I think this description has just traumatized me and I’ve never even seen the ad… 
I can’t stand that PSA. Is it the one where they play Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel” while showing the dogs and cats? One striped gray kitten looks like one of our cats when she was little. I have to change the channel as soon as it starts or my daughter will start crying.
The things that upset me when I see them on TV or in a movie are people, particularly children, being abused, bullied or even socially humiliated on purpose. I guess I’m oversensitive to depictions of bullying because I was bullied and ridiculed by my peers as a child and teen. I even get mildly upset when seeing cartoons in which the school’s “queen bee” makes fun of a character, because it happened to me.
I saw ‘Watership Down’ (the animated movie based off the book) when I was about 10, and it really upset me at the time.
Specifically, one scene where they were showing the rabbits cowering and shivering in terror in their rabbit holes, if I’m remembering correctly. I can’t really put my finger on it, and I’m not all that fond of rabbits, but it disturbed me, back then.
I am somewhat claustrophobic.
Clint Eastwood got to me twice.
In Absolute Power, the scene with Eastwood helplessly watching from that little room off the closet as the President, played by Gene Hackman, comitted murder, left me feeling like I was trapped under a wheel of a heavy vehicle. I really empathized with the terror in Eastwood’s eyes.
InMystic River, it was the scene where Sean Penn and his buddies crowded Tim Robbins into that booth in the sleazy bar just prior to taking him outside and executing him, that put me in a cold, hyperventilating sweat.
There’s a scene in It’s a Wonderful Life, when the pharmacist hits young George Bailey on the side of the head and starts his bad ear bleeding. After the pharmacist realizes that George has stopped him from putting the poison in the pills he goes to hug him, then George cringes and begs the pharmacist not to hit his sore ear again…yikes, but I can’t watch that.
Yup, that’s the one. I’ve never seen the full commercial, because I turn it off or leave as soon as I see the first sad-eyed, slat-ribbed dog.
Similarly, the abandonment of Jessie the cowgirl doll in Toy Story 2.
The scene in The Longest Day showing American paratroops in Normandy landing in the square at St Mere Eglise which is occupied by German troops who are just shooting them dead under canopy.
They cant steer away or basically take any action to avoid their fate.
It genuinly turns my stomach.
Strangely, the common thread here is Sarah McLachlan. Obviously, her music is disturbing…
Seriously, though…Elendil’s Heir, the scene where the cowgirl doll is abandoned (set to Sarah McLachlan’s “When She Loved Me”) is a tearjerker scene for supervenusfreak, too.
I think the second time I saw the “Angel” ASPCA commercial, I called and became a member. We now make monthly donations to them. Nearly all of our animals are rescues or adoptions, even one of our horses, so I’m a big softy on this sort of thing.
Heh, we also make monthly donations to Save the Children–DeathLlama basically felt our money should go to help people, not animals. We’re both big animal lovers, though, and when he saw a 60 Minutes piece on pets abandoned after Hurrican Katrina, he said, “sniff Okay, maybe we can donate to an animal cause, too.” Then he saw the ASPCA commercial, and that sealed the deal.
Meanwhile, another “GAH!” movie moment is the face-peeling scene in Poltergeist. I love that movie and saw it at practically every sleepover between the ages of 11 and 13, but I just could not handle it. I’ve seen the movie probably 30-50 times, but managed to watch that particular scene in its entirety just once, when I braved it as an adult watching HBO or somesuch.
Yeah, I hate that one with a passion. We have it on Tivo, thanks it being shown during an Animal Planet show my son loves. He is the sweetest, most empathetic kids I have ever known, and he insists on watching that damned thing every time, even though it makes him cry so hard I get worried. He said he has to watch it so that he doesn’t forget those dogs and cats… He’s 8.
I’m a big softie too; this post made me cry! :o My son is 7, and if he ever saw that commercial, I’m sure he’d have the exact same reaction.
As for shows/films that upset me, it’s definitely anything that shows harm being done to kids. Can’t think of any off the top of my head that haven’t been mentioned already, but I actually make my husband screen any movies I haven’t seen so he can weed out the ones that would upset me.
Oh, hell yes. Me, too.
Every so often, I think I ought to download “When She Loved Me” from iTunes. But I don’t, because I know I’d never be able to listen to it without bawling.
I cried at the airport a couple weekends ago when I was reading Certain Girls by Jennifer Weiner.
Susan
Oh, I’m totally with you on that one - and I don’t even have kids! Damn Romans. I haven’t been able to watch a Joaquin Phoenix movie since then without wanting to break through the screen and strangle him for that Colosseum speech.
My personal most disturbing moments…
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Perfect Blue. This is an all-around trippy, disturbing movie, but what I really couldn’t stand was the gang-rape scene. I know that it was staged in the context of the movie - Mima is only an actress playing a part - but it was still VERY hard to watch. At one point while being “raped” Mima had this zoned-out expression on her face, as if that was the moment when her reality started to fall apart. Very unnerving.
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Apollo 13. This is sort of silly, but I can’t stand the part where astronaut Fred Haise throws up in the weightlessness of space. Vomit I can handle, but his just…hangs there. Eww.
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Bambi. “Mother?”
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Fantasia. Yet another Disney oldie haunts my childhood!
There’s a lot going on in this movie, but when people talk about the part that scared them the most, they usually mention “A Night on Bald Mountain” with Chernobog and his demon-summoning and various other shenanigans. Well hey, I thought that part was awesome personally, but I was never really afraid of ghosts and stuff like that, even as a real little kid. The part that freaked me out when I first saw it was “The Rite of Spring”. If you were ever 3 to 8 years old, you probably liked dinosaurs a whole lot. If you were like me, you especially liked stegosauruses best. So you can imagine the trauma that a youngster that age would experience seeing a steggy get mauled and killed violently by a T-Rex in a cartoon. Wait, that’s not allowed in cartoons, is it? Huh? And then, if that weren’t bad enough, ALL of the dinosaurs march off slowly to die of thirst in a barren wasteland. And if THAT wasn’t bad enough, the whole world then (apparently) gets flooded completely. The End. Jesus, what a sick thing for Walt to do…
I saw a PBS show called The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off. No need for a spoiler to figure this one out. I’m watching this and the whole time I’m going AAAAIIIIEEEEEE.
This was the nicest guy in the world. I could have gone the rest of my life without knowing Dystrophic Epidermolysis Bullosa was a disease.
Most powerful movie ending was The Spitfire Grill. I wouldn’t say it upset me but it managed to unleash multiple emotions at the same time.
I am pretty notoriously disturbed by many, many movies. I’ve had to leave the theater on more than one occasion because of people suffering on screen. There are many good movies I haven’t seen because I can’t handle people suffering. I can watch Uma Thurman chop off the limbs of 100 men with a kitana, but give me one person locked in a dark room screaming to get out and I lose my shit. Schindler’s List, Reservoir Dogs, and Apocalypse Now, for example, are all fabulous movies I will never see.
But the most traumatic movie I have ever seen was Oldboy, which is an all out torture-and-suffering-and-violence fest with a lovely little twist at the end that is so unexpected and horrible and personally triggering that afterwards I locked myself in the bathroom for several hours in an attempt to get away from that horrible movie and its horrible imagery. If there is one movie in the world I wish I had never seen, it’s that one.