A particularly grim “educational” film made in the early 60s called something like “Signal 30” that was made up of film taken by police departments after major traffic accidents. It was of the “Scared Straight” school of assault on your sensibilites to make an impression on you as a driver. One bad shot of a crisped body following a fire, and one absolutely horrible shot of a truck driver whose load of pipe had shifted forward and crushed him in the cab. His face bulged most awfully - still get shudders.
Having just visited the Newseum and the Holocaust Museum has permanently engraved many horrifying images on my brain, but two rank as the worst:
- The Newseum: They have an exhibit there of Pulitzer Prize winning photos throughout the years. One is fairly recent, 1994, IIRC. It’s from Somalia and shows a starving child, crouching on the ground, his arms around his knees, his belly bloated from not eating in weeks. You can’t see his face. But that’s not the tragic part.
Behind him, on the ground, sits a vulture, waiting for the child to die.
The photographer who took the photo killed himself a few years later. A large part of what drove him over the edge was intense regret for not picking the child up and taking him to a food station. (Journalists were told not to touch famine victims for fear of contracting diseases.)
That picture still makes my eyes tear up.
- Holocaust Museum: There’s a lot of sadness here. But the worst is the images I saw from Nazi “medical experiments.” There are shots of children with charred skin sitting together, naked and clearly starved. It’s the only time I can remember where I actually gasped out of horror.
I was visiting a friend in a hospital and the child in the next bed had horrible scars all over his head and hands. He had been playing with a bottle full of baking soda and vinegar that blew up in his face. I immediately threw up in the wastebasket. You have no idea how bad that made me feel to make an injured boy cry.
SNenc, I’m with you on that Pulitzer winning photo of the little girl on the side of the road from the spring of 1993. I recall the New York Times front page that it ran on, as that newspaper is the reason I flunked senior English and didn’t graduate from college on time.
A detour; the class is “God and Evil in 20th Century Literature”. The professor is a liberal Lutheran democrat with tenure (all things I am not) and we already don’t get along.
One morning he brings that photograph, clipped from the NYT, and passes it around the class. Sharp breaths and startled looks accompany it around. He begins a discussion/lecture on “if there is a caring God, how does He allow such awful things to happen”.
I lost my cool. Did he know where that photo was taken? No, he didn’t. Did he read the article that accompanied it? No, he didn’t.
Well I’ll tell you. That little girl is lying by the side of the main north-south highway in the Sudan, where a simmering 13-year civil war between the Communist government in the north and the Christian and native tribes in the south has been escalated, putting thousands of refugees on the road.
That little girl is not starving because God doesn’t care about her. That little girl is starving because men with Soviet rifles and little red stars on their caps marched around her home county shooting the farmers and salting the fields.
I’ll remember that photograph forever as an illustration that men are the source of evil, not chance or God.
As long as we’re horrifying ourselves, take the time to browse through all the postwar Pulitzer winning photographs at the Newseum:
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{{{{{{{{dlgirl}}}}}}}} Billy is doing fine now, he’s now 17, though that’s only physically. Perhaps the phenobarbital when he was three, delayed his emotional development. There is no way of knowing.
Take care of yourself, sweetie, you have to take medication, because these human bodies just don’t always work right, do they? 
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I went to see the band Skinny Puppy on their Too Dark Park tour when I was 17. They had a lot of T.V. screens set up on the stage and throughout the concert they played various images of vivisection, suicides, war, traffic accidents etc…really gruesome stuff. I particularly remember a middle-aged man shooting himself in the head in some parliamentary setting and the blood just pouring out of his face like water from a faucet turned on full blast. I have perhaps seen images that are equally disturbing since, courtesy of the internet, but to have so much thrown at you in the duration of a concert was overwhelming. I still don’t know if it was the best or worst concert I have ever been to…
Renton:
It is quite a horrid video.
–Tim
I’m not trying to say that it isn’t horrible, but the photo of the General shooting the Vietnamese guy does not show blood, IIRC. It’s been a while since I’ve seen, not do I really want to again. It shows the guy’s face at the moment of death, shows a horrible grimace. I recall seeing an interview with the photographer (Adams?), and what chilled me the most was his comment that he snapped the photo at the same instant the General fired, and he knew that the photo shows the guy with the bullet still in his brain, having not yet exited (if it did). I’ve seen the actual video footage of the shooting and I don’t recall if it shows blood at the instant he is shot, or if it shows him lying dead on the street bleeding.
Another picture that chills me to the bone is the photo of the Japanese soldier with sword held high preparing to behead the blindfolded Australian soldier during WWII. I cannot put my fear into words, how that soldier must have felt at the instant the photo was taken, when he was surely less than a second away from death.
These and other such photos should be required viewing before anyone goes to war.
Sir
Hmmm. I suppose this is therapeutic. . .
When I was 15, my brother died in an accident, and my dad was permanently handicapped. We used to own a rail dragster (one of those really long ones) and one day, when I was in high school, my dad and brother were taking apart one of the enormous tires in the rear of the dragster. It was a snow day. Both me and my older brother were supposed to be in school, but the snow was too deep for many to even get to school.
