The movie itself didn’t bother me too much, but the Sci Fi channel special Curse of the Blair Witch really freaked me out. I had trouble sleeping for days after I watched it.
Same here. This has to be one of the most disturbing movies I’ve ever seen.
I know I’ve mentioned it before, but E.T. scared the hell out of me when I was little. I had nightmares about it for weeks. To this day that movie still bothers me.
I think I like most of the movies in this thread that I’ve seen and I’m gonna rent the others.
Anyway . . .
The horse-head-in-the-bed scene in The Godfather disturbed me. I went through this “I should check under the sheets just to be sure but if I do the head might really be there” thing for ages after I saw that. I was just a little kid whenever I first saw this film.
The rape and castration scenes in I Spit On Your Grave kind of stuck with me for a while. Again, I was pretty young.
Sleepers was pretty bad. I could have been one of those kids. I wasn’t, but I very easily could have been.
Night of the Living Dead was disturbing, but in a good way if that makes any sense.
Lots of kids’ movies disturbed me–Wizard of Oz for example. Terrible film for a little kid to see.
Memento is the only movie I’ve ever watched that actually disturbed me. I was afraid for weeks afterward about getting a head injury and being like Leonard.
I cannot get through Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me to save my life.
Silence of the Lambs gets to me as well. I also saw 2 minutes of Hannibal (the part where the guy was cutting off his own face) and I turned it off.
The stuff coming in over the borders is always a good clue for Americans that other countries are out there.
Osiris: I thought the aliens took Richard Dreyfuss for the same reasons the United States used to accept some illegal immigrants as U.S. citizens: because he had proved he really, really wanted to be there and go with them. Is it true, that in the past, if a would-be American citizen sailed a coffee table across the Atlantic and up New York harbour they would be admired rather than deported? I believe it to be true but I stand to be corrected. Anyway, Drefuss was just a real pest. That’s how he got to go.
The Wall, just too weird for my little 9 year old mind, even though I only was able to sneak peaks at bits of it. I vividly remember the shaving scene.
More on the Close Encounters hijack. (too bad that smilie didn’t make it.)
I’m pretty sure they invited him. And the blond too, but she didn’t want to go. And the rest of the people on the helicopter that got kicked out. Remember the French man, he was argueing with the military that these people weren’t there by accident but that they were invited. That’s why they and only they saw images of that mountain. All of them were found with images of the mountain.
Although it I will concede it was an extremely inefficient and unfair way to go about getting people to come. I mean how would some Russian invitee be able to make it all the way to Wyoming in 1977? Or how is a Nigerian oil worker supposed to figure out the image in his mind is some mountain 10,000 miles away? It clearly favors the Americans.
Anyway
Osiris: Or at least people who eat mashed potatoes.
Disturbance by poor special effects: In Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil there was a character who attracted flies and always had a few buzzing around. In one scene he sat in a bar talking to John Cusack with his back to a window. You could see that the flies, rather than being naturally attracted to this man, were attached to him by means of little black springy wires.
I agree with Crusoe that the British movie Threads was incredibly disturbing. When I think of it I’m so glad that cannabis is now almost legal in Britain. Nuclear devastation on drugs has to be slightly less painful.
One that hasn’t been mentioned yet is Cube. That one certainly disturbed me. The entire idea of having the nerve to try to navigate that maze just terrifies me.
Ditto on Se7en (sloth, gluttony) and Ghost (those wailing shadow-ghosts), though.
omg!someone who has also seen this movie! I knew there had to be someone else out there that has seen this movie!
A few that haven’t been mentioned yet:
Welcome to Sarajevo depressed me to death. I felt guilty for having tuned out those stories and letting the news media get away with not making a big deal out them either.
Spanking the Monkey Weird. Kinda made my skin crawl.
A Midnight Clear Another well-done but wrenching horrible depressing war movie
Sling Blade The kid in that movie reminded me of my nephew. I could not stop crying after this movie, thinking about all the sweet decent little kids in the world who get yelled at and beaten down emotionally by stupid jerks. I literally could not get a hold of myself for 45 minutes.
Man Bites Dog, the story of a cheerful Belgian serial killer.
Agreed, and they tried to make it out as part comedy… not funny.
If you found this one disturbing, then by all means avoid Peter Watkins’ film The War Game, a black and white film that preceded it by a couple of decades, about the same subject (not to be confused with the Matthew Broderick-John Wood film Wargames)
What makes The War Game so creepy is that
1.) it seems so possible, as opposed to most nuclear war films
2.) It’s the only one that shows the horrors of war in a cinema-verite style. Lots of handheld shots, pictures of very real-looking destrruction. But mostly the people – you see people with this shell-shocked, vacant expression on their faces. They’re just staring, or rocking back and forth. They’re covered with black crud, and because it’s black and white you don’t know if it’s dirt or dried blood or what. Those shots of blacked, mind-dead people are scarier than any special effect in any other nuke war film.
