by Wallace, Amy
6. Deep Red (1975): A clairvoyant hacked to death and impaled on broken glass? Yep, quite nasty. A man dragged along the street behind a garbage truck? That’s pretty ouch. A recently stabbed woman drowned in a bath of scalding hot water? Now, we’re getting warmer. Okay, how about a psychiatrist being menaced by a spooky robotic doll, then struck around the head by a mystery killer who then . . . then . . . proceeds to bash his teeth out on a hard wooden mantelpiece? The doll is scary as shit, but I can take that. The teeth being deliberately knocked out? That is just ouch. Unforgettable ouch.
7. Misery (1990): In Stephen King’s novel, deranged superfan Annie Wilkes cuts off romantic novelist Paul Sheldon’s foot, punishing him for having the audacity to try escaping her suffocating clutches. Screenwriter William Goldman was attracted to the adaptation because of the shocking power of this scene. But who knew that a softened version of the scene would somehow have twice the ouch? In Rob Reiner’s film, Kathy Bates cripples James Caan by placing a block of wood between his ankles and then thwacking them with a sledgehammer. This practice, usually employed when impeding the movement of farm animals (or disobedient workers), is known as “hobbling,” as Annie helpfully explains. The unanimous cries of the audience immediately made the practice infamous. A bigger crunch has never reverberated around auditoriums.
8. Zombi 2 (aka Zombie aka Zombie Flesh-Eaters) (1979): Zombie movies generally center on a few key, shocking images: walking corpses and people getting munched. That’s enough of a raison d’être to spawn hundreds of great zombie movies. (Okay, maybe eleven good ones, thirty-two great bad ones, and countless bad, bad ones.) It’s ironic, then, that Lucio Fulci’s notorious Italian splatter-fest gains its infamy from one moment that doesn’t have a whole lot to do with flesh-eating. I’m talking of the scene when poor Olga Karlatos gets out of the shower, hears an intruder, locks the bathroom door and then . . . bang. A moldy zombie hand bursts through the wooden door, grabs her painfully by the hair, and then slowly pulls her face towards the door, her eye inching ever-closer to a huge, fourteen-inch splinter. The eventual penetration of said eye by big splinter is unmatched in its nastiness. Poor lady. Frankly, if I had a choice between eyeballpuncture and being eaten alive, I’d choose the latter. Leave my eyes out of it; just eat me, already.
9. The Fly (1986): David Cronenberg is truly the king of body horror. A large part of his oeuvre is dedicated to surreal distortions of the human form. Classic images, such as Max Renn pulling a flesh revolver out of an abdominal vagina (in Videodrome), are seared onto the brains of many horror fans. His fevered imagination of parasites in armpits, mutant afterbirths, and the aforementioned exploding heads are gloriously twisted. But sometimes Cronenberg can get the biggest ouch from the most everyday of terrors. In The Fly, the fast-disintegrating Seth Brundle stands in front of the bathroom mirror, horrified and fascinated by his decaying fingers. He first squeezes an obscene amount of pus from one of the digits. Cue audience, freaking out. This is then topped by Brundle casually peeling off one of his fingernails. Somehow this small moment combines the unease of every anxiety dream of rotting teeth with the sheer agony and ecstasy of picking a scab. It’s truly unmatched for sheer squirm and audible wince.
10. Grindhouse (2007): In Eli Roth’s hilarious faux-trailer for the nonexistent Thanksgiving, there is a moment that proudly aspires to match Italian horror cinema’s limitless depths of misogyny. There is no real reason why a scene in which a cheerleader bouncing on a trampoline does the splits in the air and lands naked onto the killer’s knife would feature in a holiday-centric slasher flick. You thankfully don’t even see the collision of the skyward-pointing instrument and the young lady’s young lady-parts. But good God, if the entire audience I saw it with didn’t raise the roof with a deafening “OOOOOOH!” A moment so wince–inducing, it causes both sexes to cross their legs. That’s some powerful ouch.