My brother was quite a car nut, as was my dad. They hoped to rebuild this dragster so that they could race it at the Salt Flats in Utah.
The back tires were giving them some grief, and that day, they were working hard to take the tires apart so that they could fix it.
It was a split rim tire, which is notorious in the racing world.
Around 3 o’clock in the afternoon, my mom and I were watching a soap opera (a friggin’ soap opera, fer christsakes.), when we heard a popping sound from outside.
My mother begins to panic. It was obvious that the popping sound was from outside, near our unattached garage.
I tried to calm her, telling her that it was nothing. Eventually, I pulled on my snow shoes to trudge out to the garage to make sure that everything was okay for my mom.
I walked out to the garage, and saw my brother lying on the ground, his body was holding the garage doors open.
A couple of years before, my brother had accidentally dropped an engine into a car, and had damaged it. My father was infuriated. I was the cerebral one who rarely helped our dad. I assumed that my dad, being angry at my brother for doing something stupid, had popped him one. He had quite a temper.
Something told me, though, that something was really terribly wrong. I stepped over my brother and entered the garage. My father was leaning against the garage wall, and he told me something that chills me to this day.
“The tire exploded, and both of my arms are broken, and I think that Brett (my brother) is dead.”
I could see pieces of bone sticking out of his sleeves. But, unfortunately, that wasn’t the worst part. After I reached my father, I turned and looked at my brother in the doorway and noticed, for the first time, that he was faceless.
Really.
A piece of metal had struck him in the right temple and sheered the flesh from his face. Luckily for him, he died instantly.
That was thirteen years ago, and it’s the most horrifying image I’ve ever seen.
(I would like to add the following disclaimer. I’m fairly inebriated, but it really did happen that way. Even worse, actually. I usually don’t tell people what happened to my brother. I’m not fishing for sympathy. I think that this is genuinely interesting topic, and I wanted to add my 2 cents.)
I just watched “Threads” for the first time recently. It was the single most depressing film I’ve ever seen, and contained some really horrific imagery.
What got to me the most were the scenes dealing with scarcity of food, and what people will do when they are hungry. There is one scene of two people finding a dead sheep, and they begin ravenously eating it. I think what got to me the most was that they were elated - almost as if they were tucking into a wonderful Christmas dinner. The thought of becoming that hungry terrifies me.
As an aside, to illustrate just how depressing this film is…
Afterward my GF suggested we watch something lighter to cheer us up - like say, “Schindler’s List”. I think she was only half joking…
Are we talking horrific things we’ve actually seen, horrific images, or horrific things we’ve heard about?
I’m not sure what is “most horrific” I’ve seen personally.
There was the suicide on the train tracks - the Amtrak was cruising around 80 mph, and we stopped well after we have passed over him. You ever see spaghetti sauce with lots of lumpy meat? All over the train, splashed on the windows, on the tracks… The clean up squad had trouble finding all of him. They wound up with three small trash bags of chunks ‘n’ lumps, then hosed off the tracks.
When I worked at a clinic we had a lady who had had a C-section a couple days before, just out of the hospital. The stench that followed her was enormous, like rotting meat. Seems she had a bit of infection. The stitches holding her together gave way and she just sort of sunk to the floor, erupting puss and blood, and trying to hold onto her internal bits.
There was the motorcycle accident on the shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago. The bike had stopped but the rider had kept going for about city block. On his front. Although he was wearing a helmet, the front of it (and his skull) had been worn down to about his ears. There was a stripe of blood, ground meat, bone fragments, and, towards the end, lumps of oatmeal stretching from about 10 feet from the bike to where the body lay. You know it’s bad when the Chicago cops and paramedics are standing around shaking their heads and no one is rushing to flip the body over and start CPR.
The worst WWII Holocaust image I ever saw was not of people but of the concrete ceiling in one of the “shower” rooms where they gassed people. There were deep gouges and pits in the concrete. Seems when the gas started and people realized they were going to die they climbed up on each other in panic and tried to claw their way out of the ceiling with their bare hands. Maybe it was just me, but I had a really visceral reaction to the thought of being so terrified and trapped that I would try to dig through concrete with my fingernails, and maybe actually succeed in clawing out a few chunks before I died.
Gosh, that’s enough venting for now, don’t you think? That’s the worse I’ve seen, but I’ve heard more awful.
Not much compared to some of what I’ve read here, but…
The worst thing I’ve seen in person was after a motorcycle accident a couple towns over. It had happened just minutes before I got there and the police had shown up and were moving people along. I didn’t know it was a motorcycle accident at first, but then I saw the bike in the tree… and a hand lying in my boss’ driveway. Apparently clean-up hadn’t gotten that far yet. Just seeing a hand lying in a driveway… that really f’ed me over.
Something I just avoided seeing: race car driver died at a track I was attending with my cousin, who’s also a driver but not that division. Natural instinct is to run towards the accident (out of wanting to help and just plain sick curiosity), but my cousin’s faster than I am and he got there and immediately started waving me away. I decided to obey for once and he told me later what it was. The guy had ended up facing right into the wall, and the inside visor of his helmet was covered in blood-nast. (Of course my cousin still races. He’s probably seen worse. I’ve worried about him more since then, though.)
