other horror films before it ventured into new depths of graphic violence; what makes this film's gore so revolting is the fact that, possibly for the first time, the extreme violence was depicted without the distancing tools usually associated with gory horror.
When we finally see Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) successfully remove the face of a victim, Edna Grüber (Juliette Mayniel), the scene is unforgettably disturbing because of its sheer clinical remove. Audiences at the time were getting used to over-the-top, Grand Guignol-esque gore in film, but they still couldn't quite take a scene that made them feel as though they were actually witnessing a facial removal surgery — no overemphasis, no sensationalism, just the violence speaking for itself. Six decades later, watching that scene remains an endurance test.
Fat Girl - Ending
Similarly to "Salò," there is an element of real-life discomfort to the second-to-last scene of Catherine Breillat's "Fat Girl" — an unbearably direct depiction of 12-year-old Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux) being pinned to the ground and sexually assaulted by an unknown man (Albert Goldberg) in the woods. Reboux was 13 (via Evening Standard) when the film was made, and, although the scene avoids further discomfort for the actors by only depicting Anaïs from the waist above, it's still so scary and realistic that it's difficult to imagine any way it could have been shot without overburdening Reboux physically and emotionally. And, much like in "Salò," it feels somewhat like cheating — of course, seeing a real child in that situation will be harrowing, even with the situation simulated.
What makes it worse, in this case, is that "Fat Girl" is otherwise an all-time great film about sexual violence. It's a discomfitingly perceptive story about how the patriarchy, sexual assault culture, and unattended psychological distress can chip away at a young person's development to the point of leaving them vulnerable to abuse so profound not even they themselves can comprehend it; for many survivors around the world, it has even been therapeutic in some manner. And it's very difficult to square all that with the fact that 13-year-old Reboux was put through shooting that scene — especially when you learn that she never made another film after 2001.
Under the Skin - Beach sequence
"Under the Skin" features uniquely unsettling scenes of humans getting lured into a terrifying alien contraption, sapped of their insides like fruit in a juicer, and turned into empty, wrinkly bags of skin. So why is it that, whenever people talk about this film, the scene that always inspires hushed dread is the completely mundane one set on a vacant Scottish beach?
That question provides an inroad into the eternal mystery of what makes horror movies effective. The infamous "beach scene" in the Jonathan Glazer arthouse alien film, in which the Female (Scarlett Johansson) watches as a swimmer fails to rescue a drowning couple from the raging ocean, kills said swimmer with a rock to the head, and leaves the couple's baby sitting helplessly on the rocks, is not scary in a traditional horror-movie sense. There's no monster or killer or elaborate manifestation of violence; we just bear witness to an everyday tragedy and its outcome.
That, in fact, is the kicker. Traditional horror movie scenes mean something, even if that something is just an opportunity to revel in well-produced gore; the drownings and the baby's demise are meaningless. Despite their deep human terror, Glazer shoots them from an enormous, quiet distance, like we're just seeing hapless strangers from afar. And, because the scenes are meaningless, they're also not fun — only all-too-real reminders of something that could happen to any of us. Do not watch this film with your friends on horror movie night.
L'eclisse - Tribal dance
If most of Michelangelo Antonioni's "L'eclisse" is "hard to watch" in the sense of being slow, uneventful, and centered around vapid characters, one scene around the halfway mark is genuinely hard to watch for its content. That would be, of course, the scene in which Vittoria (Monica Vitti) visits Marta's (Mirella Ricciardi) apartment and, spurred by her exoticist admiration of Africa, performs a would-be "tribal dance" in full blackface — much to the anger of Marta, a literal colonizer with an estate in Kenya, who abhors Africans and thinks Vittoria is idealizing them.
The point of the scene, as ever with Antonioni, is that no one is right — both Vittoria and Marta are racist Europeans leading culturally futile, amoral existences, utterly indifferent to the worldwide suffering that props up their lifestyle. The horror of blackface is very much knowingly resorted to: Antonioni flits between shooting Vitti like a clown and a monster, her makeup and movements always shocking in their absurd cruelty towards the people she's supposedly honoring. But still, it's blackface, and there's an argument to be made that employing it even in a critical manner is still fundamentally racist, or at least racially insensitive, especially when it's all in the name of, well, another narrative about white European ennui with zero non-white characters in it. Unlike all the blackface scenes in classic films that have "aged poorly," this one was born upsetting — and it's hard to say if that makes it better or worse.
Dogtooth - Forced incest
Every Yorgos Lanthimos film so far has angled for provocation and shock in some form. Even a more mainstream and accessible effort like "The Favourite" still featured Emma Stone trying to crush a bunny with her shoe. But no Lanthimos flick beats the carnival of grotesquerie in his 2009 international breakthrough, "Dogtooth."
With its story of two parents raising their children in a fenced-in home, convincing them of the outside world's dangers and imparting a series of increasingly strange mores and beliefs onto them, the film managed to sicken audiences both Greek and international. How could such a film, disturbing in virtually every moment, still manage to feature a scene upsetting enough to upstage everything else in it? The answer: incest.
In a way, that word alone explains the chill that will run down most viewers' spines while watching the parents (Christos Stergioglou and Michelle Valley) force their son (Christos Passalis) to fondle his two sisters (Angeliki Papoulia and Mary Tsoni) with eyes closed, and then choose one as his sexual partner. But it's not just the incest. Like most extreme films, "Dogtooth" eventually settles into an established internal normality, one which even the most horrified viewer gets begrudgingly used to. But little in the parents' bizarre tyranny prepares us for a scene of forced brother-sister incest. That moment arrives like a final, decisive assault on viewer sensibilities. Sometimes, to strike a crushing blow, you gotta wait for them to let their guard down.
Le Bonheur - Ending
Agnès Varda's "Le Bonheur" ("Happiness") delivers the most horrifying ending in film history, and it comes completely out of left field. Having spent the whole movie maintaining a breezy affair with feisty post office worker Émilie (Marie-France Boyer), Francois (Jean-Claude Drouot) finally confesses to his dutiful wife Therese (Claire Drouot) that he's in love with two women. Sure enough, the endlessly sweet Therese understands, accepts, and cuddles with Francois for a riverside nap. When Francois wakes up, Therese has seemingly committed suicide by jumping into the river.
The aftermath of that moment arguably cements Varda as the precursor to all the taboo-breaking shocks of the New French Extremity. At first, Francois mourns Therese, and the film takes on a momentary gloomy tone. But, soon enough, he gets back in touch with Émilie and rekindles their romance. They marry, Francois' kids accept Émilie as their new mother, and "Le Bonheur" goes right back to its original sunny groove, the characters and the autumn leaves moving on as if Therese never existed. Whatever unfathomable pain and sense of betrayal drove Therese to suicide, the world forgets it. Death doesn't etch her pain into permanence; it just makes it easier for Francois to brush that pain away. Once she's no longer there herself to feel her own pain, it ceases to matter to anyone that she ever felt it. Don't be fooled by the romance and bright colors: "Le Bonheur" is a horror movie.
If you or anyone you know has been a victim of sexual assault, help is available. Visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).