I can’t feel much horror for those images of the holocaust, or of vietnam, I grew up seeing those images repeatedly and they’ve lost their power to shock me. And besides, these are a secondhand experience.
But if I had to pick a reproduced image, the most horrifying thing I ever saw was a famous photographic portrait of Andy Warhol by Richard Avedon. It just shows Warhol from the waist to neck, holding up his black sweater. His whole body was a mass of scars, from when Valerie Solanis shot him. They say the bullet bounced around inside his ribcage and tore his insides to shreds, and the surgeons work was just as bad. It’s a miracle he lived. Somehow the sight of the healed scars evoked more terror in me than anything I’ve seen at that r*****.com site. Avedon was one brilliant photographer…
I had a horrifying dream image of my mother with male genitals,
also a dream image of a ravenous black dog attacking my liver.
Carl Jung had a horrifying image of God defecating (with a large turd) on a church. I am using this in a personality theory book I am writing.
If you want real life instances, not photos, and such, then I recall a woman who got hit by a car as we were only one or two cars behind, when I was a kid. I was probably about 10. It was at night and I didn’t see her get hit, but I saw her lying dead in the street mere seconds after it happened. When I looked at her body, it looked like wet towel that someone had wrung as tightly as they could. :::shudder:::
My poor mom witnessed the whole occurence and was shaken for a long time. Mom was one of the people who pulled over to help stop traffic. The newspaper reported that the woman who got hit had mental problems and probably threw herself in front of the moving vehicle.
This is going to sound weak, but thankfully I haven’t seen many horrific things in my life. One day my older brother’s friend’s mom’s car pulls up to our house. My older brother gets out (he was about 12 at the time, I was 10).
His arm was broken so badly that the only thing keeping it together were two strands of flesh.
shudder
If we are going to use images from dreams, I’ve got a few…
A living monkey with most of it’s intestines hanging out of it’s anus.
A man dropped several stories onto a fence, his body broken so that his pelvis was between his shoulderblades. This is from the same dream, the guy was the person who messed up the monkey and I was the person who threw him off of a balcony.
A smoky room packed with rotting corpses. This one had me disturbed for several days, it was so vivid.
A corpse charred so that it had a black crispy skin like an over-roasted marshmallow. The sight was not so gross as the taste (yuck!).
A person having their hand nailed to their face.
A friend having most of his face bitten off by a polar bear while he twitched and made gargling noises.
A woman with tentacles for nipples.
It’s a wonder that I still willingly go to sleep.
There’s not a whole lot in the way of blood and guts that can get to me. Hell, I watch surgery for fun. But two recent movie shots kicked my ass:
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The scene in “Unbreakable” where Sam Jackson’s character falls down the stairs. Seeing the bone twisted like that was not fun.
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“Legend of the Drunken Master” when Chan gets pushed into that thingy of hot coals. That was painful to watch.
As I said, blood and guts don’t really make me all that squeamish. And I’ve seen Schindler’s List . . . it was just startling for me, mostly.
iampunha, just so you know, Jackie Chan did that stunt three times to make sure he got it right. He still has the scars to this day.
And you wonder why no insurance company will underwrite his movies.
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Seeing my father in the hospital this past January dying from heart disease at age 50. I got to have my last conversation with him (not knowing it was going to be the last), and had went out in the waiting room. While I was out there, he had a massive heart attack, but was still alive. They had him on a respirator, and when I went back, they told me they’d injected him with morphine to keep him out, and to keep from pulling out his breathing tube. When I was there, he woke up anyway, and started pulling on it. I took his hand off of it, and tried to explain what was happening. I looked him directly in his eyes, and he had so much fear and confusion in his eyes that I could see that what I was saying wasn’t sinking in. I stood there, holding his hand, looking into his eyes, trying to wish the confusion away so I could make him understand. They injected him with more morphine, and it started taking hold while I talked to him, holding his hand. When he was out, I left. I never saw him alive again.
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Shauna. Shauna was my then-fiancee (this would be 1999). She was nearly raped by an ex-boyfriend when she was out of town (she was from Seattle, and had to fly back when her mother’s health started failing). Shauna’s about 5’2", MAYBE 100lbs. David is roughly 6’6", 255lbs. She fought him. He was drunk, and it finally dawned on him that she wasn’t gonna just let him. So he beat the shit out of her. He broke fingers. He cracked ribs. He ripped out her navel ring. She lost chunks of hair from where his hands were wrapped in it, ramming her face-first into her dresser. He bit her (she sleeps nude, and he came upon her sleeping. They used to live together when she still lived there, and he still had a key to the one lock she forgot to change). He bit a perfect circle of blood on the inside of her thigh. He bit her so hard in her back and shoulders that the teethmarks were visible for damn near a week and a half afterwards. He bit her on her left breast so hard that she came within, according to her doctor, “a prayer” of losing her left nipple permanently.
One of the scariest things that I have ever seen was when Clint Malarchuk got his jugular sliced into. Here is the story with a link to a photo.
When I was in high school my history teacher showed us the film NIGHT AND FOG, about concentration camps. Seeing all those emaciated bodies being bulldozed into mass graves was probably the worst thing I’ve ever seen and ever will see.
MESSAGE TO GROK*: Do you mean there’s someone besides me who saw THREADS ??? I saw it while in college, but can’t find a video of it anywhere, and I’ve got movie catalogs like crazy. Did it turn up on PBS or cable or something? Any info from you, or anyone for that matter, would be appreciated.
Sir Rhosis-
There is in fact a movie of the Vietnamese soldier’s execution and a picture.
I’ve seen both. And yes, in the movie, it shows blood squirting out of the side of the guys head as he’s shot. It’s gruesome.
