I work with a guy who is massive – built like a brick shithouse. Gruff, no-nonsense and is, what you might call a man’s man. However, I found his Achilles heel today, which is an extremely low tolerance for anything scary or medical in a movie or TV. I found it quite hilarious. His threshold for this kind of thing is ridiculously, comically low.
I am not so bad – I have long convinced myself that the severed anus spilling out pus and blood over the rotting corpse on the screen in front of me is “only pretend” and given it’s not real, I tend to be able to cope.
However, I am not immune. I see there’s a new version of The Exorcist coming out and due to some hysterical publicity back in “the day” I am not going to ever watch the original. I’m too scared. I daren’t. A vestigial terror of Satan and that thanks to a religious upbringing is also responsible. Bit nervous even writing about it.
Do you have a grimly squeamish blind spot?
On screen, anything to do with eyes being harmed (but I prefer my horror in the style of Hammer rather than Saw so that doesn’t often spoil my viewing).
In real life, I cannot touch cotton wool.
A hand and knives!!
Worst is when someone is being attacked with a knife and they grab the blade to protect themselves. Ugh.
I remember watching the film about Billie Holiday “Lady Sings The Blues” and I just about passed out and threw up at the same time watching the explicit needle-in-the-arm junkie scenes.
Even now I look away when I have a simple blood test.
Interestingly my Dad used to tell a story about when he had a job in his university holidays as a hospital orderly, and apparently on his first day he passed out when a particularly gruesome bloodied body came in. He got used to it though, he was a very mind over matter sort of person. Unlike me I’m just a wimp. But he did tell me it was OK if you were squeamish at the sight of blood.
What a disappointment! For a moment, I thought we were going to have a thread about Wham comics super-villain Grimly Fiendish. One of the best names for a baddy. Ever!
http://www.internationalhero.co.uk/g/grimfien.htm
Just realised that Grimly bears a remarkable resemblance to Gru from Despicable Me. Coincidence or plagiarism?
How do you think I felt? I thought this was going to be about the Damned.
I have also noted the resemblance of Gru to Grimly Fiendish. However, Grimly also borrows heavily in looks from Uncle Fester and, in turn, Uncle Fester to Nosferatu.
I’m never keen on any grim scenes featuring dental procedures.
Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier in “Marathon Man”? No thanks. I don’t even like to think about it.
Yup, anything dental. When my torturers bring out the drill it would take me, oh, three seconds to say “the secrets are in the safe, my best friend Tommy did it and my wife , yes, she’s under the bed there”….
Don’t really watch horror films, but what freaks me are the films which lack overt gore or horror, the kind of films where you fill in the gaps. The one that springs to mind is Wait Until Dark with Audrey Hepburn.
The Haunting from 1963 is another example. No gore in sight but absolutely terrifying.
Good one. How about Michael Hordern’s incredible performance in MR James’ Whistle and I’ll Come to You? Scares the living daylights out of me every time. The whole 40 minute film is on YouTube.
Definitely eyes for me as well. I’m okay with gory films, didn’t turn my face away at the end of Bone Tomahawk once. What did stick in my mind and really disturb me was No Country For Old Men. There was something nihilistic about it that just got under my skin and wouldn’t go away.
Like you BC, knowing film is pretend means it doesn’t freak me out the way genuine blood (eg. a documentary filmed in an operating theatre) does. With one exception: the beach landing at the start of Saving Private Ryan I found really difficult to watch on the big screen. Too horrific.
I think the closer something comes to real life, the worse the horror. I got a cheap copy of The Exorcist sometime ago and put off watching it for ages. When I did, it was a case of ” meh”, ” ooh look, she can do really difficult yoga moves” and that was it really. I didn’t even see the great qualities that Kermode raves about, but then I am a cinilliterate fool.
I remember walking out of Christiane F, the Berlin junkie film with Bowie in it, because the idea of this teenage girl getting lost in the drugs scene seemed tangible. But I was 14, so I guess that it made more of an impression then than it might do now.
