Peel your eyes, crack your fingers and try not to lose your lunch when these films bring the pain.
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00:00With so many truly grim horror films out there, and with more being made all the time,
00:04there are innumerable scenes designed to leave audiences kinda wanting less.
00:09And while many of them do get off on one-upping the level of blood and violence of their predecessors,
00:15this doesn't mean that every hard-to-watch moment comes from the bloodiest flicks.
00:20In fact, the most horrifying scene often requires a nuanced touch.
00:24And also, just as a content warning before we begin this one in particular,
00:28with a title like this, this one is going to feature some heavy violence
00:32of all kinds and descriptions of it, so please, please bear that in mind.
00:36So, just when you thought it was safe to go back in the living room,
00:39I'm Josh from WhatCulture.com, and these are 10 More Hardest-to-Watch Horror Movie Moments.
00:4510. A Stone's Throw – Speak No Evil
00:48One of 2022's best horrors, pretty much every second of Speak No Evil is difficult to watch.
00:54Not because of violence either, no, but because this tale of a Danish couple accepting to stay
01:00at the home of a Dutch couple that they briefly met on holiday, leans heavily on awkward situations
01:06that are just unbearable. As their hosts start to act increasingly strange, aggressive and imposing,
01:13the horror initially comes from the awkwardness of asking them to tone it down,
01:18without pissing them off or making them angry.
01:21Of course, this is all set-dressing for a gut-punch final reveal,
01:25where it turns out that this Dutch couple are actually a pair of psychopaths
01:30who go from country to country killing lovers and stealing their children.
01:35And when they finally put this grand plan into motion here, we get the movie's most stomach-churning
01:41scene. Powerless to their fate, the couple are driven out to the middle of nowhere,
01:45stripped naked and forced to stand still. Then the Dutch pair stone them to death,
01:51with the impact of each rock being more brutal than the last. The powerlessness of the situation
01:57combined with the frankness of the violence, not to mention the understanding that they're not just
02:02dying, but that their killers will then steal their child, just makes this a traumatising
02:08ending for even horror veterans. 9. A Helping Hand – Gerald's Game
02:14Gerald's Game hasn't quite stood the test of time as an all-time great like so much of Mike
02:18Flanagan's work, but it is an excellent little chamber piece about a woman who gets handcuffed
02:23to a bed and left there, after her and her husband's frisky night ends with the latter
02:29having a heart attack. After days spent stuck to the bed with her escape attempts failing,
02:34things start to get a little drastic. With her wrists cut from struggling to free herself from
02:40the cuffs, it becomes clear that there's no way out of them without inflicting some harm on
02:45herself. And here's where the famous de-gloving moment comes in, and honestly, even just writing
02:52that down and saying it out loud makes my tummy feel a little bit dodgy. As you might be able to
02:57tell from that creative moniker though, in order to free herself, she needs to rip her hand through
03:02the cuff and in doing so, she pulls all the skin off it in the process, leaving her with a mangled
03:09appendage. There's almost certainly no way we can show this in the video, but trust me,
03:14they pull no punches in showing just how brutal and painful this is.
03:198. A Great Pain – Evil Dead Rise
03:22The most recent movie on this list now, so skip to the next entry if you don't want spoilers,
03:26but honestly they kinda give away this whole bit in the trailer anyway. Evil Dead Rise did
03:31not disappoint when it came to the violent heritage of the franchise, even if it did
03:36lean a little bit too heavily on CGI here and there. Still, there are plenty of watch behind
03:41your fingers moments, but of course the one we're talking about today is the now infamous
03:46cheese grater shot. Now despite all the hype, this moment is quite short in the finished flick.
03:51In this scene, a possessed Bridget goes full ham and attacks Beth with a cheese grater as
03:56she tries to crawl away, scraping the skin off of her back leg with it. It's quick, it's nasty,
04:04and leaves everyone thinking, God I'd hate it if that happened to me.
04:077. Face Off – Dagon
04:10We've had a scene of de-gloving on this list so far, but you know what's worse than that?
04:14Well, de-facing. Alright, admittedly it's not quite as catchy or as memorable, but the most
04:21insane scene in the otherwise rather pulpy and B-movie inspired lovecraftian horror Dagon
04:27comes towards the end, where our heroes are caught by the cult that worships the titular deity.
04:32Protagonist Paul and reluctant helper Ezekiel find themselves at the mercy of the villains,
04:38who have a painful fate for both of them prepared should they refuse to give themselves to the cult.
04:43Ezekiel is the first on the chopping block, and both Paul and the audience have to watch as the
04:48cult start the process of flaying him alive, starting by cutting and peeling the skin
04:55directly off the guy's face. While Dagon does have an issue with some dodgy effects and a
05:01wonky tone, this is a scene where the filmmakers absolutely commit to the bit,
05:06doubling down on visceral violence and a truly harrowing tone.
05:106. No Place Like Home – Eden Lake
05:13Look, I know we talk about Eden Lake all the time at WhatCultureHorror, but I think we actually
05:18showed some pretty good restraint not putting it on the first version of this list, and leaving
05:23it off twice would just feel like an insult. The British horror cult classic sees a couple
05:29terrorised by violent youths while on an idyllic holiday at a lake. With the man tortured and
05:35killed and the woman, Jenny, chased through the woods and barely making it out alive,
05:39it initially looks like this bleak, bleak movie might actually get a happy ending.
