Yea, the CSI school roasting amputated cadaver arms over coals on NatGeo last night.
I know it’s for forensic purposes, and muscles contract at given temperatures, but damn!
A friend once told me about witnessing a person having their leg knocked off… sheared - by a car on a busy highway trying to cross from the dairyqueen to the store. That story might have affected me, more than him
Gaaah, too many real-life ones to mention, and I should say I don’t seek out the macabre or horrifying; just the opposite really.
Also, because I have a job in a safety role, well-meaning (I assume) people keep sending me grotesque videos of things like horrible hand wounds or people being thrown out of crashing cars. Naw, not gonna go through those either.
Oddly, the most haunting image that first comes to mind is a brief scene from the much-derided Speilberg remake of War of the Worlds. It’s the one where:
Tom Cruise and his kids are trying to escape from New York on foot with a mass of other refugees. They come to a railroad crossing in some little river town, the gates comes down, and an Amtrak passenger train roars through the crossing…on fire from stem to stern.
Don’t know why, but with all the creepy stuff in that film, and there is a bunch, I can’t get that one out of my head.
That exact scene disturbed me too. Glad I’m not the only one!
Add me to the list that was bothered by that scene.
I guess I’m sort of sick, because I think I would have liked to watch that show!
(wanders off to look it up)
There’s an image in Conor Macpherson’s brilliant play The Weir that I would happily laser out of my brain if I could. It doesn’t even happen on stage, it’s part of a story that one of the characters tells, and the actress I saw doing it wasn’t even any good, but it’s still seared into my mind. I saw it like ten years ago and I don’t remember the exact details, but basically
A grieving mother gets a phone call from her dead little girl, begging her to come get her because it’s cold and the guy next to her is horrible and she wants to go home.
It’s beautifully written - I’m not recapturing it properly - and it’s excruciating.
It was really most sincerely dead.
Oh, and I thought of another one. Years ago I lived in an apartment next to a profoundly mentally ill woman. She’d blast the religious channel on TV all night long, screaming at imaginary people and quoting scripture at the top of her high whiney voice. I call the cops many times and all they could do is settle her down. then as soon as they left she’d be right back at it. I used to lay in bed imaging doing the most painful, awful things to her. After three weeks of sleep deprivation I was really having some thoughts that I’m too ashamed to admit. One day I came home from work and the men in the white coats were dragging her, straight jacketed with some kind of gag device in her mouth, to an ambulance. The combination of seeing in real life what I had only heard jokes about and remembering how I had wished painful death upon her just knockied me for a loop.
When younger, I used to search the web for horrid stuff, out of morbid curiosity. Rotten.com, tubgirl, goatse etc. never squicked me out too bad. Steering clear of anything like child p---------, the one thing that haunted me for a good while was the notorious Chechen video clip showing the torture and subsequent beheading-by-knife of a Russian POW by two cheerful mountain men, all to the tunes of a merry folk music soundtrack.
Kid works for Wolfram & Hart, eh?
Is “pornography” a dirty word now?
Joe
I happily watched Monty Python as a youngster. Then there was the skit “Sam Peckinpah’s Salad Days.” (you can find it on youtube) I repelled me, it horrified me, it was completely at odds with most of MP’s stuff and never found it to be the least bit funny even thought as a kid that everything MP did was gold. To this day I still cannot watch that sketch even though I have seen stuff probably more gross in the movies & TV since.
Some people avoid it out of the belief that it attracts spambots and the like.
Fictional examples:
-That scene from War of the Worlds disturbed me too. Seeing things burn generally does, see the first nonfictional example below.
-The brief rape and murder scene from Dead Man Walking is the reason I can’t watch rape scenes. I’m sure it’s quite mild in comparison to other scenes like it, but the sound of the girl screaming and crying will probably stick with me forever.
Non-fictional examples:
Generally, seeing structures on fire gives me the willies. The way it completely swallows them up, and how the only colors you can really see are a brilliant red-orange and black is completely disturbing to me. One year when my family and I were coming home from our summer vacation, there was a car accident that happened about seven or so cars ahead of us. The car in question had been traveling down the other side of the highway, and when it was struck it bounded all the way across the median and came to rest on our side of the highway. Good Samaritans and onlookers managed to pull out all of the passengers (who were all injured, but alive), but just afterwards, the car caught fire and we just sat there and watched it burn. I remember thinking that the car had probably been this family’s summer vacation transport, their home away from home, so to speak, and here it was being reduced to a twisted, skeletal heap of blackened metal. I also remember thinking that the very same thing could happen to my own family.
Soon after the December 2004 tsunami, Newsweek (I think it was Newsweek) put out an issue that had a multiple-page photo spread of the destruction and the victims. One in particular stood out: an Indian family holding the limp body of a small 3- or 4-year-old boy and obviously grieving. What disturbed me the most about it was the fact that there was all this black dirt and debris in the boy’s eye sockets, presumably from being swept through the water. For me, it hammered home the sheer–well, LIFELESSNESS–of death. A lot of bodies I had seen in real life before or since had either been embalmed, and thus looked like they could wake up at any moment, or were decomposed/skeletonized, and therefore unrecognizable as a former human being. That image of a truly dead-looking human body–and a child, no less–will never leave my head.
When I was a kid we hid under our wooden desks to save ourselves from a nuclear bomb. They showed a movie of the Hiroshima bomb and a guy was walking across a bridge when the bomb went off. He was vaporized ,on the bridge was a shadow in the shape of his body. When that is all thats left of a human being due to our bomb, it is terrible. It probably pushed me toward pacifism.
The music video for Interpol’s Evil scares me horribly. It’s that damn creepy puppet, and the opening with a car crash, with the girl on that stretcher and her parents crying…shudder
I guess car crashes in general terrify me. It also doesn’t help that the song itself is said to be about serial killer Rosemary West.