10 Movies That Got Real Dark, Real Fast
When movies take a very dark path out of nowhere.
Transcript
00:00 For a movie to find success of any kind, it has to evoke some sort of emotion from the
00:04 audience. Whether it's joy, excitement, intrigue, or nostalgia, those watching a story have to feel
00:10 connected to it. It's no easy task, but there are plenty of ways it can be done.
00:15 Certainly, positive emotions aren't the only path. Movies can make you feel sad,
00:19 angry, or scared as an effective method to commit you to the story.
00:23 Usually, there are certain types of movies in which an audience would expect this kind of darkness,
00:28 but that is not always the case. Such darkness, particularly coming so abruptly and seemingly
00:33 out of nowhere, can be quite jarring for an audience, and it can often then change the
00:37 complexion of the entire film. On the other hand, it could potentially add that touch of genuine
00:43 emotion, even if that emotion is depression, to make a memorable and often iconic moment.
00:48 And so, with that in mind, I'm Ellie, with WhatCulture, here with 10 movies that got real
00:53 dark, real fast. Number 10, Zombieland.
00:56 This is the first of two zombie movies on this list, but it's very different from most others
01:01 in the genre. Zombieland, even with the living dead and the gory deaths, was still first and
01:06 foremost a comedy. The movie was goofy, weirdly heartwarming, and outright hilarious at times,
01:11 but there was one moment of pain and darkness just waiting to pounce on the unsuspecting audience.
01:16 This revolved around Woody Harrelson's character, affectionately known as Tallahassee,
01:20 by his new friends. The whole point of using destinations as their names was to avoid getting
01:25 too close or attached to each other, but still, Tallahassee found himself discussing his dog,
01:30 Buck. He loved the dogs so much that they were best friends, but he was taken away from him by
01:34 the damn zombies. It's not until he's playing a game of Monopoly with Columbus, Wichita,
01:39 and Little Rock that the realisation hits. Buck wasn't Tallahassee's dog, he was his son,
01:45 his young boy that was killed by the zombies and that he would never see again. Woody Harrelson
01:50 wasn't the only one crying at this point. Number 9, The Dark Knight.
01:54 Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy was far darker than the Joel Schumacher and Tim
01:58 Burton efforts that came before it. In fairness, this wouldn't have been particularly difficult,
02:03 but this was definitely a newer tone to the Caped Crusader on the big screen.
02:07 The broodier Bruce Wayne found himself up against a far creepier version of the Joker in The Dark
02:13 Knight, but even so, the movie took an unexpectedly harrowing turn. When the clown prince of crime
02:18 called out Batman on TV, the Joker was broadcast interrogating and torturing a man who dressed up
02:24 like the Batman in what was a genuinely disturbing video. Off screen, he took the man's life, but how
02:29 he announced this to the world was arguably even darker. Mayor Garcia looked out of his office
02:34 window across Gotham. Before seeing this Batman impersonator, with the Joker's smile painted on
02:40 his lips and a noose around his neck, crash into the glass. The shock of the moment of seeing a
02:45 man hanged by the neck slamming into the window out of nowhere, followed by the subsequent murder
02:49 tape, was darker and tougher to watch than anything else in the movie. Even more so than
02:54 using a man's head to make a pencil disappear. Number 8, Mulan.
02:58 One of the trademarks of Disney animation is the impossibly catchy music. Let It Go,
03:03 You're Welcome, and most recently We Don't Talk About Bruno have taken the world by storm,
03:07 and songs like these often distract from how dark the stories can actually be.
03:11 Take Mulan, for instance. The main story is about the titular character going undercover as a man
03:16 in the Chinese army in place of her father, trying to prove herself not only to Shang,
03:21 but to her own family. In the background of this, however, is why she has to join the army
03:25 in the first place. The setting for the movie is the invasion of China by the Huns, but with
03:30 songs like Reflection and Honor to Us All, this could easily be forgotten. Instead, the troops
03:35 in Shang's command were having a laugh, becoming friends, and enjoying their time together.