The worst/best film recently was “Hard Candy”. The guy got trapped in a justified hell of his own making, but it was difficult (yet strangely compulsive) to watch him spiraling down.
I can’t watch horror films at all as I am a lily-livered milksop.
Mind you my wife gets scared watching Rosemary and Thyme, so I probably still seem quite brave to her.
Having inadvertantly seen the odd clip over the years, I steer clear of the gratuitously nasty ones like, Saw, Hostel etc . I find them disgusting and degrading.
The one that really gave me the chills was the Japanese film ‘Audition’ – just so… freaky ! ‘Kiri kiri’ Jeez! *shudders*. ‘Ringu’ was also excellent at ratcheting the sense of dread, and the Hollywood remake ‘The Ring’ was surprisingly good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPgA88v0aDU
This is going to sound a bit silly but I have a phobia of peeled bananas. Cannot touch them or be anywhere close to them. I _will_ scream like a small child if you come at me with a one, squeamish doesn’t even begin to describe the over-reaction.
Why? I don’t know.
Sorry but I had post this.
https://youtu.be/U90dnUbZMmM
Brilliant! Thank you.
The original Dutch version of The Vanishing is chilling.
I hate seeing toast crumbs in a butter dish. Or small pools of water on a kitchen worktop. Or the feel of grease or newsprint on my fingers.
The best example of the thing that makes me turn away is the eyeball slicing in Un Chien Andalou. I can happily watch cartoon violence (as in Game Of Thrones), but realistic graphic violence is a strict no-no.
However, even that pales into insignificance compared to the ultimate horror: Ant and Dec.
I’m a big fan of horror and nothing scares me, annoyingly, because I want to be scared!
I do however have a very low tolerance threshold when it comes to embarrassing behaviour on film. Any scene where someone makes a fool of themselves makes me squirm and peek through my fingers, shouting “Noooo – don’t do/say it!” If it’s really embarrassing I’ll have to turn it off.
The TV series James at 15 from the late 70s would make me physically ill at the time. These days I’m unable (no great loss, I grant you) to watch any type of reality TV dating type situations.
Eyes and amputations. Basically anything being cut out or off and I’m freaked out. But only in films or tv. Pictures of that kind of thing don’t bother me.
I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies over the years, killed in various horrific or mundane ways and in various states of decomposition. Never bothered me. Not sure what that says about me.
I have a real problem with realistic violence in films, just can’t watch it, to the extent of checking anything with an 18 certificate that hints at any kind of violent content. Sometimes it’s the anticipation of a violent event that causes greater discomfort than when it actually happens. I broke my self-imposed rule recently to watch Michael Haneke’s Hidden (a very good film, it has to be said), and almost threw up when a particular brief but extremely violent moment occurred.
The older I get, any hint of graphic violence in movies seems to me deeply troubling and entirely unnecessary.
Ah, dear old Grimly Squeamish. Saw him at Stratford in the Scottish play, great actor.
His younger brother Mildly did some great work in Rep and provincial theatre.
Wow – what a lily-livered parade of lightweights we are.
If you want me, I’ll be trapped inside a wet paper bag, eating rice pudding with the skin on.
Ah yes, “Rice Pudding With The Skin On”, the legendary lost live album from Nutmeg Comedown’s first American tour of 1971. Only issued in Canada, and selling a paltry 700 copies due to zero publicity, the quarter inch masters were rediscovered in a studio bin only last year.
Nutmeg Comedown! Have an Up.
I Googled (to look at their discography of course) and was a little taken aback at the large number of pages dedicated to the recreational use of nutmeg which had nothing to do with the Great British Bake Off.
Yes KFD, I am sure – absolutely sure – that you are referring to the footballing “nutmeg” when an attacking player can bamboozle a hapless defender by deftly kicking the ball between the defender’s legs and running on towards goal.
Irreversible – the movie.
2 scenes that made me turn away and disgust me…the rape scene and the fire extinguisher to the head scene.
It’s one of those movies where you watch once and say “That was a well made movie, with an original concept, but I won’t be watching it again”