Dario Argento’s films have some amazing scenes - “Suspiria”, for instance, has
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a woman being stabbed multiple times in the chest. Her chest finally falls open, and her heart is exposed - it’s stabbed directly, and blood oozes out.
Maybe this doesn’t qualify as a murder; it’s unclear whether the person actually dies. In the film “Men Behind the Sun”, which deals with a concentration camp -
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A woman is put out in the cold for several days, with her arms packed in banks of snow. She’s brought inside, and boiling water is poured over her arms. The skin and flesh just slough off her arms, leaving only bone, as she looks on in horror.
No, I don’t ordinarily watch movies like these in my spare tine…
A kid runs through a bunch of pigeons. Construction work is being done, including putting windows in a building (?) and there is a huge sheet of glass overhead. The pigeons scatter, one hits the guy who is operating the machine and he pulls the lever thingie. The glass drops and completely crushes the kid.
A couple minutes later, the kid’s mother gets her hair caught as she goes out of an elevator, the doors close. Her head is caught inside the elevator while he body is outside. After a struggle with people trying to help her, she is decapitated. (Side note, something similar happened with a doctor recently, too lazy to link, look on snopes.com)
Although it’s not technically a ‘horror’ movie, “American History X” contains, hands down, the most gruesome, cringe-inducing murder in the history of cinema.
If you’ve seen it, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
One one of those FRIDAY THE 14TH’s Jason kills a guy with a weed wacker to the head. In the same movie there is a sickening girl in sleeping bag slammed against tree scene that isn’t gory but IS gruesome – if that is possible.
The most gruesome I ever saw in any movie wasn’t gory – it was the murder in American History X
Oh, he was in the scene but he wasn’t the one wielding the chainsaw. It was the dealer that Al and his friend had gone to see, but then the deal went bad and the dealer handcuffed Al’s partner to the shower rack and went at him with the chainsaw when Al wouldn’t talk.
I second the dismembering wire scene in GHOST SHIP and the girl getting her skin pulled off in HELLRAISER III.
The whole basic Hellraiser set-up of getting your skin pulled off by all of those hooks suspended from the air is pretty grim.
The whole idea of being eaten alive by zombies, as in the NIGHT OF LIVNG DEAD movies, struck me as a particularly unpleasant way to go.
I recall a movie called (I think) GATES OF HELL where a woman dies by essentially throwing up so hard that she turns herself inside out. YUCH!!!
For mental anquish, there’s always a visit from Samara in THE RING. It was a quick way to go, but judging by the looks on the faces of the victims, those last few seconds must have been hell.
The murder of the two cops at the museum by Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs.
One is sliced open with organs exposed and hung in a Christ fashion over Lecter’s cage cell. Another has his face carved off so Lecter can make an escape.
I agree with Zebra here. It has been a number of years since I saw Body Double, but that scene sticks with me for some reason. While the scence from Scarface was probably more gruesome, I’ve not been able to sit through that scene in it’s entirety, so I can’t comment on it.
But Nailbunny, how can you mention Wizard of Gore and not mention the death by punch press? Really I’d have a hard time calling any of the “deaths” in that flick gruesome since frequent use of mannequins, especially the heads, is so obvious that the movie is laughably bad.
BizarroRonJeremy, my favorite line Lewis has about his horror movies is when he says they remind him of the poetry of Walt Whitman. He says they’re no damn good, but they were the first of they’re kind so and that makes them kind of special.
Well of course it’s laughably bad, that’s the charm and beauty of it! That, and the fact that when HG made movies like this they were completely unheard of, shocking & nauseating to the average joe movie-goer. Grue.some: adj, Causing horror and repugnance; frightful and shocking: a gruesome murder. I mean, yeah, it looks like a mannequin head. Because, well…it’s a mannequin head! Special effects had not come quite as far thirty years ago as they have today, especially when your budget averages somewhere around 200 bucks per movie.
And yes, I do enjoy the punch press.
For the record, my personal most gruesome death would be the brain surgery in Bloodsucking Freaks. To quote Lloyd Kaufmann, probably the only film that gets more disturbing and offensive with the passage of time.
My vote would be in Thirteen Ghosts where the lawyer unwittingly trips the mechanism that starts the whole mechanical house up. He then at first appears to be stuck between two sheets of glass;it isn’t until one half of him starts sliding down that you realize he has literally been sliced in two the long way.:eek:
What about the guy in The Omen who got decapitated by a sliding pane of glass. If I remember it correctly, his head flew off and actually bounced! I was about 13 when I saw that, and it has always stuck with me. The special effects weren’t that convincing, mind you, but the whole scene was still quite horrifying to me.
Daryl Revok’s first murder-by-scanning in the great b-flick Scanners (head + invasive new-flesh psychic powers = BOOM!) was probably the first movie murder that really left a lasting impression for me. The final psychic duel between he and ultra-wooden Cameron Vale really sticks out too–moreso when the final ending twist throws a creepy clear light on just what was going on beneath the obvious there.
From Hellraiser II, the scene that really made me shudder was none of the overt skinning hooks and such–they really seemed more cartoonish than anything–but when the good doctor gives a violently insane fellow with delusional parasitosis a straight razor and steps away, and he begins hacking and digging the razor through his flesh. (Needless to say, this summons a skinless gal which signals a comfortable return to cartoony gore territory.)
The same can be said of virtually any Takashi Miike (the director) movie. He finds incredibly inventive, gruesome and often darkly funny ways of killing people in Ichi The Killer, Dead Or Alive Trilogy, Fudoh and Visitor Q.
My favorite would be Ichi The Killer
One of the minor characters has a really bad day. He tries to punch the masochist Kakihara whose mouth opens wide enough to trap his hand so he can eat most of the skin off of it. Then he is strapped to a chair and badly beaten and tortured with 12" long metal spikes. Then the cop comes along and rips his arm off with his bare hands, just to see if he can.
It’s outrageously gruesome, but also very, very funny if you like dark humor
It’s not a horror movie, but the most gruesome murder I’ve ever seen in a movie is near the end of Saving Private Ryan when the German soldier slooowly stabs the Jewish U.S. soldier who’s pleading with him not to kill him. It made me so sick to see the Jewish guy begging that damn nazi for his life while the nazi seemed to enjoy it so much.
The most gruesome murder in a horror movie is maybe the drill through John Morghen’s head in Lucio Fulci’s Gates of Hell (aka City of the Living Dead).