03:39 This stopped abruptly, however, after a song about finding the right girl for them. A girl worth
03:44 fighting for actually stopped mid-sentence as the troops stumbled across a village that had
03:48 been ruthlessly put to the torch. Nothing brings you back to reality like the brutal deaths of an
03:53 untold number of innocent people, particularly in a Disney movie. Number 7, Star Wars Revenge
03:58 of the Sith. The Star Wars prequel trilogy told the story of Anakin Skywalker and his seduction
04:04 by Darth Sidious and the Dark Side. The once-great Jedi who were supposed to bring balance to the
04:09 force played a great role in bringing down almost the entire Order, save for Yoda and Obi-Wan.
04:14 Everyone watching was already aware of the ultimate fate of Anakin. It was no secret
04:18 that he would eventually become Darth Vader, and the movies fell flat. One of the biggest
04:22 criticisms across the board was the goofiness and silliness, which wasn't just brought to the table
04:27 by Jar Jar Binks alone. Arguably the defining moment of the entire trilogy, however, was the
04:31 execution of Order 66. Palpatine ordered the new Darth Vader and the entire clone army to kill
04:37 every Jedi, and a harrowing montage showing the murder of the galaxy's peacekeepers followed,
04:42 but nothing compared to the deaths of the younglings. At the Jedi Temple, Anakin came
04:47 across the defenseless younglings who looked to their elder for help. Anakin instead looked into
04:52 those innocent eyes and drew his lightsaber. The deaths of these children weren't initially shown
04:57 on screen, though footage was later seen on a security hologram, as were their little bodies
05:02 afterwards. Grim stuff. 6. Up
05:05 When you go in to watch a Pixar movie, it's to be expected that there's going to be a great
05:10 deal of emotion, and usually more than a little heartbreak. If the studio can make an audience
05:14 genuinely care about toys and robots, just imagine what can happen with actual humans.
05:19 On the face of it, Up looked like it would be a nice, uplifting movie about the relationship
05:24 between an old man and a young boy. This was very much true, but no one expected the opening 10
05:29 minutes to be as devastating and distressing as they were. Even for Pixar, the opening scenes
05:34 of Up were tough to take. Carl and Ellie's relationship was truly special, but in the
05:38 montage that showed their time together, there were two gut punches that should've at least come with
05:42 a warning beforehand. The first was Ellie's trip to the doctor that confirmed she had either
05:47 suffered a miscarriage or was unable to have children at all, followed by her death. Naturally,
05:51 this tore Carl apart and audiences along with him. 5. In Bruges
05:56 Before Martin McDonagh's award nominated The Banshees of Innocherent, the acclaimed director
06:02 worked with both Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson on In Bruges. The movie was a dark comedy that
06:07 followed Ray and Kent, two hitmen who had been sent to Bruges after a job gone wrong. Early on,
06:12 audiences knew that these two friends were contract killers, but the tone of the movie
06:16 didn't exactly reflect that. There was plenty of goofy humour and a grown man sarcastically
06:21 pouting about having to be in Bruges, but then exactly what happened during the previous job
06:26 was shown. In Ray's first job for Harry, he killed a priest, firing at the target first through the
06:30 wall of a confessional booth, before shooting him in the back. The problem was that the killer
06:35 didn't see who was on the other side of the priest. The shot of the unmoving little boy
06:39 killed by a bullet of Ray's that went straight through the priest is haunting. This took the
06:44 movie down a very dark path and opened the door to some very suicidal thoughts of Ray after what
06:49 he had done. There was still a surprising amount of humour in the movie, but it was never quite
06:53 the same tone after this scene. 4. The Lion King
06:57 There are countless iconic moments in Disney animation, with more than a few coming in the
07:01 original Lion King. The opening scene, the Hakuna Matata montage, and more are favourites among
07:07 Disney fans, but the movie isn't all sunshine and singing. In fact, The Lion King is arguably the
07:12 most traumatic Disney movie ever, and that takes some doing. The phrase "Long live the king" will
07:17 forever be associated with the moment Scar throws his brother into the stampede to his death.
