Five traumatising horror movie scenes you can only watch once
It’s not exactly a secret that horror movies are meant to scare you, unsettling you to your very core and bringing your deepest-rooted fears cruelly bubbling to the surface, but there are some scenes that are just much more traumatising than others.
We all have different benchmarks for what scares us: you might not bat an eyelid at a gory slasher but find the sight of a cloaked woman in black absolutely terrifying. It really depends on what we’ve been exposed to growing up, and whether we have particularly active imaginations or not. Some people though are just cursed with the inability to forget a disgusting scene long after they’ve watched it; it’s rough.
However, there are some scenes that we can surely all agree on as being pretty traumatising, the kind that you’d have to be paid good money to watch again. Whether that’s a shocking accident that sees a child’s head collide with a pole, or a man forced to slice his own foot off, you’re not going to want to see any of these scenes when you’re in need of a comfort watch.
Listing out some sickening sights, here are five horror movie scenes too traumatising to watch more than once.
Five traumatising one-time watch horror movie scenes:
‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ (Tobe Hooper, 1974)
Imagine passing out and then waking up to a dinner table full of the most terrifying people you could imagine, from a deranged hitchhiker, a man wearing a mask made of human skin, a slightly older but equally as deranged man, to then an elderly man who looks both dead and alive. Even worse, you’re chained up and surrounded by dirt, grime, and bones, some of which belong to animals and others to humans, sending a shiver at the thought of how they came to be.
This is the poor fate of Sally in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the low-budget slasher which changed the horror game with its frighteningly real depiction of abject terror, without even a lick of Hollywood sheen to it. Luckily, she escapes, but the dinner scene is truly horrifying, where you can almost taste the nasty food on her plate and the stench of death and decay wafting into the damp and decrepit room.
‘Saw’ (James Wan, 2004)
You could put many gruesome kills or torturous moments from the Saw franchise on this list, but let’s stick with a classic: the moment Carey Elwes’ Lawrence has no choice but to slice his own foot off. It’s something you can’t even comprehend because surely the pain would be absolutely unfathomable, but in this desperate situation, he sees it as his only choice if he’s going to make it out alive.
The horror on Adam’s face as he watches on, only for Lawrence to crawl over to the gun lying by a corpse in a pool of blood and shoot him, is grim to witness. It’s not the sort of scene you’re going to rush back to watch with any urgency, and you’ll certainly want to curl up with your feet tucked beneath you for the rest of the film.
‘Hereditary’ (Ari Aster, 2018)
If there’s one thing to learn from Hereditary, it’s never to stick your head out of the car window. Even if you’re feeling too hot or you’re having an allergic reaction, as is the case for Charlie, whatever you do, keep all body parts inside the vehicle. The whole allergic reaction sequence that defines Hereditary is incredibly traumatising, not only because it results in a head getting chopped off by a pole, which is a heinous way to go, but because you don’t expect this to be the fate of the youngest child in the family.
Paired with the desperation on Peter’s face as he tries to drive his little sister to safety as soon as possible, the scene is incredibly intense and upsetting, even though it feels like it all happens in a flash, but it got the people talking, cementing Ari Aster as a horror genius for the modern age.
‘Martyrs’ (Pascal Laugier, 2008)
Martyrs is a fantastic horror film that came towards the tail end of the New French Extremity movement during the early 2000s, but it’s easily one of the most unforgettable for its depiction of female bodies being subjected to torture. There’s also a young woman returning to the house of the people who previously held her captive in order to seek revenge, and when the film begins with her brutally murdering the family, she soon discovers another woman being held captive in the basement, and the scene in which she attempts to help her is enough to have your stomach turning.
The movie is incredibly graphic, but the moment that always stands out most to me is this tenderly brutal interaction when Anna tries to help the woman, who has a metal blindfold stapled to her head. It’s, quite frankly, pretty gross, with Anna attempting to pull it from her flesh as the woman, unable to speak, struggles against her, unaware of what is going on, making for a sequence you certainly won’t be able to wipe away from your mind in a hurry.
‘Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom’ (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975)
Now, I’m not sure why anyone would want to sit through Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom more than once, as while Pier Paolo Pasolini’s arthouse horror film is a powerful meditation on fascism and totalitarianism, it’s not easy to watch, to say the least. There are many scenes you could pick out as those you’d never want to see again (I couldn’t eat chocolate cake for months after I watched the film), but I’d argue that the horrendous final sequence is the most traumatising.
In an explosive finale, any trace of sanity (not that there was ever much to begin with) gives way to heinous torture, where we see tongues being ripped clean from the teenagers’ mouths, nipples removed, scalping, and eyes being gouged out, all while the libertines watch on and do a little dance. It’s a true encapsulation of evil, and one that will haunt you for the rest of your life, where even thinking about it now, years on from when I first watched it, puts a bitter taste in my mouth.
