My husband is watching a movie which is about secretly trafficking drugs in neon colored race cars. Or something like that. I’m not paying that much attention. There is a scene where the bad guy gets information from someone by putting a rat on his belly and then covering the rat with a bucket. As he explains it, the rat will dig through the torturee’s belly to escape.
Now, I don’t want to take as gospel the word of a movie that thinks that neon colored race cars are a good way to secretly move drugs, so I’m asking you dopers. Do you think this rat torture would work in real life?
I think it likely a determined rat could bite and claw through human flesh, and if it were agitated it would do so quickly, and being confined thus would agitate it. But most importantly, I think the idea of being eaten thus by a rat would freak out everybody my side of Leroy Jethro Gibbs in at most twenty-seven seconds. If that.
I’m not saying I’d last the full 27 seconds, either. Rhymers are cowards.
It’s a rip-off of *Nineteen Eighty Four *where Winston Smith was tortured in a similar fashion.
It had been established earlier in the novel that he had a deep-rooted phobia against rats. It doesn’t matter whether the threat is realistic, ju8st that this particular individual was ready to believe the threat.
Nope, not like 1984. In 1984 they let the rats crawl all over Wilson, who was deathly terrified of them. In this movie it was explicit that the rats would chew through his belly. There’s even a shot of his scratched upped bloody belly once the bucket was removed.
It’s from Fast and Furious 2. I got drug to it. They put the rat on his stomach, put the bucket over it, then heat it up with a torch or something. He finally says whatever he’s supposed to and they lift the bucket. His stomach is scratched and bleeding. It may have been Flass from Batman Begins, if I remember correctly.
Of course not. You’re not going to freak out nearly as bad as Smith did before they even got the mask on his face, let alone got near the point of opening the cage, but any sane person’s going to be freaked by the idea - let alone once the rats start clawing and biting at you.
I didn’t have a rat phobia before I read the book. But I did after. Also, after American Psycho…though I don’t remember if Patrick Bateman actually went through with it in that one.
The thing is, I don’t know a great deal about rat behaviour. It might be that a zoologist might come to this thread and say, with authority, “oh come on, rats don’t behave like that.”
Maybe they do, and maybe they don’t. Thinking about it rationally, I am rather dubious that a rat would be able to think of such concepts as gnawing a tunnel through a person to escape a trap.
But, whether realistic or not, Winston was ready to believe the threat. That’s what made it an effective torture.
Why wouldn’t they? ‘Gnaw through nearest surface that’s soft enough to do so’ is the typical rodent method for getting past a barrier, and rats are omnivorous, so going through flesh wouldn’t bother them.
This method of torture,including heating the metal bowl or bucket, is also described in detail in the film Graveyard Shift.
Personally, I don’t think it would work that well. Is a rat smart enough to figure out ‘the metal above me is hot. I shall burrow down to escape’? I can easily see the rat just panicking and doing nothing.
This. A form of torture doesn’t need to “work” the way the OP seems to be using the word - it just needs to be convincing enough that the victim decides they’re better off talking.