07:22 After the fun songs and playful nature between Simba and his father, and even with the obvious
07:27 evil of Scar and his hyenas, this was jarring. But it was about to get so much worse. Poor little
07:33 Simba finds the corpse of his father and tries desperately to wake him up, as only an innocent
07:37 child could. How can a movie so beloved be so difficult to watch? 3. A Quiet Place
07:43 From the beginning of his feature directorial debut, John Krasinski proved himself to be a
07:48 master of suspense. The opening minutes of A Quiet Place are as close to silent as possible,
07:53 setting the eerie tone for the story and the situation itself. Things first escalate when
07:57 the young boy of the family picks up some batteries for a rocket toy that just so happens
08:01 to make a loud noise. When he turns it on, to the horror of the rest of his family, they are a good
08:06 few hundred yards away, so the father sprints towards him immediately. Even in spite of the
08:11 movie's tense opening, nobody expected those hideous aliens to beat Krasinski to his son.
08:17 Surely the movie wouldn't open with such a brutal death after what was a relatively calm,
08:21 if eerie, first few minutes. Turns out that, yes, yes it would. That innocent kid was killed
08:26 just a fraction of a second before his dad was able to save him. This fractured the family
08:30 beyond repair, and gave the entire movie a whole new tone for the rest of its runtime.
08:34 2. Jojo Rabbit For a movie based around World War II,
08:38 Jojo Rabbit was a light-hearted joy of a movie, for the most part. Such is the impact of Taika
08:44 Waititi when he gets things right, and doesn't go too far Love and Thunder style. For all its
08:48 comedy, however, there was a deep emotional thread throughout, based around Jojo's mother,
08:53 Rosie. While her son was a member of the Hitler Youth, she herself risked her life to hide a
08:58 young Jewish girl from the Nazis. There's a scene in the movie where Rosie is standing at a higher
09:02 level than Jojo, so her shoes are directly in his eye line. The audience thinks nothing of it at
09:07 the time, it's just a mother playing with her son, but it comes back in a haunting, devastating way
09:12 later in the movie. As Jojo is following a butterfly through the town square, he once again
09:16 comes upon those same shoes at his eye line, only this time, there is nothing underneath.
09:21 She's been hanged. Jojo Rabbit had plenty of laughs, and things never got too dark,
09:26 which made this hugely impactful moment all the more heartbreaking.
09:30 1. I Am Legend This list has largely been comprised of the
09:34 deaths of numerous characters, whether it was characters largely unknown, someone's parents,
09:38 or even the death of a child. You could argue that none of them compare to the death of an
09:42 animal on the big screen, however. Audiences typically go into certain genres of films
09:47 expecting to see death, and though these can be devastating, the death of a dog,
09:50 particularly one as good as Robert Neville's in I Am Legend, just hits different.
09:55 This took a relatively dark movie to a whole new level instantly. The horror of the fight
10:00 sequence before it, the realisation that the dog Sam had been hurt and would soon turn against her
10:05 best friend, and the action of Robert killing her himself was just too much to take. The act
10:10 itself happens off screen in a way, where Will Smith is visible but Sam isn't. You could argue
10:15 this as some small solace, but that didn't make it any less traumatic. The death of a dog is one of
10:20 the worst things you can see on the big screen, particularly when the owner is forced to put it
10:24 down himself. And that concludes our list. If you think we missed any, then do let us know
10:29 in the comments below, and while you're there, don't forget to like and subscribe, and tap that
10:32 notification bell. Also, head over to Twitter and follow us there, and I can be found across various
10:37 social medias just by searching Ellie Littlechild. I've been Ellie with WhatCulture, I hope you have
10:41 a magical day, and I'll see you real soon.