This is Kevin Carter’s Pulitzer prize winning photograph, from 1994. It was a Sudanese girl. He killed himself on July 27, 1994. He felt that the vulture was not the only predator.
This is referenced in the most wonderful book, House of Leaves.(Pg. 368)
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*Originally posted by red_dragon60 *
**
I remember that picture. Yah know, I’m not creeped out by the vulture waiting for dinner. I mean, it’s a vulture - that’s what they do, wait for things to die then eat them. What creeps me out is that 9 times out of 10 when this sort of thing happens to people the ultimate cause is people doing bad things to other people. The vulture doesn’t have a choice about being a vulture, and vultures don’t cause war, famine, drought, or disease. They’re just part of nature’s clean-up crew. We (collectively, as a species), on the other hand, choose to commit acts of cruelty that we don’t have to commit. Now that’s horrifying and disgusting.
It’s hard to be objective or what is and is not horrifying. But back when the Murragh Building in Oklahoma City was bombed and the photographer took that famous picture of the fireman holding the dead baby girl, I was torn up. What you see is a blonde leggy kid in a diaper. That is what my nephew was at the time, born only two days after the little girl(I later saw her birthday on the news.) I see my nephew in that picture. Thank God he is almost seven now, the way she should have been.
Another Murrah Building image–I was downtown less than an hour after the bombing, and was placed helping in a Red Cross facility for people to try to meet up with or find their friends and loved ones, and for people who lived in nearby apartments to sleep for a couple of days. Some of us took some of the donated food down to the rescue workers in that cold April rain, and I saw what I think was people being pulled out of the rubble. I was a ways away, and I didn’t look too long.
But as I finally decided that 16 hours was long enough, and that it was time to go home and damn near smother my 2-month old daughter with hugs, I saw a woman find out that someone–I don’t know who–was listed among the dead. The look on her face is the most horrifying image I’ve seen.
That night when I got home, we had the news on, and I saw myself walking toward the camera and the door. Then I noticed the back of that woman’s head at the side of the frame.
I didn’t sleep much for a while.
On a side note, IIRC, that photo of the fireman got the photographer sued and fired. It seems that OG&E (OK Gas & Electric) owned the camera he used, and sued him for the royalties on the photo.
Stofsky
I think I’ll stick to Art.
Max Beckmann’s 1918 painting THE NIGHT, now hanging in Dusseldorf. An orgy of cruelty. A group of desperadoes invades a slum dwelling and kills its inhabitants. Whether the theme is assault or retaliation is not clear, which adds to the horror.
Also influenced by World War I (and by Matthias Grunewald’s Isenheim alterpiece), Otto Dix’s triptych WAR (1929-32), now hanging in Dresden. The central panel is an abandoned trench before a bombed-out village…the scorched land looks sick, pale, and dead. But the clutter of human bodies that fills the trench glows with decay and putrescence.
In the left panel we see an orderly column marching through the morning fog to the slaughter; the eyes of one of the soldiers fixes us.
In the right wing, the image of the artist himself carries a wounded man away from the carnage, stepping over a dead comrade.
The predella (in altars reserved for depictions of the dead Christ) shows three exhausted soldiers sleeping under a tent-cloth. But the image is ambiguous. The gravelike space, the stiffness of the bodies, make the viewer wonder if they will ever awaken.
Finally, Bruce Conner’s sculpture CHILD (1959-60), in the Museum of Modern Art, NYC. An artistic answer to Hiroshima, it is a baby’s burned high chair with a faceless, charred facsimile of an infant strapped into it.
The documentary film Memory of the Camps. The 55 minute film was compiled from images shot during the liberation of the concentration camps. The stark reality of the images is more powerful than anything I’ve ever seen.
While I confess I didn’t see this myself, I have to get it off my chest. I got the story from a person who was one of the folks who walked on the scene at the end.
This woman was in jail on drug charges, but she also had psychiatric problems as well, so she was talking to the jailhouse shrink as part of her drug treatment and to (hopefully) get her life in order. Anyhow, unbeknownst to the counselor, someone had smuggled this woman a gun (it was a minimum security place, some of which can have pretty lax precautions). So in the middle of a counseling session she pulls out the gun, shoots this guy, then puts the pistol to her own head and pulls the trigger.
OK, that’s bad enough. Here’s where it really starts to go over the top.
Apparently our trigger-woman had poor aim for her own head and,instead of the bullet demolishing her head it just carried away a chunk of skullbone. Apparently still motivated to die, she then reached up and started clawing out chunks of her brain with one hand. When the guards and other people came running to see what the noise was about they found her on the floor, surrounded by blood, bodily wastes, and fistfuls of brain tissue. She was also apparently trying to finish the job of emptying her own skull by hand but by that point her coordination was pretty shot and she wasn’t having much luck.
By the way - she actually did live. Pretty messed up, of course - the left side of her body is paralyzed, no control over bodily functions, has all sorts of neurological problems, but apparently still has some awareness of her condition.
Anyhow - the person who told me, as I said, was another counselor working the next room over who was part of the group that walked in on this mess.