3.) The film was supposedly commissioned by the BBC and never shown there. One reason may be that they show the authorities trying to keep order by shooting looters, and herding people into detention. Yet that is one of the scarier effects of major war – the return of martial law.
Another film that had a severe chilling effect on the group that went to see it was Apocalypse Now. Usually we’d stop off somewhere, grab a bite to eat, and talk about the movie we’d just seen. But AN was a conversation-killer.
Agree with CalMeacham about The War Game. It chills to the bone, partly because a lot of it is based on real incidents – Hiroshima, the bombing of Dresden, etc. The bits that especially chilled me was the guy describing collecting wedding rings off bombed corpses and showing his bucket – practically full. And the martial law-style execution of looters.
I’m usually jaded and unflappable by movie violence and horror to a fault, but Se7en really got inside my head. I had nightmares for a week.
Yes. What really disturbed me about this one is that I knew what was going to happen from reading about the movie, and kept waiting and waiting for it.
Career Girls: Mike Leigh is an amazing filmmaker, and while Naked is a pretty distrubing movie, I throw in this one for the brilliant ways the actors completely get into their parts, and how I kept wanting to reach into the screen and give them a good shaking. It reminded me of being totally awkward and uncomfortable as a teenager/young adult, especially in relationships with friends and other people.
The Shining: I absolutely cannot deal with the twin girls in the hallway.
And sort of off-topic: That scene in Twin Peaks (the series, not the movie, when BOB is crouching at the foot of Laura’s bed, laughing maniacally. Still chills.
I have a very strong stomach (or mind if you prefer) when it comes to films. No movie has ever scared, disturbed, or affected me in the manner being described here.
…except for one, and I am loathe to admit it. It was a really bad flick called The Fly 2 and was the sequel to the serviceable Jeff Goldblum/ Geena Davis movie. The Fly 2 is pretty much a waste of good celluloid, but it scared the bejeezus out of me. I think I know why. There is this mutated dog who is kept in a pit in the lab. It is hairless, can’t walk, and is only giving a thin gruel to eat. It is a pitiable creature, and dies. At the end, the bad guy’s genes are scrambled, and he undergoes the same type of mutations the dog underwent. Though his mind still functions fine, he is now a malformed thing unable to manage more than a slow crawl. He is put in the dog’s old pit, fed the same gruel, and studied the same way the dog was. He is striped of his humanity in both treatment and bodily form Something about involuntary human experimentation, mutation, and the inhumanity of the “justice” really got to me. Odd, because the the first film didn’t bug me in the least - not even the inside out baboon.
I guess we all have our internal buttons that can be pushed by random things.
American History X did not disturb me as much as I thought it was going to. My boyfriend had geared me up for it, but it didn’t get to me. It was well done and Edward Norton did his usual great job.
Se7en disappointed me severely. They had something going and then they took the cheap ending. The ending ruined the movie for me - I don’t like seeing cheap writer tricks. It disturbed me only in that it could have been so much more.
A Clockwork Orange was disturbing. I loved it, though. I have it on tape. I read the book and that was neat. I was amused by the differences between the book and the movie.
It is hard to disturb me sometimes, but I will never, ever watch Doom Generation again. It was trying to be artsy and it was just… too much. The worst scene in the movie is very graphic and it really does not need to be seen.
My general rule of thumb is that I will not watch rape scenes in movies. I don’t care where they happen (at home, in prison). I will close my eyes in a theater, or will fastforward a VHS. They are unbearably ugly and disturbing to me and I don’t need to see them on screen. I’ve dealt with enough of that shit in real life.
I loved Poltergeist as a kid and it still gives me a good spine-tingle. The clown was very disturbing. I was given a clown that laughed maniacally when you pulled its cord. Then it began to laugh when no one touched it. We gave it to a cousin.
My co-worker was very disturbed by The Birds. She was attacked by a bird as a child, after all. She was also disturbed by The Shining. I was affected a bit by the book but the movie didn’t get to me.
Timing is everything…
I saw about two minutes of Pulp Fiction and refuse to ever see any part of it again. It was a part where someone(I don’t know the characters) is discussing stuffing a body into a car trunk.
My roommates had the flick on and I caught a bit of it when I walked in the door. I was coming home from the county jail where I was visiting a friend who had killed two people and stuffed the bodies in the trunk of a car for out-of-state disposal. My friend got 65 years