What moments from TV shows most make shivers go down your spine when you even think about them–much less watch them?
Here’s mine:
I’ve been watching Xena: Warrior Princess reruns on Bravo in the mornings before I head out. Yesterday’s episode was “The Abyss,” one of the few sixth season episodes I bothered watching the first run. The plot features Xena and Gabrielle on the run from a tribe of cannibals. Gabrielle’s not on her A-game in this episode, what with being filled with angst over accidentally killing an innocent in the previous episode, and consequently gets first injured, then captured by the cannibals.
Anywhistle, the marvelously creepy sequence is this:
In their camp, the captives treat Gabrielle’s wound, apparently preferring their dinner to be as healthy as possible beforehand. This in itself is quite distressing to watch, as it’s played much like a gang rape: while four of the cannibals hold her down, a fifth covers her mouth with his hand while healing the wound.
But that’s not the creepiest bit. The creepiest bit isn’t even when they drag Gabby out to dinner while her friend Virgil, earlier terrified of his fate, begins frantically begging them to take him and spare her.
No, the creepiest bit comes just after. The cannibals force Gabrielle onto a spit and bind her to it, and she sees one of them eat a hunk of flesh from last night’s special. Then–while she’s not just alive, but still conscious, half a dozen of them start smearing some orange glop all over here–basting her. Naturally she begins to freak out and scream for Xena, but her screams are silenced when they stuff a breathing tube into her mouth, making it entirely clear that they intend to cook her alive.
Naturally Xena arrives a moment later and kills all the cannibals. But it’s still wonderfully creepy.
The sudden knife attack on Carter and Lucy Knight at the end of an episode of ER– I can’t remember the episode title. Very unsettling.
Also, I can’t really think of a specific example, but it seems to me that the more recent episodes of Law & Order often feature crimes to hideous and cruel that it’s difficult to even watch.
Nitpick: I don’t think we actually see the attack on Lucy, only on John. He enters the suture room, looking for Lucy, and gets stabbed from behind. When he collapses he sees her gasping in pain behind him
I’ve mentioned this one in similarly themed threads, but early in the second season of Twin Peaks, Laura Palmer’s cousin Maddie watches as BOB rises with a horribly leering grin from behind the Palmer’s couch, then slowly but deliberately steps over the couch, and then (as I may disremember) over a coffee table, and advances toward Maddie.
In a show with a lot of disturbing imagery, that scene sticks with me.
Well yeah, I didn’t mean to imply that the viewer witnesses both attacks. That’s what makes it so horrifying: you’ve barely processed what just happened to Carter, then the Lucy reveal really knocks you reeling.
As someone mentioned above, the L&O shows are chock full of 'em, 'specially SVU. One that sticks out, though, is the episode of the original series in which an attractive fortysomething blond woman confesses, on the witness stand, to having had an ongoing sexual affair with her son.
Buffy: The first appearance of The Gentlemen in Hush gives me the heebie jeebies every time.
The New Twilight Zone episode “Gramma” was one of the hands down creepiest things I’ve ever seen on TV–still have no idea how they got away with it. I’ve only seen it the once, have no idea if it holds up but it gave me the willies at the time.
“Criminal Minds” where Hotch and Reid are being held hostage, along with some other people, by a spree killer in a hospital store room. The killer has shot out the light and has everyone sitting on the floor. Hotch starts bonding with the killer, telling him how he hates working with incompetants, including this guy (Reid) who couldn’t pass his shooting test after three years on the force, and how he wants to kill the snot out of Reid for being so incompetant. The killer says he can, and Hootch starts kicking and screaming at Reid about how he couldn’t even pass a stupid gun test after three years. It was creepy as hell, the punchline being that
Reid had only been with the force for one year. The “three” Hotch was referring to was his third gun, a little pistol he wears on his ankel. Reid took the little gun and shot the killer
The last execution scene in “The Man Who Was Death” from the *Tales from the Crypt * series. The irony is very heavy-handed and laid on with trowel, and certainly the ending doesn’t come as any surprise. But the slow inevitability of it all, combined with that creepy, deranged, half-circus half-Cajun music by Ry Cooder on the soundtrack, gives me wonderful goose-bumps every time I see it. William Sadler does a great job in the title role as a psychopath you kind of like but who still really creeps you out.
Julia’s mother was on the flight, and is identified as one of the people who didn’t make it. Julia spends some time talking to the corpse about old times. It starts out positive, but in the end Julia basically admits that she never really loved her mother at all, and she’s glad to be rid of her Mid-way through the talk, the “corpse” starts gasping for breath. Julia quickly snatches the pillow out from under her mother’s head, and uses it to suffocate her. She then goes home, and as she goes inside, her mother gets up from the couch and tells her that she decided not to take the flight after all.
Was the whole sequence with the not-quite-dead body a dream sequence, or did Julia murder a total stranger? If the latter, did they ever follow up on it?