One that’s stayed with me since the movie came out in 1989. Gage’s death in Pet Sematary. Going from a joy-filled family picnic on an idyllic sunny afternoon to life-defining tragedy in the blink of an eye, and just finishing with the blood-soaked shoe on the asphalt. That shoe. I’ll never get that image out of my head.
Good one. I can’t watch it again.
Yes. Also the next murder, of the innocent driver. Fast, probably painless, not gory, but disturbing in Chigurh’s utter pathology.
Speaking of ER, the scene that still haunts me is the episode where Dr. Carter gets stabbed by the mental patient, and as he collapses to the floor he looks across the room and sees Lucy the intern lying there dying in a pool of blood with her throat cut.
Yeah, I try to forget that one.
I meant to say “psychopathy.” Duh!
Same–kind of… I remember Nacho being mentioned in Breaking Bad and had conflated him with being involved with the guy Walt kills in Jesse’s basement (but NOT that guy, but that he showed up connected to that incident). I did a rewatch of BB sometime between season 2 and 3 of Saul and realized I was wrong.
Add 1 to this
Annihilation is another one of those films that just seems uniformly unsettling from start to finish. You don’t really see the first death, but the mutant bear screeching in Cassie’s voice was super creepy. Especially as it tears the shit out of Anya’s face as she has everyone tied up.
I am going to have some serious nightmares after skimming this thread. I think a death scene that is disturbing, yet without blood or gore, is HAL’s death in 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL’s line “My mind is going, Dave. I can feel it.” spoken with minimal emotion is just creepy as can be. Sure, he had it coming, after the similarly gore-less but creepy murders he committed, but wow it freaks me out. Even more so now that I know what Alzheimer’s is.
Is there any more disturbing “death” in any other G-rated movie?
Bambi’s mom?
I’ll see your Bambi’s mom and raise you one Bing Bong.
In the otherwise forgettable Apollo 17, the lunar astonauts are infected by creepy moon spiders that had apparently finished off an earlier Russian expedition. The decision is made on earth to abandon them to their fate rather than bring the survivors and the plague home to earth. The astronaut remainining in the command module in lunar orbit, who wasn’t exposed, was nonetheless told that he was being left there to die in his capsule as it runs out of oxygen and fuel…but that Mission Control would stay on the line with him till the end so he had company as he slowly suffocated. That struck me as indescribably horrible-to be betrayed and abandoned like that while they were pretending that’s not what they were doing made it infinitely worse somehow.
A pale disturbation compared to Where the Red Fern Grows.
There are only a few scenes that I find disturbing. Probably the worst one was feeding Ray Liotta his own brain in Hannibal.
I think my wife can watch anything done to any human but will immediately turn off anything where a dog is harmed.
My vote is for the death of Cordelia in King Lear, and especially his speech afterward.
"Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And thou no breath at all? "
Messala’s death in Ben- Hur (1959).
Best death throes scene ever. I bet the theater was real quiet during this.
After getting totally trampled in the race, he still needs to tell Judah what happened to his mother and sister.
“Look for them in the Valley of the Lepers…if you can recognize them.”
First thing I thought of was the Catch-22 swimming scene, which was mentioned upthread (23 years ago!).
Nobody has yet mentioned the scene in The Great Waldo Pepper where Waldo puts his friend out of his misery as he burns to death. I was 12 when I saw that, and it stuck with me for a long time.
And why is that? I ask because Wife and I love the movie, and have seen it 3 times now.