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Witness the pinnacle of horror's ability to disturb. These meticulously selected scenes are guaranteed to test your limits, showcasing the genre's most impactful and challenging moments.
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00:00With so many truly grim horror films out there, and with more being made all the time,
00:04there are innumerable scenes designed to leave audiences kind of wanting less.
00:09And while many of them do get off on one-upping the level of blood and violence of their predecessors,
00:15this doesn't mean that every hard-to-watch moment comes from the bloodiest flicks.
00:20In fact, the most horrifying scene often requires a nuanced touch.
00:24And also, just as a content warning, before we begin this one in particular,
00:28with a title like this, this one is going to feature some heavy violence of all kinds and descriptions of
00:34it,
00:34so please, please bear that in mind.
00:36So, just when you thought it was safe to go back in the living room, I'm Josh from WhatCulture.com,
00:41and these are hardest-to-watch horror movie moments.
00:44A Stone's Throw, Speak No Evil.
00:46One of 2022's best horrors, pretty much every second of Speak No Evil is difficult to watch.
00:53Not because of violence either, no, but because this tale of a Danish couple accepting to stay at the home
00:59of a Dutch couple
01:00that they briefly met on holiday, leans heavily on awkward situations that are just unbearable.
01:07As their hosts start to act increasingly strange, aggressive, and imposing,
01:12the horror initially comes from the awkwardness of asking them to tone it down without pissing them off or making
01:18them angry.
01:19Of course, this is all set dressing for a gut-punch final reveal,
01:23where it turns out that this Dutch couple are actually a pair of psychopaths
01:28who go from country to country killing lovers and stealing their children.
01:33And when they finally put this grand plan into motion here, we get the movie's most stomach-churning scene.
01:40Powerless to their fate, the couple are driven out to the middle of nowhere, stripped naked, and forced to stand
01:46still.
01:46Then, the Dutch pair stoned them to death, with the impact of each rock being more brutal than the last.
01:53The powerlessness of the situation combined with the frankness of the violence,
01:58not to mention the understanding that they're not just dying, but that their killers will then steal their child,
02:04just makes this a traumatizing ending for even horror veterans.
02:09A helping hand.
02:10Gerald's Game.
02:11Gerald's Game hasn't quite stood the test of time as an all-time great like so much of Mike Flanagan's
02:16work,
02:17but it is an excellent little chamber piece about a woman who gets handcuffed to a bed and left there,
02:23after her and her husband's frisky night ends with the latter having a heart attack.
02:28After days spent stuck to the bed with her escape attempts failing, things start to get a little bit drastic.
02:33With her wrists cut from struggling to free herself from the cuffs,
02:37it becomes clear that there's no way out of them without inflicting some harm on herself.
02:43And here's where the famous degloving moment comes in,
02:47and honestly, even just writing that down and saying it out loud makes my tummy feel a little bit dodgy.
02:53As you might be able to tell from that creative moniker though,
02:56in order to free herself, she needs to rip her hand through the cuff,
03:00and in doing so, she pulls all the skin off it in the process,
03:04leaving her with a mangled appendage.
03:07There's almost certainly no way we can show this in the video,
03:10but trust me, they pull no punches in showing just how brutal and painful this is.
03:16A great pain.
03:17Evil Dead Rise.
03:18Evil Dead Rise did not disappoint when it came to the violent heritage of the franchise.
03:23Even if it did lean a little bit too heavily on CGI here and there.
03:27Still, there are plenty of watch-behind-your-fingers moments.
03:31But of course, the one we're talking about today is the now infamous cheese grater shot.
03:36Now, despite all the hype, this moment is quite short in the finished flick.
03:39In this scene, a possessed Bridget goes full ham
03:42and attacks Beth with a cheese grater as she tries to crawl away,
03:46scraping the skin off of her back leg with it.
03:50It's quick, it's nasty, and leaves everyone thinking,
03:54God, I'd hate it if that happened to me.
03:56Face off, Dagon.
03:57We've had a scene of de-gloving on this list so far,
04:00but you know what's worse than that?
04:02Well, de-facing.
04:04Alright, admittedly, it's not quite as catchy or as memorable,
04:07but the most insane scene in the otherwise rather pulpy and B-movie-inspired lovecraftian horror Dagon
04:14comes towards the end, where our heroes are caught by the cult that worships the titular deity.
04:20Protagonist Paul and reluctant helper Ezekiel find themselves at the mercy of the villains,
04:25who have a painful fate for both of them prepared should they refuse to give themselves to the cult.
04:31Ezekiel is the first on the chopping block,
04:33and both Paul and the audience have to watch as the cult start the process of flaying him alive,
04:40starting by cutting and peeling the skin directly off the guy's face.
04:45While Dagon does have an issue with some dodgy effects and a kind of wonky tone,
04:49this is a scene where the filmmakers absolutely commit to the bit,
04:53doubling down on visceral violence and a truly harrowing tone.