Very Honorable Mention: Jackass: The Movie (2002): It’s not a horror film per se, but the honor of surely one of the biggest collective shrieks of pain I’ve ever heard in a cinema goes to the big-screen version of Jackass. Swimming With Sharks sadly loses its title of “Best Paper Cut Scene” to Johnny Knoxville and his merry band of pranksters. The scene involves the Jackass team inflicting paper cuts on each other, climaxing with the lunatic Steve-O getting a paper cut on his tongue. I saw this in a packed house and I’m not sure I’ve ever heard such a loud reaction. Simple, yet brutally effective. Truly the death of a thousand ouches.
ELI ROTH’S TOP TEN NASTIEST HORROR MOVIE
GENITAL MUTILATIONS
Eli Roth burst onto the horror scene in 2002 with Cabin Fever. He then wrote, produced, and directed Hostel, which was a smash hit worldwide. Hostel was voted the#1scariest film of all time on Bravo’s “Even Scarier Movie Moments” and earned rave reviews around the globe. Roth made the sequel in 2007, cementing his reputation as one of the most profitable yet uncompromising horror filmmakers working today. His works to date have been produced for a combined total budget of $16million, and have earned over $160 million at the box office alone. He has been profiled in the New York Times, GQ, Interview, and Rolling Stone, and has been a guest on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Kimmel Live,and The Howard Stern Show.
Between Cabin Fever, both Hostel films, and Thanksgiving, I’ve chopped up my fair share of body parts. However, there’s nothing more satisfying than filming a gore scene where you chop up the naughty bits. Genital mutilation always, always gets the biggest reaction from the crowd, and the scenes become those moments that everyone talks about years and years later. When I was a kid, if I saw a film with a great head explosion, it was cool, but nowhere near as thrilling as a realistic on-camera castration. So here are the nastiest genital mutilations—the ones that made me cross my legs and squeal like a little girl.
1. To Be Twenty—The Final Scene
I watched Fernando Di Leo’s little-seen classic and am simply amazed he had the balls to make this film. Di Leo was an incredibly smart director who loved making genre B-movies, and never cared to make Italian so-called art films. He made great crime movies, but the film that for me defines his career is To Be Twent y, a movie that for eighty-five minutes is a sexy comedy, until the last five minutes when it all goes horribly, horribly wrong. Di Leo set out to make a film that showed the change in attitude towards open sexuality in Italy in the early seventies, when the hippie movement was dying down, and the older generation wanted to punish the kids for their open sexuality. He cast two of the most popular actresses from “sexy” comedies—Gloria Guida and Lili Carati—and for eighty-five minutes, the girls run around Rome, having fun, having lots of sex, and teasing men and getting away with it because they’re so beautiful. That is, until they tease the wrong group of men at a diner. The men chase the girls into the woods, rip their clothes off, and rape them. The scene is so real and horrific, you can only imagine what they went through when they filmed it. One of girls is held upside down by two men, spreading her legs like a wishbone, and the leader of the gang vaginally stabs her to death with a giant stick. Her friend is then beaten to death, and the men walk away, accidentally stepping on the girls’ portable radio, turning on disco music. The girls are left naked and dead in the woods, and the credits roll over the frozen image, accompanied by the disco music. Even knowing what’s coming, the film has genuinely the most shocking and disturbing ending I’ve ever seen. When the film came out in theaters, crowds went to see it expecting a fun sexy comedy, and they got it . . . until the end. By the end of the first day every single print of the film was recalled, and the entire film was recut. Only one print of the film survived, and was used to make a DVD, which has both versions of the film. People were outraged, and it isn’t until only recently that critics have been reexamining the film, and appreciate it for what it is. Di Leo was grossly misunderstood, as was his film, which was made with great intelligence and care, and was intended to be disturbing. It’s a hard film to watch, but a brilliant one if you can get past
the shock of what happens and see what Di Leo was saying about culture and society in Italy at the time.
