I did a search on this page, and apparently no one has mentioned Akira Kurasawa’s Sanjuro (1962),which has a scene you’ll find either incredibly disturbing or hilariously over-the-top.
Kurasawa was apparently pestered by people who thought his death scenes were too tame and bloodless, so he gave them enough blood to satisfy them. Toshiro Mifune’s samurai dispatches another samurai with a sword cut that cuts right into a major artery:
At 1:31 in.
This was from the early 1960s, when you didn’t see this kind of thing (about the same time they cut out the scene in Spartacus where Kirk Douglas cuts off a Roman soldier’s ar. And that scene had no blood). I admit that I was freaked.
Nowadays we’ve become jaded. Mel Brooks played this idea for laughs in Dracula…Dead an d Loving it when Lucy Westenra, as a vampire, gets staked.
A decade or so later in the Lone Wolf and Cub movies, every scene of swordplay would routinely have veritable firehoses of arterial spray. And it’s a slippery slope to most of Takashi Miike’s filmography from there.
Kurosawa wasn’t trying to make the scene especially bloody - the rig on the losing fighter malfunctioned, creating the giant arterial spray, and Kurosawa liked the effect and kept it in. Within a few years, it became a standard trope in samurai movies, as veryfrank just noted.
How about in Untraceable? Colin Hanks body is being slowly dissolved in acid and accepting his death and knowing his fellow police are watching him on video stream, he blinks out a key fact in morse code by blinking.
The pretty cruddy movie Volcano (the one with Tommy Lee Jones and Anne Heche) has a couple of scenes that disturbed me to no end. In one, a firefighter heaves someone to safety but in the process has to land boots-first in lava, and we watch him burn up like a pyro version of the wicked witch, dissolving into the ground.
In another, a demolitions crew is setting charges to drop a mall into the path of the lava flow, and one of them gets his foot stuck under debris. There’s no way to get him out in time before they have to blow the charges, and he’s saying “no, don’t risk your lives for me, get out of here!” And one of his teammates basically says, okay I’ll stay with him, and they huddle melancholically until the dynamite goes off and they’re crushed to death. Characters knowing what’s about to happen (like in the cannibal bit I cited in an earlier post in this thread) is terrifying to me onscreen.
Definitely a big part of what makes it disturbing.
I thought the scene in Signs, where Mel Gibson (no, that’s not the disturbing part) is talking to his conscious but soon to die wife while she is pinned to a tree by a car.
The most astonishing (and stomach-turning and saddening) aerial shot I’ve seen was in “Santa Sangre”, showing the small elephant dying, with rivers of blood gushing and gushing out of its trunk and all over the place. Freaking heavy.
Jodoworoski sometimes could really deal it - not sure, though, if always in the most digestible manner.
Two kinda funnier ones just hit me - in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, one shlep gets sucked up into some sort of giant chocolatey tube or something, and another brat becomes a giant blueberry that gets rolled away.
True, but this quote (maybe not from the most reliable of narrators) ostensibly reassures us they’re “ok”:
WW: “My dear boy, I promise you they’ll be quite all right. When they leave here, they’ll be completely restored to their normal, terrible old selves. But maybe they’ll be a little bit wiser for the wear. Anyway, don’t worry about them.”
When the film’s protagonist (I’d lke to say antagonist but pretty sure that’s wrong, here) films his victims, at a certain point he’ll whip out a tripod leg that has a blade on the end of it. As he approaches (while stilll filming) his victim with the modified weapon, it’s apparently important to him that he documents the fear on their faces before he dispatches them - a psychopathy stemming from when he was a child, when his psychiatrist father would film his son as large creepy insects were placed on him, in bed, in order to document that fear.