IIRC, from memory alone, it was a public execution of a North Vietnamese solder convicted of spying or some such thing back during the war. It was a fairly big case and the execution took place in front of a number of reporters and newscrews there for the trial. I also seem to recall that when it aired in the U.S., it cemented the anti-war cause in the U.S… Alot of people were moved by both the picture and the grainy footage. Ironic, considering this was going on all over the place in Vietnam.
The one that sticks out in my mind was the first real killing that I’d ever seen on T.V… I think I was about nine or ten at the time.
It was a while back when Central America was in the midst of a number of uprisings and coups. The late 70’s (?).
A news crew is there reporting on the tensions and fighting in the area. A U.S. reporter, going for the scoop interview, walks up to talk to a rebel soldier in the street. The camera was aways a away, and you can’t hear the audio between the soldier and the reporter, but you can clearly see what’s going on.
You see the reporter walk up soldier, rather calmy, at this point, and try to interview the guy. You then see him hold his hands up in the air and stand back from the soldier. Then, as the camera man starts whispering to himself, off camera, “Oh no. no. No!” he proceeds to get on his hands and knees and begin to motion widely. He’s begging for his life. He then lays down on the ground, per the soldiers orders, spread-eagle, and is shot in the head."
I’ll never forget it.
Your images are truly horrible and gruesome. I hope you are ok.
This thread… I can’t even finish it… I’m so scared, and now i have to go to bed…
When I was in 7th grade, there were a bunch of abortion protestors right in front of our school. They had huge signs with incredibly graphic pictures. The one I remember most showed a pair of forceps holding the unidentifiable head of a fetus. Also in the picture was a tray holding other various parts of the fetus.
Less graphic is when some guy exposed himself to my cross country team my freshman year of HS. I was 14. He was in his car and he was pants-less and masturbating and he would follow our bus (he would turn around and wait for us if he had made a light that we hadn’t). That doesn’t sound so horrifying (because it isn’t) but it was still shocking and I’m more scared of sex now than before.
Thanks. I think I handle them pretty well. The good thing about dreams like that is the sense of relief you feel when you wake up.
I’ve seen it a bunch of times. I show it to everyone I can get to sit still for it. Completely creepy, but kind of a cheesy ending. A finer, more deeply disturbing film is the one with Jane Alexander and WIlliam Devane… “Testament” - also early Kevin Costner and Rebecca De Mornay. Very deeply disturbing and sad.
By the way, I don’t know where you live, but I’ve never had any trouble finding it at video stores.
A quick Google search turned up this:
http://www.ibp-intl.demon.co.uk/nuke/threads.html
stoid
I’ve never seen anything really horrible in real life
In documentaries:
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A cat in some Asian country, being prepped for dinner: drop quickly in hot water to soften skin, stir, pull out, skin (in one neat motion, i might add) and drop in cold water, where we get to enjoy the site of the cat spasming and gasping for air, atill alive. Cool.
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Old film of some psychotic fucks doing some kind of “experiement” which involved tying a conscious pig down, then blowtorching it’s skin til it bubbles up and peels off, with the pig screaming and struggling. Even cooler.
<Leaves room, vomits, crys, returns>
Now, we all know the Internet is an endless source of mind-boggling horror. Lots of dismemberment, scrambled brains, human roadkill. But among my favorites, I’d have to list:
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The autopsy photo of the lovely young female murder victim…not an amazing amount of blood or viscera, but there didn’t need to be: she had a broom shoved so far up inside her that just the broom itself and about six inches of the handle was still visible. (Gasp, churn, more vomit)
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The suicide victim who, fantastically, committed the deed by cutting himself in half at the waste with a circular saw. The photo was black and white, and the body parts were already in rigor mortis, the lower half still “sitting” at the saw, the upper half having fallen to the side. Now THAT was a man intent on dying!
stoid
who used to have a fascination with this stuff, and the Internet satisfied it.
PS: A non-violent horror: a video of two cute little Japanese girls, giggling away, one in the bath, the other perched on the edge. The one perched leans over, barfs into the water. Giggling all around. Girl in water fishes out the chunks, eats them. Neato.
(Runs from the room gagging)
I’ve been a firefighter for 14 years and I’ve seen some pretty hideous things. But the one that sticks out is a 15 year old kid who got half of his head ripped off in an auto accident. A cop had fished out his wallet for ID and was looking at the back of a photo of the kid and his girlfriend. He was laughing and pretending to read the back of the photo. “Dear Brad, I love the way you ---- me in the — with your big long ----”. I was about to tell the cop that he was a sick piece of shit until I noticed that his eyes were as round as saucers. Just his way of dealing with it, I guess.
Another thing that bugged the hell out of me was a photo of a tiny Egyptian woman being led (carried) to the gallows for the murder of her husband. Her face was an absolute rictus of terror. I wasn’t so big on the death penalty after that.
The worst thing I ever saw was in 1980. I arrived at work, my first drafting job, at my boss’s house. I smelled smoke. The next door neighbor lady was on her porch. Even though she didn’t speak English, we managed to communicate that we both smelled smoke. At that moment, the house next to hers started pouring smoke, and flames spouted from the roof. A man came out. It was horrible. He only had underwear on, and skin was peeling from him in strips, he was so badly burned. I ran inside to call 911, and we got a blanket to wrap him in.
It turns out that the guy had an alcohol/drug problem, and his wife had left him. He decided to commit suicide by hooking up a garden hose to his gas fireplace and piping in the gas to his bedroom. The gas didn’t kill him, and when he awoke the next morning he lit a cigarette. Ka-Boom!
Several houses’ roofs caught fire from this Darwin Award wannabe.
I was interviewed on the news as a witness. My lousy 15 (try 2) minutes of fame. I looked totally pasty white, and I stuttered a bit.
I still remember the way he looked.