2. The New York Ripper—The Nipple-Slicing Scene
Despite his writing and directing masterpieces in so many different genres (watch Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, Don’t Torture a Duckling, and The Beyond for proof), critics and fans have never quite forgiven Lucio Fulci for his early eighties Times Square sleaze-fest, The New York Ripper. Fulci went on an amazing run starting in 1980 with Zombie, and made some of the most violent but beautiful and surreal horror films that fans are only now truly beginning to appreciate. However, he abandoned this craft for pure sadism, shock, and violence in The New York Ripper, a film even the most hardcore horror fans feel they need to take a shower immediately after watching. Fulci made this film without two of his longtime collaborators—cinematographer Sergio Salvati and composer Fabio Frizzi—and somehow the film just feels “dirtier.” There are many brutal murders in this film, done by a pervert who hangs out in Times Square sex clubs and kills in a comical Donald Duck voice, but nothing is more cruel and disturbing than Daniela Doria’s slow death by razorblade in her apartment. The film has already had a girl stabbed in the vagina with a broken bottle and a nymphomaniac tied up in a motel room before being stabbed to death, but this killing “the Little Duck” makes extra special. The killer calls the police inspector on the case, and slowly slices open the inspector’s prostitute girlfriend, played by Daniela Doria, with a razor blade. But just when you think it’s over—the killer, in graphic close up, carefully slices into her nipples, before finally, slooooooowly bringing the razor over her eyeball. It’s a relentlessly brutal death, and you just get the sense that Fulci was pushing himself to see how far he would dare go to on camera. The beautiful Daniela Doria was one of Fulci’s favorite victims—she was the first to die in House by the Cemetery, she literally puked her guts out in City of the Living Dead, and Fulci ties her up naked to a bed before killing her here, and later gives us a full shot of her carved-up corpse. It’s unfortunate the term “misogyny” got applied to Fulci, because if you see his feminist masterpiece Beatrice Cenci, you know how absurd that label is, but if you saw only this film, you’d understand why people don’t go seeking more of his work, which is truly a shame. Fulci was a genius, and this simple killing is far more disturbing than seeing the same woman endlessly throwing up her own intestines. Viva Fulci!
3. Ricco the Mean Machine—The Cock-and-Ball Gag
If you live in Italy in the 1970s, it’s a real bad idea to sleep with the mafia boss’s wife, no matter how hot she is. In this case, it’s the lovely Malisa Longo, who’s forced to watch the boss’s henchman hold down her lover, Manuel Zarzo, as they chop off his manly bits and shove them down his throat, before tossing the poor eunuch into a vat of acid. This scene caused great outrage in 1973, when the film was released, and the scene was cut, so to speak, for many years. The level of violence in this scene is fairly disproportionate to the rest of the film, which plays like a fairly tame seventies Italian gangster revenge film. Suddenly, out of nowhere, you’re treated to this giant close-up of a knife ripping through the genitals, and then you see them stuffed into his mouth. I’d put this castration on par with the penis-removal in Cannibal Holocaust, in which the penis is presumably also eaten, just not on camera. (Like how I worked another castration in there? Clever, eh?)
4. Cannibal Holocaust—The Stone Dildo
Director Ruggero Deodato spent many years as Italian neorealist master Roberto Rosselini’s assistant director, and took what he learned and applied it to the cannibal genre. With a camera, a skeleton crew, and a jungle full of savages who had never before even seen a movie camera, Deodato made a film that today still holds up as probably the most disturbing film of all time. I cast Deodato as the cannibal in Hostel: Part II not only as a nod to Cannibal Holocaust, but also so I could ask him questions about how he filmed this stuff. Deodato made it seem like it was no big deal, that he just asked the jungle savages to do something and they did it, but the performances are just too good for people who live in trees and hunt with poison darts. In one scene, our main character, a professor from New York University, stumbles upon a villager whose wife was unfaithful. The villager ties the woman’s legs to a tree and stuffs her vagina full of mud, and then proceeds to repeatedly stab her in the vagina with a giant phallic stone until she’s dead. The villager puts her corpse in a canoe, and sends her down the river, presumably as a message to the village, but also probably so they can later enjoy her as a snack. The professor is suitably horrified by the savagery, and we as audience members are equally horrified that someone could film such a scene. However, composer Riz Ortolani’s music is so groovy that you can’t help but later sing it and reenact it at highly inappropriate moments with your brothers when you’re at dinner with your parents. It happens.
5. Ichi the Killer—The Nipple Slice
There are so many over-the-top deaths in Miike’s Splatter Manga Massacrepiece that the film very quickly becomes a cartoon. But even after you’ve seen naked men hung up by hooks in their flesh while boiling oil is poured over them, tongues cut out, and people sliced in half, the scene where a woman’s breasts are put under a table through two holes and her nipples are sliced off still makes me queasy. It’s just so simple and sick, and to stand out in a film like this is a feat indeed. The movie never takes a serious tone, and is meant to be a nonstop, over-the-top orgy of cartoonish violence, but this one kill feels somehow more painful than slicing off your own tongue.