04:58No place like home, Eden Lake.
04:59The British horror cult classic sees a couple terrorised by violent youths while on an idyllic holiday at a lake.
05:07With the man tortured and killed and the woman, Jenny, chased through the woods and barely making it out alive,
05:13it initially looks like this bleak, bleak movie might actually get a happy ending.
05:18Oh, how naive we were to believe that,
05:21because after stealing a car from one of the young boys' brothers, it seems as though Jenny has escaped.
05:27In her delirium, she ends up crashing the car, sure, but fortunately, it's in a nearby town,
05:33where she's taken in by a group of adults having a party.
05:36Only, it turns out that she's actually crashed into the house of one of the boys who was trying to
05:42kill her,
05:43and once their parents find out what's happened, they decide to protect their own and get rid of the evidence.
05:49It's the final flashback, The Tortured.
05:52In The Tortured, a distraught and heartbroken couple hatch a twisted plan to exact vengeance upon a serial killer called
05:59John Kozlowski.
06:00It's personal for the couple as well, as Kozlowski took their son away,
06:05so in turn they hatch a plan to catch and torture him to give him a taste of his own
06:10medicine.
06:10And as the title and premise suggest, The Tortured is torture porn at its very worst.
06:16And while there are many truly shocking and hard-to-watch scenes throughout,
06:19the hardest of all is actually one where no acts of violence are committed.
06:24See, towards the end of the film, after the couple have done everything within their power to torment an apparently
06:29amnesiac killer,
06:31a flashback then reveals that there were actually two men being transported in the prison van,
06:36the day that Kozlowski was taken after it crashed.
06:39And it's actually the other man, some guy called Patrick, who was serving time for tax evasion,
06:44who this couple actually kidnapped and as such have been torturing for most of the movie,
06:50and were left knowing that they didn't even torture the right culprit.
06:55Happy birthday, men.
06:56Writer-director Alex Garland put another notch in the folk horror belt with the divisive men,
07:01giving the city dwellers among us a hundred reasons to stay out of the countryside.
07:06In this flick, we follow hero Harper as she heads to the countryside to try and process the death of
07:11her abusive husband James.
07:13However, it seems that all of the villagers' inhabitants are rather intimidating, disgusting, and quite unfriendly men,
07:20or to be more precise, man, as they're all played by actor Rory Kinnear.
07:25At the film's conclusion, the boundaries between superstition and reality break down,
07:29as the men all lead a surreal and physics-defying assault on the house where Harper is staying.
07:35This ends in one of the queasiest sequences put to film in recent memory,
07:40as the men give birth to each other in sequence,
07:43with their bodies contorting and self-mutilating as their bellies swell,
07:47and each one crawls out of the bloodied orifices of the last,
07:51concluding in the birthing of Harper's dead husband James.
07:55It goes on forever and leaves a nothing to the imagination,
07:59to the point where you might have forgot what film you were even watching in the first place.
08:04The Eye, The Sadness.
08:05Director Rob Jabazer may not be a big name on the horror circuit,
08:09but his Taiwanese body horror blood fest, The Sadness,
08:11is shot for shot one of the most disturbing projects put to film in recent years.
08:16With a population succumbing to a viral pandemic that turns them into killers,
08:21who thrive on receiving and distributing pain,
08:25there are few places The Sadness won't go to torture its cast.
08:29But we have to pick just one,
08:31and that singular scene arises from the sadistic whims
08:34of the closest thing the film has to a consistent antagonist, the businessman.
08:39Having taken young Molly's eye out with an umbrella already,
08:43this guy pursues her to a hospital and, well,
08:46I literally can't even say what happens to Molly in this scene.
08:50The movie itself thankfully doesn't show what's happening in this scene either,
08:55only the reactions to it.
08:56But when people call The Sadness exploitative and pushing too hard on its sexual violence,
09:02well, you can't really argue after watching this scene in particular.
09:06A permanent family vacation, Midsommar.
09:08Few films are so bold as to go full tilt in their opening scene,
09:12and yet that's precisely what Ari Asta does with Midsommar.
09:16Though this flick doesn't go quite as hard on the horror as Asta's hereditary,
09:20you don't know that from the beginning,
09:22which depicts the murder and suicide of lead Danny's parents and sister respectively.
09:27Initially, we don't know what's happening in the scene,
09:30as the camera slowly moves around a darkened house with a score building
09:35to elicit a sense of dread.
09:37And then we see them,
09:39the pipes connected to a running car and the three dead,
09:43particularly Danny's sister's haunted lifeless face
09:46and the tube duct taped to her mouth.
09:49It's an absolute jolt,
09:50but the camera lingers so you're forced to reckon with the horror on display.
09:54It's supposed to stay with you throughout the rest of the movie
09:57as a reminder of the trauma that Danny endured,
10:00and oh boy,
10:01does it accomplish just that.