05:44Oh, how naive we were to believe that, because after stealing a car from one of the young
05:50boys' brothers, it seems as though Jenny has escaped. In her delirium, she ends up crashing
05:56the car, sure, but fortunately it's in a nearby town, where she's taken in by a group of adults
06:02having a party. Only, it turns out that she's actually crashed into the house of one of the boys
06:08who was trying to kill her. And once their parents find out what's happened, they decide
06:13to protect their own and get rid of the evidence. 5. The Cats Out the Back Smile
06:19I freaking love Smile. It's one of the biggest surprises in a recent memory, a real mainstream
06:25crowd-pleaser that's built on a solid filmmaking core. Is it perfect? No, but it is damn effective.
06:33And right from the opening scene, where hero Rose is cursed after witnessing the death of a
06:37possessed victim of the smile demon, we know the movie means business. And this comes to a head in
06:44the film's most difficult to watch scene, where Rose attends her nephew's birthday party. See,
06:49she's wrapped him a gift, and the scene shows him opening it in front of all the other parents and
06:55kids. Though we don't get to see initially, the kids' traumatised expression when unwrapping the
07:00gift just says it all. Something bad is in that box. With everyone confused, the camera then
07:07cuts inside the box, and reveals that Rose has wrapped up the dead corpse of her pet cat, which
07:14actually went missing previously in the movie. The shot itself is uncomfortable, sure, but the
07:19difficulty to watch actually comes from Rose now being viewed as a psycho in front of all of these
07:26people, with the demon successfully making her look unhinged in front of her family, who of course
07:31want nothing to do with her after this. In The Tortured, a distraught and heartbroken couple
07:40hatch a twisted plan to exact vengeance upon a serial killer called John Kozlowski. It's personal
07:47for the couple as well, as Kozlowski took their son away, so in turn they hatch a plan to catch
07:53and torture him, to give him a taste of his own medicine. And as the title and premise suggest,
07:58The Tortured is torture porn at its very worst. And while there are many truly shocking and hard
08:04to watch scenes throughout, the hardest of all is actually one where no acts of violence are
08:08committed. See, towards the end of the film, after the couple have done everything within their power
08:13to torment an apparently amnesiac killer, a flashback then reveals that there were actually
08:19two men being transported in the prison van the day that Kozlowski was taken after it crashed.
08:25And it's actually the other man, some guy called Patrick who was serving time for tax evasion,
08:30who this couple actually kidnapped and as such have been torturing for most of the movie. And
08:36we're left knowing that they didn't even torture the right culprit.
08:43Writer-director Alex Garland put another notch in the folk horror belt with the divisive men,
08:48giving the city dwellers among us a hundred reasons to stay out of the countryside. In this
08:53flick we follow hero Harper as she heads to the countryside to try and process the death
08:57of her abusive husband James. However, it seems that all of the villagers' inhabitants are rather
09:03intimidating, disgusting and quite unfriendly men, or to be more precise, men, as they're all
09:09played by actor Rory Kinnear. At the film's conclusion, the boundaries between superstition
09:14and reality break down as the men all lead a surreal and physics-defying assault on the house
09:20where Harper is staying. This ends in one of the queasiest sequences put to film in recent memory,
09:26as the men give birth to each other in sequence, with their bodies contorting and self-mutilating
09:32as their bellies swell and each one crawls out of the bloodied orifices of the last, concluding in
09:39the birthing of Harper's dead husband James. It goes on forever and leaves nothing to the
09:45imagination, to the point where you might have forgot what film you were even watching
09:48in the first place.
09:52Director Rob Giabasa may not be a big name on the horror circuit, but his Taiwanese
09:57body-horror bloodfest The Sadness is, short for short, one of the most disturbing projects
10:02put to film in recent years. With a population succumbing to a viral pandemic that turns them
10:08into killers, who thrive on receiving and distributing pain, there are few places The
10:13Sadness won't go to torture its cast. But we have to pick just one, and that singular scene arises
10:20from the sadistic whims of the closest thing the film has to a consistent antagonist, the
10:25businessman. Having taken young Molly's eye out with an umbrella already, this guy pursues her to
10:32a hospital and, well, I literally can't even say what happens to Molly in this scene. The movie
10:38itself thankfully doesn't show what's happening in this scene either, only the reactions to it. But
10:44when people call The Sadness exploitative and pushing too hard on its sexual violence, well,
10:49you can't really argue after watching this scene in particular.
10:56Few films are so bold as to go full tilt in their opening scene, and yet that's precisely what
11:01Ari Aster does with Midsommar. Though this flick doesn't go quite as hard on the horror as Aster's
11:07Hereditary, you don't know that from the beginning, which depicts the murder and suicide of Lee Danny's
11:13parents and sister respectively. Initially, we don't know what's happening in the scene, as the
11:18camera slowly moves around a darkened house with a score building to elicit a sense of dread. And
11:25then we see them, the pipes connected to a running car and the three dead, particularly Danny's
11:32sister's haunted lifeless face and the tube of duct tape to her mouth. It's an absolute jolt,
11:38but the camera lingers so you're forced to reckon with the horror on display. It's supposed to stay
11:43with you throughout the rest of the movie as a reminder of the trauma that Danny endured, and oh
11:48boy does it accomplish just that. So that's our list, I want to know what you guys think down in
11:53the comments below. Could you sit through any of these scenes? And are there any worse ones you've
11:58seen that deserved a spot here? Let me know and while you're down there if you could please give
12:02us a like, share, subscribe and head over to What Culture Horror for more lists and news like this
12:06on the regular. Even if you don't though, I've been Josh, thank you so much for watching,
12:10and I'll see you soon.