I wrote this about a week ago in the Only in Theaters… thread:
It was just a moment, but the last scene of Carrie (1976). It starts with nice, melancholic music, with soft, gauzy focus of Sue (played by Amy Irving), dressed in white, and her sad, bewildered expression as she leans down to place flowers on the remains of the house where Carrie died. Then all of a sudden, the hand from the grave, grabbing Sue’s arm, accompanied by screeching violins and Sue’s insane, hysterical scream as the film returns to the real life of what her life has become. It difference in sound volume can’t be reproduced at home (I’ve tried), nor can the shrieks of the audience members when no one knows what to expect (or what a jump scare was, back in 1976).
Man, I love that movie. So great. I worked in the Miracle Mile for a couple of years and I love revisiting the flick every once and a while, it really brings me back.
I was wondering is someone would bring that up.
John didnt have a huge budget, but wanted his film to make an impression. He couldnt have done that without the true dedication of his star, Divine.
It’s the story of a girl living under the Taliban who has to disguise herself as a boy to try to earn money (only men can work, and her father was dead). She gets taken into an education camp, but eventually her ruse is discovered, and she is forced to marry at age 13.
The final scene only shows her husband going into a bathtub. It is the most horrifying movie scene I’ve ever seen.
Why?
Earlier, there was a lesson that men have to make an ablution – a ritual bath – after having sex. This is the ritual bath, and it means that the girl – who has been the center of our sympathy – has been raped.
I actually found the ending contrived. If I see some guys carrying guns I’ll immediately start waving and shouting and exclaiming “Thank God you’re here!” NOT evince no response whatsoever.
The final 20 minutes of Megan is missing, not just that being so horrifying and pushing so many boundaries, the final five minutes pushes that beyond a limit I did not know I had.
The second half of Martyrs and the explanation of Why it is happening was pretty horrible.
(ending of Night of the Living Dead) actually, i always thought they knew Ben was not a zombie, but shot him anyway because he was black. Or at the very least, didn’t care whether he was a zombie or not. Ben may have hesitated to approach them because he was afraid of just that.
Oh, Lord. They’ll have to cut it down to about seven minutes–and I’m saying that as a
major fan of that movie and early-to-midcareer John Waters movies in general.
A censored version of Pink Flamingos does exist (with the chicken-sex scene, the blowjob, and the singing butthole all expunged). I know this for a fact, because they have run that version at the UC Theatre in Berkeley at least once. It was in the late 1980s, it was my fifth or sixth time seeing PF, and I was so indignant about the censorship of a classic movie that I never set foot in the UC Theatre again until quite recently.
Like most people, I had The Mist and Se7en at the top of my list.
I don’t know that I find the finales of “end of the world” movies like Miracle Mile, On The Beach, Melancholia, Don’t Look Up, or Seeking a Friend for the End of the World “horrifying” per se. More like profoundly sad.
The ending of Under the Skin was horrifying,
First of all, the entire film is weird and unsettling. You have this weird space alien in a Scarlet Johansen and it’s companions or handlers or whatever driving around Scotland picking up randoms and doing…whatever to them. Then yadda yadda yadda… the alien almost gets raped and then set on fire by a trucker.
I keep thinking of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? But it was practically a relief at that point.
My husband was terribly scarred by Looking For Mr. Goodbar.
He was still inside the house. And, honestly, if I was a black man in the 1960s, I’m not so sure how quickly I’d be bringing attention to myself when faced with a mob of armed white people.
At the risk of undercutting my own argument, it’s interesting how we all bring our own experience (baggage) to a movie. The movie came out in 1968, and we have a story featuring a brave strong black man is calling the shots and won’t be pushed around by the likes of Harry which isn’t something common. A lot of people watching it couldn’t help but think about race relations while watching that movie. When George Romero was asked why he cast Duane Jones to play the part of Ben, he said it was because Jones was the best actor available to him at the time. I’m not saying your analysis is wrong, it’s a legitimate interpretation, but I think the ending would have been the same even if a white actor had been cast. I think the mob was just having a good time plugging zombies and carelessly shot Ben.