6. Last House on the Left—The Blow Job With Extra Teeth
In a wonderful twist of events, the mother of murdered rape victim Mary Colinwood goes so far as to not just seduce the psycho serial killer/rapist (played by Fred Lincoln), she actually goes down on him, and finishes him off with a final chomp. The kill isn’t nearly as graphic as Mary’s mutilation, when you see the killers spool out her intestines like a garden hose, but you hate this bastard so much it’s fun to see him get it. It’s also worth noting that Fred Lincoln (under the name F. J. Lincoln) went on to direct a number of porn films, which makes this death that much more appropriate.
7. Cannibal Ferox—The Meat Hook Brassiere
Those troublemaking twentysomethings should know better than to go playing around in a cannibal village in the jungle— especially since this film was made as a response to the success of Cannibal Holocaust. When they’re finally captured and punished, director Umberto Lenzi, in a bid to outdo director Ruggero Deodato, has the cannibals hang up actress Zora Kerova by her breasts with large metal hooks. You can see her flesh stretching—my nipples hurt just thinking about it. It’s all done in plain daylight right on camera, and the effects are pretty sick. It should be noted that Zora Kerova—just a year later—gets a broken bottle stabbed into her crotch in Lucio Fulci’s sleaze-fest The New York Ripper, presumably in a bid by Fulci to outdo Lenzi.
8. Cannibal Holocaust—The Abortion by Hand
I could fill up this entire list with genital mutilations from Deodato’s neorealist grindhouse classic, but I’ll try to keep it to the most painful ones. A villager is pregnant, and we witness the other girls hold her down, reach up inside her, and pull out a baby. These are not the village midwives, this is some kind of punishment, and since we know they’re cannibals, we can only assume they’re preparing dinner. It’s as disgusting as it sounds. The camera doesn’t flinch, but you will.
9. Mother’s Day—The Axe in the Balls
This is one of the most satisfying kills in all the eighties slasher movies, because the girls who’ve been held captive and raped by the hillbillies get their revenge and hit one of the rapists where it hurts the most. I showed this film at my bar mitzvah after-party (because I wasn’t friends with enough girls to have a dance) and we replayed this scene over and over, frame by frame, laughing and cheering at the meaty testicle-lump that spills out over the blade. A great kill.
10. Night Train Murders—The Switchblade Tampon
&nb
sp; Two creepy Italian guys and a demented rich woman torment two girls traveling home for Christmas in Aldo Lado’s tense, atmospheric ripoff of Last House on the Left. The more unstable of the two psychos pushes the envelope by holding a switchblade at the crotch of one of the girls, and as the train goes into a tunnel they bump on the tracks and he accidentally stabs the knife into her. The scene’s played very, very realistically, and we realize the psychos didn’t mean for it to go that far, but now that the damage is done, they have to finish the girls. The girls are so sweet and likable that you really want them to survive, so when that moment comes it’s extremely difficult to watch. What makes it more nauseating is that you feel the killers are as sick about it as the audience is.
JAMES GUNN’S NINETEEN FAVORITE REASONS
GOD MADE HUMANS SO SQUISHY
James Gunn likes horror movies. He’s made a few movies that seem like horror movies but aren’t really all that horrific—including writing the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead ,which is kind of more of an action film than a horror film, and writing and directing 2006’s Slither, which is really kind of a comedy more than a horror film. Currently, he is writing and directing Pets, which also isn’t a horror movie, and writing and directing the Internet series PG-Porn (guess what—not horror). Most recently, he wrote this biography, which he really wouldn’t recommend to anyone. You can be one of his 30,000 closest friends at www.myspace.com/slithermovie.
These are a few of my favorite gory moments in movies. Some of these movies I don’t even like—but each of these moments in particular is transcendent. A word of warning: many are over-the-top and funny, but a few are disturbing and not for the fainthearted (however, I suppose if you’re fainthearted it’s kind of stupid to be reading The Book of Lists: Horror).